Hi, this is Fredgreen from the Golf Smarter Podcast. This is part two
of our extended series with Tonymanzoni, who passed away in twenty eighteen. Even
if you've heard these episodes in the past, it's a great reminder to reiterate
Tony's teaching methods that he communicates so effectively and based on your feedback, works
incredibly well. What we're doing differently this year versus what we've done the last
few years is that I'm replaying these episodes in the dated order they were originally
published. Tony's book The Loss Fundamental, One Simple Move Better Golf Forever is
once again available on Amazon, including the Kindle format, and his video of
the same name can now only be seen online. If you'd like to gain
access, please write directly to me at golf Smarter podcast at gmail dot com
or click on the Heyfred button at Golfsmarter dot com to find out more.
Please visit Golfsmarter dot com. Tony. Please make sure that Tony is all
lower case. Thanks so much for your support and enjoy For members only.
Golf Smarter number two fifty four, recorded on October twenty six, twenty ten.
The single Pivot swing in detail with Tony Manzoni. 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. A few episodes ago, we had a conversation with
Tony Manzoni, who claimed to have unearthed the secret to Ben Hogan's golf swing.
Tony calls it the single Pivot swing and he'll soon be opening this Single
Pivot Academy down in Palm Desert, California, where he coaches and teaches at
College of the Desert. Well after that podcast, not only did Tony get
a number of calls requesting a coaching session, I received many emails wanting more
in depth information. So I called him and luckily we caught Tony before he
left the country for meetings in China, and he was more than willing to
discuss his theories in detail. Welcome back to the Golf Smarter Podcast. Tony,
Hey, how are you today. I'm doing well and I'm so glad
that we caught you. I understand you're going to be leaving the country any
minute, right, Yeah, I'm going to China and meet with some government
officials about doing some golf courses there, and also created some golf schools and
kind of tied into what we're doing with golf illustrated here at College of the
Desert. Wow, that's very exciting. It is, and it's my first
trip to Asia, and I'm so excited about going to China because right now
I think that's a hotspot for all the golf activity in the world. One
of my business acted We're not just golf, yeah, oh yeah, everything,
everything, and golf is kind of the criteria for people that are working
in various industries to do business. In my golf management program, I get
a lot of boys from Korea and China that have been sent here by employers
so that they get some form of knowledge about the management of golf courses and
then also a little bit about teaching, but primarily to get their skills up
so that they can play golf and do business on the golf course. Very
interesting. Well, and part of your College of the Desert program is golf
management. Correct, that's correct, Yes, that's correct, very very good.
So when you were on the show and we had you talking about shot
Watch and among other things, but we wanted to talk about your single pivot
swing, and I've got to ask you a couple questions about it, and
you were kind of vague about it, which was okay, but I was
inundated with emails and phone calls from listeners around the world saying, wait a
minute, I want more. You tease this as Ben Hogan's you really didn't
even talk about it. So it's not much that I would call someone back
and say, hey, can you do a second episode? You know,
in a couple of weeks. Usually we'll do long interview and cut into two,
but this time we had to call you back and get you to talk
more about the single pivot swing. I hope you well, I can do
that. I can do that for you because it's really a passion of mine,
and I think we've kind of got a ground swell moving right now with
this thing. When I came up with a method through years of research and
especially watching Ben Hogan, I wasn't sure myself, because when you're thinking a
little bit out of the box as an instructor, there's always a question,
well, you know, have I flipped my wig here or have I really
found something? And it took a while for me to realize that this is
valid, this is what Hogan did, because there's been a lot of people
saying they knew what he did, and I think this is an aspect to
it. I'm not sure it's everything he did, but I know that I
that in watching some of the film that I have of him, especially in
his later years, this is exactly what he did. Wow, all right,
Well, and one of the comments that I received was, I can't
believe he doesn't have a website, not even a simple one. So you
need to explain this. And it's like, well, I'm finishing a book
with a gentleman by the name of Paul Sarvanti, who is a very very
fine co writer, and I speak in a certain way, so he's tried
to keep that flavor in the book without editing me out of it. And
so Paul does have a website that he's building at this present time, and
we will have a lot of information. And then Golf Illustrated, because I'm
working with them with a single pivot golf school. They have the Golf Illustrated
has just gone online and they have a pretty large website, and we're going
to be doing kind of golf fignettes that we've putting on there, myself,
Al Geiberger, Mike Lyons, and Brian Geiberger. That's the force for some
of us. And also a young lady by the name of Karen Gottwald who's
our female instructor about to single pivot, how you have to set up to
it, because setup is really important in making this happen. What we're eliminating
in the single pivot golf swing is we're eliminating the lateral move, the shift
from the right leg to the left leg. And it's not an invention.
There have been many great players that played off the left side, but no
one has ever really explained it in detail how you do it and what are
the functions and so forth. So that's what that's what my role has come
has happened, is that I've watched this and of course I give lessons to
a lot of people, especially elderly people, and now that this doesn't work
for young people because my golf team are all you know, they all kill
the ball and they're all playing off of one axis. But I saw that
older people, people that always said I can't get over the left side,
I can't finish the swing anymore. I can't get any distance. Increase their
distance just two to three clubs by just putting them in the right position,
by setting them to the ball correctly, and then keeping them there throughout the
motion so that there's not a lot of weight on the right side, so
they can clear their left side. They can turn their chest left of the
target and get the right shoulder pointing at the target. And while they do
that, the left arm stack is connected high on the chest. And that's
the secret of this. It's playing off of one axis. Now we're not
tilting the shoulders, so this is not stack and tilt. And I don't
mean to infer that what they do is wrong. I don't like to get
into those things. But you can't hurt your back doing this. When you're
tilting your shoulders, especially on the through swing, you're going to end up
in what we used to call a sea position, and there's a little bit
of strain on the lower back. And all the people that played from that
era that finished with the head back and the body kind of in a sea
position, they all were troubled with their back in later years. And if
you see any pictures of him, he posts it up so that he was
on a straight line because he didn't work that way. He didn't work down
and under to hit the golf ball. When you do that, you have
to turn your arms over. There's two ways to square the golf club.
