For Every Golfer There's A Swing

Filed in archive Golf Instruction on March 6, 2009

Courtesy: Getty Photos

Yesterday, I wrote about AJ Bonar's long-standing single move to generate more power at impact, a move that has its supporters and its detractors.

But doesn't every swing theory? Just look how much dust was stirred up when Andy Plummer and Mike Bennett introduced their Stack and Tilt method two years ago.

That one is still reverberating around the golf world. Amateurs seem to love it; the teachers hate it.

So too with AJ Bonar's instant power move.

At the same time that I unearthed the Golf Magazine story from 2006 on Bonar's "magic move", I found another website called Perfect Golf Swing Review.

This is a website devoted to breaking down every element of the golf swing into tiny detail. And, boy, is there a lot of detail!

It's the brainchild of Jeffery Mann, a retired physician who took up the game in 2002.

His study of the golf swing is intense almost to the point of being obsessive. In fact, Mr. Mann reminds me very much of how Bobby Clampett embraced Homer Kelly's book, The Golfing Machine.

When Clampett blew up and quit the game, he said later that he had focused too much on specific movements rather than allowing himself to feel the swing.

At any rate, during his discussion of the downswing, Mann makes reference to the swing theory of AJ Bonar.

Long story short, he thinks Bonar is all wrong (go to Q and A section at the bottom of the page).

Is Mr. Mann correct? I have no idea. I don't really know that AJ Bonar is correct. But this is the problem for golfers, amateur and professional: who does have the truth?

Frankly, the answer is that no one does. The best any teacher can do is to have some solid insights.

It then boils down to how that teacher communicates those insights. I lean towards the theory of feeling the swing; others, like Clampett and Jeffrey Mann, want the left-brain version: why it happens, how it happens, when it happens.

No one is right all the time and no one is wrong all the time. I like chocolate ice cream; you like vanilla.