Rory McIlroy is one of the best ball-strikers in golf, and the best driver of the ball in his generation.

Perhaps the best driver ever.

So why is he tweaking his golf swing?

Because that’s what top players do—and it’s a good thing! Stand still at the top of the sport, and you’ll start going backwards. Amateurs tend to think it’s all-or-nothing when it comes to swing changes, both with their own and with pros. If things are going well, don’t touch it. If they’re not, blow it all up.

In reality, pros are constantly making smart and subtle upgrades to their technique. That’s how they stay at the very top through the years.

Which brings us back to Rory…

Before/After

I get into it in more detail in the video below, and as I wrote about here, Rory’s golf swing has drifted more across the line over the years (meaning the club is pointing to the right of his target). If you look closely, you’ll also notice that Rory’s left wrist is a little more cupped, too.

Here’s a 2014 to 2024 comparison…

Again, different isn’t necessarily bad, but in Rory’s case, with his arms moving deeper and his club pointing more to the right, the club would tend to re-route behind him, which would cause a wide right miss, especially with his irons. Occasionally, he’d yank it left as a kind of overcorrection.

Which is why he’s making this his offseason golf swing project.

Speaking to Golf Digest last week, Rory explained that the root cause comes on the takeaway.

• Rory says his tendency is to let the clubhead get outside his hands, with the clubface slightly shut, on the takeaway.
• Instead, Rory says he wants his clubhead more in line with his hands.

When he lets the clubhead get out, Rory says it causes his right arm to stay too high, which pitches the clubshaft more vertical. Instead, he says he wants the end of the club pointing more towards the ball, with his right elbow staying low.

“When the club gets too vertical my right arm stays high, and that’s what causes the cupped and across look,” McIlroy explains.

“When I set the correct arm and wrist structure early on the takeaway, I can just turn it to the top.”

A little DIY golf swing upgrade from Rory, which he says involves hitting lots of balls at a blank screen focusing only on technique—which is strangely good advice for the rest of us.

https://twitter.com/GolfDigest/status/1852689616962527358

The post Golf Swing Gossip: Why Rory McIlroy is grinding on this backswing move appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

This creates consistent ball-first contact—no chunks—and makes it easier to control the distance of chip shots.

JD Cuban

Here’s an image I use with my students to help simplify the basic chipping stroke and ensure solid contact. Take a very narrow stance with the top of your spine tipped toward the target and the ball back, just inside your trail heel. Now picture a wall outside the toe of the club at address, and swing the clubhead up and down this imaginary wall into impact, finishing low to the ground. It’s OK if the club runs into the ground, so long as the ball is back in your stance.

JD Cuban

A simple way to practice this at home or on the range is to stick an alignment rod in the ground along your extended target line and angle it toward your trail heel. Let’s call this your “wall.” Place a second rod about a foot in front of your front leg, angled toward your toes. Hit chips with the club riding up and down the first rod (top image) and stopping short of the second one (above). Make sure your hips turn to face the target at the finish. Once you can make this motion your own, you’ll be hitting your chips solid and getting them to the hole.

Jackson Koert, a Golf Digest Best Young Teacher, is director of instruction at Atlantic Beach (Florida.) Country Club.

Main Image: JD Cuban

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It’s OK to envy another golfer’s swing. It can be good for your own golf swing—but only if you do it the right way.

The problem: You may like another player’s golf swing—Adam Scott, let’s say—but you may not be able to swing exactly like them, for a variety of reasons:

• The player with your ideal golf swing may be built differently from you. If you’re tall and lean, a shorter and stocky golfer’s swing might not suit you.

• Even if you’re built similarly, your body’s proportions may be significantly different than theirs. Your wingspan may be shorter than your height, for instance, while the player you idolize may have a wingspan that’s longer than their height, which can make the two swings look different.

• More crucially, you may have different physical strengths and weaknesses from the player you idolize. They may have flexible hips, which again, can change how their golf swing works.

