Speaker 1: Last year, I'm in Vegas at the celebrity golf tournament
Speaker 1: before the Super Bowl, all pro football players that can't
Speaker 1: hit a golf ball. But if I handed you a
Speaker 1: violin and said, hey, I'm going to come back in
Speaker 1: a year, I want you to play Mozart for me,
Speaker 1: you're probably not going to be doing anything but playing
Speaker 1: scratches and you know, squeaks.
Speaker 2: If you play golf, you know the deal. You take lessons,
Speaker 2: you take a tip from YouTube, you practice, you integrate,
Speaker 2: and then it works until it doesn't and you're back
Speaker 2: at square one. Simply put, you've joined the quest for
Speaker 2: the perfect thing. So if you're obsessed with breaking eighty
Speaker 2: or ninety, blasting it to eighty or hitting it down
Speaker 2: the middle, you've come to the right place. This is
Speaker 2: golf smartest, correct the mistakes. And now here's your host,
Speaker 2: Josh Carton. Today I am talking to Crystal Garcia Christ.
Speaker 2: Thank you for being here today, my pleasure. You are
Speaker 2: the first person I've had on who I think did
Speaker 2: not really grow up playing in the way that a
Speaker 2: lot of pros and teachers instructors have. So why don't
Speaker 2: we start there?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I am a bit of an anomaly in
Speaker 1: the world of golf, because I'm probably the latest bloomer
Speaker 1: that's well known. And the reason why that is is
Speaker 1: because golf is challenging for everybody. It's a very small
Speaker 1: number of people that I call naturals that usually pick
Speaker 1: up the game and they're generally shooting par within a
Speaker 1: year and a half two years. So I read an
Speaker 1: article that was the genesis for how I got into
Speaker 1: my whole journey, and it was a disheartening article in
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine in Golf Digest that that the
Speaker 1: average golfer reaches their peak at about three years of
Speaker 1: picking up the game as an adult, and then they
Speaker 1: are basically that's where they're going to live out the
Speaker 1: rest of their life. And they said, you know, guys
Speaker 1: who place at scratch are better. They also hit that
Speaker 1: peak that early. And I started asking my friends later
Speaker 1: as I became more of a golfer, I'd be like,
Speaker 1: you know, hey, man, like when did you start playing,
Speaker 1: Like fifteen sixteen? When did how long did it take
Speaker 1: you to shoot par? A year and a half? Like
Speaker 1: That's generally what I always heard. And so Golf Digest
Speaker 1: in that same article said they were giving away awards
Speaker 1: for people who had dropped their handicap the most during
Speaker 1: the course of a year, and I think the first
Speaker 1: place went to a guy who went from twenty two
Speaker 1: to eleven. And I was like, man, that's a really
Speaker 1: cool idea, and I just kind of put it in
Speaker 1: the back of my mind. And then in November of
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine, I was buying my seventh driver
Speaker 1: in three years, hoping it would fix my block slice
Speaker 1: and next to the cash sure was Ben Hogan's Five
Speaker 1: Lessons book, and so I always liked the pictures in
Speaker 1: that book. And you know, I'm forty years old, struggling,
Speaker 1: struggling golfer, very often well over one hundred, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: you know what, I'm going to pick up this book
Speaker 1: for twelve dollars and I start thumbing through it. And
Speaker 1: the difference in two thousand and nine from when I
Speaker 1: was younger is YouTube would come out and I could
Speaker 1: actually go on YouTube and look up swings of Ben Hogan.
Speaker 1: I've always been interested in the mystique. I know the
Speaker 1: story about the bus accident all that, but I'd never
Speaker 1: really caught his swing more than you would see as
Speaker 1: a flash before a US Open or a master's like
Speaker 1: champions like Ben Hogan, and that's all you saw. There
Speaker 1: wasn't enough to sink your teeth into, you know. So
Speaker 1: I started to watch his swing on YouTube, and then
Speaker 1: for Christmas a month later in two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: I got a flip video camera and the first thing
Speaker 1: a golfer thinks is man, I got to go out
Speaker 1: to the golf course with my buddies and I got
Speaker 1: to see my swing. I came home devastated. I thought
Speaker 1: I had a good looking golf swing. It had just
Speaker 1: become so so dysfunctional, and I had no idea. But
Speaker 1: I am somewhat of a movement expert. I could see
Speaker 1: very clearly that I did not have a good golf swing.
Speaker 1: And those three elements the article on you know you
Speaker 1: top out after three years, and I was like, that's
Speaker 1: not going to be me. I'm going to try and
Speaker 1: beat that guy's record. To the book Ben Hogan's Five
Speaker 1: Lessons and seeing my swing, that was the genesis for
Speaker 1: me to start my swing evolution. In the year twenty ten,
Speaker 1: in January, I saved every scorecard, putted every ball out.
