Hi, this is Fred Green, host of the Golf Smarter podcast. Over
the next couple of months, on our Friday episodes that retrieve the greatest hits
from our archives, we're going to feature some of our many conversations with Tony
Manzoni. Tony was an amazing golf instructor who passed away in twenty eighteen,
and we first met him in twenty ten, and every time he was featured
on the podcast with us, emails flooded in from golfers around the world,
with more positive feedback than any other teacher we've featured. So unless you're new
to Golf Smarter or didn't play at College of the Desert anytime between the nineteen
eighties and the two thousands, you've probably never heard of Tony because we were
the only media outlet to really pay attention to him. We've been replaying these
episodes the last few years, and I still get emails today reporting on how
well you've connected and improved using Tony's teaching method. Tony's book The Lost Fundamental,
One Simple Move Better Golf Forever, which was out of print when he
passed away, is once again available on Amazon, including the Kindle format Tony's
video of the same name was also out of circulation when he passed, but
can now be seen online. If you'd like to gain access, please write
directly to me golf Smarter podcast at gmail dot com or click on the Hayfred
button at golfsmarter dot com. Lastly, after he passed, we created a
Tony Manzoni Memorial Golf Smarter Fund to benefit the first t of Coachella Valley,
which is where Tony lived for decades. Your tax deductible contributions are greatly appreciated.
You can find out more at golfsmarter dot com slash Tony. We hope
you enjoyed the journey and know that even if you've heard these episodes before,
you're going to learn something new. We're going to start with the first time
we met Tony back in October of twenty ten and golf Smarter episode two hundred
and fifty one. Thanks so much for your support and enjoy the single pivot
swing Ben Hogan's secret reveal. This is golf Smarter sharing tips and insights from
golfers and golf professionals to help lower your score. It's worked for your host,
Fred Green, Welcome and thanks for downloading the Golf Smarter Podcast. Our
guest today is Tony Manzoni, a very interesting man with a fascinating career that
includes tour player, instructor, college coach, contributing author and co founder of
Callaway Impressive. He'll provide us with all the details on that, but most
interestingly of all, based on years of research and modifications, he's unleashed the
single pivot swing, which may be the secret to Ben Hogan's amazing ball striking
ability. Let's found out more. Shall we welcome to the Golf Smarter Podcast.
Tony, Hi, Fred, How you doing today. I'm doing well.
Thank you so much for joining us. You've got an illustrious history in
the golf world, and I'm really intrigued about talking to you about where you
started and where you are today. You really have done a lot of different
things in golf, haven't you. Well, I have. You know,
I started my career in the Chicago area, well, you know, Chicago
and Wisconsin, about fifty miles from Chicago and Ni Person Country Club, and
I you know, kind of made my bones there and went into the service,
came back and worked for worked at Almaden Country Club in San Jose,
where I lived, and from that point Ken Van Turrey, who I knew
very well, Wait, you're talking about Almaden Almenden Country Club in northern California.
Yes, and to say, okay that Almaden, all right, because
all of a sudden we were in Wisconsin and now you're in San Jose.
Oh yeah, well I'm you know, I move. We moved to California,
moved to San Jose because I was Chico Go born and got a work.
I got a job at al Maden and played pretty good golf and turned
professional obviously made some you know, made some good scores. I think I
still have the record there at sixty one. At Almaden, I met Ken
Venturi Uh played in a few events with him. He taught me to come
into the desert Uh the Palm des area. There was a new golf course
called Mission Hills opening up, and I worked for Ken as the head professional.
He was director of golf, but primarily he was with CBS, so
we saw him once a month. During that period of time, I got
an idea because I was training a lot of LPGA gals and one of them
was Sally Little, and I got an idea about playing a mixed team championship
where we wanted to play men against women, giving the ladies a distance margin.
As it turned out, it turned out to be the Mixed Team Championship.