The risk: At best, copying a golf swing with different underlying traits could cost you power and consistency. At worst, it could leave you injured.

How to have good swing envy

Yet golf swing envy is a trap even tour players fall into. It’s natural to try to emulate the golf swings you like the look of, but for an example of how to do it the right way, look to recent PGA Tour winner Patton Kizzire.

Taking aim

Patton Kizzire knocks it close @ValsparChamp. pic.twitter.com/vXJQ8tzT0c

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) March 18, 2023

As Kizzire’s coach, Golf Digest Top 50 Teacher Justin Parsons explains: Kizzire is an athletic six-foot-five-inches with long legs. His wingspan is slightly shorter than his height, which means his golf swing is naturally going to be more upright.

As Parsons explains:

“He likes the look of Ben Hogan’s flatter, more horizontal golf swings. If Patton tried to swing on a flatter plane like Hogan, he’d struggle to reach the ball effectively due to his proportions. His swing plane is naturally going to be much, much more upright. That’s how he’s going to play his best golf.”

He continues:

“We’re past the idea of [the year] 2000, or 2004, where there is a one-size-fits-all philosophy. As instructors we’re all trying to make sure we’re fitting swings for people’s bodies.”

That last bit from Justin is the key takeaway, and the important part for the rest of us.

4 Takeaways:

1. Recognize that just because you like the *look* of a player’s swing, that doesn’t mean it’s the best swing for you to copy.

2. Before picking your golf swing idol, pay close attention to how they’re built.

3. Swinging your swing means matching your golf swing to your own unique body, to bring the best out of what you have.

4. You can dive deeper here, but things like wingspans can affect the shape of your golf swing. Kizzire has a shorter wingspan means adjusting his posture and setup to stand closer to the ball, and swing more up and down, Parsons says. A player with a longer wingspan of may need to stand further away, and swing more around.

Main Image: Jared C. Tilton

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Question: I see you’ve been touting the benefits of higher-lofted fairway woods, but a lot of times I like to hit my 3-wood off the tee. What do you say people like me should be doing?

Answer: Let’s be clear: Some people can absolutely smoke a 3-wood, so we are in no way saying no one should be using them. But if you fall into that camp, you are a statistical anomaly.

More often, teeing off with 3-wood results in one of the worst feelings in golf. You’re on a par 4 with a narrow landing area. You opt to play safe with the 3-wood instead of your driver . . . but then don’t find the short grass. Total fail.

We’ve trotted out this data before, but it bears repeating. Information from Shot Scope, which tracks hundreds of thousands of shots from amateur golfers, showed a 3-wood was slightly more accurate than a driver off the tee (48 per cent of fairways hit compared to 46 per cent with a driver). Hey, who doesn’t want to hit more fairways? Go with 3-wood, right?

Not so fast. The tradeoff probably isn’t worth it. Why? The numbers also show that players, on average, give up 19 yards in distance by going to the shorter club. Having two clubs more into greens, like a 5-iron instead of a 7-iron, seems to us to be a big price to pay for hitting two extra fairways for every 100 tee shots.

But wait, don’t tour pros like Scottie Scheffler regularly hit 3-wood off the tee? Sure. Tour pros often hit less than driver when trying to shape the ball or run the risk of running out of fairway if they nut a driver. You, my friend, are not Scottie Scheffler.

“Drivers have much larger, more forgiving heads that can help keep the face square on off-centre impact and lead to greater accuracy for many,” said Jason Fryia, co-owner of The Golf Exchange when we busted this myth in 2022. “The larger footprint of the driver allows for more adjustability and therefore a driver can likely be better fit to produce more accurate results. The same thing can be said for the greater amount of driver clubheads available in the market today. For these reasons, a properly fit driver is often more accurate than a 3-wood.”

