I wrote a post on the weekend, which was little more than an out-loud head-scratching question, “What is Tiger Woods doing with his swing?” Well, I know now what he’s trying to do, but I’m still in the dark as to why he’d be swinging in this manner…
You see, I found a clip of his swing coach Sean Foley performing a model, I guess you would call it, of the swing he’s got Tiger trying.
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Sean Foley Swing With An Iron
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I described Tiger’s impact position as bizarre, unless he was trying to hit a punch shot with his driver down the fairway. It certainly isn’t the swing you would want to be trying to generate 120+ mph impact velocity with the driver, with all of the stress this action will put on the body.
Look, to each his own, and I try my best to be respectful of others when I disagree with something I see in a golf swing or read, hear or watch someone saying about the golf swing. I’ll try to say this this with as much respect as I can and without being arrogant, and again, it’s my opinion: I think this swing is completely unworkable for a professional golfer playing 7000+ yard golf courses.
If you’re a person who just wants to put the ball in play, not miss many shots and hit it short and straight, I guess this swing would work for you with enough practice.
But it’s little more than a long pitch motion, as you can see by Foley’s demonstration and very abbreviated back swing, even with what looks like a long iron in his hands, judging by the length of the shaft and the trajectory of the ball. He never gets off his left side, and even in slow motion, you can see that there is absolutely no power in this swing, which ends in a sort of pirouette around the left leg. Try swinging a Driver as hard as you can with this technique, I dare you.
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Tiger’s “Sean Foley” Swing – Slow Motion
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And to add another problem to the mix, this is a swing that will put more and more stress on the body the harder one tries to swing, as Tiger is a player who hits the ball hard and swings hard on most of his shots, especially off the tee.
Oh, and Tiger perhaps would be better served paying attention to Sean’s technique, or Sean should point out to him a couple of things if he’s going to play with this swing. One, he can’t swing as hard as he likes to, or this swing is going to cause even more damage to his left knee, and second, even though he’s been with Sean for over a year now, why is he still swinging with a virtually closed left foot setup when Foley clearly has his left foot flared nearly 45 degrees outward to avoid stressing the left foot and knee during the swing?
A third thing you’ll notice is that Tiger is shifting his weight almost completely over to the right side on his back swing, which is clearly not what Foley does on his swing (this is where I agree with what Tiger is doing, but again, it’s not what his coach is doing or advocating). There are so many things different between the two swings, I’m wondering if Tiger is picking and choosing what he listens to Sean about, and that is certainly not the path to success when learning from someone.
The first thing I would tell someone who is interested in the MCS swing is that you can’t pick and choose what you’re going to do- you either do it a certain way, from grip to stance, or you may as well forget it and try something else.
The flared left foot would be the first thing either Foley or Woods should be noticing that Tiger is not picking up on from Foley’s demonstration.
Final Note: I can’t for the life of me figure out why arguably the best golfer of all time (again, I say Nicklaus, but the key word is arguably, and Tiger hasn’t retired yet), who has won over 70 PGA Tour events and 14 majors, suddenly would take up with this bizarre swing technique and not even be able to do it the way it’s intended.
I’m completely at a loss to figure out his reasons for undertaking such a radical swing change and one that is perhaps the most mechanically-incorrect of all of his many swings.
I have a theory about why Tiger is constantly changing his swing and seeking new coaches.
Back in the good old days the very best golfers learned by mainly self study, watching the ball flight and on occasions a trip to the swing coach. To name but a few that worked this way, Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Lee Trevino, Jack Nicklaus, Moe Norman etc etc, true greats (not that Tiger isn’t) that knew instantly when there was a problem with their swing because they made their swing their own.
Tiger, on the other hand, has always been told what position to be in, all the way back from his father to the current day. He also relies heavily on video of himself to fix issues (all of this is in his Golf My Way book) and practices positions instead of watching the ball and learning how his body causes the flight.
Perhaps he now always has to be told what position to be in now? It would seem a very difficult habit to break especially if it’s been done that way for a very long time.
