The Release Revealed

The hiatus between my last post and this is easy to explain. My swing continued to improve daily. That meant that any video or daily narrative would be rendered "History" by the next day's revelation. As days went by, I thought about this blog, but I was moving along with no defining moment to talk about. Now there is.

Basically, over the last month or so, I've been working on the final piece of my swing: the follow-through. What happens after impact has become my focus. Until I arrived at this point, my swing thoughts ended at impact. All my thoughts, all my practice were grounded in one outcome: a relatively powerful propulsion of the golf ball down the fairway towards a target. After impact, my swing really looked like a spring flower wilting in strong sunshine.

I knew it was a problem. My first strategy was to treat the problem as a lack of momentum. I started doing gravity swing drills and trying to use my left arm to whip up speed. That wasn't the answer, but it did serve a purpose. It did show me how fast a swing can be. Generally, the pace of my swing is fairly safe. As my son once told me, my swing looked good, but "it's slow." In the last few days, I worked on that left arm—trying to swing it as fast as I could and finishing high over my head and letting the club come down over my back. That helped, and I felt as though I was getting more distance. The mental image of swinging up high like that also reminded me of the way some of the seniors swing, Nicklaus in particular, and that similarity encouraged me.

When I went to the range, however, I could see that I had a problem. Too often, I was pushing the ball right, blocking it. If I got the timing exactly right with my hands, I could hit the ball where I wanted to, but this effort was unreliable. I had noticed this tendency out on the course, where I practice hitting off the turf in the evenings. Lately, I've been practicing the second shot on one fairway where the ball is slightly below my feet, usually producing a push or slice. I thought it was that kind of lie that was my problem. I thought that once I learned how to hit that shot, my troubles would be over. But pushing the ball at the range, too, showed me that I was wrong. The problem was with my swing.

I found the solution the other day after hitting two hundred balls. My analysis was that during the release, my hands continued to move forward, even though I felt I was throwing the clubhead with my right hand. The result was that I never gave the clubhead a chance to square up at impact. I finally got the feel of slowing down the left hand to give the right a chance to throw the clubhead and get ahead of the left hand into the follow-through. This worked beautifully, adding a key missing piece to my swing. Naturally, I couldn't wait until the next day to do some more practice. That night, I dreamed about the right hand crossing over the left.

At the range the next day, my shots were perfect. Right out there straight, time after time. Having established that kind of consistency, I started experimenting with shaping shots, hitting slight draws and fades using the advice from the very helpful Johnny Miller video on YouTube. His advice worked perfectly. Now I felt as though I had made a significant advance in my accuracy. I could see that the next challenge would be to add more distance.

When I catch it well, I can carry a 5-iron about 175 yards, and a good drive flies about 230 or 240. To me, this is fine, but I feel as though I ought to be able to hit even farther with my new understanding of how the swing works at impact and in the release. I also realize that I'm swinging too hard to get these distances. Often, after a long drive, I'll lose my balance. In my next post, I'll probably be describing my attempts to develop better tempo to get both distance and accuracy. As much as my swing has improved, there is a world of difference when I look at a really good swing. It's way out in front, like the favorite in a horse race, and I'm like the young Seabiscuit, way back in the pack, but gaining.

In the video below, you'll see me rehearsing with my driver, working on a good coil and turning level left during the downswing and on my new release. I've been studying Els on YouTube and the video showing Michelle Wie and Ernie side by side. My full swing is an attempt to emulate what I see them doing. I'm also going through the motions of the release where the club whips through from parallel behind the ball to parallel in front of it.