J. C. Pennies was was uh the group that one of my
trying to have trying to say that they sponsored it. And that was for
about sixteen years on ABC. And from that point in time I was very
interested in golf club design and I got together with a fellow by the name
of Richard Parenti and Dick Dela Cruz and we started a company called Hickory Stick
and we were selling a lot of clubs, but we didn't have the capital
to cover the orders. A fellow by name of Elie Calloway was a member
at the Vintage where I had sold the one hundred and thirty for one of
their golf expos there, and he liked the club. I made a cold
call to him and talked him into invested in the company, which he did,
and that's like the best call you ever made, best call, great
cold calls of all time. Oh my god. I talked to him into
putting his name on the We started out as Calloway hicky Stick Golf Club and
then went from Calloway Hicky Stick to Callaway Golf and the company ended up settling
in the Carlsbad area, which is the heartbeat of all the golf club companies.
And from then we went public. And during that period of time,
I decided I wanted to go in a little different direction. So I had
a hunk of money, didn't want to retire, and I heard that the
College of the Desert was thinking about a golf academy and they had about a
twenty five acre piece of land and no funding. So through friends of mine
and the help of Greg Norman and a few people that I knew in the
industry, we built a golf driving range of building and a classroom and it
houses a golf management program. And I had intended to do this for two
or three years, get it started and let it flourish, and crazy part
about it. This is my twenty fifth year. I became the golf coach
of College of the Desert, which has been probably one of the most satisfying
things I've ever done in golf. And I mean I'm talking Callaway and Mix
Team championship and all that, but to work with these young Kik kids and
changed the direction in their life. Off the golf course has been the most
rewarding thing and it's what keeps me going just being around these kids. And
we have a great record. We won our conference championship twenty three years in
a row, and we won state championship four times under my tutelage. And
so that you know it's all good, it's all real good. And during
that period of time, my passion is teaching golf. I played at a
decent level. I had my moments in golf, but I really was too
interested in going out at night and chasing skirts and drinking a few years and
I passed that out to my students. I said, I wasted a pretty
good opportunity. So I use some of the faults in my own life as
examples of what not to do. But golf has always been my passion in
instruction. There's nothing like helping somebody with the golf game and seeing them play
much better golf. That's way for me, is worth more than the money
that you get for doing it. I'm a little bit shocked and stunned dismayed
here. You mean the path to enlightenment and happiness is not lower scores exactly.
It's teaching, it's sharing your knowledge with the Yes, it is it
really for me it is. I mean, I'm sure that there are other
people that won't agree with that, but for me, it's been the I
thought, if we just hit lower scores, we're just going to be happy
forever. Well, I'll tell you, even when I shot sixty one,
I still blurred it out and I didn't burdy a par five. I somebody
should have come along him slap me in the head that time. That's just
the mindset of all of us when we play golf. We always think we
could have done better anyway. I started studying Ben Hogan because in my mind,
I don't think anyone's ever controlled the ball like Ben Hogan in the past
or in the present. And there's no I mean these guys. He could
give strokes to most of these guys. When it comes to pure ball striking,
I don't mean scoring, I don't mean putting, but I mean hitting
the ball from tee to green. And wave of change has occurred in and
teaching of golf. At one time, one of the commonalities of what you
saw of a really good player was his head didn't move, and then pretty
soon people start saying it's okay for your head to move, and he can
go anywhere it wants to go. Well, your head. There's a center
point in the golf, so when you set to the ball, you center
yourself to it, and if you move off the ball, you've got to
move back on it. So there's a lot of compensations occurring. And also
I was brought up in the era where you fan the club open and close
it, so you square the club head with the rotation in the arms.
But in watching Hogan, especially in his later years, and he didn't really
make a lot of film available for people to see. I read all his
books, but nothing in his books said what he did in my estimation,
maybe grip and so forth. But he played off the left side. He
played off with one axis. There's two access points in the swing left leg,
right leg. In moving to the right leg, you have to make
some kind of a lateral moving back to the left leg and then rotate around
the left leg. Transitional move is where all the problems happened in the golf
swing. And also if you're rolling your arms or crossing your arms over,
the club is going to be open a long time closed a long time and
square for just a moment. And the more you practice, the closer you
can get the square more often. But there's still a lot of air involved
in that swing. And you can look at all the arm swingers. I
can name you, Phil Michelson, I can name you Tiger Woods, and
I can name you and Dustin Johnson. These are known names, and they
hit the heck out of the ball. But they can hit it anywhere in
the world. And I mean they can hit it two fairways. Right.
