Don't forget that Watson still swings it past parallel at the top even now as a 60 year old. He is certainly a more controlled driver than he was in the late 70's as he showed at The British Open over the last few years.
I'd say Frank was talking about Watson's driving in general from being in his 20's to his 30's and just using the vids as an illustration which I agree do not show this. Other than very slight differences in length of swing, those two swings are identical.
Ok Wayne got to take you to task on one point you made. You say Nabilo totally disregards what was actually happening in his swing. The 1980 swing going much further bast parallel yet Nobilo says he is much more controlled. I agree with you that it doesn't appear he's really saying what the vid is showing. Yet you put up a swing of Watson at Augusta with a shorter backswing to make your point. That doesn't really tell the story either because he is hitting a short iron not a driver. Good vids.
TOM...Happy New Year...the best in 2011,from the Seniors who follow you !!! Helping the young players with their Vision, well into their Senior years !
Instructors on TV, for the most part, only parrot whoever the latest guru(s) is/are. Kostis is a perfect example. He was a first-rate player and had some of the best ideas on the swing I've ever heard in the 70s and early 80s--his Inside Path book is, for my money, the best all-but-unknown instructional book ever--but by the 90s he was going against his own former ideas 180d, because the "body" teachers were prominent. I've noticed he's gone back the other direction recently.
Also bad: Post-shot analyses where they try to attribute bad shots to some action in the swing that the player almost always has anyway (and usually an attribution based on whatever the hot theory is at the moment, or the ax that analyst is always grinding). If you wanted to make this kind of "analysis" valid, you'd show the analyst the swing first and make him PREDICT where the ball ended up. I guarantee you these guys would be only slightly ahead of random rate, if that.
The reason Watson didn't win as many majors as he could have is because of a slight outside in movement on the forward swing. You never saw that Wayne?
@JazzandSoul1 Or perhaps you could say that the only reason he won as many majors as he did was that very same move, the thought of which makes evident why such speculation is essentially pointless. Swings of the great ones are what they are. Many times the effort to correct and make better only makes worse. Watson always tried to practice his way out of a shut wrist and high hands at the top, but could never incorporate the change when he played. Good thing, I think, given his great career.
Who could ever disprove such a statement? It's not testable, not disconfirmable, and therefore can be only speculative. There is that little matter that at the height of his game, when he was #1 in the world, for several years (late 70s and early 80s), he still had to fend off a guy like Nicklaus. What giant of the game does Tiger have to beat?
Also, he never became a really great ballstriker until he was in his 40s. You probably know that.
@JazzandSoul1 How can you say that with assurance though? How do you know that for sure? I wonder what Tom would say if you or I asked him why he thinks he didn't win as many majors. Thanks.
Strange to compare 75 and 80 - I don't believe his swing changed hugely in those years. Tom always had a full back swing and a reverse c finish position, as he has aged I think we still see a full back swing and a slightly less C finish position. It would be more valid to compare 80 and 95 or 2000 say.
Frank Nobilo wasn't comparing these two swings. Listen to him. He said that as the years went by, he started to get more on his left side and had less of a reverse C. He never said anything about his swing in 1980 being different than his swing from 1975. He wasn't even doing a specific swing analysis. He was talking in generalities. There are plenty of later day Tom Watson swings on youtube that reflect this.
@fauvrdamor Listen again. Nobilo specifically says that Watson's swing in 75 was "bomb and gouge", while in 80 it was more controlled. The video shows the exact opposite, shorter and tighter in 75, longer and softer in 80.
Nobilo's most flawed assumption about thses two swings of Watson are the time periods in which he says they occurred. The swing that Nobilo says was filmed in 1975 is definitely incorrect since Watson's caddie in this photo is standing behind him with a Ram golf bag; at this time period Watson was on the McGregor staff so that picture is more likely from the late 70s, the picture on the left is probably from 81-82 when he had gotten a little longer at the top with the driver.
Don't agree.. watsons swing sucked ass until a decade ago,he sucked it inside on the take away, shut at impact, and severe hip action to not snap it. If u look at his swing now, he's addressed this major flaw in his swing, thus hits it much more consistent now than in his early career. Btw long doesn't mean loose or out of control, nor vice versa.
HIs swing "sucked ass"? Really? Why are you in this discussion?
It had "flaws" based on a model you or other people hold to, is what it did. It varied from some ideal that people have in their heads. Meanwhile, he was winning majors, becoming the #1 player in the world, and beating a still-effective Nicklaus.
