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Posted 20 April 2009 - 12:07 PM
Should be upright like Hogan, and not in the back bent reverse C of Johnny Miller.
The first thing I think about when I look at Johnny Miller's swing is that he's left-handed. And that's quite different. Most left-handers, I believe, should play left-handed. But Phil Mickelson is a right-handed player that plays great left-handed golf. Well, Johnny was a left-handed person who played right-handed golf. That gave him extra strength. A right handed person is strong in his right arm, but weak in his left. The golf swing is all with and using your weak left arm and it takes many long years to build up its strength. If you are left handed, playing right, you are using your natural strong side and you have a strength advantage.
The great golf hustler Titanic Thompson always played you right handed, and his usual score could be in the high 70's which beat most club players. But if he lost, he would double the bet and play you 9 holes more playing left handed. Yes, he was left handed and was scratch from that side and there was no way you could win. All that right handed golf, just made him stronger left handed.
One of the things that Miller could do that's really great to watch is hit balls just with his left arm and really hit the ball tremendous. He can hit a 6-iron 160-yards with one arm, quite incredible and something that he practiced quite a bit. I saw a lot of young players on the range at Augusta this year doing the same thing. I built up my long power by swinging a 5 lb weighted club to warm up, then a 10 lb iron bar, then a sledge Ax, all left handed. That was a little secret some of the long drive gorillas used to do.
Johnny Miller (on hitting shots with one arm): "And what happens is when you're tall and you can play the ball close in, you get a very upright swing and the club doesn't rotate quite so much. Combined with a reverse-C, a lot of people "poo-poo" the reverse-C, but I had a reverse-C and it keeps the clubface square. It doesn't turn it over. But the thing that set my swing apart probably the most was that I was the first guy to have an early-set, and I got that from hitting balls one-handed. When you hit balls one-handed left-handed, you always set the club gradually. By halfway up, you're already at 90 degrees with the forearm and so you don't have to do anything until you're way down here and then release it."
Now, when we look at Johnny's grip, we really see the Hogan influence. In the evenings when he was a young kid, Johnny's dad would bring him downstairs and they would look at pictures of Hogan and Nelson and Snead. And I know he studied the Hogan book and that's the grip that Johnny put on, which was a very weak left hand grip.
That meant his left hand was turned toward the target, the "V" on the top of the left hand pointing directly up to the chin. So that's an anti-hook grip. But being left-handed and being a little stronger here, that might have something to do with being able to play so well with this grip.
A weak left hand grip tends to lead to an open clubface at the top for most people, and it did with Johnny Miller as well. Now that open clubface pretty much takes the hook out of the game. And I'll tell you one thing about Miller - - nobody hit the ball straighter than this man! Now if he did miss it, he would tend to miss off to the right. And as his game went off a bit, he would miss a little too much out to right field and partially because of that weak left hand. But when he was on, he could hit that golf ball as hard as he wanted to and hit it dead straight.
This all worked fine when he was young, strong, very thin and limber. When he aged, filed out, put on weight, lost speed, he began to leave 2 or 3 out per round that went so far right into the woods nobody found them and they were automatic 6’s. Overnight he went from the best I ever saw, to the worst. Some rounds he could not break 80. He finally limped into the JB camp and JB did finally fix the fore right problem. But the once beautiful swing was gone and what he had working looked like she-yit. It was ugly to watch. Miller was never comfortable with it, nor did he trust it, and he could never get it back, so he turned in his driver for a Mc mic.
Nicklaus at the time drifted into it because he liked to fade the ball and rarely hooked it. And like all the others, when he aged it took his back out and he went back to his old upright swing of the early 60's.
We do not seek a swing that works for a short time. We seek on that works for a long time. JB said the woods are full of guys who come out and play lights out for 3 or 4 years, then lose it and are gone, David Duval would be the latest on that list. He said, if there swing was right, if they actually understood the swing, they would have never lost it. JB felt to be known as a great striker of the ball and legend, you had to dominate your major competition and play great for over a decade. Then you proved you had a swing that worked and held up in the test of time.
For a time, about a three-year period, Johnny was simply off-the-charts great and he dominated the PGA Tour. I never say anyone play that good and I was out at most of his desert wins. I could not get enough of the guy and was following him around like his new dog.
