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    The Only Golf Lesson You'll Ever Need: Easy Solutions to Problem Golf Swings
    The Only Golf Lesson You'll Ever Need: Easy Solutions to Problem Golf Swings
    The Only Golf Lesson You'll Ever Need: Easy Solutions to Problem Golf Swings
    Ebook340 pages2 hours

    The Only Golf Lesson You'll Ever Need: Easy Solutions to Problem Golf Swings

    By Hank Haney and John Huggan

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    About this ebook

    The Only Golf Lesson You'll Ever Need, Hank Haney, one of the most respected and soughtafter golf instructors in the world, shares the secrets he's learned by observing hundreds of thousands of students--from top PGA Tour pros to high-handicappers. He explains how intelligent observation of your ball-flight tendencies--the way your shot behaves in the air--provides the answers to helping you develop a consistent repeating swing that will lower your scores. You'll also pick up valuable pointers on how to precisely match your equipment to your game.

    Hank Haney believes that a "flawed swing" that still produces a good shot is a good swing. By focusing on the outcome of your swing first, rather than on the swing itself, he believes you can often avoid making the awkward and unnatural changes to grip, stance, posture and alignment that many golf instructors ask of their students.

    The Only Golf Lesson You'll Ever Need will help you straighten your hook or slice, add distance to your drives, identify and fix the flaws in your swing, and become a wizard around the greens.

    "I'm proud of the way my swing holds up ion all kinds of conditions and under the severest pressure. Both are a tribute to Hank Haney and his teaching. Hank knows more about ballflight and what controls it than anyone in the game. And if you understand that, you're on your way."
    -- Mark O'Meara from the Foreword to The Only Golf Lesson You'll Ever Need
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJul 12, 2011
    ISBN9780062029522
    The Only Golf Lesson You'll Ever Need: Easy Solutions to Problem Golf Swings
    Author

    Hank Haney

    Hank Haney is widely recognized as one of the outstanding teachers in golf. The results of his teaching method were most recently seen in pupil Mark O'Meara, who last year won both the Masters and British Open en route to being named PGA Tour Player of the Year. Haney has been named one of Golf Magazine's Top 100 Teachers, was selected as the 1 993 National PGA Teacher of the Year, and has been a member of the Golf Digest Professional Advisory Staff since 1 991. He lives outside Dallas, Texas, where he operates the Hank Haney Golf Ranch.

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    Book preview

    The Only Golf Lesson You'll Ever Need - Hank Haney

    Part One

    Understanding Your Swing

    1

    Where I’m Coming From

    The Learning Sequence

    Hi, I’m Hank Haney. Thanks for coming to me for a golf lesson. Before I take a look at your swing and your shots, let me ask a few questions about you and your game.

    How long have you played golf?

    What is your handicap?

    What is the lowest your handicap has ever been?

    How often do you play?

    How often do you practice?

    Where does your ball go? Does it slice? Does it hook?

    Where do most of your short-iron shots finish?

    Do you tend to hit the ball fat or thin?

    When you hit it fat, do you make a deep divot, or simply hit behind the ball?

    Do you tend to hit the ball off the toe of the club, or the heel of the club?

    Do your shots tend to start right of your target, or left of your target?

    Do your shots tend to fly too high or too low?

    Which shot gives you the most difficulty?

    What is your favorite club?

    What is your least favorite club?

    If you had a tree in your way and could play either a slice or a hook around it, which would you choose?

    Where do most of your bad drives finish?

    That last one is especially important and reveals much about your swing. Your driver is your straightest-faced club, so shots hit with it are going to curve the most. The shape of your drives exposes your swing tendencies. That comes as a big shock to most people. It isn’t because the driver is bigger. Or longer. Or heavier. It’s because of the face. The lack of loft causes you to hit more in the middle of the ball, which means that if the face is open or closed, your shots will have substantial curve right or left. More loft produces more backspin on your ball, which counteracts any sidespin. That’s why it is relatively easy to hit a straight shot with your wedge.

    FIG. 1 Your driver has less loft than your wedge, so it is harder to hit straight.