Do you think you can make a video analysis of a pro Golfer hitting a FADE and speak on some fundamentals for hitting a FADE shot? I know we would all appreciate that Wade!
Have you seen his video on Nicklaus? At that time Jack was hitting it left-to-right all the time--and, at least in his mind, intended to hit the fade the right way, with an inside path and full release (a draw swing, in other words) but a preset open clubface. His idea was that to get the fade you ought to be even more "under" the ball, rather than getting steep and outside on it--but then, by the late '70s, he'd crept into the over-the-top habit and had to make big changes.
I'm not so convinced it's actually out-to-in, relative to the target line, but I'll have to go look at slower-motion, more HQ vids to be sure. I do know that he really did try to give it a big thump, which for a guy his size meant he was really using his body aggressively to support that arm swing, which often can cause a tendency to get out and over. I also have heard him say that at his best, all he thinks about is path (coming at the ball from the inside) and release...
...which suggests to me that if he's always thinking about being sure that the club is coming at the ball from the inside, it may be because he was fighting a tendency not to. I have this developing theory right now that the things any individual good player thinks about most are the things that tend to counteract whatever his bad tendencies are; this is why, for instance, when a pro says he always thinks about making his swing compact, it's because his tendency is to swing...
...very fully, which is a tendency the average amateur may NOT have. Or, for instance, when a pro talks about "getting on top of the ball with his chest," it may be because his tendency is to do the opposite, which is to say that a good player's tendency may be to come at the ball too much from the inside with too strong a release--but when an average player tries to follow the "get the chest over the ball" advice without having that initial tendency, it's a disaster.
What I'm saying is, being a top player may have a lot to do with having completely different instincts about swinging the club from the get-go than a handicap player has. It may not even have to do with being more athletic, or whatever; it may have to do with early success, early instruction, early patterns arrived at by accident, whatever.
At any rate, let me go poke around and see whether Watson actually is out-to-in relative to the target line, or whether he comes down just a bit outside his path going back (which, no matter what pros think, almost all of them do to one extent or another, partially because of the force of the body and the slight straightening of the angle between shaft and arms set at address, caused by the application of force and the weight of the club).
I can tell you I've seen him play in person, and his standard shot is a high, mostly straight ball that falls a little left, rather than the big sweeping draw he hit so much when he was younger.
OK, sorry to hit you with another post (these limitations drive me nuts sometimes), but anyhow: Looking at other YT vids of Watson's swing confirms what I was thinking--that he does come down outside his original backswing path (he's always pulled his hands well inside on the backswing), but he's hitting the ball from the inside relative to the target line and his body lines approaching the ball (the latter is what's really important). You can see this for yourself if...
...you look at some of the DTL shots and notice how the ball appears outside the toe of the clubhead when the clubhead is nearly level with the ball about a foot before impact; you'll see the clubhead approach from the inside so that the ball appears to be moving toward the sweet spot right up until impact. In a true outside-in action filmed DTL, you'd see the ball appear toward the heel just before impact, and it would be moving toward the toe in those last few milliseconds.
Yeah, I saw that. Weird. It really doesn't square with what he says elsewhere, both before and since, so I don't quite know what to make of it, other than the fact that sometimes a guy goes too far with one thing (the "whole bottle of aspirin" thing that Harvey Penick used to talk about) and has to work on a completely opposite thought to bring it back in balance. You'd like to avoid that sort of thing as much as possible when working on your own game, I think, but it happens.
@emncaity Man, I'm 21 finishing up College and I'm hoping my friend will buy my old AP1 irons so I can buy a laser rangefinder like the Bushnell 1600 with slope or the 1600 tournament edition. What do you think about that? I don't care if people frown on others who use them at all. I know you can't use them in a big tournament, but you will have a caddie.
I think it's great to know exact yardages by whatever means you can. I'd cross-check whatever you buy with somebody else's, and even pace off distances, to be sure everything's calibrated right. Even a small-percentage inaccuracy can end up really hurting you. I don't know of any competitive players who frown on people using them in anything but a competitive (or money) round; some aren't bothered even when they're playing a money match.
Now, if your question is whether coming down outside the path of his backswing (but still inside the target line) has something to do with his barely-there draw, I dunno. Snead did it most famously, and he did OK. I do think that a guy who swings it that far inside on the backswing (Watson did it worse when he was younger, I think) probably has to try very hard not to come too far over that path on the downswing, so it would figure that he'd work hard at that.