Speaker 1: It was forty four rounds of golf, and by studying
Speaker 1: the classic swing. This is an important note. As a
Speaker 1: freshman in high school, I shot under par. I was
Speaker 1: played the number one position on my high school golf team,
Speaker 1: and my dad took me to see a golf instructor
Speaker 1: for the first time, and he put me into the
Speaker 1: modern swing and changed my natural classic swing. Both feet
Speaker 1: planted on the ground, stable base, turned the upper body
Speaker 1: against the lower body, swing on plane, all of that,
Speaker 1: and my game went to absolute in the garbage can.
Speaker 2: So what version of the modern swing was this? Like
Speaker 2: so like, because you know, there was the whole X
Speaker 2: factor kind of thing.
Speaker 1: So I'm very good friends with Jim McClain. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was elements that could be X factor ish, But it
Speaker 1: wasn't Jim that I went to go see. But this
Speaker 1: is one of the most famous teachers in the world.
Speaker 1: You know, got I learned an awful lot about practice
Speaker 1: and you know, and all of that. But it was
Speaker 1: the beginning of this phase where we wanted to keep
Speaker 1: the feet plan and turn the upper body against a
Speaker 1: stable lower body, keep the club on plane the whole time,
Speaker 1: you know, not this kind of like more. You know,
Speaker 1: we all imitated Nicholas, you know, that's what me and
Speaker 1: my older brother did, and we played pretty good.
Speaker 2: Golf under as a teenager. Hell yeah, you are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I tied the number one player in our district
Speaker 1: as a freshman in high school.
Speaker 2: How frustrating was it to go through that, have be
Speaker 2: that good and then have a kind of deteriorate I mean,
Speaker 2: what was what were your thoughts at the.
Speaker 1: Time, Well, it was absolutely devastating because you have to
Speaker 1: love golf a lot to get to where I had
Speaker 1: gotten to. I had won a three day tournament, you know, earlier,
Speaker 1: and you know, and you know I wasn't like I
Speaker 1: shot seventy seven the last day to win that tournament
Speaker 1: when I was in the eighth grade, you know, before
Speaker 1: the ninth grade, and you know, I was a good golfer.
Speaker 1: But there was Gary Nicholas as my same age. He
Speaker 1: was still there were guys levels above me. But the
Speaker 1: point is I went to shooting nineties in over one
Speaker 1: hundred on bad.
Speaker 2: Days, which has got to be very disconcerting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I became, you know, I focused on another
Speaker 1: thing that I loved. I loved martial arts. I became
Speaker 1: the number one rated junior fighter in the state of Florida,
Speaker 1: and then I went on to win the Florida Open,
Speaker 1: the Florida Games as an adult, so I competed in
Speaker 1: sport karate. I actually quit golf for four years after
Speaker 1: college because I was just so bad at it. It
Speaker 1: was years later. I was twenty seven and I was
Speaker 1: living with a friend. We worked together in a restaurant,
Speaker 1: I remember, and he loved golf, and we watched Tiger
Speaker 1: win the Masters by twelve and ninety seven. He's like,
Speaker 1: you know, we gotta get you back out there. I
Speaker 1: was like, all right, you know, So I started playing
Speaker 1: golf again and we played with another friend of ours, George,
Speaker 1: and George made us put everything out and I shot
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty six.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, I've driven home after shooting a ninety three,
Speaker 2: like thinking I wanted to, you know, drive my car
Speaker 2: into a tree off the cliff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, So you know I have not only
Speaker 1: am I probably the latest bloomer in golf, I'm probably
Speaker 1: the biggest swing of scoring.
Speaker 2: Oh my, yeah, one hundred and twenty six down to
Speaker 2: where you're at.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, like my low round is sixty seven.
Speaker 1: I've shot sixty eight. I'm not like one of these
Speaker 1: guys that shoots insanely low scores usually in the seventies,
Speaker 1: you know, but it's it's when it was bad. I
Speaker 1: would have paid a million dollars if a genie could
Speaker 1: have said, oh, I'll give you this golf swing and
Speaker 1: the ability to play at this level, I would have
Speaker 1: jumped at the chance, because you're hopeless when you're like that.
Speaker 1: You know. That's where I lived for fourteen years until
Speaker 1: I bought the Ben Hogan book and had the revelation
Speaker 1: I'm just going to go back to my childhood swing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so talk a little bit about there's that pursuit
Speaker 2: of the Hogan swing that was built for Hogan that
Speaker 2: he had to hit a zillion balls of day to maintain.
Speaker 2: So what did you pick up from Hogan that got
Speaker 2: you back to that classic swing?