You can turn your arms over and hit it, or you can rotate your
body and keep your arm connected to your body like it's a lever connected to
a gear. So when you set up to the golf ball, the first
thing you're going to do is you're going to set up sixty forty sixty percent
of your weight on your left foot and forty percent on your right. And
why you're doing that is because you're aligning your left hip to the outside of
your left foot, and that's impact. Is when we hit the golf ball,
whether we sway off the ball and come back to it, that's where
we're going to end up. But with this concept, we're going to get
against impact to start with. So we've positioned the legs in the proper position,
and now all we have to do is rotate the upper part of the
body and we're gonna coil the body without moving that center and that's our head.
We're going to stay our face will be right down on the golf ball.
Okay, So the right shoulder and the right hip are going to turn
behind us and that's going to pull the arm around the body with the rotation.
Well that Donald, I'm going to stop you for a second here,
because as you're describing this, not only am I trying to do this,
I'm standing up, I got a club in my hand. I'm doing this.
I'm sure there are people who listeners right now who are on a commute
train standing there doing this with so so let me just let me just kind
of visualize this. So when I'm bringing my hands back, I'm not bringing
my hands up. I'm bringing my hands more. You're you're not and you're
well, yeah, but you're not bringing your hands back. Your arms are
connected to your body and you're turning your you're turning your upper torso, and
your arms are being moved to a position behind you. The arms are in
front of you, okay, and they're going to stay in front of you
in the addressed position. But as your body, as your body is rotating
and it's it's turning, it's turning around, the right shoulder is now be
displaced behind the spine and the right hip is being displaced behind the spine,
so your right side is turning. There's no there's no lateral move back,
there's no there's no sway back to low power. You're coiling. Imagine a
wall against your right shoulder. Okay, you're going to turn inside that wall
with your right side, and that movement will take the club back into a
position. And everybody is different because we are all built differently. Some people
have a lot of flexibility, some don't. Some are short waists, some
are long legged. So there's no position you can say you have to take
the club here. So by connecting the arms slightly on top of the body
at address, we from a single axis, which is the left leg,
and we we stay against that brace, almost the feeling of there's an imaginary
wall on your left side. Okay. So now from that position, you're
gonna coil the upper body staying centered. Okay. So when we coil,
we're not gonna tilt our head to the right. We're gonna stay right on
that ball. So the right shoulder, right hip go behind us, and
the club the arms will follow. The left arm is going to go across
the chest. This is a big This is the big key, it's going
to go across the chest, and the left arm should sit fairly high on
the left pectoral muscle. Okay. Years ago, there was a great player
by the name of Dick Mayer. He won the US Open, the World
Open. I had a little problems with alcohol in his later years, and
I met him and he used to watch me hit balls, and he used
to say, son, you've got to keep your left arm on your tit
and he meant the nipple. Okay. And he and he wrote a book
subsequent to that that gerald Ford was in the gerald Ford Library. He gave
me the book, and in that book it says that everybody has an area
in the body that defines where the left arm should be. In that sh
the left arm should be right above that nipple of the on the man on
the left pectoral muscle. Okay. And he would watch me hit balls and
say, you got to keep your arm up on your tit. And I
used to think this guy's whacked out because I had no idea what he was
talking about, until I learned that that position is paramount to hitting the ball
solid and straight time after time after time, because when the left arm stays
high in the chest. The only way it can move because it's connected to
the body is the rotation of the body opening up through the target, kind
of like if you've ever seen Anika Sorenson play. Anika was very It was
a real rotator of the golf swing and it looked like her body was facing
the target at impact. And that's exactly what it was. So if people
out in the audience would stand up, if they can do this and put
their arm right across their body and then take their right arm and hold their
left arm high against the chest, and then just turn the body and see
how the arm moves with it. It's not coming off the chest, it's
still pressed against it. But if you keep turning left, the club will
square itself. Now you talk about seniors being able to do this. What
kind of to me? The way you're describing this In this rotation, it
seems like a lot of flexibility is required. I mean, you have,
oh, no, none at all. I'm believing I'm about as flexible as
a solid pretzel. I can't. I can't touch my toes. Okay,
I'm lucky if I can get past my knees when I bend over. But
I can do this. Oh yeah, I can do this. Hey,
I'm seventy four years old. You know, an atrophy is snuck in there
somewhere. And now I try to stay as limber as I can. But
really, I'm not going to yoga, I'm not doing stretching. But what
I found is that all all, if you put your arms across your chest
like you see guys chriss cross their arms, and you get in a swinging
position, you set yourself off against the left side brace and just turn the
top part. You're going to turn it enough to where your back is to
the target. Even less than that is fine, okay, But if you're
turning your right side behind you, that's this is the ticket. If you
try to turn your left shod over your chin, it's harder to do.
If you take your right side and pull it back behind you towards the target.
That's the keyword, towards the target. Because at the top of your
swing, your weight is now seventy thirty. You're braced against that wall and
on your left side, the seventy being on the left side left side you
started sixty forty. Because you're displacing your weight behind you and it's going behind
you towards the target. You have now braced up seventy thirty. The left
knee has not pulled back from the ball or pulled back to go towards the
ball or behind it. The left knee is pointed straight to the toe of
the left foot. Okay, in your rotation, your your knee is pointed
to your foot. You're not banking your knee on that rotation. Well,
you're You're both knees are bent. Okay, I'm because I'm trying to talk
you through this. Okays. I as I turn my right pocket and my
right shoulder behind me, okay, towards my left heel towards my left heel.