    The answers I get to those questions tell me how knowledgeable you are. How much you understand about what you are trying to do is important. What is the strength of your game? The weak points? What would you like to improve? It is, after all, your golf game I am trying to fix. I want you to be happy. And that usually means an improved ball-flight and better shots. If the ball flies too high, I’ll bring it down; too low, I’ll move it up. If every shot curves to the right or left, I’ll straighten them out.

    Plus, it always helps to know what you, the student, is thinking. Have you had other lessons? Who from? Different teachers teach different theories.

    The bottom line, however, is that the responses I get to those questions give me somewhere to start and tell me what sort of swing faults you are likely to have. Which, of course, is the whole point of you coming to see me in the first place. Proper diagnosis is the first step toward curing any problem.

    Okay, let’s see you hit some shots. Watching you will give me even more clues as to how to go about fixing your faults. There’s no need to feel embarrassed. Everyone has swing faults. And I mean everyone. Even my most famous pupil, Mark O’Meara, has tendencies and little mistakes he constantly has to look for in his action. And he always will, even if he did perform well enough to win two major championships and be player of the year in 1998. So, believe me, you won’t be telling me anything I haven’t heard many times before.

    Here’s what I’ll be paying most attention to:

    BALL-FLIGHT

    All golfers have one of two tendencies. Either your shots will move predominantly from left-to-right or mostly from right-to-left. In other words, you’re either a slicer or a hooker. Most people, of course, slice.

    And there’s more. Your shots start off straight at your target or to the right or left (see fig 2). And you hit the ball too high, too low, or on the proper trajectory for your clubhead speed. In an ideal world, a perfectly on-plane swing will produce a gentle draw shot, the ball curving slightly from right-to-left. That is fact. Indeed, I have never heard a teacher dispute this point. Here’s why.

    Because you are standing to the side of the ball, the club should swing to the inside of the ball-target line in the backswing, to straight at impact, to back to the inside in the through swing. So you want to contact the inside part of the ball with the clubface closing as it comes through in order to start your little draw to the right of the target.

    When I first started working with Mark O’Meara he represented the Ben Hogan Company. One day, in Mr. Hogan’s office, Mark asked him what the correct flight on a perfectly struck shot should be. He told Mark exactly what I have just told you.

    Mark then asked another question: When you hit that draw should the clubface be square, closed, or slightly open but in the process of closing?

    Mr. Hogan looked at Mark for a long moment. Then he asked who had told Mark to ask that question. Mark said, My teacher, Hank Haney. You tell him he’s right, was Mr. Hogan’s reply. When I heard that I knew I had asked an intelligent question and I knew I was on the right track.

    FIG. 2 There are three possibilities with every shot: hook, slice, or straight.

    Every time I give a lesson I get ball-flight results. All because I’m looking at the flight of the ball and impact. Changing one has to change the other. If you get stuck changing things that have nothing to do with the flight of the ball you get into trouble. You get no change to the ball-flight or impact and frustration is the result.

    For example, what good is it saying that you swung too fast? How is swinging slower going to change impact? If the change made has no immediate effect on your shots, then the best you can say about it is that it is a building block for the future. In that regard, such a change can be worthwhile. But a change in ball-flight is what you are really after. Never lose sight of that.

    IMPACT

    If you’re going to hit a better shot, you have to change the geometry of what is happening in your swing as club strikes ball. More questions:

    Is the club coming into the ball too much from the outside or the inside?

    Is the angle of the shaft as it comes into the ground too steep or too shallow?

    Is the clubface open or closed?

    Where is the bottom of your swing—at, behind, or too far ahead of the ball?

    Have you increased or decreased the loft on the clubface?

    Improvement in any or all of those angles will improve your ball-striking.

    Wait a minute, I can hear you saying. What about my swing? What about my grip? What about my stance? Don’t those things come before I hit the ball?

    Only chronologically. If you really want to make a positive difference to any aspect of your game or swing, you have to understand what it is you are trying to achieve.

    When I start an analysis of your game, I first look at the flight of the ball. Then I work back. The flight of the ball basically tells you what happened at impact. Changing what your shots are doing means first changing what happens between club and ball at impact. Your main goal is to change how the ball flies, so you have to change impact. That will lead us to the swing plane. Changing that, changes impact. But in order to change your swing plane you must change something your hands and arms and/or your body are doing. So you go (a) ball-flight, (b) impact, (c) swing plane.

