Speaker 1: Hey, this is Fred Green, host of the Golf Smarter podcast.
Over the next few weeks, from the Golf Smarter Archives,
we're going to feature all of our conversations with Tony Manzoni.
Tony was an amazing golf instructor who passed away in
twenty eighteen. We first met him in twenty ten, and
every time he was featured on the podcast with us,
emails flooded in from golfers around the world, with more
positive feedback than any other teacher we've featured in twenty years.
So unless you're new to Golf Smarter or didn't play
at College of the Desert anytime between the nineteen eighties
to the two thousands, you've probably never heard of Tony,
because we continue to be the only media outlet to
pay attention to his teachings. We've been replaying these episodes
for the last few years, and I still get emails
today reporting on how well you've connected and improved using
Tony's teaching methods. Tony's book The Lost Fundamental, One Simple
Move Better Golf Forever, which was out of print when
he passed away, is once again available on Amazon, including
the Kindle format. Tony's video of the same name was
also out of circulation when he passed, but can now
be seen online. If you'd like to gain access, please
write to me directly by clicking on the Heyfred button
at golfsmarter dot com. To find out more about Tony,
please visit golfsmarter dot com and click on the Tonymanzoni
tab at the top of the page. We hope you
enjoy the journey and know that even if you've heard
these episodes before, you're going to learn something new. Thanks
so much for your continued support and enjoy the single
pivot swing Ben Hogan's secret revealed.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: Welcome and thanks for downloading the Golf Smarter podcast. Our
guest today is tony' Manzoni, a very interesting man with
a fascinating career that includes tour player, instructor, college coach,
contributing author and co founder of Callaway Impressive. He'll provide
us with all the details on that, but most interestingly
of all, based on years of research and modifications, he's
unleashed the single pivot swing, which may be the secret
to Ben Hogan's amazing ball striking ability. Let's found out more.
Shall we Welcome to the Golf Smarter Podcast.
Speaker 3: Tony, Hi, Fred, How you doing today.
Speaker 1: I'm doing well. Thank you so much for joining us.
You've got an illustrious history in the golf world, and
I'm really intrigued about talking to you about where you
started and where you are today. You really have done
a lot of different things in golf, haven't you.
Speaker 3: Well, I have. You know, I started my career in
the Chicago area, well, you know, Chicago and westcon about
fifty miles from Chicago and Niperson Country Club, and I
you know, kind of made my bones there and went
into the service, came back and worked for worked at
Almaden Country Club in San Jose where I lived. Uh
And from that point Ken Venturi, who I knew very well.
Speaker 1: You're talking about Almaden Almendon Country Club in northern California. Yes,
And to say, okay that Almaden, all right, because all
of said we're in Wisconsin and now you're in San Jose.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, well, I'm you know, I moved we moved
to California, moved to San Jose because I was Chicago
born and got a work. I got a job at
al Maden and played pretty good golf and turned professional
obviously made some you know, made some good scores. I
think I still have the record there at sixty one.
At Almadan, I met Ken Venturi played in a few
events with him. He taught me to come into the
Desert uh Tom Des area. There was a new golf
course called Mission Hills opening up, and I worked for
Ken as the head perfer national. He was director of golf,
but primarily he was with CBS, so we saw him
once a month. During that period of time, I got
an idea because I was training a lot of LPGA
gals and one of them was Sally Little, and I
got an idea about playing a mixed team championship where
we wanted to play men against women, giving the ladies
a distance margin. As it turned out, it turned out
to be the Mixed Team Championship. J. C. Pennies was.
Speaker 2: The group that.
Speaker 3: I'm trying to say that they sponsored it, and that
was for about sixteen years on ABC. And from that
point in time, I was very interested in golf club
design and I got together with a fellow by the
name of Richard Parenti and Dick Delacruz, and we started
a company called Hickory Stick and we were selling a
lot of clubs, but we didn't have the capital to
cover the orders. A fellow by name of Edie Callaway
was a member at the Vintage where I had sold
a one hundred and thirty for one of their golf
expos there, and he liked the club. I made a
cold call to him and talked to him into invested
in the company, which he did, and.
Speaker 1: That's like the best call you ever made.