One of my favorite Miller stories is the fact that he won the 1972 Phoenix Open by nine shots with a final round of sixty-one. Then he went directly to Tucson and won that tournament by 14 shots. He shot another sixty-one there and also shot the low round of the field every single day, talk about blowing away the competition. Tiger never shot that low or hit it that close.
It wasn't unusual for Johnny to absolutely freeze two or three iron shots per day. That means he hit them so close you could kick them in. Nobody in the last 30 years has hit irons closer than Johnny miller did during his run. He was laser accurate. He even had his caddie, Andy Martinez, measure courses to the half-yard. Yes, you heard me right. Johnny wanted to know if it was 157, 157 1/2 or 158-yards to the hole. And he believed he could actually control his ball that well.
Johnny was smoking on fire in the early 70's and this included an unbelievable closing 63 at Oakmont in the 1973 U.S. Open to win the whole thing. Johnny simply hit every fairway and every green, and he made the toughest course in America look simple. You see this a lot in Golf, and in pool. The young kid comes out and just fires and is fearless, because he does not know much and is just playing by feel.
Then everyone begins talking to him. The coaches get at him and he begins to think and control and soon he can’t play a lick. Then he knows too much, and paralysis by analysis kicks in. Miller said when he played all those great long holes at the US Opens, and he pared or birdies them, he thought no big deal, where’s the next hole. When he now plays the same hole, 20 years later, he thinks my God this thing is a monster, long and hard, par would be great, but a bogey would not be bad either.
How you think is how you perform.
When Miller was having all this success many of the players who came up using the old Hogan upright model, began to think the reverse C was the answer, especially when Nicklaus also began using it, but not as severe as Miller was. Monkey see, Monkey do takes over. We always want to copy what the top dogs are winning with but here is an example from history when they were doing something wrong and making it work with their incredible talent.
"The sky, the sky/ Hands up, hands up high/ Finish high, finish reverse C."
That means keep your head in one place, let your body swing and tork around the head, then bend the back into a big C and hit down the line. Hogan never did that, neither did Palmer or Player or Casper, the big 3. They saw Cary Middlecoff wipe out his neck and cripple himself by the early 60’s so the warning was out there.
That's what golf pros were teaching back in the 1950s and '60s. The classic swing--big and full, finishing in a perfect "reverse C." Unfortunately, that same classic swing can put your average 50-year-old in the hospital. Top tour players like Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Tom Kite and Fuzzy Zoeller, to name a few, have at one time or another each been sidelined with career-threatening back injuries. Today even younger players like Fred Couples, Peter Jacobsen and Tiger Woods have closeted that backbreaking motion, along with their steel-shafted drivers, in favor of the gentle power of graphite and a more balanced, upright, back-friendly swing. Slowly they went away from the Miller reverse C and back to the Hogan swing, not as flat at the top, just more upright on the swing plane.
JB, Jimmy Ballard could see what these golfers were doing to their selves and was the first to cry out stop the reverse C. Everyone laughed at him for teaching the old Hogan swing from the past. JB did not want the head to stay in place, he taught you to sway, move the body over right into a firm wall, then fire the body into the shot using the legs with the back straight on the finish.
Just as Tiger Woods is doing today.
In 1976 I played the course just before the Open and I could not believe how long and tough it was. I walked the course every day, Monday through Sunday to see what that was like on a pro player. Damn, all those hills, it wore me out and I never followed an entire event again unless it was a major and then I only did thur-Sun, like the Masters also.
The rest of the tour, I would fly in Wednesday morning, make my calls and meetings that day, take a client out to dinner. Calls Thusday morning, then I would take a client out to the PGA tour event and walk 18 with him that afternoon, having lunch at the club. That gave me a chance to see what the course was like, how the rough and greens were, what clubs they were hitting, things you could not pick up on TV. Once I had that down, I preferred to watch the finish, Sat-Sun on TV, where I did not have to fight the crowds. And the nice part, it all went on my unlimited expense account. Friday morning, more calls in the area, then fly home to Atlanta that late afternoon. That was my life, for decades. I attended more PGA tour events every year, than Nicklaus did.