Speaker 1: You know? So the first thing that I picked up
Speaker 1: from Hogan was by kind of adopting the notion that
Speaker 1: I'm going to just start all over again. It gave
Speaker 1: me a way to reboot my self image because my
Speaker 1: self image was really in the dumpster that I was
Speaker 1: a terrible golfer. I was always embarrassed. But I had
Speaker 1: this new idea, I'm going to swing like Cogan. I'll
Speaker 1: just swing like Cogan. I started to work on it,
Speaker 1: and I started to make a little bit better contact.
Speaker 1: I started to notice. You know, I did take some
Speaker 1: lessons with a couple people I had taken lessons before
Speaker 1: the transformation, and all they did was make me worse,
Speaker 1: just nightmarish. But the next person I called, I said, hey,
Speaker 1: I want to learn to swing like Ben Hogan. Can
Speaker 1: you help me? And of course there's laughter on the
Speaker 1: other side of the phone, and I picked up a
Speaker 1: couple tidbits from him. Then I was hitting golf balls
Speaker 1: on a driving range in February in twenty ten, and
Speaker 1: an old man came walking up to me and he goes,
Speaker 1: let me see you hit a ball. Hit one, because
Speaker 1: let me see you hit one more. I hit another one.
Speaker 1: He goes, your head's in front of the ball. I
Speaker 1: can help you with that. I'm Roger Donne and he
Speaker 1: hands me his card and in La Roger Done golf
Speaker 1: shops all over the place. They're all over the Southwest,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, you're the Roger Dune and he's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't turn pro, but I did pretty good with
Speaker 1: the stores. Be here on Tuesday night, so it gives
Speaker 1: me a two hour and forty five minute lesson. He
Speaker 1: charges me forty five dollars bring it in cash. We
Speaker 1: actually talked about the swing for an hour and a
Speaker 1: half to almost two hours before we even got out
Speaker 1: to the driving range. And but he he talked about
Speaker 1: a Hogan fan. He was into it. He goes, first
Speaker 1: of all, your swing's too upright. I want you to
Speaker 1: take your left hand and feel like you're reaching your
Speaker 1: right pocket on the back swing. And I'm like, you're crazy.
Speaker 1: But you know, he was able to get me into
Speaker 1: that Hogan plane, you know. And now I understand, you
Speaker 1: know more of why he said that and how it
Speaker 1: fits into the classic swing. But at first I was like,
Speaker 1: you're you're freaking nuts because the last lesson I had,
Speaker 1: the guy was telling me to wretch my arms down
Speaker 1: the train tracks as far as possible, and this guy's
Speaker 1: telling me to reach in my left pocket, which is
Speaker 1: as deep, low and inside as possible. And I'm like,
Speaker 1: you know, what do you do? It was woh, my gosh,
Speaker 1: it's been a crazy journey. Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, so so what so was it a philosophical shift
Speaker 2: for you? Was it physical? Was it philosophical or was
Speaker 2: it just kind of rebooting your system.
Speaker 1: Well, I realized now years later, it was one of
Speaker 1: my friends, Sean Cox, who was the director of golf
Speaker 1: at the Grand del Mar. Now he's up in San Francisco.
Speaker 1: It's a wonderful, wonderful pro friend of mine who pointed
Speaker 1: out to me, he goes, have you ever read a
Speaker 1: book called the Alter Ego Effect? Like, no, I don't
Speaker 1: know anything about it. He goes, you should read that
Speaker 1: because that's what you did with your Hogan transformation. And
Speaker 1: I'm like, excuse me. He goes, Yeah, all sorts of
Speaker 1: athletes and performers create these alter egos that allow them
Speaker 1: to create a new self image and prove their performance ability.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, son of a gun. And I realized
Speaker 1: at that moment, Yeah, I put on the Hogan hat,
Speaker 1: created this new identity. Was able to put in the
Speaker 1: background all the noise and the disappointment and embarrassment of
Speaker 1: my golf game and create something fresh. And I had used.
Speaker 1: Bruce Lee was my idol when I was a martial
Speaker 1: arts competitor, and then I became a pro vallet dancer
Speaker 1: and Mikhail Barishnikov was my idol for that pursuit. All
Speaker 1: I did was replace replace it with Hogan. So okay,
Speaker 1: well I'm gonna imitate Ogan and I'm going to do that.
Speaker 1: And it seems so matter of fact, But now I
Speaker 1: kind of see it much much deeper what happened internally
Speaker 1: to go along with the external work, To.
Speaker 2: Talk a little bit about the martial arts, because that
Speaker 2: always seems to me like martial arts are such a
Speaker 2: great background for somebody who wants to be good at golf.
Speaker 2: How is that influence what you've done?
Speaker 1: Well, it's it's tremendous striking in the martial arts, whether
Speaker 1: it's you know, punches or kicks like a spinning back kick.