    Impact controls which way the golf ball goes. Any change you make to your swing has to have some influence on impact. Most golfers say they have five different swings. They may feel that way, but the reality is that if the ball-flight is the same no matter what they are feeling, they only have one impact. If you had five different swings, you’d have five different ball-flights.

    All of my teaching is designed to create a better impact. To do that you have to find out what kind of impact you have to begin with. A correct impact is one where the club is coming into the ball from the inside with the clubface square to the arc of the swing.

    But is that yours? Where do your shots start—left or right? Does the ball curve left or right? Does the club come into the ball on the proper angle of approach? In other words, are you digging in too much, or hitting too shallow? If the bottom of the swing is in the right place, you’re not hitting either in front of the ball or behind it. Test yourself. Make a line of tees on the ground (see fig 3). Can you hit one? Or do you tend to bottom out in front or behind the line?

    If your impact is correct, it follows that you will also have the correct loft on the club, which is indicated by the trajectory on the shot. You won’t add loft by breaking down your left wrist at impact, or take too much loft off the club by bending your right wrist back incorrectly. A fast-paced swing will hit the ball higher because it imparts more spin. A slower swing generally produces lower shots.

    FIG. 3 Find the bottom of your swing by trying to hit a line of tees.

    It comes down to this. To create a totally correct impact, you need a fundamentally correct swing. If you haven’t got that, you will always be missing something at impact. Which is where your analysis has to come from.

    Ask yourself: What am I trying to fix here? It isn’t the speed of my swing. It isn’t the role of my right elbow in the swing. It isn’t my left knee. It isn’t my shoulder turn. I am trying to fix my impact.

    Any correction you make has to directly or indirectly affect impact. Anything else may make your swing look prettier, but it won’t really have any positive effect on the quality of your shots. So why bother?

    WHAT THE CLUB IS DOING

    The club is the thing that hits the ball, so what it does as it moves from address to impact and beyond is the most important aspect of your swing. I don’t buy the notion that if your body moves correctly, the club is going to all of a sudden do everything right. That just doesn’t ring true. I look at the body merely as something that needs to work properly in order to give your hands and arms the opportunity to do the right things. That’s not to say your torso is unimportant, but there is no guarantee that making a good turn leads automatically to a good swing. There are too many other variables. What I will say is that a poor body turn leaves you with little or no chance of making a good swing.

    So I don’t fix a bad body motion unless doing so has a direct influence on the club. For example, if you come to me with a reverse pivot—your weight moving to your front foot on the backswing, then to your back foot on the downswing—then your body is the first thing I am going to work on. That’s where I’ll start, but only because it gives me a chance to improve the role of your hands and arms and the club.

    SWING PLANE

    In any swing the club has to move in and around your body and it has to move up and down. If you’re swinging on the correct plane you’ve got just the right amount of in and just the right amount of up in your backswing, the club moving on an arc around your body. When the club swings on a natural arc, the face squares up more easily. Think of it as like hitting a tennis ball or clapping your hands.

    That’s the ideal, but there are two other possibilities. If you swing the club on too much of a straight line—too upright (see fig 4)— coming into the ball, you’re going to tend to open the clubface through impact. If you swing the club on too much of an arc—too flat (see fig 5)—the clubface will tend to close too quickly through the hitting area.

    So the swing plane determines to a great extent whether or not the clubface is going to be square coming into the ball. Or, at least, a correct swing plane gives you your best chance to get the face square. That’s not to say you can’t make an upright swing then flip your hands over through impact, or make a flat swing and hold the face open with your hands, but both are difficult to do consistently. It’s hard to get everything just right on anything other than an occasional basis.

    FIG. 4 Swinging on too upright a plane invariably leads to a slice.

    FIG. 5 Swinging on too flat a plane usually leads to a hook.

    Another thing the swing plane does for you is determine where you’re going to hit on the clubface. How much the club swings behind you on the backswing influences how much in front of you it swings on the downswing.

    If the club comes down on too upright a plane, the clubhead will be closer to your feet than it should be. So you will tend to hit the ball off the toe of the club.

    If you swing down on too flat a plane, the club will tend to swing too much out in front of you. So you will contact the ball with the heel of the club.

    Lastly, the plane of your downswing

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