Speaker 3: Best call, great cold calls of all time.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: I talked to him into putting his name on the
We started out as Calloway Hickory Stick Golf Club and
then it went from Calloway Hickory Stick to Callaway Golf
and the company ended up settling in the Carlsbad area,
which is the heartbeat of all the golf club companies.
And from then we went public. And during that period
of time, I decided I wanted to go in a
little different direction. So I had a hunk of money,
didn't want to retire, and when I heard the College
of the Desert, was thinking about a golf academy and
they had about a twenty five acre piece of land
and no funding. So through friends of mine and the
help of Greg Norman and a few people that I
knew in the industry, we built a golf driving range
of building in a classroom and it houses a golf
management program. And I hadn't intended to do this for
two or three years. Get it started and let it flourish,
and crazy part about it. This is my twenty fifth year.
I became the golf coach of College of the Desert,
which has been probably one of the most satisfying things
I've ever done in golf. And I mean I'm talking
Callaway and mixed team championship and all that, but to
work with these young kids and it changed the direction
in their life off the golf course has been the
most rewarding thing and it's what keeps me going just
being around these kids. And we have a great record.
We won our conference championship twenty three years in a row,
and we won state championship four times under my tutelage,
and so you know, it's all good, it's all real good.
And during that period of time, my passion is teaching golf.
I played at a decent level. I had my moments
in golf, but I really, I really was too interested
in going out at night and chasing skirts and drinking
a few years and I passed that on to my students.
I said, I wasted a pretty good opportunity. So I
use some of the some of the faults in my
own life as examples of what not to do. But
golf has always been my passion in instruction. There's nothing
like helping somebody with the golf game and seeing them
play much better golf. That's that's way for me. It's
worth more than the money that you get for doing it.
Speaker 1: I'm a little bit shocked and stunned, dismayed here. You
mean the path to enlightenment and happiness is not lower
scores exactly. It's teaching, it's sharing your knowledge with the y.
Speaker 3: It is it really for me, it is. I mean,
I'm sure that there are other people that won't agree
with that, but for me, it's.
Speaker 1: Been I thought, if we just hit lower scores, we're
just going to be happy forever.
Speaker 3: Well, I'll tell you, even when I shot sixty one,
I still blurred it out and I didn't Burdy a
par five. I somebody should him slap me in the
head that time. That's just the mindset of all of
us when we play golf. We always think we could
have done better anyway. I started studying Ben Hogan because
in my mind, I don't think anyone's ever controlled the
ball like Ben Hogan in the past or in the present.
And there's no I mean these guys. He could give
strokes to most of these guys. When it comes to
pure ball striking, I don't mean scoring, I don't mean putting,
but I mean hitting the ball from tee to green.
And a wave of change has occurred in the golf
uh and teaching of golf. At one time, one of
the commonalities of what you saw of a really good
player was his head didn't move. And then pretty soon
people start saying, it's okay for your head to move
and he can go anywhere it wants to go. Well,
your head there's a center point in the golf, so
when you set to the ball, you center yourself to it,
and if you move off the ball, you've got to
move back on it. So there's a lot of compensations occurring.
And also I was brought up in the era where
you fan the club open and close it so you
square the club head with the rotation in the arms.
But in watching Hogan, especially in his later years, and
he didn't really make a lot of film available for
people to see. I read all his books, but nothing
in his books said what he did in my estimation,
maybe grip and so forth, but he played off the
left side. He played off with one axis. There's two
access points in the swing left leg, right leg. In
moving to the right leg, you have to make some
kind of elateral moving back to the left leg and
then rotate around the left leg. And that transitional move
is where all the problems happened in the golf swing.
And also if you're rolling your arms or crossing your
arms over, the club is going to be open a
long time, closed a long time, and square for just
a moment. And the more you practice, the closer you
can get the square more often. But there's still a
lot of air involved in that swing. And you can
look at all the arms swingers. I can name you
Phil Mickelson, I can name you Tiger Woods, and I
can name you and Dustin Johnson. These are known names
and they hit the heck out of the ball. But
they can hit it anywhere in the world. And I
mean they can hit it two fairways. Right. You never
saw that in Hogan zero. Okay. Part of that's moving
off the ball. The second part is that Hogan learned
the square of the golf club with his body rotation.