The Shot Scope data puts it into further perspective. The overall average in the research showed tee shots with the driver going 207 yards, the performance average at 222 yards and the longest shot averaging 246 yards. With the 3-wood, those numbers dropped to 188, 194 and 222 yards, respectively. That’s a difference of 19 yards on average; 28 yards on solid strikes and 24 yards on the Sunday punch.

What does it all mean? The easy answer is, it’s better to hit driver every time. The other option is to learn how to find more fairways with your 3-wood, which not only makes for approach shots from better lies but also lessens the distance gap, as shots that hit the fairway tend to roll more than those in the taller grass. But you might need some lessons to take advantage of that.

Main image: Andrew Redington

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Sang Kim, the founder and CEO of 4D Motion Sports, has created a product intended to address the problems that hold golfers back from achieving their peak performance. Kim has been a serial entrepreneur and inventor for the last quarter century, working on mostly internet startups. He wanted a break after his startup was acquired by a Fortune 500 company, so he began to play a ton of golf.

“First thing that happened, I just couldn’t putt,” Kim said. “One day I three-putted 12, 13 times, and I said, ‘there’s got to be a better way.’”

Kim, a self-described “science-y guy,” realized that it was only a tiny portion of the golf ball that he needed to get into the cup to hole more putts. He put his inventor cap on, went home and grabbed his son, and they took a hacksaw to both sides of the golf ball and started experimenting. What they came up with was the PutterWheel, a product Kim later presented to a pair of “Shark Tank” judges in a competition at the ASI Convention, which he won.

“We were just mobbed,” he said. “Then we got a Dick’s [Sporting Goods] deal, we were in 750 stores. That kind of got me into the [golf] business.”

That’s when Kim realized that what he really wanted was to fix his full swing. He knew that while there were a lot of great golf instructors out there, they can’t be with you all the time, and rarely on the course. Leveraging his tech background, he wanted to create a system that can measure, analyze and train your swing anytime, anywhere.

At the time, 3D body motion capture was available, but Kim noticed it was far too expensive for the average golfer. He wanted to create something that was affordable, put it on mobile devices and make it super-fast. That’s when he came up with 4D Motion, a passion project 12 years in the making that Kim is ready to launch for the consumer.

“It’s the hardest thing I ever worked on,” he said. “If I knew it was going to take me over a decade, I’m not sure I would have ever started. But now i think we have a product that I can honestly say, it has to make people better.”

When I first tried out the 4D Motion vest and saw instant feedback on the Apple Watch, I was intrigued, surprisingly, because I’m the type that wants to know less about my swing when things are going well (surprisingly, they are right now). “That’s the goal,” Kim says. The prototype vest, which can be worn under a golf shirt, has three sensors in it, one between the shoulder blades, one on the sacrum at the bottom of your hips, and one on the chest that acts as the gateway to the phone app that picks up everything from setup, shoulder plane, pelvis speed, spine angle, and beyond. After my first swing on the range, it took three seconds for all these data points to show up in the 4D Motion app, which showed I came slightly over the top and that I extended a bit too early, which led to a pull. Those two data points were in red, signalling what I had done wrong. Setup, posture, rotation and shoulder plane were all in green, signalling those were all in good shape. Simple to understand.

On the next swing, I attempted to swing more inside to out, hoping to get rid of the over-the-top motion that can lead to dead pulls or mega slices. After impact, I felt I had fixed the issue. The data reflected that. That euphoric feeling was short-lived, however, when Kim showed me that I had a poor loss of posture score. Back to work.

@cpowers141 An early look at the 4D Motion Sports 3D Swing Vest. Possibly the future of golf instruction. Check out my full story at golfdigest.com #golf #golfinstruction #instruction #teaching #technology #tech #golftiktok #golftok ♬ original sound – ChrissyDoes

You don’t even need to leave your house, or even have a club in your hands, to work on the proper positions in your swing. Put the vest on in your living room, open the phone app and you can simply get into your setup and make your turn. The sensors will pick up how your torso and hips are moving, and the model of yourself in the app will turn green and make a dinging sound when you are in proper position.