A new young kid just out of college comes out at age 22 and wins the US Open at the Atlanta Athletic club. It shocked the Golf world. When he went to the top of the leader board I began to follow him. On the final round I was walking with JB and I said lets skip the 17th green and walk up 18, I have been following Pate for the last 2 rounds and I know right where he is going to hit it. He fades it right every time, and he did, the ball almost ended up between my feet in the rough and he drew a really lucky lie, it was sitting up like on a tee where he could pick it off clean. Fate was with him that day. His opponent had his ball sit down where he could not get at it and he dumped it into the water.
I held my spot until they pushed me and the ropes back and I was standing right behind him when he hit, I was no more that 5’ away. IMHO, one of the greatest golf shots of all time. When he hit it stiff, 22" away, the crowd, 30,000 went nuts. It was a real lucky break for me, to be right there, to be in place, to see that great shot. Normally on the leader, you are looking over the heads of everyone and you don't see squat. You have to give up a hole and walk up to the next one to gain any decent view and position.
I looked over at JB and said, there is your next Arnold Palmer. JB said, no, he has maybe 2 or 3 years swinging into that C, and then he’s cooked, crippled, off the tour. I did not believe him, I said, did you see what he just did? JB said, it does not matter, and sadly it came to pass and he like Miller came to JB to fix something that was, UN fixable. JB patched him up and he makes a living on the senior tour today but does nothing special. That swing, killed off that great talent in his prime.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HF...52/ai_76167196/
I was there and saw both the opens at Cherry Hills, and all those greats shots from the 60’s to date and Pates shot is in my top 5.
http://sports.yahoo.com/golf/pga/news?slug...o&type=lgns
http://usga.usopen.c...tory/video.html
What makes the golf swing so hard on the back? University of Southern California orthopedic surgeon Robert G. Watkins says it's the repetitive extremes in rotation and compression that go with the sport. "Spine injuries lead the list of injuries on both the senior and regular PGA tours," says Watkins, spine consultant to the Professional Golfers' Association Tour and editor of The Spine in Sports (Mosby, 1996). "It's true for amateurs too."
The human spine simply wasn't designed to swing a golf club. A 1996 study showed both professional and amateur golfers generating "peak spinal compression loads" of 6,000 newtons (a measure of gravitational force). That's the equivalent of eight times an individual's standing body weight. These back-crunching levels are "close to the known failure loads associated with lumbar intervertebral joints," concludes Thomas P. Headman, a biomechanical engineer at the University of Southern California.
The same study clocked amateurs generating 85 Nm (newton meters) of torque, compared to 57 Nm generated by professionals with more energy-efficient swings. Normal joints in the spine fail, Watkins notes, at 88 Nm of torque, while degenerated joints, typical of avid or professional golfers, fail at 54 Nm.
The two principal trouble spots are the shock-absorbing disks between the vertebrae and the facet joints, at the back of each vertebra, that act as brakes to rotation. Each disk is a round ligament, made up of an annulus, which is like a multilayered collagen basket that absorbs rotational stress, and a lighter-density liquid nucleus that absorbs compression. The layers of the annulus are woven for maximum absorption. But it doesn't take much to tear this basket. "You can tear the annulus with no more than 3[degrees] of sudden loaded rotation," Watkins says. "If the disk ruptures into the spinal canal, it can injure the sciatic nerves that run down to the legs." Couples once likened the resulting pain to "a hand grenade going off in my back." Facet joints are more prone to arthritic changes and to producing bone spurs that narrow the spinal canal.
So why doesn't the hand grenade go off every time you swing a golf club? Coordinated muscle function. That's what enables John Daly to hit 1,000 practice balls a week with a swing speed exceeding 130 M.P.H. "An uncoordinated swing is much more likely to hurt the spine," Watkins says. "Pros don't generate these peak torques on their spine like the amateur does, because of coordinated muscle function. They can still get in trouble, because they do it 10,000 times. But it's not because they don't have the coordinated muscle strength to protect their backs."
The problem is top golfers coming up are hitting 1,000 balls a day. Nicklaus did, and this in time wears the body out. Jn had both hips replaced. Tiger just had a knee replaced. A golf swing can cripple or injure you, so use one that is friendly towards your back.
If all these top players can injure their backs, so can you, so slow down and be careful. Don't push your body into something it can not handle.
Click the pics to enlarge them, Miller and Nicklaus in the C
Hogan and Tiger & AP in the proper upright position.
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