About

The idea for this blog came from a comment by professional golfer Mike Bennett. Bennett has said that there is only one fundamental (fact?) in the golf swing: hit the ball first and the ground after you hit the ball. This is called "taking a divot". However, some professional golfers evidently did not take a divot, for example Jack Nicklaus. Fact or fiction?

Andy Bennet and Mike Plummer also have a "system" called Stack and Tilt (S&T). The S&T System contradicts a lot of conventional golf instruction and has a lot of critics. There are many other golf swing systems: The LAWs of Golf, the One-Plane Swing, the Golfing Machine, Power3 Golf, and many more. Each of them has slight  to major differences with the conventional wisdom.

Typically (and reasonably) the "facts" of these systems are based on studying the swings of professional golfers. However, the more you look at professional golf swings, the more that the factual base of swing systems seems to evaporate (in the video above, if you carefully study professional golfer Aaron Baddley's swing when actually hitting a golf ball you will notice that it is different from the swing he uses when posing for S&T instructional pictures--if you want more detail, see professional golf instructor Brian Manzella's analysis of the video here). Is the system fact or fiction?

The unfortunate "fact" about golf instruction is that it is all based on pretty weak theory (the theory is embedded in golf machines such as Iron Byron used to test golf equipment) and equally weak research. One example of high quality research (sometimes called the "gold standard") is the clinical trial. In a clinical trial, people are randomly assigned to a drug treatment or therapy, there is a placebo control group that does not receive the treatment and the results are compared statistically. Either the drug on average worked or it didn't.

Imagine if the clinical trial methodology was applied to golf instruction. People would have to be randomly assigned to learn different golf systems or different variants on the conventional wisdom. After a period of instruction (how long does it take to learn a golf swing--maybe many years) we would observe the statistics of all the golfers in the study: driving distance, greens in regulation, average scores, etc. etc. And, we would know which instructional approach produced the best golfers.

Don't hold your breath: a clinical trial of golf instruction will never happen. We could never even start by drawing a random sample of people who would be subjected to years of golf instruction. Most people would wisely refuse to participate in such a study and any resulting sample would never be random.

What are we amateur consumers of golf instruction to do? We can evaluate the golf systems for their internal consistency, their simplicity, and their ease of understanding. We can experiment on ourselves (dig it out of the dirt as professional golfer Ben Hogan used to say--Hogan had his own system called the Five Lessons). And, we can write about it. That should provide enough material for a number of years of blogging!