Of course, using the product at the range or inside your own home can only get you so far. What’s different about Kim’s product is that it tells you exactly what you are doing differently on the range and on the course, allowing you to identify the factors that are keeping you from swinging your best when you need it most. In a recent experiment with a low-handicapper, every swing he made on the range was in the green on the app. Then he went out to play six holes and the app revealed a number of flaws, including early extension and flat-shoulder plane.

“You get tense, you tighten up. You don’t rotate properly,” Kim said. “His biggest flaw was flat-shoulder plane. He never knew that about himself. So now he knows. With the system, you could even take a practice swing and see if you fixed it or not.”

The vest is already being used by top players as well as their instructors. Kim’s also made headway with Major League Baseball teams — the former Nationals hitting coach Kevin Long is on 4D Motion’s advisory board. It’s also been used by the U.S. Figure Skating team, where he’s developed an injury prevention system that uses machine learning to identify the jumps in a workout and detect fatigue that can lead to injury.

Soon, you’ll be able to get your hands on it, too. Kim says they are launching a Kickstarter campaign for the product because they need financial support for its production. As for pricing, Kim says they will offer multiple different packages, but final pricing will be in the $600-900 range (Editor’s note: Golf Digest is a minority partner with an even more affordable option, the Mustard Golf app that provides AI-generated feedback and instruction on your swing videos).

“My goal is to make this something that’s affordable. If you can afford a new driver, or a putter these days, you can afford this,” Kim said. “And I think you’re going to get a lot more improvement from this than a new driver.”

The product has already gone through several updates and is faster since the first time I used it. You will now be able to quickly add notes and comments, marking down what specifically went wrong or right on every swing and be able to click into that swing and see what you wrote down later.

“That’s when you can really differentiate,” said Jim Beadle, the director of business development at 4D Motion Sports and a golf instructor himself. “OK, good shot, bad shot, high draw, high cut, punch shot. You can really start to differentiate between every shot I took on that golf course.”

The whole picture, naturally, can be overwhelming. That’s why Kim is revealing only a fraction of the amount of data and technology that they have at their disposal for now. As time goes on, users will be able to unlock more and more data points that will be useful for them. Simplifying the product for the consumer was paramount.

“I wanted to help people like me,” says Kim, who is a single-digit handicap always looking to improve, just like the rest of us. “That’s what this product is all about. Maybe you can’t afford to take lessons, maybe you don’t have time to take lessons. Maybe you like your swing on the range but want to know what is going wrong with your swing on the course, where it counts.

“Golf’s one of the few sports where—imagine you met somebody and you say, ‘Oh, you play piano? How long have you been doing it?’ And they say, ‘30 years.’ And they get up there and they play ‘Chopsticks.’ That would never happen. But in golf, you meet somebody who has been playing for 30 years and he’s still a 28 handicap. Something’s wrong there, and I’m trying to help fix it.”

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I’ve been working with Brian at Sea Island Resort in Georgia now since the spring of 2019, under the guidance of the late great Jack Lumpkin. Jack was actually Claude Harmon’s assistant and he used to babysit for Butch Harmon when he was a kid.

So Jack was the one who actually started coaching Brian when he was only 11-years-old, and since Jack’s passing two years ago. I have taken over the reins with Brian.

These days, it’s a very standard tournament warm-up now for Brian.

Brian always loosens up with a few wedge shots and then he moves into a Delayed Strike Trainer (DST) club which is a bendy golf club.

For those of you which haven’t used that, if you are a right-handed golf for example who would draw the golf ball a lot – the DST would make you feel like you are getting on top of the golf ball a little bit more.

Which for Brian, really helps him get into a more powerful set up position with his lead hand and lead shoulder, which we are working on. It really helps him with his movement, and helps him with a couple of fundamental things.

