I played some of the best golf of my life in 2023 and 2024. I consistently carried my lowest handicap index ever, shot in the mid-70s on three courses playing for the first time, and made far more birdies this year than in any previous two-year period. And, now, I’m going to blow all of that up to make a significant change to my swing.
As “good” as my golf has gotten, I know it could be better. There could be fewer catastrophic misses, a more consistent, repeatable action, and less fighting against my own body due to mental and physical limitations of middle age, the prior being a bigger problem than the latter.
My coach at Man O’ War Golf, Mike Pulliam, has been teaching me this same swing for a decade, refining my goals and application as my habits and body changed, while always maintaining the same core principles. The problem is that unless I lived on the practice range with constant supervision, the swing we’d created for me would quickly morph into something else, as I made tweaks and adjustments in my endless quest to hit the ball a little farther.
That’s the real issue: greed. For the past several years, I’ve worked independent of my coach to try to add some speed to my driver swing. Born of jealously and a need to keep up with the Joneses, I had it in my head that what was holding me back from my playing even better golf was my slow swing speed (probably upper 90s to low 100s on the course). That has led to more of a homespun swing, and some very bad biomechanics, all in the name of “lengthening” my swing.
Until recently, I didn’t realize how terrible some of my mechanical flaws had become. Mike would tell me about them, but I think because I couldn’t see my swing, I didn’t fully process some of the diagnosis and why his corrective suggestions worked. I suffered a classic case of “reals vs. feels” being horribly misaligned in my full swing, as it turned out. However, I recently started using an old Rapsodo flight monitor on the range intermittently, and the camera and the data do not lie.
The short of it is that my attempts to lengthen and speed up my swing with a “bigger turn” actually only resulted in me reaching too far back at the top of my swing, lifting my upper body out of my swing posture, wrapping the club around my head with a flying right elbow. I saw it in every swing, even when I would make a desperate swing with the only goal of not going too far back. It was no use. The muscle memory was too deeply ingrained, like scar tissue. I couldn’t not make these moves. While any of these individual flaws may not be fatal to a golf swing, what they require to be functional is a serious of movements that I couldn’t consistently make.
So, the die is cast. Mike and I have our winter project. It’s going to take a lot of work. It’s going to require me to make some changes to my body. It’s probably going to wreck my game for a while. However, I know that I will come out the other side better. That’s the one, single commonality of my golf lessons over these many years: I’m always better after a lesson (and I’m always worse when I try to do it on my own).
I hope you enjoy reading along on our journey.