As I do that, my left knee points towards my toe on your
left left foot, left foot, the right leg will elongate, it'll get
it won't lock, but it'll get. It'll get steeper. Okay. So
now you're now you're braced on your axis that you're going to swing around.
Okay, So you're there. Okay. Now all we're all we're doing is
we've coiled the top part of the body. Our legs are in position.
So now all there is left by staying connected high on the pectoral muscle.
Okay, we just unwind our chest through the target around the left leg,
and we finished with the chest pointing left of the target and the right shill.
We're pointing at the target. And trust me when I tell you I
have I've got an eighty six year old man that when he first came to
me and he took the club back, he looked like a tree falling to
the right. He had no conception of turn. I've got him on his
left side now and he's hitting the ball farther now than he did when he
was in his fifties because he's hitting it with his whole body. He's not
working down under so that his arms have to flip over so that the arms
leave the body. He's hitting it with his chest, his core, his
hips, and the last thing through is the clubhead, so as his body
unwinds, the clubhead hits the ball. Now, if you're on the right
side and you try to do this, you're gonna you're gonna spin out open.
You're gonna spin open, but you can't get open enough. When you're
on your left side. As you start unwinding, you can open up as
early as you want, and you're just gonna hit the ball harder. Okay.
Now, now the key here, the key as we do this is
that the left arm must stay on the chest as you open. Okay,
So you're gonna be turning level. You are not gonna work be working down.
You're gonna stay level like Hogan did in his later years, and you're
gonna smash the ball. And the by product of this is that whether you
pull it or push it, and we will do that for our life,
no one's gonna hit it dead straight at the pin every time. They're gonna
push it a little right, but there'll be no side spin on the ball
because the club head is held square throughout the heating area. There's no rotation
to square it. It's square from the beginning to the end. Okay,
So you'll pull it or push it dead straight, So your your shot dispersion
is going to get real narrow, real narrows. So you're gonna start hitting.
You're gonna hit a lot of greens and a lot of fairways, and
you're gonna hit the ball much more solid, which will make your average hit
further. See you when we move off the golf ball, and it's a
trend in teaching at one time, the Nicholases, the Palmers, they stayed
right on the ball their head and did not move. It didn't move because
they didn't make that little lateral move on the backswing. And then all of
a sudden, instructures starts saying it's okay to move your head, and I'm
here to tell you that's a bunch of bs. It isn't okay to move
your head because you got to move it back to the place you started,
because that's your center before you hit the golf ball. And you know,
unless you're neuria Of or somebody like that, how do you do that,
especial when you get past fifty. So that's why so many people, you
know, we have a driving ring chare at the college and you see people
and they're just locked back on that right foot. The ball goes right,
and their instructor says, will shift your weight. Well, that's that's the
problem. They did shift their weight. They put too much weight on the
right foot early. Yeah, once you get back on that right side unless
you unless you have an athletic body. And even the athletic guys that are
arm swingers every now and then they're all all over the place. I mean,
you look at Dustin Johnson and tremendous athlete, tremendous strength. He can
hit the ball two miles, but every now and then he can hit it
so far off to Faarrowey Mickelson another arms swinging around the downswing. But you
can see it when the when the arms come down, the body can't.
The body can't rotate and the arms come down at the same time. One.
So if the body doesn't, if the arms come down, the body's
going to follow the arms when they when the when you're a rotator, the
arms always follow the body. And and and because you're not turning the club
over, the club head isn't going to be opened a long time, closed
a long time, and square for just a moment. So now you're you're
eliminating one of the things that happens to all of us as soon as you
get anxious, as soon it means something. You know, our our eye
hand coordination runs down our leg I mean that I don't care who it is.
Uh. You saw Dustin Johnson in that one tournament where he stood in
a bunker, Well, he didn't have to be in that bucker if he
could have just hit the ball in the faraway. But because he's he has
to square that club with his arms. As soon as it gets really important,
you're gonna you're just you're gonna hang on or you're gonna release it too
early. See, And that's what Hogan, that's what he really figured out.
And in his later years he made statements, I square the golf club
with my body. Okay, well that's how, But he didn't tell you
how to do it. That's what the single pit was school and concept is
about. It tells you how to do it. And I want to tell
you. Uh And I don't mean to brag, but I am going to
brag. Since I've been teaching. Yes, since I've been teaching this,
I have had nothing but repeat business and nothing but referral business, and people
tell sending me emails and tell me I never hit the ball like this.
I haven't hit it like this since I was a kid. Blah blah blah
blah blah. And it works. I've got al Geiberger, who's a pretty
good golfer in his day, doing this, Okay. Al geiber was voted
as having the top one of the top swings of the top five best wings
and he is now a single pivot player. Okay, I have a terrific
teacher from Canada that was reluctant to this at first, although he tried to
stay centered to the ball, but once he got all the pieces together,
his following now is expanded tremendously because you get instant results. I know one
of the guys that heard your podcast came down to see me. Really yeah,
oh yeah, I've had two actually I had two lessons and this one
young man great to hear. Thank you. Yeah, and what do you
shoot? He said, well, I'm about a twenty handicap. So I
said, well, I hit a few balls from me, and I saw
he had his hands out of position and he's just swinging back on the golf
ball and with no power. And then here he's in this probably early thirties
and well built guy, and here I'm this over the hill pro and I
get up there with a nine iron and I'm hitting the pass where he's hitting
the seven aar and I mean way past, And he's where are you getting
on all with that power? And I said, because you're hitting it with
your flick of your wrists and I'm hitting it with my whole body. And
I got him in position, and i'll tell you, after about the fifteenth
golf ball, he was blasting another. So I've never hit a ball this
far in my life. Oh, get me the chills. Believe me when
I tell you it gives me the chills because my passion is teaching, and
I'm you know, we all want to make money, but I promise you
this is this is like an elixir for me because I finally found something that
really works for I don't care what level player. And I've got some I've
got some kids. I've got a twelve year old, and I'm going to
give a plane lesson too. She's had six lessons, and she has so
far and so straight, it's just ridiculous. But she's she's blessed. But
she's also she's also lucky that she got a fellow like me that didn't teach
her shift to the right, shift to the left, because she'd be chasing
that monkey for a long long time. Well, I'll tell you, my
passion is finding people like you to share this knowledge. So I'm glad that
we've found each other now. I received an email from a listener in Joplin,
Missouri, and he had a number of questions. He says that I
just finished it and I had a lot of questions. Instead of writing to
you, he thought he'd write to me so that maybe I can ask you
again. And you mentioned a couple of times about Hogan's later year later years.