You never saw that in Hogan zero. Okay. Part of that's moving off
the ball. The second part is that Hogan learned the square of the golf
club with his body rotation. So he connected the arm as he took it
back across the chest and then rotated the body to square it. Now the
club has stayed square for a real long time, and there is that's to
me, is the secret of hitting the ball properly. You put very little
side spin on the ball. So you shot this person, you're always going
to push it. You're always gonna pull it. That's just golf. But
you won't pull it with a hook or side spin. You won't push it
with a sly So your dispersion gets very narrow, and by rotating your body
instead of tilting down and under where that's where all the spine problems and back
problems happen. When you rotate your body, you can rotate to where your
right shoulder points at the target and your chest has left the target. Now
I have an eighty six year old man that I teach. I've got a
lot of people from the Vintage and Eldorado, which are really fine clothes,
probably the best in the desert, and they come to me for golf instruction
because they like what I'm teaching and they can hit the ball more solid more
often because again, we don't have any compensations in the motion. We brace
up against the left side, rotate the body and rotate back the other way.
Don't have to make a lateral move, don't have to turn the hands
over in time anything. We just rotate the body. We trap the club
on the left arm on the chest. So it's a really easy way to
play well. During this period, al Barco, a noted writer, interviewed
me, and you know, you know I'm nobody. I'm a guy at
a driving range. Well, he liked what I had to say. And
he put about an eight pager in Golf Illustrated magazine and the response was overwhelming.
I got calls from all over about people wanting telling me, well,
I was trying stack until I couldn't do that, and this really helped me
and my back doesn't hurt and blah blah blah. I talked with an editor
of Golf Illustrated and he said, would you like to have a Golf Illustrated
single pivot golf school? And that's what's going to happen in December, College
of the Desert. I've got al Geiberger, who has followed this process like
that it teaches now and plays this way. I got his son Brian,
who's a very very fine player, a good instructor from Canada by the name
of Mike Lyons, and myself and we're going to put together a hell of
a golf school. And when people walk out of that school, they're going
to know why they hit it right, hit it left, and when the
ball spins, will know exactly what. They'll know a simple move to stop
it from spinning, and they're going to be able to hit the ball farther
than they've done in their life. And I don't care if they're a young
player thinking about the tour or an old guy that's played and he can't get
off his right side anymore. He spins out and slices everything will fix all
that, and it's not complicated. I've never believed that the golf swing was
rocket science. But I did know that Ben Hoogan knew something that other people
didn't, and he divulged this in other subsequent books where he made phrases he
said, well, I'm going to play off my left side from now on.
Lee Trevino said to me, I've never seen anybody play good off their
right side, but I said a lot of great players play off their left
side. But when he made that statement to me, I had no idea
what he was talking about. I never realized, because I know you never
stop learning in this game. This is a school you never graduate from because
there's always tweaking. There's always things that you can glean from other players,
other teachers, and so forth. So I do know one thing Tiger Woods
is all being taught to play off the left side. Watney just said on
television in the last tournament, I had a great tip I set up with
seventy percent on my left side. They're all getting back to stay in the
center to the golf ball. It's just too hard when you're moving that club
as fast as these young people are moving it. It's too hard to time
it with your hands and arms. You've got to trap it so that you
can turn through it and eliminate the left side. And that's what this does.
I can tell you that I don't care who it is that's wild with
the driver. Fifteen minutes with them, if they're especially if they're a good
player, a tour player, let's say, fifteen minutes to learn this process.
They're they can hit as hard as they want to not hit the left.
So it's very exciting and it's going to be really worthwhile. Well,
that was an all encompassing answer. You answered every single question that I didn't
even get to ask in your first answer. That's what I want to do.
I'm gonna want to go into details, but I do need to break
for just a moment because Tony, thanks so much for waiting, and let's
get back to I don't even know where to go here. I do want
to ask you about working at the College of the Desert before we go back
into your your golf school because and then of course the single pivot swing.
But is the the College of the Desert. Do you cover more than just
golf instruction? I mean, there's so many kids today who who may not
be good enough to, you know, get up to the tour, but
they love golf so much that they would like to be involved in the golf
industry. Does your program facilitate that? Absolutely. We have a golf management
program and we take those kids through turf grass management, golf shop operations,
methods of teaching golf fundamentals and rules of golf, public speaking, marketing classes.