I see kids on the range at my course being instructed this way.
That is a very plausible theory, Seb, and a pretty sad one if true. I’ve been studying the golf swing seriously for six years in my “spare time,” meaning I don’t play or teach golf for a living. And yet, in six years, I’ve progressed from completely clueless to where I am today, a little north of clueless, if you will.
These guys play golf for a living, with millions of dollars at stake, and yet they still don’t know the fundamental concepts of how to swing a golf club without having having a “coach” or “guru” hanging over their shoulder?
Tiger’s been swinging a club since he was 18 months old. If he still needs a coach, at 35 years of age, to tell him how to do it, something is seriously wrong… heck, something would have been wrong if that was the case when he turned pro at 20… now, it’s just bizarre.
Updated: Here’s an interesting quote from Jack Grout’s bio:
“Grout and Nicklaus worked together as coach and student from the time Nicklaus began golf in 1950. They developed a unique arrangement where Nicklaus would visit Grout at the start of each new season to review fundamentals, virtually from scratch.
“Nicklaus would consult Grout periodically for tune-ups and minor modifications, away from the Tour, if he was struggling for form, but Nicklaus primarily stayed with the knowledge he acquired with Grout. Grout made annual visits to the Masters, U.S. Open and PGA Championship, but seldom instructed Nicklaus at major tournament sites.
Grout believed in self-sufficiency, that a golfer had to be in charge of his own swing. His conviction was that a golfer could achieve his full potential only by being self reliant.“
For that reason alone, I will always view Nicklaus as the greatest over Tiger unless Tiger wins three or four majors more than Nicklaus.
Exactly, and that is something that Jack Nicklaus talks about extensively in his book, you can’t truly learn to swing with someone constantly over your shoulder telling you to be in this position and that position. In fact even during the times that Grout was actively instructing Nicklaus he taught him self sufficiency, he had him learn something and then go away and learn to repeat it but also how it felt when he was doing it and figure out why he was doing it.
I watched an interesting program on Tiger after “the incident”, there was a lot of detail about the methods that his father employed to create “Tiger Woods”, throwing balls at him as he practiced, employing brain washing techniques used by the US armed forces, constantly pushing him and pushing him. Not to mention all of the yes people that surrounded him all of the time. It certainly is a logical explanation for his behaviour during the incident but it also goes a long way to explain why he seeks out coaches to instruct him, perhaps it’s that constant pushing he had as a young boy that he craves now as an adult?
I agree it is a sad state of affairs, but it is so common to see. There have been programs about parents who push their children to become huge stars, and eventually the children not only resent their parents but lose their childhood.
Something else that Jack Nicklaus talks about in his book is the players constant need for their coaches to be on hand tweaking something before a match, if you start doing that then you will be thinking about the tweak instead of concentrating on the match in hand.
In addition he doesn’t like how there are stretching and massage areas for players, he said that he always did his own stretching, because if the people stretching you were delayed you might then be in a rush for the match, and also you should know how to do it yourself!
Sean is not in control of what he is teaching tiger. Tiger has his own theories that he is trying to impliment. he doesnt completely buy in to foley. He did harmon and haney but not foley. Tiger is trying to control the club through manipulation for the entire swing. You cannot do that at those speeds. you have to send it on it’s arc and let it go. His impact is a pitch shot moving 120 but it cant work like that. It will not be a productive result.
Well, Brandon, if that is the case, then he’s wasting Foley’s time and his own. Granted, Foley can only benefit from having Tiger as a client, but Tiger’s not getting any younger and this fooling around with his swing might be the reason he never catches Nicklaus.
I personally don’t care if he does or not, but I imagine Tiger does…
Funny how everybody who went to stack and tilt and praised it has since changed back to the swings that got them on the tour in the first place. That method is only useful for hitting crisp yet short irons and wedges. Trying to increase the power will overload the swing because the arms and upper body take over. Whenever Weir, Wilson, or Baddeley tried to increase their power on the course for their driver and long irons, they would hit some horrible hooks. Stood a few feet away from Weir on a few holes of the 2008 PGA at Oakland Hills. He unleashed some power hooks where 75% of the crowd around him thought to themselves, “Wow…I got that shot.”