He was just curious, is that the is those later years? Is
that after he wrote the Five Lessons? Oh yeah, way after, way
after. Okay. So he says that he's intrigued by what you're describing and
he's read Hogan's Five Lessons and it really didn't help him as much as would
he would like. He wants to well, if you listen, if you
read the Hogans, there's a lot of really great stuff in Hogan's but what
he says in there, and you know, I mean they asked him near
his death because he went to Golf Golf Digest in the nineties to release a
secret, but he wanted a six figure payment and they refuse, and so
I think he took it to the grave with him. But they asked him
in his later years, well, what was your secret? What really was
it? Because there's been a lot of speculation, and he said, they're
going to have to dig it out of the dirt like I did. And
I just love him for that because he had no gruz, he had no
real video, nothing to work with. He had to get out there and
just beat balls. But he got an idea in a dream state. And
I know what that I really believe I know what that idea was. And
it wasn't weakening his grip and all that pronation and supper nation stuff. I
mean, he may have done that, but I've got film and you can
look at him at the top of his swing and his weight is on top
of his left side, his right leg is so steep, been so braced,
and you can see he's right there ready to rotate. So he eliminated
that transitional move that I don't care who you are, whether you're a tour
player or a high handicapped player, it's difficult. You've got to move laterally
onto the left foot and then rotate, and you have to time that rotation
in a split second when that club is really really moving. And for some
of these young guys that hit three or four ferris then blowing out of bounds
right or left and never knowing what they know what I'm talking about because I
was one of those guys. When I was a young man, I was
a very good player. But every time I got into a tour event one
hole or two holes, I'd hit the ball left and it'd be out of
bounds or into some real trouble where I ran my score up, and I
always thought, well, I just don't have it, And I just want
to pass this information onto people. For those young people that are out there
that really want to play this game, You've got to be connected and rotate
that body so that you can control that club. You have to know where
that clubhead is through impact. If you're just guessing and hoping, you're you
got a long road and a rough road to go through. Well, you
had mentioned the word coordinate, and I'm wondering what it. What kind of
I guess coordination is the word that I'm looking for. Does it take a
lot of good hand eye coordination? Does it a lot of work to get
that coordination together to hit it, to get it at that right spot.
If you're going to hit the ball with your hands and arms, if you're
going to rotate your arms you hit the golf ball, you better have really
good coordination, and then you better practice every single day for a long time,
because you can lose it immediately, and you're going to lose it when
you get anxious anyway. But if you're if you're scaring the club with the
rotation of your big muscles, your your big muscles, your shoulders and chests
really can't rotate on a lot of different planes. Your hands and wrists are
much more pliable. They can they can flip over and flop and hang on
and so forth. The body really can't do those things, and the body
of the nerve endings are right at the edge of the body. So when
you're nervous, the last thing you want to try to do is to do
something with your fingertips or your hands. It's just not doable. You know
when your handshake when you get nervous, but your chest doesn't shake. Okay,
So if you can take that club and trap it across your chest,
and then the only way that that arm can move is for your chest to
rotate, that clubhead is going to be in the same position time in and
time again. I mean, I'm writing a book, I'm going to China.
I run a golf management program, and the coach of the Ben's golf
team. I don't have any time to go out there and hit balls.
Okay, but when I go out to hit golf balls and to demonstrate this,
there is no question in my mind that I can take a driver out
seven iron witch. I don't care what it is. I'm going to hit
it one way. I'm going to hit it straight. Now. I may
tot it a little bit, I may heat it a little bit, but
the ball is going to hold its line because my club head is not turning
over, it's not tumbling. Just not a lot of spin on the ball
when you hit it. No, I don't have any side spin at all.
That's what I'm telling you. I don't have any side spin on my
golf ball. Ball doesn't draw, my ball doesn't fade. My ball goes
right or left a little bit, but never to the point where it would
ever be in the rough. Okay, And unfortunately for me, I learned
this to at an advanced age. I don't I don't have the desire to
compete, but I really have the desire to pass this on. Now.
I can tell you, as a golf coach, a lot of the young
men that come to me they have they're pretty good players. I mean plus
ones and scratch and so forth. And when they hear this, and they
don't hear it from a lot of people because this is kind of this is
not new, but it hasn't been talked about. Let's put it that way.
They're always very suspect. And as I tell them, look, I
am not going to try to change the way you think or to play.
I'm going to just show you the way I play and think, and then
you make your own mind up on what you want to do, because I
don't want to disrupt anybody in their game. And obviously there's a lot of
ways to play this game, but I think I've found a way that really
makes it easy for that advanced player as well as a high handicapper. I
think they both profit from this. I mean I I would get on the
golf chair, I would talk to whoever on the tour and not be a
little bit nervous about what it's about telling him this, because if they're an
arm swinger, I can improve them. It's just it's just that simple.