It has a business aspect to it, It has a general education aspect
to it, and then it has core training aspect to it, which is
the core courses like golf shop operations or methods of teaching golf. So when
the student comes out of this two year program with an AA degree, they
can get into the industry and they get into middle management very quickly. For
instance, in this valley, I've got nine head professionals that have come out
of this program. One of my students has been in China for fifteen years,
and in fact, I'm leaving the eighteenth of next month to go to
China because we're going to create a linkage of Chinese students coming to College of
the Desert and taking accelerated programs. And at the same time they're interested in
maybe me setting up some golf schools in China. So I'm very excited about
that. But the college program is really a terrific program. You know,
the PGA of America has these IgM programs and it's a five year commitment.
I kind of like what we do and what the San Diego career colleges do.
You get in and get out two years and you certainly have you're not
going to be an expert, and no one is coming out of these programs
because you have to have the hands on But that two year commitment, you
can get right out into industry and get going a golf team as well.
Oh we have a great golf team. We have a great golf team.
I've been coached for I believe it's now going on nineteen years, and we
won our conference every year. The previous coach, who is a terrific coach,
we had had one and a few more years. So we're at the
twenty third year in a row right now, and under my coaching. I've
won four state championships and a number of what they call regional tournaments. It's
been just great working with young people. First of all, they all hit
it over three hundred yards. It's crazy. I mean, I feel like
putting on a calf An address when I play with the boys. So I
finally said, okay, I from now on, I'm up in the uptees.
I swallowed my pride because at one time I could pop it pretty far.
But it's just crazy how far they hit it now. But the problem
is is that they can hit it anywhere far, and so we try to
get them to understand how they have to manage themselves on the golf course.
And of course, anger is one of the things that comes along with the
game, and you have to have a little fire in your belly to be
a competitor, obviously, but you can't let it affects you to the point
where it affects your next group of shots. And I being Italian, struggled
with that up until the last week. But anyway, at sixty that day,
but I do try to talk to the boys. You know, in
all honesty, these are the things you can't do and can do it you
don't understand that you also disrupt other people when you're angry at yourself. It
makes people uncomfortable around you, and it's not what the game is supposed to
be. But it's gotten to the point where there's so much, so much
money now and all of that, all that same that's attached to it that
I think we've lost a little bit in the transition from the days when guys
jumped in an geloppy and drove from tournament to tournament and didn't make enough money
to stay on tour they had to go and take club jobs. But there
was something really, something really pure about that period. Now, in that
period, the amateur status was very was looked upon much differently than it is
today. Even if even if you have an amateur status today, I mean,
does that even exist, Well, I guess it would for college players,
but you know, right, you're right, yeah, I mean there
is, but I think that a lot of people, just like in other
sports, to kind of get around it a bit. But anyway, that's
the college is. It really is the reason I'm here more than anything else.
So we've heard about stack until we've heard about single plane and dual plane
swings. Now you want to talk about the single pivot swing. Well,
they're just you know, sack until I don't. I'm not going to say
that they're wrong. It's just a different way of looking at it. I'm
basing everything I'm talking about on what I believe who was the best golfer,
and that was Ben Hogan. And Ben Hogan his later years played off his
left side, and that just really means that he eliminated the lateral move in
the golf swing. He means it. I need it. I'm sorry to
interrupt, but I do need a better understanding, better explanation of what you
mean by playing off the left side. And I'm standing up right, okay,
when you set up to the golf ball, instead of setting up fifty
to fifty or even fifty forty being the left side and sixty being the right,
like a lot of people really tilt to the right when they're going to
hit the driver because because they've been told if they hang back like that,
they can work under and catch the ball on the f swing. And that's
true if you're going to rotate your hands and arms. But Hogan's raced up
a little left now. He did a little differently than I teach. When
he took the club back, it looked like he was going to move to
the right, but as the club went back in his rotation, he set
up against the left side. And I've got zillion pictures showing that. And
he set up against the left side because now he's against impact and all he
has to do is rotate his body. You don't lose any power, trust
me. In fact, you gain power, and more importantly, because you
can catch the ball dead square again. You're not moving away from the golf
ball in the backswing. So it's nothing new. It was done for years
by a lot of players. It just wasn't talked about, and I think
a lot of people misinterpret doing it. They said, well, aren't you
reversing your weight shift, aren't you? And that's the farthest thing from the
truth. The reverse of the weight which just when you stand up, you
stand up for the ball and your hip slide underneath you and your hips go
go to the right, and your head is to the left, and then
on the downs from your head goes back and your and your hips go forward
and you're on the right foot. That's how the reversing the weight shift,
but staying off of staying on one axis and then working around that axis is
a far cry from that. And it's I can tell you there's a lot
of naysayers until I have ten minutes with them and then they that I owe
them. Yeah. Yeah, Once you can show them and put the club
in their hand and work with them directly, I'm sure you have much different
result than just trying to explain it without the visual. Yeah. And it's
not an old and this is not an old man's thing. I've got a
couple of fifteen year olds that are shooting in the sixties and they beat that
ball over three hundred yards at fifteen years old, and they and they look
at me. And I got one Korean boy and every time he looks at
me as his coach, no side spin. And I just get a big
kick out of that. You know it. It's it's my passion. As
you can tell, I talk too much about it and too fast about it.