So he connected the arm as he took it back
across the chest and then rotated the body to square it.
Now the club has stayed square for a real long time.
And there is that's to me, is the secret of
hitting the ball properly. You put very little side spin
on the ball, so you shot dispersion. You're always going
to push it. You're always going to pull it. That's
just golf. But you won't pull it with a hook
or side spin. You won't push it with a slice,
So your dispersion gets very narrow. And by rotating your
body instead of tilting down and under where you that's
where all the spine problems and back problems happen. When
you rotate your body, you can rotate to where your
right shoulder points at the target in your chest has
left the target. Now, I have an eighty six year
old man that I teach I've got a lot of
people from the Vintage and Eldorado, which are really fine clothes,
probably the best in the desert, and they come to
me for golf instruction because they like what I'm teaching
and they can hit the ball more solid, more often,
because again we don't have any compensations in the motion.
We brace up against the left side, rotate the body
and rotate back the other way. Don't have to make
a lateral move, don't have to turn the hands over
in time anything. We just rotate the body. We trapped
the club on the left arm on the chest, so
it's a really easy way to play well. During this period,
al Barco, a noted writer, interviewed me, and you know
I'm nobody. I'm a guy at a driving range. Well,
he liked what I had to say, and he put
about an eight pager in Golf Illustrated magazine and the
response was overwhelming. I got calls from all over about
people wanting telling me, well, I was trying stack until
I could do that, and this really helped me and
my back doesn't hurt, and blah blah blah. I talk
with an editor of Golf Illustrated and he said, would
you like to have a golf illustrated, single pivot golf school,
and that's what's going to happen in December, College of
the Desert. I've got al Geiberger, who has followed this process,
likes that it teaches now and plays this way. I
got his son Brian, who's a very very fine player,
a good instructor from Canada by the name of Mike Lyons,
and myself, and we're going to put together a hell
of a golf school. And when people walk out of
that school, they're going to know why they hit it right,
hit it left, and when the ball spins will know
exactly what. They'll know a simple move to stop it
from spinning, and they're going to be able to hit
the ball farther than they they've done in their life.
And I don't care if they're a young player thinking
about the tour or an old guy that's played and
he can't get off his right said anymore. He spins
out and slices. Everything will fix all that, and it's
not complicated. I've never believed that the golf swing was
rocket science, but I didn't know that Ben Hogan knew
something that other people didn't, and he divulged this in
other subsequent books, where he made phrases. He said, well,
I'm going to play off my left side from now on.
Lee Trevino said to me, I've never seen anybody play
good off their right side. But I said a lot
of great players play off their left side. But when
he made that statement to me, I had no idea
what he was talking about. I never realized, because I
know you never stop learning in this game. This is
a school you never graduate from because there's always tweaking.
There's always things that you can glean from other players,
other teachers, and so forth. So I do know one thing.
Tiger Woods is all being taught to play off the
left side. Watney just said on television in the last tournament,
I had a great tip. I set up with seventy
percent on my left side. They're all getting back to
stay in the center to the golf ball. It's just
too hard when you're moving that club as fast as
these young people are moving it. It's too hard to
time it with your hands and arms. You've got to
trap it so that you can turn through it and
eliminate the left side. And that's what this does. I
can tell you that I don't care who it is
that's wild with the driver. Fifteen minutes with them if
they're especially if they're a good player, a tour player,
let's say, fifteen minutes to learn this process. They can
hit as hard as they want to, not hit the left.
So it's very exciting and it's going to be really worthwhile.
Speaker 1: Well, that was an all encompassing answer. You answered every
single question that I didn't even get to ask in
your first answer.
Speaker 3: I got go into detail more than that.