Then he progresses to the ball between his arms, The Tour Striker Smart Ball. Brian has always had an early set in his takeaway, and this ball really tends to soften it out a little bit.

RELATED: Everything you need to know about this year’s major at Royal Troon

We aren’t trying to change his early set completely, just soften it a little bit so then he can make some more of a body orientated golf swing.

He then will progresses to aligning his ball position, making sure that he is exactly where he needs to be in relation to the target and where the ball would be in his stance.

As you can see, he will still flick back and forth between a few of the drills until he feels comfortable.

It’s then he would head into hitting shots with his pre full shot routine, which is something he is working on as we have seen him take his time while he is over the golf ball. He isn’t a player that has negative thoughts, he is just waiting for the positive thought before he pulls the trigger.

The more he can get into those processes, the more he has noticed that transfer onto the golf course.

Even on the Friday afternoon of the Open Championship last year he said to me, “It strikes me that if I just keep to my process, maybe I will be ok this weekend.” I said to him “Yeah, I’m pretty sure you will be ok.”

Thankfully he was!

Main image: Francois Nel/Gatty Images

RELATED: Speaking with Justin Parsons about his journey from Northern Ireland and the UAE to the US and Open Championship glory with Brian Harman at Hoylake

The post Watch: Warm-up like the 2023 Open Champion, Brian Harman appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

The 30-year-old South African ranks 10th in SG: Putting, fourth in one-putt percentage, fourth in three-putt avoidance, and ninth in Approach Putt Performance.

Bezuidenhout is, simply put, an elite putter across the board.

“It’s always been the strong spot in my game,” he says. “I love spending time on putting. I love working on my putting; hitting different putts; reading the greens. It’s something that I enjoy.”

So what can we learn from him? That’s what I asked him at the Travelers Championship last week. Bezuidenhout said learning Aimpoint really helped his green-reading and recommends it to the rest of us, but it’s his daily routine, above all else, that the rest of us can learn from.

Bezuidenhout’s ‘dialed’ drill

Before every round, Bezuidenhout sets up a little putting station:

• He finds a flat six-foot putt
• He draws a chalk line on the ground
• He places two tees outside of the putter head
• He places two more tees a little wider
• He uses the line on his golf ball

https://twitter.com/LukeKerrDineen/status/1806426627447898314

Once he’s all setup, Bezuidenhout spends 10 or 15 minutes simply hitting putts, trying to roll the line on his golf ball down the line on the ground. He’ll also reserve about 30 putts which he hits with only his left hand.

The tees are there to make sure he hits the ball in the sweet spot of the putter, and with a square putter face.

“I use the same setup every day,” he says. “It helps me get my start line dialed, and keeps my stroke consistent day after day.”

A few minutes of this every day, perhaps on a putting green at home, and you’ll come out the other end an improved putter, too.

Main Image: Sean M. Haffey

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But more than any of that, Aberg is the owner of one of the best swings in golf. The 24-year-old Swede swings with a simplicity that is a complete break from the many idiosyncratic, though exceptional, moves that top the game today.

It’s the swing that nearly won him the 2024 Masters in his first major championship start (he finished runner-up) and gave him the 36-hole lead at the U.S. Open at Pinehurst. He is among the top players on the PGA Tour in total driving (a stat that factors in both distance and accuracy), and he is inside the top 15 in numerous ball-striking statistics.

Ludvig Aberg’s golf swing is absurd.

Soooo pure. pic.twitter.com/gt9nyeIn0g

— LKD (@LukeKerrDineen) January 20, 2024

All of this for a guy who grew up in Eslov, Sweden, a town of 20,000 where winter high temperatures top off in the mid 30s—not exactly ideal for creating a technically sound golf swing. Or is it?

We caught up with Aberg to learn more about how he created the swing that we see today. Luckily for us, his go-to drill that he worked on as a kid at home can help fix two of the most common golf-swing issues: early extension and lack of shaft lean. Let’s dive in.