Wow, now you you mentioned that. Well. One of the things that
it says in the Hogan's book is that the beginning of the downswing transfers the
weight from the right foot to the left foot. Well, Hogan said,
the first move of the down swinger is to clear your left side. Okay,
if your weights on your right foot and you rotate your left side,
you're on your right foot when you're hitting the golf ball. And that's why
a lot of people, when they took his words verbatim, they couldn't hit
the golf ball because because he left out the parrot. The part in the
letter I have by Ben Hogan to a friend about how to hit the driver,
he states emphatically, at the top of my swinging, my weights on
the instep of my left foot, not my right foot, my left foot.
And when the first time I read that, I just blinked and said,
well, Ben must have had a cocktail that day and or maybe a
little dyslexia kicked in, but he meant right foot. And then as I
continued my research and looked at film of him, and then saw quotes where
he told Mike Austin, who was a pro from Los Angeles, from now
on, I'm going to play off the left side. And then one time
I'm with a conversation with Lee Trevino. Lee said, I've seen a lot
of great players play off the left side. I've never seen anybody great that
stayed for any length of time on the right side. But I didn't understand
what he was talking about, and like most people I was, I was
too embarrassed to say, I don't know what you mean by that. So
through this period of time, this learning experience, and then also there was
a lot of self doubt. Who am I? Who am I to say
some of these guys are wrong? Then when Jack Nicholas made a quote in
Golf Digest after the stack, until people pointed out to him that he was
staying on his left side, Jack made the statement, and it was a
very, you know, brash statement. He said, anyone that teaches you
to shift your weight on your right foot on the backswing doesn't know how to
teach well. Led Metter and a lot of these guys hairsit straight up.
Okay. And I know when I first wrote, you know, when I
was writing my book some excerpts of it. When in the local sportsbook here
a little golf book, a couple of pros wrote skating reviews of what I
said. You're insane, You're a fraud, blah blah blah. You know,
in the South side of Chicago, and me wanted to go over there
and punch somebody in the nose. But you know, at my age,
I watched that stuff. So I just wrote back. I just wrote that,
and I just said, well, you have your you know, you
have the right. I don't think you should slander me, but you have
the right to not agree. But but Al Geiberger and Jack Nicholas agree with
me, and that's pretty That's good enough for me. But there really was
a lot of self done. I must say to you that you know,
I've been a hand player all my life. I had no formal training.
I was a kid and I caddied like most of us did from my era,
and that's how we learned to play golf. We got to play on
Mondays at Caddy's Day and we had hand me down clubs, but we prevailed.
And because I could play baseball pretty good and I was kind of blessed
with eye hand coordination, I got to the point where I can play in
a tour event. Not to stay out there, but I was good enough
to qualify. Let's put it that point. But the game was always elusive
for me, And I just said, I just came to the conclusion,
well, I'm just not good enough. I've put my tie in, but
I'm just not good enough. And I just didn't understand connection and rotation.
And then a lot of people think that Jimmy Ballard was the one that was
the first one to say that, but that's really not true. I've got
books that were written in the twenties and thirties that talked about connection and rotation.
And there was an argument at the time. Do you face the ball
when you're hitting it or are you facing the target when you hit it?
Because when you're facing the ball, your arms have to cross over in front
of you when you when your body's facing the target, then your your arms
are being pulled by the body, so that this this this argument has gone
gone on for a while. Okay, And Hogan, you know, he
was a very bright man. He had, like I said, one seventy
five IQ, so he was close to genius. He he figured it out,
He got a thought and figured it out and worked on it. And
I don't think he ever really divulged his secret. But you can see it
in his later film. You can see it so clearly. You can see
his rear end is totally on his left leg, as was Nicholas. Even
though Nicholas hoisted the club upright and Hogan took it around him, they were
still against that brace. And I think that that is, you know,
playoff of one axis is it really eliminates a lot of the air made on
the transitional move and then the coupdi gras on that is, if you could
keep your left arm connected high on the chest so that the movement of the
body rotation brings the arm into impact, then you got the best of everything.
And that's what we teach. I mean, there's some finite things like
when you set up to the ball, your right hip has to be on
the inside of your right foot head a dress, and then when you go
sixty four do you find that the left hip has to be in line with
the outside of the left foot. So the legs are going to be reactionary
to the swing. You're not going to have to drive the legs, you're
not going to have to move the lower body and then the upper body and
all that stuff. That's all very very difficult. And really when we use
the legs for power, that leverage comes from the ground up. It doesn't.
It doesn't come when we're when we're moving laterally, we're actually not totally
on the ground. So the more you're grounded, the more power you can
get from your legs. But your legs have to be in a certain position
so that you can so that they can stay grounded as you rotate the top
part, and then they just react. Unfortunately, you can't see what I'm
saying, but hopefully your listeners are getting a flavor for this. And and
you very descriptive. It's good. I mean, if if you know,
don't not while you're driving, of course, but if you can close your
eyes and listen, you can visualize a lot of what you're saying. Yeah,
because this is this is really important, and I mean it's really important
if you're if you're if you love the game I do, and you want
to improve. And the beautiful part about this whole concept is you can do
it from your chip shot to your drive. It's the same exact concept.