Speaker 1: They're all rotational and you all build your force from
Speaker 1: the ground up. A boxer couldn't knock you out standing
Speaker 1: on a sheet of ice. You know, you have to
Speaker 1: be able to use the ground. And the motions are
Speaker 1: very very similar as far as discipline goes. I find
Speaker 1: that there are also parallels because it's like you're not
Speaker 1: playing a team sport. It's all solo. You know, there's
Speaker 1: there's nobody to congratulate but yourself and nobody to blame
Speaker 1: but yourself if you inter lose. But martial arts is
Speaker 1: man's That's what I spent the first thirty five years
Speaker 1: of my life. That's that's what I did, and I
Speaker 1: you know, took it pretty deep.
Speaker 2: I'm always kind of amazed, especially you know, somebody as
Speaker 2: good of an athlete as yourself, if you're a ballet
Speaker 2: dancer and you know, martial arts champion, all those things.
Speaker 2: It's always fascinating to me that somebody who's a great
Speaker 2: athlete can struggle with golf. Yet it happens all the time.
Speaker 1: Right, Oh my gosh. Last year, I'm in Vegas at
Speaker 1: the celebrity golf tournament before the Super Bowl. Hey, I
Speaker 1: love to meet all these great pro athletes and everything,
Speaker 1: but you're seeing all pro football players and all these
Speaker 1: different athletes that can't hit a golf ball, and it's like, God,
Speaker 1: bless you know. I mean, the best athletes in the world.
Speaker 1: But if I handed you a bye violin and said, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna come back in a year, I want you
Speaker 1: to play mozart for me, you're probably not going to
Speaker 1: be doing anything but playing scratches and you know, squeezed.
Speaker 2: That was my experience with the clarin up.
Speaker 1: So golf is a fine art. I separate the idea
Speaker 1: of a fine art from a popular art. Thusly, you
Speaker 1: can teach yourself a popular art, but a fine art
Speaker 1: is a master's student relationship that's handed down from generation
Speaker 1: to generation. So you can teach yourself to break dance,
Speaker 1: you can teach yourself to play acoustic guitar, you can
Speaker 1: teach yourself to rap, but you can't teach yourself opera.
Speaker 1: You can't teach yourself violin, and you can't teach yourself ballet.
Speaker 2: For sure. I know so many people who are really
Speaker 2: good athletes who take up golf and get really serious
Speaker 2: about it, and they struggle exactly like you were struggling.
Speaker 2: What do you do with somebody like that when they
Speaker 2: come to you.
Speaker 1: Well, if we have an athletic background, the first thing
Speaker 1: I want to do is I want to tap in
Speaker 1: on what they were doing previously. So well, the first
Speaker 1: thing I want to ask is did they ever play
Speaker 1: a sport, either a stick sport or something that required throwing,
Speaker 1: because they're the same kinetic sequence. One of the famous
Speaker 1: drills that I do is I'll have a student and
Speaker 1: we'll throw balls, and I show them that you can't
Speaker 1: throw the ball until your lead foot plants. And once
Speaker 1: we get that, then I have them get the feeling
Speaker 1: of throwing the ball into the ground. And what this
Speaker 1: does is it helps them to connect the way they
Speaker 1: move in other sports into golf because it's, like I said,
Speaker 1: it's the same kinetic sequence. A lot of my students
Speaker 1: you'll see on YouTube, have these light bulb moments where
Speaker 1: they're like, oh my gosh, where they just unlock two
Speaker 1: or three more levels of compression by understanding how they're
Speaker 1: applying the energy. So what you have to remember is
Speaker 1: we create all the forces in the golf swing. We
Speaker 1: can overpower the forces, which is what ninety percent of
Speaker 1: golfers do, or we can harness the forces. When you
Speaker 1: look at pro golfers they look like they're effortless, it's
Speaker 1: because they're harnessing the forces they're generating in the swing
Speaker 1: and then transmitting them down the club shaft. I just
Speaker 1: taught a weekend golf school. People flew in from all
Speaker 1: around the country and I've got an aid iron and
Speaker 1: I'm like, look, guys, you don't have to swing hard
Speaker 1: or apply force. You know, I'm doing it and I'm
Speaker 1: just blasting the ball, and they just they just were mystified.
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to be braggy or something. I'm just
Speaker 1: trying to say. It's like, I'm not exerting energy or
Speaker 1: extra force to do this. I'm actually removing extraineous force
Speaker 1: as simply as I can put it as I'm just
Speaker 1: letting the weight of my arms in club fall, adding
Speaker 1: my turn, and then snapping at the bottom. So energy
Speaker 1: goes flinging out the end of the golf club like
Speaker 1: snap and a towel, you know. But it's not about
Speaker 1: using more force, right.
Speaker 2: I find in my own game, my biggest struggle is
Speaker 2: when I'm not hitting the ball straight off the tee,
Speaker 2: is that I have that instinct to just start pulling
Speaker 2: it down from the top, and that's when I start
Speaker 2: slicing the ball and blocking it out to the right
Speaker 2: instead of having the nice rhythmic sequence coming through the ball.