Also, if you read his book Getting Back to Basics, he's adamant about extension down the line and not letting the left wrist break down for as long as possible past impact, and he says he does that by rotating the forearms to avoid the hand-flip. If you do that and hit the ball from a solid, strong, inside-and-shallow approach, you'll kill it, which he does. His high, slight-draw ball flight depends on that path; out-to-in won't get it done.
pretty sure the announcer was talking about leg drive not necessarily swing length. He has a massive shoulder turn in each vid, just a longer arm swing in the second vid hence the longer swing length.
long arm swing does not nessarily = trying to smash it. I wouldnt necessarily have a go at nobilo for saying he might have gone after it more aggressively in his previous years.
Get off your high horse, they're just talking for entertainment. put mute on if you dont want to hear it.
Don't forget that Watson still swings it past parallel at the top even now as a 60 year old. He is certainly a more controlled driver than he was in the late 70's as he showed at The British Open over the last few years.
I'd say Frank was talking about Watson's driving in general from being in his 20's to his 30's and just using the vids as an illustration which I agree do not show this. Other than very slight differences in length of swing, those two swings are identical.
stevepising 9 months ago
Ok Wayne got to take you to task on one point you made. You say Nabilo totally disregards what was actually happening in his swing. The 1980 swing going much further bast parallel yet Nobilo says he is much more controlled. I agree with you that it doesn't appear he's really saying what the vid is showing. Yet you put up a swing of Watson at Augusta with a shorter backswing to make your point. That doesn't really tell the story either because he is hitting a short iron not a driver. Good vids.
4AStateChamp 11 months ago
TOM...Happy New Year...the best in 2011,from the Seniors who follow you !!! Helping the young players with their Vision, well into their Senior years !
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1BoomerTEE 1 year ago
i think instructors from television are trying to confuse the people that are trying to learn
BoHoVsGolf 1 year ago
@BoHoVsGolf
Instructors on TV, for the most part, only parrot whoever the latest guru(s) is/are. Kostis is a perfect example. He was a first-rate player and had some of the best ideas on the swing I've ever heard in the 70s and early 80s--his Inside Path book is, for my money, the best all-but-unknown instructional book ever--but by the 90s he was going against his own former ideas 180d, because the "body" teachers were prominent. I've noticed he's gone back the other direction recently.
emncaity 11 months ago
@BoHoVsGolf
Also bad: Post-shot analyses where they try to attribute bad shots to some action in the swing that the player almost always has anyway (and usually an attribution based on whatever the hot theory is at the moment, or the ax that analyst is always grinding). If you wanted to make this kind of "analysis" valid, you'd show the analyst the swing first and make him PREDICT where the ball ended up. I guarantee you these guys would be only slightly ahead of random rate, if that.
emncaity 11 months ago
The reason Watson didn't win as many majors as he could have is because of a slight outside in movement on the forward swing. You never saw that Wayne?
JazzandSoul1 1 year ago
@JazzandSoul1 Or perhaps you could say that the only reason he won as many majors as he did was that very same move, the thought of which makes evident why such speculation is essentially pointless. Swings of the great ones are what they are. Many times the effort to correct and make better only makes worse. Watson always tried to practice his way out of a shut wrist and high hands at the top, but could never incorporate the change when he played. Good thing, I think, given his great career.
wdefrancesco 1 year ago 2
@wdefrancesco What are the negatives of a slightly outside to in swing path like Watson's? Would it more likely cause a heel or toe shot?
JAKEHARRIS281 11 months ago
@wdefrancesco
Not to mention the fact that Sam Snead, the winningest American player ever, had the same slight over-the-top move. He did OK.
emncaity 11 months ago
@JazzandSoul1
Who could ever disprove such a statement? It's not testable, not disconfirmable, and therefore can be only speculative. There is that little matter that at the height of his game, when he was #1 in the world, for several years (late 70s and early 80s), he still had to fend off a guy like Nicklaus. What giant of the game does Tiger have to beat?
Also, he never became a really great ballstriker until he was in his 40s. You probably know that.
emncaity 1 year ago
@JazzandSoul1 How can you say that with assurance though? How do you know that for sure? I wonder what Tom would say if you or I asked him why he thinks he didn't win as many majors. Thanks.