Speaker 1: That's what I want to do. I'm going to want
to go into details, but I do need to break
for just a moment because Tony, thanks so much for waiting,
and let's get back to I don't even know where
to go here. I do wanted to ask you about
working at the College of the Desert before we go
back into your golf school, because and then, of course
the single pivot swing. But is the College of the
Desert do you cover more than just golf instruction. I mean,
there's so many kids today who may not be good
enough to get up to the tour, but they love
golf so much that they would like to be involved
in the golf industry. Does your program facilitate that.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. We have a golf management program and we take
the kids through turf grass management, golf shop operations, methods
of teaching golf fundamentals and rules of golf, public speaking,
marketing classes. You know, it has a business aspect to it,
it has a general education aspect to it, and then
it has core training aspect to it, which is the
core core courses like golf shop operations or methods of
teaching golf. So when a student comes out of this
two year program with an AA degree, they can get
into the industry and they get into middle managers very quickly.
For instance, in this valley, I've got nine head professionals
that have come out of this program. One of my
students has been in China for fifteen years, and in fact,
I'm leaving the eighteenth of next month to go to
China because we're going to create a linkage of Chinese
students coming to College of the Desert and taking accelerated programs.
And at the same time they're interested in maybe me
setting up some golf schools in China. So I'm very
excited about that. But the college program is really a
terrific program. You know, the PGA of America has these
IgM programs and it's a five year commitment. I kind
of like what we do and what the San Diego
career colleges do. You get in and get out two years,
and you certainly have you're not going to be an
expert and no one is coming out of these programs
because you have to have the hands on. But that
two year commitment, you can get right out into industry
and get going.
Speaker 1: The golf team as well.
Speaker 3: Oh, we have a great golf team. We have a
great golf team. I've been coached for I believe it's
now going on nineteen years, and we won our conference
every year. The previous coach, who was a terrific coach,
we had had one in a few more years. So
we're at the twenty third year in a row right now.
And under my coaching, I've won four state championships and
a number of what they call regional tournaments. It's been
just great working with young people. First of all, they
all hit it over three hundred yards. It's crazy. I
mean I feel like putting on a taff of address
when I play with the boys. So I finally said, okay,
I from now on I'm up in the upteas. I
swallowed my pride because at one time I could pop
it pretty far. But it's just crazy how far they
hit it now. But the problem is that they can
hit it anywhere far, and so we try to get
them to understand how they have to manage themselves on
the golf course. And of course anger is one of
the things that comes along with the game, and you
have to have a little fire in your belly to
be a competitor, obviously, but you can't let it affects
you to the point where it affects your next group
of shots. And I being Italian, struggled with that up
until the last week.
Speaker 1: But anyway, sixty that day.
Speaker 3: But I do try to to talk to the boys.
You know, in all honesty, these are the things you
can't do and can do it. You don't understand that
you also disrupt other people when you're angry at yourself.
It makes people uncomfortable around you, and it's it's not
what the game is supposed to be. But it's gotten
to the point where there's so much, so much money
now and all of that, all that fame that's attached
to it that I think we've lost a little bit
in the transition from the from the days when guys
jumped in unto loppy and drove from tournament to tournament
and didn't make enough money to stay on tour they
had to go and take club jobs. But there was
something really, something really pure about that period.
Speaker 1: Now, also in that period, that amateur status was very
it was looked upon much differently than it is today.
Even if even if you have an amateur status today,
I mean, does that even exist, Well, I guess it
would for college players, but.
Speaker 3: You know, right, you're right, yeah, I mean there is,
but I think that a lot of people, just like
in other sports, to kind of get around it a bit.
But anyway, that's the college program is It really is
the reason I'm here more than anything else.
Speaker 1: So we've heard about stack until we've heard about single
plane and dual plane swings. Now you want to talk
about these single pivot swing, well.
Speaker 3: There's just you know, sack until I don't. I'm not
going to say that they're wrong, it's just a different,
different way of looking at it. I'm basing everything I'm
talking about on what I believe who was the best golfer,
and that was Ben Hogan and Ben Hogan his later
years played off his left side, and that just really
means that he eliminated the lateral move in the golf swing.
Speaker 1: I need it, I need it. I'm sorry to interrupt,
but I do need a better understanding, better explanation of
what you mean by playing off the left side. And
I'm standing up.
Speaker 3: Right, okay, when you set up for the golf ball
instead of setting up fifty to fifty or even fifty
forty being the left side and sixty being the right,
like a lot of people really tilt to the right
when they're going to hit the driver because because they've
been told if they hang back like that, they can
work under and catch the ball on the f swing.