You You are connected at the left arm and you rotate your body through the
target and it pulls a club through. The club can't turn over, and
you're gonna hit really wonderful shots. And we're not trying to stay behind the
ball. We're trying to move through the golf ball. Again, that's another
concept. See when you drop your right shoulder down, your head goes backwards,
it goes away from the target. Your body arches and your hands turnover
and you hit the golf ball. But the true rotational person doesn't drop down
and hit the ball. His right side stays level and he just slams his
right side through that golf ball. He hits it, hits through the golf
ball, his right side goes past the ball. If you're using the golf
ball. And this is what I tell all my students. The golf balls
a line. It's just a point of reference to align your club hit at
the target. But you've got to move past that line. Your divot has
to be on the other side of that line. It can't be behind that
line when you put your golf club behind the ball. If you brought the
club right to that spot each and every time, you'd be hitting the ball
fat because the club sets behind the golf ball. So we've got to catch
that ball and then the divit forward of it. Okay, so we've got
to be moving through it. The more underneath you work. For all the
people that hit it thin and fat and thin and fat. You're behind the
ball, so you have to be in position to hit the ball with power.
And most people are behind the ball too far, so the only thing
they can fire is their hands, and they hit and fall back. They
step back in the box like baseball players used to do. I mean that
that move is prevalent in golf. There's PhDs with that movement. I can
tell you that this seems to be your creation, your discovery, not of
your creation. Obviously you're you're basing it on on what you're watching from Hugan.
But even if you uh were to put in a search engine on the
internet, single pivot swing, it's gonna pop back up with stack and tilt.
Yeah yeah, and it's not. And believe me when I tell you
the only similarity is that we we set up more weight left. But that's
the only similarity. Stack until is totally different than what I do. And
God bless them, that's that's their method. I don't I don't talk about
their method because it's it's not my method and it's not what I believe.
And I'm sure they're just as passionate about their method. Heck, they wrote
a book and and and they did a tape. But I can. I
can honestly tell you that when my art article came out and Golf illustrated,
I got a lot of emails from people that bought their book and bought their
tapes and said, I can't do this. It hurts my back. But
when I tried your method, I could hit the ball. Now does that
mean I'm right, No, It just means that some people think that my
method is easier. I do know one thing. Ben Hogan rotated through the
golf ball. He didn't tilt. He was stacked. He was what we
call posted, straight up and down. When he hit a golf ball,
he did not tilt back. His chest was left with the target, and
he was always in perfect balance. He didn't go down and search for that
golf ball. He didn't need to do that. He could turn to the
ball. He cleared his right side and his early swings, he was very
long with the swing, and his swing looked the same, but there was
a big change to his golf swing. His knee position was more towards the
ball as he turned. In his later years, his knee jetted straight out
to the left foot, as did a gentleman by the name of James Barnes
in the twenties with Hickory Chefts. So again, that wasn't Hogan's invention.
It was I'm sure Ben found that if when his knee worked that way,
he was more balanced and braced, because that's the whole key here, is
that your body has to be ready to make a really athletic move, and
when it's drifting right and drifting left like a willow, there's nothing athletic about
that. And one of the things that you haven't mentioned yet as a comparison
or even its relevance are the other terms that we hear so frequently are the
single, single and two plane swing. Yeah, you know, and Jim
Hardy is it Jim Hardy? Yeah, he wrote the book on plane swing,
on single plane swing, and he's a very fine teacher, and he
even shows that Hogan got a little bit on his left side when he does
his demonstrations. Well, I believe that the body rotation puts the club in
a position just like when you're going to throw a baseball. You kind of
wind up, but there's no specific position that you put your arm, and
your arm goes to a place where your body feels strong so that you can
make a hard throw. And I think the golf it has to be that
way. I think that when we set up properly, and if we're not
changing our spine angle, if we just rotate the body and keep the arms
connected to the body, that they're going to find the position that you should
be in. I have never believed that you should try to get your wrist
hinged at the top or flat at the top. I think that I think
that that hurts people primarily because they're thinking about their hands and their position,
and you can't shut that off. At the top, you're going to be
thinking about your hands and trying to get that club flat at impact. And
I've got scores of film of me hitting the golf ball where my left wrist
is flat, and I can tell you that I have never tried to get
left wrist flat. Leave, lag and all of that are they're the consequence
of doing something before that. So as I rotate and that club is being
pulled, that club is going to be lagged, and my left wrist will
have to be flat. When my body stops and the club goes forward,
that's when my left wrist is going to hinge and it's going to cup.
That's when you hit the ball weak, but that's because the body stopped.
Okay, but there's no way that you can bring your arms down and try
to keep your left wrist flat. I mean, that's insanity. I see
people hurt themselves doing that and they hit everything weak right, And yet there
are people that are teaching that today. And you know, that's one of
the things that I've always said. I'm a pgm ember since nineteen sixty five,
and not one person from the PGA has ever come over and said,
Okay, let me see what you're doing to make sure you're not making people
crazy here. And I think that a lot. There's our teachers that are
teaching out of a book and they're just not cognizant of why things happen.
There is cause and effect, and the left wrist flat of impact is an
effect of something else. It is not because you purposely try to keep your
left frist flat. I mean, that's just that's ludicrous. You're moving too
fast, there's too much weight forward, especially when you have a driver in
your hand. Even though it may be fifteen ounces or so, the weight
of that clubhead is enormous as it's moving through time. And if you're if
you're if your body stops, that weight is gonna is gonna flip your hands.
I don't care how strong you are, they're gonna, they're gonna,
they're gonna cup. And that's why a lot of people when they go to
hit the ball hard, they hit that sky shot, they go straight up
in the air and they get that mark on the top of their club.
I know there's a lot of people out there now nodding their head. I'm
raising my hand. I'm one of those people. Yeah, okay, that's
because you pull the club down steep, the clubhead turns over and you make
contact with the top of the club, not the face. The top.
Okay, well, that's because the body is still and the arms are down.