Speaker 1: Right. That was one of the things I had to
Speaker 1: learn in martial arts because I used to expend too
Speaker 1: much energy. And my coach was like, look watch how
Speaker 1: Pat fights. He's real smooth. When it's time he goes,
Speaker 1: you know. So like for me, it's like the time
Speaker 1: is at the bottom to apply speed and you know,
Speaker 1: just that little snap at the bottom. But if I
Speaker 1: try and apply it up here, it's just going to
Speaker 1: be gone. It's just lost.
Speaker 2: You know, modern golf instruction as opposed to kind of
Speaker 2: the classic swing model. Just give me an idea of
Speaker 2: where the divide takes place. I would imagine the classic
Speaker 2: swing to me, which is what really interests me, is
Speaker 2: that it's much more accessible and doable than swinging like
Speaker 2: Rory or But we watch them on TV and think
Speaker 2: that's how I'm supposed to.
Speaker 1: Play, right, right, So Rory and Bryson, they're playing the
Speaker 1: modern game. They have modern swing elements, but both of
Speaker 1: them also have a lot of things that I really
Speaker 1: like in their golf swing. Rice in de Shambo lifts
Speaker 1: his lead heel with a driver, classic swing move. Rory
Speaker 1: doesn't have the amount of lateral sidebend that a lot
Speaker 1: of modern swingers have, and he has a fairly neutral
Speaker 1: grip the modern swing. Let me give you my assessment.
Speaker 1: This is something I've arrived at talking with people in
Speaker 1: my own experience. When I was first learning the modern swing,
Speaker 1: my swing was on videotape. Here's an old tube television.
Speaker 1: We're gonna watch your swing on it on VHS or whatever,
Speaker 1: And there was a dry erase marker drawn picture that
Speaker 1: this is the perfect swing plane. And so to me,
Speaker 1: the demarcation point between the classic swing, which is how
Speaker 1: I was taught as a kid growing up, and the
Speaker 1: beginning of the modern swing, is the video camera. Because
Speaker 1: there became this idea that you know, there was a
Speaker 1: perfect swing plane, that you can keep the club on
Speaker 1: this plane and it's just going to be this perfect
Speaker 1: tilted Mary Go round. Whereas if you look at Arnold Palmer,
Speaker 1: Bobby Jones, Sam Sneed, they all took it inside and
Speaker 1: put it on that plane. On the down swing, you
Speaker 1: got guys like Miller, Barber and Arnold Palmer that wild
Speaker 1: looking swings where their club head is not on that
Speaker 1: plane at all, but they're playing extremely high level golf.
Speaker 1: So by the nineties we started to see all golf
Speaker 1: instruction moving towards us keep the feet planted, put the
Speaker 1: club on that perfect plane. In order to start it
Speaker 1: off on the plane, the club head has to go
Speaker 1: back outside the hands in order to draw it up
Speaker 1: that perfect circle. All this stuff is completely arbitrary and
Speaker 1: makes no difference at all. Because the reason I say
Speaker 1: this is because the Hall of Fame is filled with
Speaker 1: golfers where that club is all over the place on
Speaker 1: the back swing. It's not like the top ten guys
Speaker 1: all kept it on that plane.
Speaker 2: I remember when all of a sudden, I don't remember
Speaker 2: what year it was. You probably you have a much
Speaker 2: better memory than I do, when all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: everybody's problem became, oh my god, they're swinging over the
Speaker 2: top right. Yeah, and then it But and I love
Speaker 2: what you're saying, which is that's not the flaw. That's
Speaker 2: actually what you're supposed to be doing.
Speaker 1: So in my book, the way I look at it,
Speaker 1: I want to coil as much as I can to
Speaker 1: my trail side for power. And I told you Roger
Speaker 1: Dunn was the first person who said take your left
Speaker 1: hand and put in your right pocket. The only difference
Speaker 1: between the modern swing and the classic swing is the
Speaker 1: classic swing you did not lift the arms prematurely. He's
Speaker 1: kept the upper arms connected so as you turned, the
Speaker 1: arms are low. And then once you lift the arms
Speaker 1: later in order to get back on plane, you're going
Speaker 1: to see this little over move. Okay. The modern swing
Speaker 1: people lift the arms sooner to keep that club on
Speaker 1: that plane. So it's on that plane on the way down.
Speaker 1: If I was throwing a bar all into the ground.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna take it artificially up this plane line
Speaker 1: and throw it down into the ground. I'm gonna take
Speaker 1: it back to the inside and throw it down. That's
Speaker 1: the most power if I was gonna throw a punch,
Speaker 1: if I was throwing, you know, that's how the shoulder
Speaker 1: is designed. So to me, it makes more sense to
Speaker 1: take it inside, coil to the max, and then drop
Speaker 1: the hammer.