But I can't help you're talking so fast, Yeah, I can't help
myself. It's because I'm excited about this. Necessarily, it is a breakthrough
and there's no question about it. Fabulous. Uh And now for for the
school, how many days is this school that you're going to be putting on
for your UH, there will only be There'll only be it will be a
one or two day school each day six hours of instruction. UH. So
it'll be a one day Saturday school and a one day UH Sunday school.
So a person can come to both day both schools if they if they need
me. But to be honest with you, if we have you for six
hours, UH, you're going to be able to do it and you're going
to be understand why you do it. We're going to teach you cause and
effect UH. And that's very important for someone. And I can promise you
that I will not have anyone that won't be swinging, and we'll prove it.
We're gonna film in the beginning and film you in the end, and
you're going to see a tremendous change in your setup position and the way you
finish. Most people never get to their left side because it's too far on
the right side to ever get there. And we'll get you through the golf
ball. And we're not going to say do you shift your weight. We're
going to show you how to rotate your body and that's going to make your
weight shift and you're going to be in really good balance and you're going to
hit the ball hard for the first time in a while. You Know,
the thing about a golf school that I've had difficulty with is that, say
you get it one day of instruction or two days at best of instruction,
or three or four, and you go through it and you're like, Okay,
I got it. Yeah, I understand what I'm doing now. And
then you go home and you don't get a chance. Now that you've played
three days in a row, You've got to catch up back with your life
and your work, and you don't get a chance to play for three weeks,
and you don't get a chance to practice for two weeks whatever, and
you go out there and all of a sudden, it's all gone. It's
like, now, what did they teach me? Again? And I find
that to be a difficult part about golf schools that you know, if I'm
coming across the country go to your school, I'm going to lose all this
stuff. How do I retain it? What kind of follow up do you
have to help somebody if they're like, Okay, so I went to your
school and I got it, and it was great. But now I need
some help. Everyone's going to get a book. Is going to get a
book called The Loss Fundamental, which I've written, and it will be out
before the school starts, and it's a complete explanation. Also, they will
be able to talk to us via via email and we can actually if they
tell us what the ball is doing, we can tell them what they're doing.
But we're not basing our instruction on timing, and that's the key.
That's a key issue. We're not basing that instruction on you going out and
hitting four hundred balls a day. We're basing it on body position. If
we can show you where your body should be on the backswing and on the
through swing, the rest of it is pretty easy. Once you connect your
arms or keep your arms connected to the body, and of course they're connected.
