Rebel with a cause

It's raining and cold today, so I am thinking rather than playing golf. This is a dangerous practice, as many golfers know. The great Peter Thomson used to sit down and think about his game after a round, rather than go out and beat hundreds of balls on the driving range, but somehow I suspect he was thinking about different things from those I think about.

I did spend some of this research time looking into the thoughts (well, the expressed thoughts) of one Monte Scheinblum, long driving champion and rebel golf teacher. Maybe rebel is too strong a word, but I think his ideas (and he relishes the fact) go against a great deal of current conventional golf teaching.

Fortunately, Monte is fun to read, while being extremely thought provoking in his blog and Youtube contributions. One of his main golf tenets he 'debunks' is the 'hold the lag' stratagem. He advocates throwing away the lag or, put another way, releasing right from the top of the downswing. Heresy, I hear you cry. But when he explains what he means, it makes a whole lot of sense.

He talks about natural versus unnatural or forced lag (or words to that effect) and explains why trying to hold the lag, often by pulling on the club handle, causes a myriad of problems: open faces, slices and pushes, far beyond the ability of most golfers to make sufficient compensations. He explains what goes wrong, in reasonably technical terms, while acknowledging that there are some top players who can get away with almost anything in there set-ups and swings. He stresses that much of his advice is mainly relevant to the average player, particularly players, like me, struggling for consistency.

One of the really good things he does is to reassure us that, provided some backswing rules are followed (no over-swinging with the arms) and provided some body positions are maintained during the swing (backward spine tilt), this natural lag will occur. He even allows us to hit hard with the trailing hand and almost defies us to release too early, provided those other (fairly simple) rules or principles are followed.

For me, one of the other good things about Monte's ideas is that they really don't conflict with my hard won principles of no sway, weight on the front foot at impact and don't swing too hard (provided in the last of these that swinging too hard is linked to over-swinging the arms). His ideas are also at least partially in line with many of the very good principles of teachers like Ross Duplessis and Shawn Clement, though there would be points of disagreement, I'm sure.

Anyway, there's a lot to like in Monte's ideas; they take some pressure off the golfer trying like crazy to create lag, restrict the hip turn, get forward lean in the golf club at impact, etc., etc. They are well worth a look. He is definitely a rebel with a cause.