Speaker 2: How hard is it for people to pick that up.
Speaker 1: It's the easiest thing I've found. I've been obsessed with
Speaker 1: the golf swing for fifty years. You know, Okay, it's
Speaker 1: what kids do naturally. If you give them a golf club,
Speaker 1: they're gonna whip it back to the inside and then
Speaker 1: hit down on it.
Speaker 2: One of my kids was a good baseball player and
Speaker 2: as a great arm, and you know, it was a
Speaker 2: good hitter, and it took him about two rounds before
Speaker 2: he caught one. He's hitting the to eighty two ninety
Speaker 2: because nobody had fixed him. He was taking a totally
Speaker 2: natural swing at it.
Speaker 1: Take a kid, they can hit it too. Eighty two ninety.
Speaker 1: You know that has that natural pattern. And imagine they
Speaker 1: were able to refine that for about eighteen months and
Speaker 1: learn how to putt, chip, hit wedge shots. I bet
Speaker 1: you they're going to be one of those people that's
Speaker 1: around that scratch level.
Speaker 2: How similar is the is the swing to the putting stroke?
Speaker 2: You know? Is there something people can take from what
Speaker 2: you do and apply it to their putting that will
Speaker 2: help them.
Speaker 1: I've got a friend who's a plus four handicap. He's like,
Speaker 1: Chris Man, I'm playing really good golf lately, but my
Speaker 1: putting like he missed. He had this like twenty footer
Speaker 1: per eagle and he ran at like seven feet past
Speaker 1: and missed the putt. Coming back, He's like, man, but
Speaker 1: I'm putting like crap. I'm like, are you working on
Speaker 1: your putting? He goes.
Speaker 2: Right. The problem with the average kid is they don't
Speaker 2: want to practice putting the short game I did.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen forties, Bobby Locke from South Africa, he
Speaker 1: was winning a lot. He was probably the greatest player
Speaker 1: you know in that era. And he came to America
Speaker 1: and he wrote a book and in the nineteen forties
Speaker 1: he said that Ben Hogan was the best putter on tour.
Speaker 1: Really in nineteen forty nine, Ben Hogan had the accident,
Speaker 1: gradually lost sight in his left eye, which was his
Speaker 1: dominant eye, and his depth perception got worse and worse,
Speaker 1: and he developed the yips. This is my understanding of
Speaker 1: what happened to mister Hogan.
Speaker 2: Now what that's the biggest breakthrough thing you do with
Speaker 2: students where people suddenly get it.
Speaker 1: The thing that most of my students come to me
Speaker 1: for is to learn how to compress the golf ball.
Speaker 1: That's probably the thing that they admire the most about
Speaker 1: what I do in my swing and they want to
Speaker 1: get it. And so the main thing that I want
Speaker 1: them to understand is impact alignments. Okay, so if I'm
Speaker 1: going to compress a golf ball, for example, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: be able to hit down with say I've got an
Speaker 1: eight iron. If I wanted to compress a golf ball,
Speaker 1: if my weight was on my right leg and I
Speaker 1: was tilted back, I'm probably not going to be able
Speaker 1: to do it right. But you hear all the pros
Speaker 1: talk about covering the ball or being on top of
Speaker 1: the ball. That's impact alignments. So you cannot deliver the
Speaker 1: force through the shaft into the ball unless your skeleton
Speaker 1: is aligned properly. So if you have improper impact alignments,
Speaker 1: you can spend years, millions of golf balls swinging on
Speaker 1: the range and you're never going to figure it out.
Speaker 1: It's the it's the violin analogy. That's where you need,
Speaker 1: you know, a professional to look at you and say, okay,
Speaker 1: look see this right here. You know you're you're tilted
Speaker 1: too far back. You know your weight is not you
Speaker 1: know where it needs to be. There's no way you
Speaker 1: can reach the ball and compress it in this way.
Speaker 1: But if you get here, you're on top of it,
Speaker 1: got forward Chafflin, then we can do something. The problem is,
Speaker 1: you know, everybody wants to take out their five iron
Speaker 1: or driver and swing as hard as they can and
Speaker 1: hit it perfect, you know, and flush it. I'm like,
Speaker 1: if you can't do it with just like a chip
Speaker 1: a pitch shot, it's going to be very hard to
Speaker 1: teach you impact alignments with a five iron or a
Speaker 1: three iron that your mind is telling you I have
Speaker 1: to swing this hard. That was one of the things
Speaker 1: I was teaching this weekend was I had a five
Speaker 1: wood and I'm like, guys, I'm swinging it like a
Speaker 1: pitching wedge, and it was just the same tempo, smooth,
Speaker 1: and you know, I'm just hitting it long and straight,
Speaker 1: and everybody's brains were melting because it's like, you're not
Speaker 1: swinging hard, but why is the ball going so far?