I mean, it sounds almost insane to say that, but connection in
the golf thing is different than the body being attached to the arm being attached
to the body. Once we show them how connection occurs, and it's a
very very simple explanation with an exercise, they can do it almost instantly and
you will be able to tell by what the ball does if you're connected or
disconnected. There is no question about that. In fact, a good instructor
can turn his back to the student and watch the ball flight and he can
tell you physically what you did. It is so simple. So what the
golf our school will be is that this explanation over and over and over for
six hours and when you're when you walk away from here, you're going to
be able to do this. It isn't going to be a matter if you're
going to lose it, because we're not basing it on you having good timing
that particular day. So the name of your book the loss Fundamental? What
is there something specific that it is a basic fundamental that is missing for most
people who take construction. Well, it's playing center to the ball and that's
been and that's the fundamental that really is lost because there's so many people teaching
to move the weight all onto the right leg and then move it back all
the way on to the left leg. I noticed that when I've taken a
lesson, or I've been given instruction, or even going through a change is
swing change, that the first thing that happens to me is that all of
a sudden, my rhythm is all screwed. Up my timing, I start
speeding things up. Well, you know, rhythm is a very important aspect,
and you know, with the technology that's happening nowadays. I met a
gentleman by the name of Ted Calwell that has invented a thing called shot Watch
and it's an amazing piece of equipment because it monitors your rhythm and I think
most importantly, it monitors your grip pressure on the golf handle through impact,
which it has a lot to do with velocity. And it also monitors the
time of the swing. So you can you can take this watch, put
it on. It tells the time, and you spin it around and turn
it backwards on your left hand if you're right handed golfer, and go ahead
and pop the ball, and it's going to give you these readouts. And
you can store these readouts, so a person practicing can really really when they
hit it really well, they can look at those numbers and say, Okay,
that's the numbers I want to get close to. Yeah, I have
I have Ted right here. I'd like to have. That would be great.
And and you know it's interesting because when Ted first introduced the shot Watch,
he came on we talked about it on the Golf Smarter podcast and there
were so many people that, so many listeners who purchased the shot Watch,
and I got great feedback. Teddy there, Yeah, I'm here, Fred.
Nice to talk to you again. Yeah, it's great talking to you.
Thanks so much for coming on and sharing this time with Tony. Yeah,
it's a pleasure. I was listening very carefully to what Tony was having
to say. Because one of the things that we've adopted at the urging of
Tony and consistent with his with his single pivot idea, is our grip pressure
now has an added feature, just to refresh your memory or for your first
time listeners that aren't familiar with shot Watch. We have a pressure plate on
the back of the watch that's very very sensitive and it makes contact with the
pulse point on the active arm, the left arm for a right handed golfer.
Now, when the arms rotate or the wrist moves, those tendons exert
pressure against that plate and that's what we get our grip pressure readings on.
Now. In addition to giving a reading on the grip pressure throughout the swing
plane, which is the average from takeaway to contact with the ball, we
do a statistical operation that on those grip pressure readings, there's fifty or so
of them through the swing, and then we give the variation in the grip
pressure. So what that tells the user is that if there's a large number
for the variation, there's a lot of variation in your grip pressure through your
swing, which is just the opposite of what Tony is talking about, because
that means the arms are rolling over, the wrists are cocking, you know,
the golfer is bearing down at the time he's either breaking his wrists or
cocking or making contact with the ball that will cause a variation in the grip
pressure instead of as Tony was talking about, keeping it constant throughout the swing.
So we've added that feature and we think that's going to be very very
helpful in terms of getting people to hit longer and straighter shots. We still
have the other swing parameters. We have the swing speed, where we encourage
the use of the instrument to as a swing speed workout device. Start off
hitting slow, swinging slowly, maintaining balance, working on the single pivot,
and gradually increasing your speed while maintaining your balance and while and so we you
know, we give a digital readout of that speed with one being slow as
ten being fastest, so that like Tony's guys here, they're off the charts,
they exceed what we can capture with the shot watch, because, as
he's saying, they'll whip that club around at a phenomenal rate in excess of
one hundred and thirty miles an hour. But for just us mere mortals,
you know, we're going to start out, We're going to start out.
We're going to work toward getting that single pivot swing, keeping everything compact and
making good contact with the ball to drive it, to drive it longer.
So the shot watch, you've you've done a lot of work on the shot
Watch since it initially came out, and you've made a bunch of changes.