And that's true if you're going to rotate your hands
and arms. But Hogan's braced up a little left. Now.
He did a little differently than I teach. When he
took the club back, it looked like he was going
to move to the right. But as as the club
went back in his rotation, he set up against the
left side. And I've got zillion pictures showing that. And
he set up against the left side because now he's
against him act and all you answer to do is
rotate his body. You don't lose any power, trust me.
In fact, you gain power, and more importantly, because you
can catch the ball dead square again, you're not moving
away from the golf ball in the backswing. So it's
nothing new. It was done for years by a lot
of players. It just wasn't talked about, and I think
a lot of people misinterpret doing it. They said, well,
aren't you reversing your weight shifts, aren't you? And that's
the farthest thing from the truth. The reverse of the
weight shift is when you stand up, you stand up
for the ball and your hip slid underneath you and
your hips go go to the right and your head
is to the left. And then on the downswing, your
head goes back and you and your hips go forward
and you're on the right foot. That's how the reverse
of the weight shift. But stay off. Staying on one
axis and then working around that axis is a far
cry from that, and it's I can tell you there's
a lot of naysayers until I have ten minutes with them,
and then that I owe them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, once you once you can show them and put
the club in their hand and work with them directly.
I'm sure you have much different result than just trying
to explain it without the visual.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's not an old this is not an
old man's thing. I've got. I've got a couple of
fifteen year olds that are shooting in the sixties and
they beat that ball over three hundred yards at fifteen
years old, and they and they they look at me.
And I got one Korean boy and every time he
looks at me as his coach, no side spin. And
I just get a big kick out of that. You
know it. It's it's my passion. As you can tell,
I talk too much about it and too fast about it,
but I can't help take notes.
Speaker 1: You're talking so fast.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I can't help myself. It's because I'm excited about this. Necessarily.
It is a breakthrough and there's no question about it.
Speaker 1: Fabulous. And now for the school. How many days is
this school that you're going to be putting on for your.
Speaker 3: Uh, They'll only be There'll only be. It will be
a one or two day school each day six hours
of instruction. So it'll be a one day Saturday school
and a one day Sunday school. So a person can
come to both day, both schools if they if they
need me, But to be honest with you, if we
have you for six hours, you're going to be able
to do it, and you're going to be understand why
you do it. We're going to teach you cause and effect. Uh,
And that's very important for someone. And I can promise
you that I will not have anyone that won't be swinging,
and we'll prove it. We're going to film you in
the beginning and film you in the end, and you're
going to see a tremendous change in your setup position
and the way you finish. Most people never get to
their left side because it's too far on the right
side to ever get there. And we'll get you through
the golf ball. And we're not going to say to
you shift your weight. We're going to show you how
to rotate your body and that's going to make your
weight shift and you're going to be in really good
balance and you're going to hit the ball hard for
the first time in a while.
Speaker 1: You Know. The thing about a golf school that I've
had difficulty with is that say you get it one
day of instruction or two days at best of instruction,
or three or four, and you go through it and
you're like, okay, I got it. Yeah, I understand what
I'm doing now. And then you go home and you
don't get a chance. Now that you've played three days
in a row, you've got to catch up back with
your life and your work, and you don't get a
chance to play for three weeks, and you don't get
a chance to practice for two weeks whatever, and you
go out there and all of a sudden it's all gone.
It's like, now, what did they teach me? Again? And
I find that to be a difficult part about golf
schools that you know, if I'm coming across the country
go to your school, I'm going to lose all this stuff.
How do I retain it? What kind of follow up
do you have to help somebody if they're like, okay,
so I went to your school and I got it
and it was great, but now I need some help.
Speaker 3: Everyone's going to get a book. Is going to get
a book called The Loss Fundamental, which I've written, and
it will be out before the school starts, and it's
a complete explanation. Also, they will be able to talk
to us via email and we can actually if they
tell us what the ball is doing. We can tell
them what they're doing. But we're not basing our instruction
on timing, and that's the key. That's a key issue.