Speaker 1: You know? And it's the correct transmission of energy through
Speaker 1: the shaft with good impact alignments.
Speaker 2: It's funny because I've tried to do the same swing
Speaker 2: for every club thing, and it's interesting the results because
Speaker 2: it tends to if I catch a square, my driver
Speaker 2: is great and it really doesn't impact my distance all
Speaker 2: that much. If I put a good swing on the ball,
Speaker 2: it's gonna go no matter how intensely I'm coming at
Speaker 2: it or how smoothly I'm coming at it, And obviously
Speaker 2: you want you want both. It's interesting to me because
Speaker 2: we all do swing differently as we move up the
Speaker 2: length of the club. Should people be trying to employ
Speaker 2: the same swing er? Is there a different swing when
Speaker 2: I mean, obviously there's a different swing when you're hitting
Speaker 2: a sixty, I suppose than a driver.
Speaker 1: There's variations, okay, but just as a general rule, Jack
Speaker 1: Nicholas said, I want one golf swing. I want one
Speaker 1: golf swing. I want to keep the game as simple
Speaker 1: as possible. He said, the secret to is one iron.
Speaker 1: You know. Trevino famously said only God and Nicholas can
Speaker 1: hit a one iron, and Jack said, the secret is
Speaker 1: I swing it like a seven iron. You know, it's
Speaker 1: he said that he swung his irons generally three quarters.
Speaker 1: He said, I want to hit my driver hard because
Speaker 1: I want to, you know, stretchically, bite off as much
Speaker 1: as I can. Every shot after that is a precise distance.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter if it's a six iron or an
Speaker 1: eight iron. It just matters I can hit my number.
Speaker 1: And so he swung three quarters, and you look at
Speaker 1: his distances. It's like, you know, Jack Nicholas is one
Speaker 1: hundred and you know, sixty five yards. He's got a
Speaker 1: six iron. It's like, believe me, he can hit a
Speaker 1: two hundred. It takes some discipline, it takes taking your
Speaker 1: ego out of it. You know. I'm working hard on
Speaker 1: that right now, you know, because I've always, you know,
Speaker 1: wanted to hit my irons as far as I can
Speaker 1: hit them, you know. But I'm really starting to become
Speaker 1: more judicious. And you know, like, you know, go ahead,
Speaker 1: hit an eight iron. Club up. You can always have
Speaker 1: too little club, but you can never have too much club,
Speaker 1: you know, right for sure?
Speaker 2: For sure. Now, if you look back at classic swings,
Speaker 2: and you know we've talked about Hogan, what are the
Speaker 2: swings that you most admire and what have you taken
Speaker 2: from them to apply to you know, your methods.
Speaker 1: Right off the bat, I think Bobby Jones and Sam
Speaker 1: Snead they have very similar motion. If you've seen my videos,
Speaker 1: you'll see that. I show how they take the club
Speaker 1: back low to the inside, and then they both have
Speaker 1: a pretty generous looping motion over onto the golf plane.
Speaker 1: But the thing that I love about their swings is
Speaker 1: how fluid and uninhibited they are, all three of them, Hogan,
Speaker 1: Snead and Bobby Jones. It's like they put that club
Speaker 1: in motion and there's just nothing impeding it. There's no jerks,
Speaker 1: there's no kind of like movements that don't seem to add.
Speaker 1: It's like very symphonic. It's very very smooth and elegant,
Speaker 1: you know. And so so those are the swings that
Speaker 1: really stick out to me. I absolutely think Jack Nicholas
Speaker 1: may be the smartest golfer that ever lived. Actually, I'll
Speaker 1: go ahead and say he is. He made it simpler
Speaker 1: than everybody else and obviously eighteen major wins, nineteen major
Speaker 1: runner ups. You know it's crazy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it's it's interesting or it struck me that
Speaker 2: his swing in some ways. I mean, I would like
Speaker 2: give anything to swing like Sam's Need. I would take
Speaker 2: a couple of years off the end of my life
Speaker 2: if I could never.
Speaker 1: That's a tough wager, because you got me thinking about it.
Speaker 2: Sir, I'm not kidding you.
Speaker 1: Need was the man like when I interviewed Chee Chee.
Speaker 1: I'm like, you know, Hogan, Hogan, Hogan, and he's like Hogan,
Speaker 1: Hogan was the man he goes. If I could have
Speaker 1: putt it for Hogan, he would have shot in the
Speaker 1: mid fifties every time. But Sam Snead, He's like Sneid
Speaker 1: was longer, you know, Sneed hit it every bit as
Speaker 1: solid as Ben Hogan.