If only all golf shots required a 125 yard 9 iron…
I noticed that too, rpm. It’s just not workable as an overall swing. Now, if I was chipping or pitching a shot and wanted to make crisp contact (and get lots of back spin), I’d do exactly what Foley is doing in that video, but without the full follow-through.
I’d keep my weight on my left side, make a short back swing without letting my weight shift or my leading heel come up, and I’d make an equally short down swing through the ball, and my hands would never get past shoulder-height on either back or down swing.
Foley has a very Stack n Tilt looking swing. Awesome for the wedge game, not so much for the driver. Tiger is doing some sort of hybrid of everything and it doesn’t look good.
I will confess to having tried a variation of S&T in the early stages of my Swing Theory blog research, I should dig out the old tapes and transfer them to digital, and I had the same conclusion – great for short clubs, absolutely no good for anything longer than a 7 iron shot, and not very long…
Hey that would be a really interesting comparison to see how it looks next to your MCS swing!
Stack n’ Tilt may be very accurate for short shots but so is the mcs Austin system. I had two holes-in-one this year and was quite often hitting flagsticks (which I don’t recomend cuz the ball often gets catapulted by the flagstick). I feel quite confident on any approach shot and all the way to the driver that I can place the ball where I want it. I feel with what I do, where I point, I can hit the ball.
Meant to have this with post but was interrupted for dinner:
Does the Stack n’ Tilt fan the club or is it square on square as is the Austin system?
Damn. Two? Still the usual 1-3 foot miss for me
. At least I have the consolation of knowing that I always make a hole in one on the 18th hole of miniature golf.
I’ve been a witness to three first time hole on ones…a bladed cut that bounced and rolled, a thinned ball that hit a back slope and rolled back down and in, and finally a beautifully struck draw by the Michigan Senior Open champion (took him 35 years of being a scratch golfer to get his).
There’s a lot of luck to that 1/5000 shot
. The good news is that I went on and shot par on each hole so they only gained two on me!
The only advice I can give from what you may not already know is to go out and play on cold, rainy, windy and what the ignorant may call a “miserable day.” The truth is there is no such a thing as bad weather but many varieties of the elements showcasing their glories. My holes-in-one were had on days when the golf course had but a few folks out there with the lot of mortals chased away by the cold biting winds. My hole-in-one in April was had after a night of 2 inches of rain and it was so windy the next day that at various times, we all had our hand carts blown over by the wind which I guestimate were 30 mph wind gusts. I like to say about such conditions, these are the weathers that the game was invented and developed in Scotland and therefore meant to be played. Separate from that, I have an outdoor driving range/rug backstop that I am hitting balls into all winter long and take the extra time to shovel free of snow and so my swing is well aclimated to the cold.
Anyways, the point is, mcs is acurate and its packs a big punch to boot. One stop shopping. No need to play the stack n’ tilt for acuracy and mcs for power. We spend lots of time here discussing attaining the maximum limits attainable for our bodies in propelling the golf ball a specific distance and this should not overshadow the fact that we should as well with this same swing technology, be able to aim the ball very specifically to an exact point.
Well-said, Chief. My central premise in trying to crack the Swing Theory of Golf was this theory that I was trying to prove: The technique for producing the longest hitting golf swing should also be that which provides the most accuracy.
I would add the one caveat or addendum to this premise: The two combined in a mechanically-correct technique would make the “Perfect Swing.” You can hit the ball longer or perhaps more accurately (no one was as straight as Moe Norman, and not many are longer than Sadlowski), but the meeting point of accuracy + length is where the perfect swing lies, and that, I believe, is the Mike Austin/MCS swing.
Tiger also has to raise the left hip so much no wonder it puts such a strain on his knee to make the impact.
recent driver, no power.