Aberg’s early extension fix

Growing up, Aberg had a very typical junior golf swing. Powerful, yes, but occasionally inaccurate because he would early extend in the downswing, when his hips would move toward the ball. This caused him to get stuck, he says, with the club coming too far from the inside. Tiger Woods had the same issue as a junior golfer. The result for both? Big hooks.

“That’s still my tendency today that I get a little bit on the inside, and I’ll just flip my hands,” he says.

To fix this early extension, Aberg turned to an at-home drill. “During the wintertime when we were back home, I would be inside, and I had a chair next to my butt, and I would always try to feel the pressure on the chair,” he says.

He would place a chair behind him, directly against his butt, get into a golf posture and make rehearsal swings, feeling his butt touching the chair throughout the entire swing. If he lost that pressure at any point in his swing, he knew he was early extending.

On the backswing, Aberg would feel his right glute pressure into the chair and as he started down, he would feel the left glute stay back and pushing against the chair. Notice how in the video above, Aberg’s butt never leaves the red line.

“The pressure shifts from my right heel to my left toe, without doing this,” he says, illustrating his hips thrusting toward the ball in the downswing—the move he eliminated.

The feeling of your pressure moving into your left toes in transition is a feel many tour players use because it not only promotes an inside path, but it is key to generating a lot of ground forces, which creates power, as Golf Digest’s No.-1 ranked teacher in America Mark Blackburn explains.

Aberg’s shaft lean fix

In addition to struggling with early extension as a junior, Aberg would occasionally stop turning through the ball and flip his hands and arms through impact. When he did this, he had very little forward shaft lean and struggled to compress his irons.

As a fix, Aberg added to his early extension indoor drill by placing a club or other object in front his where his hands were at address, about even with his left leg. Then, as he would rehearse his swing and keeping his butt back, he would drive his hands forward to hit that club before getting to impact.

He calls this “making sure my hands are in front of the line of fire,” and if you watch him closely today, he often makes this rehearsal in his pre-shot routine, keeping his hands in front of the clubhead through impact. For many amateurs who tend to release their hands and arms too early in the downswing, it’s a great feel for feeling forward shaft lean and compression.

So try Aberg’s go-to drill at home to fix your early extension and create more shaft lean. It might feel extreme to drive your hands so far forward into impact but remember this is just an exaggerated drill. During your actual swing, your hands won’t be nearly as forward, but it’s a great feel to learn how they need to move in the downswing.

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Rory is a good putter who runs hot and cold, and the two short putts he missed on the 70th and 72nd holes of the U.S. Open are indicative of a small glitch McIlroy himself says he fights under pressure.

But it’s not the most important question facing McIlroy now. The more interesting, and frankly, confusing one is about his golf swing.

Whether it’s better or worse is subjective, but what is a fact is that Rory’s golf swing is different now. Different from the last time he was winning majors. Different, even, than a year ago.

Swing-watchers know it. People close to Rory’s world know it. Rory, himself, even knows it.

“My technique is nowhere near as good as it used to be,” an exasperated Rory said after his T-7 finish at last year’s PGA Championship, caught by Netflix cameras as part of Season Two of Full Swing. “I almost feel like I wanna do a complete reboot. I do, I do. Because I feel like it’s the only way I’m going to break through. It feels so far away.”

The question is, how much does it matter? That’s what I can’t figure out.

Getting to the Xs and Os, back in 2014, the key difference was that Rory’s arms stayed a little closer to him, and moved more vertically up on the backswing.

The clubhead tracked outside his hands, too, and the combination of these two things meant that at the top of his backswing, the clubhead and shaft were pretty much in line with his hands, when looking down the line.

https://twitter.com/LukeKerrDineen/status/1788631919061512489

This stayed the case until about 2020, coincidentally the year of Bryson DeChambeau’s first U.S. Open victory. Rory admitted he got “sucked into” swinging for more speed following Bryson’s Winged Foot win, and by that measure, it worked: 2024 Rory is about three miles per hour faster, on average, than 2012 Rory, with the second-best Power Percentage on the PGA Tour.