Speaker 2: Because I'm never going to swing like Sam Sneaed. Nicholas's
Speaker 2: swing seems more accessible somehow for an average I mean,
Speaker 2: not to hit the ball like him, but that type
Speaker 2: of swing, I mean is there because of obviously both
Speaker 2: were great natural athletes.
Speaker 1: Yes, they were both really serious athletes in multiple sports.
Speaker 2: Right, I mean, Nicholas's background is like crazy. I mean,
Speaker 2: I know he's a football player or a bad All
Speaker 2: state basketball We've gone to Ohio State for basketball. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but so what and a really good baseball player I
Speaker 2: believe as well. But what was Is there something more
Speaker 2: accessible for the average golfer about Nicholas's swing? Because I
Speaker 2: feel like I can I would love to swing like
Speaker 2: Sam Sneaed, but I feel like at my best I
Speaker 2: can at least approach a Jack Nicholas swing.
Speaker 1: So I think that this is actually kind of well known.
Speaker 1: Snead's golf swing required more mobility than Jack Nicholas. You know,
Speaker 1: he could kick you know, kick the jail, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: all kinds of weird stuff like that, but he gets
Speaker 1: in more. Snead gets in more lateral sight ben than
Speaker 1: a lot of the classic guys. But if you look
Speaker 1: at Jack Nicholas, Nicholas even has a little bit of
Speaker 1: early extension, you know which Nicholas is inside across the line,
Speaker 1: a little over the top with early extension. What would
Speaker 1: a modern golf teacher say to Jack.
Speaker 2: Nicholas, Oh, they tear him, tear them down and rebuild.
Speaker 1: Them right, Yeah, they destroyed the greatest golf swing in history.
Speaker 1: You know, and when I say Nicholas is the man
Speaker 1: is because he had it so simple. So what did
Speaker 1: he have? What did did he have that was so simple?
Speaker 1: If there's these seeming problems in the golf, you know,
Speaker 1: it's like, let me tell you what my theory is.
Speaker 1: So Nicholas said he wanted the club to go up
Speaker 1: and down his spine. Okay, I've also heard him say
Speaker 1: he always wanted the club to be inside of the fat, right,
Speaker 1: So if that's the case, the club face is always square.
Speaker 1: The way he's swinging it, it's never it's never flip, shut,
Speaker 1: catching up, stuck, it's never any of that. This this
Speaker 1: is as simple as it gets. Man.
Speaker 2: Right, No, his his swing is really I mean, it's
Speaker 2: it is. It's so simple, and I love watching videos
Speaker 2: of him. I mean it's because you just see how
Speaker 2: over complicated we tend to make the swing. Last question, here,
Speaker 2: what three things? If I'm listening to this and I'm
Speaker 2: your average golfer, if you were to tell people, you know,
Speaker 2: two or three things that they can walk away with
Speaker 2: that will help them. You know, obviously you're not saying
Speaker 2: the videos of they're swings or any of that stuff,
Speaker 2: But like what three general things can people walk away
Speaker 2: with that they can say, Okay, I could work on
Speaker 2: this and I can get better.
Speaker 1: The first thing is you have to develop a smooth transition.
Speaker 1: That is the number one thing that changed my life
Speaker 1: on the golf course because I would want to play
Speaker 1: all my force in the transition and I'd have nothing
Speaker 1: when I got to the ball. So you cannot be
Speaker 1: aggressive in the transition. You have to learn to be
Speaker 1: very patient and relaxed, smooth acceleration. Okay. The second thing
Speaker 1: I'm going to say is that if you're not willing
Speaker 1: to fall in love with your short game that's chipping,
Speaker 1: putting pitch shots, you're never going to reach your potential. Now,
Speaker 1: the thing is I said fall in love with your
Speaker 1: short game. I enjoy practicing short game. I didn't in
Speaker 1: the beginning, and if you can learn to do that,
Speaker 1: it gives you another level of confidence. Number three is
Speaker 1: you have to learn to grow a positive self identity.
Speaker 1: That may be let yourself be inspired by your idols.
Speaker 1: You know, put on a Hogan hat, put on a
Speaker 1: Bubba Watson, pink driver chef, put on you know, whatever
Speaker 1: it is that makes you feel like you know that
Speaker 1: alter ego effect can be very, very helpful because if
Speaker 1: you have thirty five years of mental scar tissue of
Speaker 1: shooting one hundred and tens, you know you have to
Speaker 1: break out of that mindset. You have to do something radical,
Speaker 1: and that's where the transformation of what I teach in
Speaker 1: my six month online program. It's all about recreating your
Speaker 1: self identity.
Speaker 2: A great point on then, thank you so much for
Speaker 2: doing this, Chris that it was great to talk to you.
Speaker 1: I loved it. Thank you so kindly.
Speaker 2: Thank you
Speaker 1: M