We're not basing that instruction on you going out and
hitting four hundred balls a day. We're basing it on
body position. If we can show you where your body
should be on the backswing and on the through swing,
the rest of it is pretty easy. Once you connect
your arms or keep your arms connected to the body,
and of course they're connected. I mean, it sounds almost
insane to say that, but connection in the golf swing
is different than the body being attached to the arm
being attached to the body. Once we show them how
connection occurs, and it's a very very simple explanation with
an exercise, they can do it almost instantly, and you
will be able to tell by what the ball does
if you're connected or disconnected. There is no question about that.
In fact, a good instructor can turn back to the
student and watch the ballflight and he can tell you
physically what you did. It is so simple. So what
the golf our school will be is that this explanation
over and over and over for six hours, and when
you're when you walk away from here, you're going to
be able to do this. It isn't going to be
a matter if you're going to lose it, because we're
not basing it on you having good timing that particular day.
Speaker 1: So the name of your book the Lost Fundamental. What
is there something specific that it is a basic fundamental
that is missing for most people who take construction.
Speaker 3: Well, it's it's playing center to the ball and that's
been and that's that's the fundamental that really is lost
because there's so many people teaching to move the weight
all onto the right leg and then move it back
all the way onto the left leg.
Speaker 1: I noticed that when I've taken a lesson, or I've
been given instruction, or even going through a change is
swing change, that the first thing that has happens to
me is that all of a sudden, my rhythm is
all screwed up, my timing I start speeding things up.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, rhythm is a very important aspect, and
you know, with the technology that's happening nowadays. I met
a gentleman by the name of Ted Colwell that has
invented a thing called shot Watch, and it's an amazing
piece of equipment because it monitors your rhythm, and I
think most importantly, it monitors your grip pressure on the
golf handle through impact, which really has a lot to
do with velocity. And it also monitors the time of
the swing. So you can you can take this watch,
put it on. It tells the time, and you spin
it around and turn it backwards on your left hand
if you're right hand a golfer, and go ahead and
pop the ball, and it's going to give you these
readouts and you can store these readouts, so a person
practicing can really really when they hit it really well,
they can look at those numbers and say, Okay, that's
the numbers I want to get close to. Yeah, I
have Ted right here. I'd like to have.
Speaker 1: That would be great. And you know, it's interesting because
when Ted first introduced the shot Watch, he came on,
we talked about it on Golf Smarter podcast and there
were so many people that, so many listeners who purchased
the shot Watch, and I got great feedback.
Speaker 2: Teddy there, Yeah, I'm here, Fred, nice to talk to
you again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's great talking to you. Thanks so much for
coming on and sharing this time with Tony.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's a pleasure. I was listening very carefully to
what Tony was having to say because one of the
things that we've adopted at the urging of Tony and
consistent with his with his single pivot idea, is our
grip pressure now has an added feature, just to refresh
your memory or for your first time listeners that aren't
familiar with shot watch. We have a pressure plate on
the back of the watch that's very, very sensitive and
it makes contact with the pulse point on the active arm,
the left arm for a right handed golfer. Now, when
the arms rotate or the wrist moves, those tendons exert
pressure against that plate and that's what we get our
grip pressure readings on. Now, in addition to giving a
reading on the grip pressure throughout the swing plane, which
is the average from takeaway to contact with the ball,
we do a statistical operation on that. On those grip
pressure readings, there's fifty or so of them through the
swing and then we give the variation in the grip pressure.
So what that tells the user is that if there's
a large number for the variation, there's a lot of
variation in your grip pressure through your swing, which is
just the opposite of what Tony is talking about, because
that means the arms are rolling over, the wrists are cocking.