JAKEHARRIS281 11 months ago
Strange to compare 75 and 80 - I don't believe his swing changed hugely in those years. Tom always had a full back swing and a reverse c finish position, as he has aged I think we still see a full back swing and a slightly less C finish position. It would be more valid to compare 80 and 95 or 2000 say.
stevepising 1 year ago
I will say this, Watson now 2010 as opposed to Watson 1975 or 1980 is less of a reverse c now. I dont understand why they compared 75 and 80.
deanw0rmer 1 year ago
Frank Nobilo wasn't comparing these two swings. Listen to him. He said that as the years went by, he started to get more on his left side and had less of a reverse C. He never said anything about his swing in 1980 being different than his swing from 1975. He wasn't even doing a specific swing analysis. He was talking in generalities. There are plenty of later day Tom Watson swings on youtube that reflect this.
fauvrdamor 1 year ago
@fauvrdamor Listen again. Nobilo specifically says that Watson's swing in 75 was "bomb and gouge", while in 80 it was more controlled. The video shows the exact opposite, shorter and tighter in 75, longer and softer in 80.
wdefrancesco 1 year ago
@wdefrancesco
Nobilo's most flawed assumption about thses two swings of Watson are the time periods in which he says they occurred. The swing that Nobilo says was filmed in 1975 is definitely incorrect since Watson's caddie in this photo is standing behind him with a Ram golf bag; at this time period Watson was on the McGregor staff so that picture is more likely from the late 70s, the picture on the left is probably from 81-82 when he had gotten a little longer at the top with the driver.
jamz50 1 year ago
Don't agree.. watsons swing sucked ass until a decade ago,he sucked it inside on the take away, shut at impact, and severe hip action to not snap it. If u look at his swing now, he's addressed this major flaw in his swing, thus hits it much more consistent now than in his early career. Btw long doesn't mean loose or out of control, nor vice versa.
senorluna76 1 year ago
@senorluna76
HIs swing "sucked ass"? Really? Why are you in this discussion?
It had "flaws" based on a model you or other people hold to, is what it did. It varied from some ideal that people have in their heads. Meanwhile, he was winning majors, becoming the #1 player in the world, and beating a still-effective Nicklaus.
emncaity 1 year ago
Do you think you can make a video analysis of a pro Golfer hitting a FADE and speak on some fundamentals for hitting a FADE shot? I know we would all appreciate that Wade!
JAKEHARRIS281 1 year ago
@JAKEHARRIS281
Have you seen his video on Nicklaus? At that time Jack was hitting it left-to-right all the time--and, at least in his mind, intended to hit the fade the right way, with an inside path and full release (a draw swing, in other words) but a preset open clubface. His idea was that to get the fade you ought to be even more "under" the ball, rather than getting steep and outside on it--but then, by the late '70s, he'd crept into the over-the-top habit and had to make big changes.
emncaity 1 year ago
@emncaity What do you think of Watson's slightly outside to in swing path? It does produce a straight ball flight with almost do draw on it.
JAKEHARRIS281 11 months ago
@JAKEHARRIS281
I'm not so convinced it's actually out-to-in, relative to the target line, but I'll have to go look at slower-motion, more HQ vids to be sure. I do know that he really did try to give it a big thump, which for a guy his size meant he was really using his body aggressively to support that arm swing, which often can cause a tendency to get out and over. I also have heard him say that at his best, all he thinks about is path (coming at the ball from the inside) and release...
emncaity 11 months ago
@JAKEHARRIS281
...which suggests to me that if he's always thinking about being sure that the club is coming at the ball from the inside, it may be because he was fighting a tendency not to. I have this developing theory right now that the things any individual good player thinks about most are the things that tend to counteract whatever his bad tendencies are; this is why, for instance, when a pro says he always thinks about making his swing compact, it's because his tendency is to swing...
emncaity 11 months ago
@JAKEHARRIS281
...very fully, which is a tendency the average amateur may NOT have. Or, for instance, when a pro talks about "getting on top of the ball with his chest," it may be because his tendency is to do the opposite, which is to say that a good player's tendency may be to come at the ball too much from the inside with too strong a release--but when an average player tries to follow the "get the chest over the ball" advice without having that initial tendency, it's a disaster.