Let let's talk for a moment. Uh, Clearly the shot watch has a
lot of value to someone at the range to help them get a steady,
a steading pace, a good rhythm rolling. But also, and this this
new concept of grip pressure I think is really interesting because I know there are
times where I find myself, you know, white knuckling. I'm just squeezing
the club in a pressure situation. And you've really got to learn to control
that, yes you do, and it really does help rad to have a
to have a digital display and represented as a real number which you can then
record, you know, in your active memory, and then on subsequent swings,
say, I got to get that number, whether it's the variation in
the grip pressure number or the absolute number. I've got to you know,
I've got to get that to where there there aren't these spikes, you know,
and in the grip pressure or large number in the variation read out.
I would think that it would be really valuable to have this on the range
and try different swings but gripping it at different pressures intentionally so that you can
see what it feels like, and then you have a gauge to go,
oh, okay, so that's what it feels like if I'm really squeezing too
hard, and that's if I'm not enough, So you can really get a
comparison and then take that with you out on the course to say, all
right, this is the difference between what it feels like, you know,
I got to relax. I can feel that right, and where the rubber
hits the road is whether the ball goes straight and if there's a lot of
variation in the grip pressure, as Tony was saying, you know you're going
to slice it. And and because that, you know that bearing down is
going to alter the flight of the ball as much as anything. And to
go on to the range with that nice relaxed you know, again to quote
Hogan, you know, just tight enough to keep that club in your hands,
you know. And uh, and there's a digital number that you know,
depending on the hand strength of the individual user, that's a custom fit.
You know. If it's uh, you know, the number that works
for you is the one you'll commit to memory and the and and the device
is really uh, it's strong. Its strength, it's strongest selling point is
that it's a muscle memory device. So important. Well, it's great to
have you back on the show. Thank you very much, Fred. Oh
yeah. And and because you had so much success with Shotwatch the first time
that we presented it on the Golf Smarter podcast, you contacted me again wanting
to do it. And so we've talked about this previously and we've made arrangements
for Golf Smarter members to be able to purchase the shot Watch at your website
at a discounted price, right and so normally the price for the shot Watch
is one ninety nine to ninety five and for Golf Smarter listeners, if you
use the checkout code golf Smarter, you'll be able to pick it up for
one hundred and eighty dollars. And for Golf Smarter members, go to the
Golf Smarter member blog and I will give you the coupone code there because you'll
be able to get that shot Watch discounted from one hundred and ninety nine to
ninety five to one hundred and sixty dollars, which is a very generous discount
for you to give to our listeners. We appreciate it very much. Well,
we're certainly pleased to do so. Fred So again, if you're not
a Golf Smarter member, this could be a great opportunity to take advantage of
signing up for that just so you can get the discount, the significant discount
here again one hundred and eighty dollars for normal Golf Smarter listeners with the coupon
code golf Smarter and for Golf Smarter members one hundred and sixty dollars, and
we'll give you that coupon code on the blog. And if you if you
didn't find it, email me and I will send you the coupon code for
that. But even more so, we're going to give one away. Actually
we're going to give two away again. Ted and I talked about this previously
and arranged that we are going to give one away to a golf Smarter member
and we are going to have a drawing if you register to enter at golfsmarter
dot com. Deadline for entry is November fifth, and we will announce the
winner on November ninth. We will give one away randomly to a golf Smarter
member on the episode of October nineteenth. But please go to golfsmarter dot com,
click on contests and register to win a shot watch again, value to
two hundred dollars discounted for you only you, and again, Ted, thank
you so much for coming back on the show and bringing Tony along. He's
absolutely yes. Well I want to I want to thank you Fred, and
I also want to thank Tony because his his advice, you know, he's
all his experience and teaching golf and all the rest of that has has helped
us in the development of the product enormously. And and you know, so
this is a this is genuinely a team effort and we're we're delighted to work
together with with Tony and his and his boys out here. Great. And
can I say goodbye to Tony myself? Yes, yes, here he is.
Hey, friend, Hey Tony, thank you so much for coming onto
the podcast, and best of luck with with this school. And I'm hoping
when I come back down to the Desert sometime in twenty eleven that we'll get
a chance to meet one another face to face. I hope so too,
And I hope I didn't give you any kind of a bad ear here with
it all that time. Oh I loved it. I loved it. At
some point I'm going to want to be wearing a cap from your team from
College of the Desert Golf team. That's a given. Awesome all right,
Pelt, thank you Tony very much. We'll talk to you. Thank you,
bye bye now. Hm