They're coming down and nothing is releasing except the arms. I can remember
so many times when I, you know, I'm from another ear I played
with for Simmon Woods, and I'd have these pure woods and I'd take I
try on a par five to kill the ball, and there there'd be a
big white spot in my on the top of my club, and I just
hated myself for that. But I never knew why I did it. I
always thought I was going underneath the ball. But you can't go under the
ball. Yeah. How many times you see people go, you know,
I need to tee it up higher? Yeah, change change their tea position
after they do that. It's nothing, nothing, nothing about that. So
all of those things, the golf God was whispering my ear. Hey,
you see what you just did? You know why? And finally, my
inquisitive nature. Uh and and I was driven by the passion not to play
any better anymore, but to be able to teach people. And also when
I want to demonstrate, I don't have to think, God, hopeing O
shank this one or something like that. I mean, I don't have those
thoughts anymore, especially when my kids are all, like I say, really
solid players. I've got a fifteen year old that's blasted in the sixties all
the time, and he hits it about three twenty off the tee and he's
fifteen years old. I want to slap him. But when I'm trying to
tell him to do this a little bit more, I've got to get up
there and be able to produce. I've got to get up there and say,
Okay, we'll watch this. I'm going to hit this fire and it's
going to be dead straight. I'm going to hit at that yellow flag and
I'm going to make it fall right just a little bit. And I can
do that. I have no fear about doing that in front of anybody,
because I know there's a mathematical thing going on. If my left arm is
trapped against my chest and I rotate my chest, my club's coming into that
ball square. So if I align myself properly and those conditions stay in place,
I'm going to hit that ball. Now. Have I ever hit it
when I was trying to do this? Have I ever pulled one or push
one? Absolutely, but I knew exactly what happened. And I'll say my
arms went first that time and I reconnect bam. I hit it perfect.
So there's no doubt in my mind that this works. There's no doubt in
my mind that anybody can do this, male, female, young or old.
And I think I think that it's I think it's what the aster figured
out. And I've just kind of add a little signature things in there that
that I think are very really you know that that relate to what he was
trying to do and then make it easier again. To set up. You
have to be set up against the wall, against the brace, and you
can't you can't let your lower body go underneath your top top of you.
So the slides under because it's got a slide back the other way. And
then you're just you're you know, you're in China town. I mean,
it's it's it's over. Sell the clubs, buy a dog, go for
a walk. If you're going to go for a walk, don't hit anything.
So well, you mentioned how you know when you talked about popping the
ball up off the tee, and then everyone always has advice about where your
tea placement was. The other thing that I frequently see from from armchair golf
instructors are the people who say, oh, you lifted your head. Oh
you lifted your head. Oh you lifted your head. And that's just insanity.
You know. I tell I show people, well, you know,
I have a number of because in a golf management program, there's a lot
of boys that came in to learn the business, but they're not really skilled
in golf. They're double digit handicaps, and I get them out there and
I, you know, I try to feed them a little bit of this
and try to help them and they top the ball on occasion and they say
to them, you know why you top that golf by say, well,
I looked up, and I sa, are you sure? Are you sure
you looked up? And they see, oh yeah, I looked up,
and I said, well, let me show you something. You watch my
head. I'm going to be I'm gonna hold my head dead's still, and
you're going to see my eyes are going to be an egul ball and I'm
going to hit the very top of that golf ball. Now you know,
I don't have timing enough to swing this club seventy miles an hour with an
iron and hit the very top of that skin. But I'm going to do
that, and I'll top that ball. I'll make a really hard swing and
then the ball will go four or five feet and they'll say, how did
you do that? It was really easy. I anticipated impact. So what
happens when you anticipate the impact you clinch. So when you tighten your hands,
your arms get shorter, they pull in towards you, and that's why
you top the golf. So for people out there that a the top it
a lot, especially with that faraway. Would it's because they're hitting to the
golf ball. So there's only one cure for this. You got to be
brave. Number one. You got to set up to that golf ball so
that you don't get way behind it and then you're trying to catch up.
You kind of focus on where you're going to go with your body and the
club head and not the golf ball. So when you get to the coil,
let's just say that's phase one of a two part swing. Then you
got to unwind to the second part and hold that position. Look, you
know, look pretty, look like if someone's taking a picture of your follow
through. And if you get your mind off of impact, then you'll quit
trying to hit, and when you hit, you'll won't have that response.
So for everyone that's top of the ball, I can promise you you're tightening
up, not looking up. That is phenomenal observation. We even had a
listener write me and said once that his dad always used to say to him,
if you lift your head, the only thing you're going to see is
a bad golf shot. When I watch Annaka, it always looks like she's
lifting her head before she hits the ball. Well, she looks like she
was looking at the target because she rotated her body and because her head and
eyes moved towards were moving following the ball. That's another thing. You don't
stay down when you hit a golf ball. You let your eyes release.
You have to because if your head is looking to the right and you're trying
to turn left, your head is going to block your rotation. So you've
got to release your eyes. I mean that's been said forever. There's a
lot of great players. But Anika David the ball at one time, and
it's a shame that he moved away from his original swing, but he was
that left arm was so across the chest. He had that club face shut
at the top. But it didn't really matter because he just rotated through the
golf ball and his eyes were really down the target line. When he was
hitting the golf ball, he was looking where he wanted the ball to go.
And Anika did the same thing becausefully, if you in your spine angle,
you don't want to focus on the golf ball anyway. I mean,
they're old saying a good player sense where the ball is and bad players stare
at it. And there's a lot to be said about that, because if
you get stuck looking at that golf ball or looking at a dimple on that
ball and all that blowning that we've been told to do, you're going to
stay on that ball and you're going to shut down your swing because the ball
is not the golf swing. The ball is the center of the swing.
You're going to decelerate like crazy if you're focusing on the back of the ball
or anything, and you gonna use your hands. Your body's going to stay
behind the ball. I mean, you're going to be You're going to be
and just still when you're hitting it instead of active. And that's why so
many people hit so short. I mean, I had a guy recently come
up to me about six foot three and he says, well, I'm you
know, I'm fairly new at the game. I've been played about a year.