emncaity 11 months ago
@JAKEHARRIS281
What I'm saying is, being a top player may have a lot to do with having completely different instincts about swinging the club from the get-go than a handicap player has. It may not even have to do with being more athletic, or whatever; it may have to do with early success, early instruction, early patterns arrived at by accident, whatever.
emncaity 11 months ago
@JAKEHARRIS281
At any rate, let me go poke around and see whether Watson actually is out-to-in relative to the target line, or whether he comes down just a bit outside his path going back (which, no matter what pros think, almost all of them do to one extent or another, partially because of the force of the body and the slight straightening of the angle between shaft and arms set at address, caused by the application of force and the weight of the club).
emncaity 11 months ago
@JAKEHARRIS281
I can tell you I've seen him play in person, and his standard shot is a high, mostly straight ball that falls a little left, rather than the big sweeping draw he hit so much when he was younger.
emncaity 11 months ago
@JAKEHARRIS281
OK, sorry to hit you with another post (these limitations drive me nuts sometimes), but anyhow: Looking at other YT vids of Watson's swing confirms what I was thinking--that he does come down outside his original backswing path (he's always pulled his hands well inside on the backswing), but he's hitting the ball from the inside relative to the target line and his body lines approaching the ball (the latter is what's really important). You can see this for yourself if...
emncaity 11 months ago
@JAKEHARRIS281
...you look at some of the DTL shots and notice how the ball appears outside the toe of the clubhead when the clubhead is nearly level with the ball about a foot before impact; you'll see the clubhead approach from the inside so that the ball appears to be moving toward the sweet spot right up until impact. In a true outside-in action filmed DTL, you'd see the ball appear toward the heel just before impact, and it would be moving toward the toe in those last few milliseconds.
emncaity 11 months ago
@emncaity If you haven't already YT "Tom Watson's secret to the golf swing". He says he didn't learn the golf swing until 1992.
JAKEHARRIS281 11 months ago
@JAKEHARRIS281
Yeah, I saw that. Weird. It really doesn't square with what he says elsewhere, both before and since, so I don't quite know what to make of it, other than the fact that sometimes a guy goes too far with one thing (the "whole bottle of aspirin" thing that Harvey Penick used to talk about) and has to work on a completely opposite thought to bring it back in balance. You'd like to avoid that sort of thing as much as possible when working on your own game, I think, but it happens.
emncaity 11 months ago
@emncaity Man, I'm 21 finishing up College and I'm hoping my friend will buy my old AP1 irons so I can buy a laser rangefinder like the Bushnell 1600 with slope or the 1600 tournament edition. What do you think about that? I don't care if people frown on others who use them at all. I know you can't use them in a big tournament, but you will have a caddie.
JAKEHARRIS281 11 months ago
@JAKEHARRIS281
I think it's great to know exact yardages by whatever means you can. I'd cross-check whatever you buy with somebody else's, and even pace off distances, to be sure everything's calibrated right. Even a small-percentage inaccuracy can end up really hurting you. I don't know of any competitive players who frown on people using them in anything but a competitive (or money) round; some aren't bothered even when they're playing a money match.
emncaity 11 months ago
@emncaity The Bushnell rangefinders are supposed to be accurate within one yard. Do you have one?
JAKEHARRIS281 11 months ago
@JAKEHARRIS281
Now, if your question is whether coming down outside the path of his backswing (but still inside the target line) has something to do with his barely-there draw, I dunno. Snead did it most famously, and he did OK. I do think that a guy who swings it that far inside on the backswing (Watson did it worse when he was younger, I think) probably has to try very hard not to come too far over that path on the downswing, so it would figure that he'd work hard at that.
emncaity 11 months ago
@JAKEHARRIS281
Also, if you read his book Getting Back to Basics, he's adamant about extension down the line and not letting the left wrist break down for as long as possible past impact, and he says he does that by rotating the forearms to avoid the hand-flip. If you do that and hit the ball from a solid, strong, inside-and-shallow approach, you'll kill it, which he does. His high, slight-draw ball flight depends on that path; out-to-in won't get it done.
emncaity 11 months ago
pretty sure the announcer was talking about leg drive not necessarily swing length. He has a massive shoulder turn in each vid, just a longer arm swing in the second vid hence the longer swing length.
long arm swing does not nessarily = trying to smash it. I wouldnt necessarily have a go at nobilo for saying he might have gone after it more aggressively in his previous years.
Get off your high horse, they're just talking for entertainment. put mute on if you dont want to hear it.
eddiehamer14 1 year ago