Instant Power or Instant Disaster

Filed in archive Golf Instruction on March 5, 2009

Courtesy: perfectgolfswingreview.net

This morning, as I perused my emails, I realized that golf equipment has a season for new releases like the car industry does.

For the auto industry in North America, it's the fall launch. For golf, it's just before the arrival of spring.

This Einsteinian moment was triggered by a couple of emails from retailers that had landed in my in-box. One was from Canada's big box store, Golftown, and it was an ad for the new TaylorMade R9 which has just launched.

This puppy has the interchangeable shaft technology and three different weight screws in the head of the club.

"The result...24 drivers in 1" says the ad. A staggering statement that immediately created stress in my brain as I worried about choosing the wrong driver from so many.

Never mind, it's the usual marketing hype.

The other email was from a teacher named A.J. Bonar, or "AJ" as he calls himself.

I've seen this guy on The Golf Channel flogging his DVDs and purporting to know the REAL secret to the golf swing. Again, marketing hype, you might think.

And when I opened the email, I discovered that Bonar is selling a new club - a fairway wood that "teaches you to play better" called the Truth, after his DVD series, The Truth About Golf.

AJ Bonar has always had radical views of the swing and has long argued that the big teachers in the game like Leadbetter, Flick and McLean have it all wrong.

Okay...

The Truth fairway wood, Bonar says in his pitch, will teach you his "Instant Power Move" and there's a screen-shot of a story taken from Golf Magazine on this power move.

Some simple searching of the Golf Magazine website unearthed the story from late 2006.

In essence, the Power Move is a fast rotating of the right wrist over the left about two feet before impact. This is not new.

But Bonar says the theory that the clubhead must remain square at impact is rubbish. And there are plenty of photos in the story showing tour pros rolling their wrists just before and just after impact. Or they appear to show that.

Bonar maintains this one move can add 30 yards to your drives. But more than that, he argues, you don't need to worry about a weight shift or driving with the lower body - it's all in the rolling of the wrists.

I must say that when I have done that on the range, the results can be amazing: flush contact, lovely ball flight and great distance all with almost no effort.

However, as so often in life, timing is everything. So this is not a move for every golfer.

Still, it does keep the ages-old mystery percolating along nicely.

What mystery, you may ask? Why, how to make the perfect golf swing, of course.

It's a mystery that will never be solved but will sell plenty of books, magazines and DVDs as long as human beings play the game.