I said, okay, well tell me about you. So how far
do you hit a how far do you hit a driver? He says,
oh, I hit about one sixty five, one seventy And I said,
you should be able to throw it that far. Forgot with your size.
And when I got through with him, you know, he was two thirty
two forty because the side was there. The length. You know, he
had a very long arm and then a club on top of it, so
he had a huge lever. But he didn't know what to do with the
lever, and so so all of these things, you know, are are
they all relat If your body's in the wrong position. I don't care how
strong you are, you can't hit the golf ball very far. I used
to give lessons to Gene Upshaw years and years ago when he was with the
Open Raiders. Jeane was a massive man, and I weighed one hundred and
fifty pounds and I just drilled it by him, I mean one hundred yards
okay, And he'd say, how can you hit it so far? My
leg's bigger than you did, and blah blah blah. But when he got
to when he got right, when he figured out where to be instinctively,
because he was an athlete, you know, he hit it two miles And
I didn't know all of this then, but you'd get there every now and
then, do you understand what I mean? Every now and then you clock
one, you say, what did I do there? When your body is
in the place? Well, now I know where that place is. That's
the thing. I know what put you and you're gonna You're gonna hit the
ball farther. You're going to hit the ball straighter. And it's it's and
it's not hard. I have people say, well, how many lessens do
I have? And I say one, maybe two, and then then then
I can pass it. I'm pass it on to you, and then you'll
know every time you hit the golf ball what that ball is doing will tell
you what you did or did not do. Well, We're gonna come down
to Palm Springs. I'm going to spend some time with you. Well,
i'd problems you. It's not going to take a lot of time. And
you don't have to be a great athlete. You don't have to be young
and springy. You can, you know, you can be just a regular
guy that doesn't have eight hours to day to practice. And I'll show you.
I'll show you how to hit the ball and hit it solid. And
I mean that's a flat guarantee. I love it. I love that kind
of flat guarantee. That is confidence, and that's what the game is about.
Having that confidence. Well, you know, you know I've been at
this a long time. I've you know, I've made my bones. As
they say, I know how to teach golf. And I've been doing this
since, you know, I've been a pros in sixty five. But it's
really the last fifteen years that I've learned how to swing the golf club.
And I just wish I had done this a little earlier and really and where
I really was sure it was right, it's probably been the last six or
seven years and now I and now there's a couple of guys on the tour.
I'm not going to mention, but I just wish I could have a
conversation with them. I don't want any money, I don't want anything.
I would, in fact, I would do it anonymously, but unfortunately egos
they're not going to say, hey, there's a guy on a driving me.
I could really help you. You know, it's just not going to
happen, but just for the sake of the game, you know. So
when do you come back from China. I'm going to be there a week
hopefully that's going to be all. I mean, I'm enamored with it,
but I have so much to do on this side of the pond. I've
got to catch up. But I want to really try to get some golf
academies there and teach people how to operate a facility, because it doesn't make
sense to me that they're going to build ten thousand golf courses in the next
five or six years. And that's the that's on the drawing board that they
don't that their own people can't operate them. Doesn't make sense to me that
they have to get somebody from Australia or America or whatever to run their golf
course. So they should build their own base of employees, you know,
so it benefits them just like we have we have here. We don't have
to call someone in Australia to run a golf course here, and that's what
they need. So they need junior programs and they need some management programs so
they get an understanding. You know, this is not rocket science. The
golf industry is a service oriented business. To accommodate people. You anticipate what
they're going to say before they do it, and you're ready to per form
that accommodation. And that's it. Learning to fold the shirt or sell a
set of clubs, Come on, we can all do that. But the
secret of this business is to make people feel welcome and not when they walk
through the door and look at them and say, well, that guy's not
going to spend any money. You know, you don't qualify people in this
business, nor should you in life for that matter. But that's a secret
of this business. And I've been lucky because that was taught to me as
a young man, and I've made a lot of money in the golf industry
and times when people didn't make money, and and you know, it's what
I pass on to most students so that they can go out there and they
can become successful. Well, if you receive two phone calls from the last
episode that we barely even scratch the surface on the single pivot swing, I'm
hoping you're going to get a lot more emails and phone calls. I will
make sure to post your email address on our blog site. And you told
me tam Manzoni at College of thedeesert dot EEDU correct. That's correct, And
then let's let them contact you that way, unless you want to give the
phone number that I contacted you at, that's this one. If they want
to, they can call me on my cellular phone. If they don't agree
with me, please don't call me and call me a bunch of names.
If you don't agree to call me, just get a hold of me and
we'll let them my cell phone. My cell phone is seven to six zero
five three four three one nine zero, and you have my email. And
anyone that's interested in trying to find out more if they're a little bit confused,
you know, and drop me into litt or give me a call and
I'll be happy to help them in any way that I can. Well,
like I said, I'm going to try to come down to the Palm Springs
area around the first part of twenty eleven. And if I do and we
get a chance to get together, I hope that you'll allow me to bring
a video camera and and maybe even put a little bit on video on here
so we can get that on golf Smarter TV too, to show people,
because based on this information and the emails that I received, they want more
information. They are intrigued by what you're saying and want to know more,
so we've got to get it out there. Well, that's great, and
I and I appreciate, I really do appreciate the opportunity to tell you all
this stuff because it's it's it's it's like, you know, I feel like
I have a lightning in a bottle right now and it's trying to get out
and I want to get it out, and not so much to praise myself,
but to help people with this game, because it's such a fantastic game,
and to suffer with it like I know I did for many years.
UH, is ridiculous. If you get the right amount of information, it
isn't that complicated. We're not building a rocket here. Okay, we're swinging
a club. And if we just play on an access and rotate around that
access, that makes it so much easier