You know, the golfer is bearing down at the time
he's he's either breaking his wrists or cocking or making
contact with the ball. That will cause a variation in
the grip pressure instead of as Tony was talking about,
keeping it constant throughout the swing. UH. So we've we've
added that feature UH and we think that's going to
be UH very very helpful in terms of getting people
to hit longer and straighter shots. We still have the
other UH swing parameters. We have the swing speed where
where we encourage the use of the instrument to to
UH as a swing speed workout device. Start off hitting slow,
swinging slowly, keep maintaining balance, working on the single pivot
UH and gradually increasing your speed while maintaining your balance
and while UH and and and so we you know,
we give a digital readout of that speed with one
being slow as ten being fastest, so that like Tony's
guys or they're off the charts, they exceed what we
can capture with the shot watch, because as he's saying,
they'll whip that club around at a phenomenal rate in
excess of one hundred and thirty miles an hour. But
for just us mere mortals, you know, we're going to
start out. We're going to start out. We're going to
work toward getting that single pivot swing, keeping everything compact
and making good contact with the ball to drive it,
to drive it longer.
Speaker 1: So the shot Watch, you've you've done a lot of
work on the shot watch since it initially came out,
and you've made a bunch of changes. Let's talk for
a moment. Clearly shotwatch has a lot of value to
someone at the range to help them get a steady,
a steading pace, a good rhythm rowing. But also and
this new concept of grip pressure I think is really
interesting because I know there are times where I find myself,
you know, white knuckling, I'm just skiz in the club
in a pressure situation, and you've really got to learn
to control that.
Speaker 2: Yes you do. And it really does help rad to
have a to have a digital display and represented as
a real number which you can then record, you know,
in your active memory, and then on subsequent swings, say
I got to get that number, whether it's the variation
in the grip pressure number or the absolute number. I've
got to you know, I've got to get that to
where there there aren't these spikes you know in the
in the grip pressure or or a large number in
the variation read out.
Speaker 1: I would think that it would be really valuable to
have this on the range and and try different swings,
but but gripping it at different pressures intentionally so that
you can see what it feels like, and then you
have a gauge to go, oh, okay, so that's what
it feels like if I'm really squeezing too hard, and
that's if I'm not enough, So you can really get
a comparison and then take that with you out on
the course to say, all right, this is the difference
between what it feels like. You know, I got to relax.
I can feel that right.
Speaker 2: And where the rubber hits the road is whether the
ball goes straight. And and if there's a lot of
variation in the grip pressure, as Tony was saying, you
know you're going to slice it and and and because
that you know, uh that bearing down is going to
alter the flight of the ball as much as anything.
And and uh, uh, to go onto the range with
that nice relaxed grip, you know, again to quote Hogan,
you know, uh, just tight enough to keep that club
in your hands, you know. And uh uh and there's
a digital number that uh, you know, depending on the
hand strength of the individual user, that's custom fit. You know.
If it's uh, you know, the number that works for
you is the one you'll commit to memory and the
and and and uh. The device is really uh, it's strong.
Its strength, it's strongest selling point is that it's a
muscle memory advice so important.
Speaker 1: Well, it's great to have you back on the show.
Speaker 2: Thanks very much, Fred.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah. And and because you had so much success
with Shotwatch the first time that we presented it on
the Golf Smarter podcast, you contacted me again wanting to
do it. And so we've talked about this previously and
we've made arrangements for Golf Smarter members to be able
to purchase the shot Watch at your website at a
discounted price. Right and so normally the price for the
shot Watch is one five. Thank you so much for
coming back on the show and bringing Tony along.
Speaker 2: He's absolutely yes. Well, I want to I want to
thank you, Fred, And I also want to thank Tony
because his his advice, you know, he's all his experience
and teaching golf and all the rest of that has
has helped us in the development of the product enormously.
And you know, so this is this is a genuinely
a team effort and we're delighted to work together with
with Tony and his and his boys out here great.
Speaker 1: And can I say goodbye to Tony myself?
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, here he is.
Speaker 1: Hey friend, Hey, Tony, thank you so much for coming
onto the podcast. And uh, I best of luck with
with this school. And I'm hoping when I come back
down to the Desert sometime in twenty eleven that we'll
get a chance to meet one another face to face.
Speaker 3: I hope so too. And I hope I didn't give
you any kind of a bad ear here with it
all that time.
Speaker 1: I loved it. I loved it. At some point I'm
going to want to be wearing a cap from your
team from College of the Desert Golf team.
Speaker 3: That's a given awesome all right.
Speaker 1: Pelp, thank you Tony very much. We'll talk to you again.
Speaker 3: Bye bye.
Speaker 1: No