Editor’s Note: The cameras angles aren’t perfect. I tried my best to match, but take every video comparison with a grain of salt.

2019 Wells Fargo Championship vs. 2021 PGA Championship

That’s the clearest point when Rory’s golf swing began to change into what we see today. His arms began stretching further out and away from his body on the takeaway, and the clubhead tracked less outside his hands.

2013 PGA Championship vs. 2024 Players Championship vs. 2014 PGA Championship

At the top of his backswing, Rory’s arms can often appear flatter these days—more around his body, as opposed to up. His club is tends more across the line now, too (meaning it’s pointing to the right of his hands), which can affect his wrist angles.

2014 PGA Championship vs. 2024 PGA

2014 PGA Championship vs. 2024 PGA Championship

But again, how much does this matter? Golf’s Hall of Fame, which lives a 7-iron away from the most heartbreaking moment of Rory’s career, is littered with less-than-perfect backswing positions. Rory’s body is also different now than it was. What worked for him in 2014 might not be best for him now.

“It’s not that people can’t play good golf,” one coach told me. “It’s that not everyone can play good golf that way.”

Jack Nicklaus – Walter Iooss Jr.

The main reason why many coaches like to see the clubhead in line with the hands at the top is because it aligns the weight of the club with the direction your arms pull on the downswing.

Think of it like a water tube behind a turning boat. The further away the tube is from the boat when the boat turns left, the more the tube will swing out to the right before re-aligning with the direction of the boat.

Matthew Wolff

When the club gets across from the hands, you’ll often see good players fling the weight of the club behind their hands and body. Usually they get the club stuck so far behind their hands that they never get it around in front of them, and miss out to the right. This is happening a lot to Rory these days: This season, he’s missing fairways to the right about 60 percent more than he’s missing them to the left, and they were a common theme during his final round at Pinehurst.

https://twitter.com/LukeKerrDineen/status/1802419295810425093

But players who do this tend to throw in some wicked left misses, especially under pressure, because they’ll overcorrect with an aggressive roll of their wrists. Think about where Rory started missing on the closing stretches of his final two rounds. He yanked his approach left of the 16th green on Saturday, then did the same on Sunday, then missed his driver left on 18.

So, does it matter? And should he change it?

There are some stats to suggest there’s room for improvement, but categorical answers are admittedly hard to find.

• Rory’s about 0.7 strokes worse in SG: Off The Tee his past four years on tour than his first four years as a full-time PGA Tour player, but that may be explained by an influx of young, athletic bombers who can get closer to Rory off the tee than in the past.
• His proximity to the hole is worse, but within a paltry two feet.
• Rory’s about 0.07 shots worse from SG: Approach these days, though his last two seasons he’s finished above his 12-season SG: Approach average.

As Paul McGinley rightly pointed out to Brandel Chamblee when he made a similar point after the final round on Golf Channel’s Live From broadcast: Rory has all the tools to win, and was two short putts away from lifting the trophy. This a year after falling short to a career performance from Wyndham Clark, which followed a career performance from Cameron Smith a year before that.

It’s scary to say that a great golfer should make some changes because he could get even better, but in Rory’s case, my gut reaction is that the race car needs some minor tuning. It’s not the biggest change, as far as golf swing changes go. We’re talking tweaks here, not overhauls.

Besides, if anecdotes count for anything, Rory’s actions suggest he thinks there’s room for some technical improvement, too:

• The aforementioned Netflix quote
• Putting coach Brad Faxon’s revelation that he had “figured out” his swing
• The lesson with Butch Harmon earlier this year
• Rory’s new waggle which disappeared as quickly as it arrived
• The drive-by tinkering with different training aids
• The “two swing” thought problem he explained at this year’s Players Championship.

It’s a problem of abundance, both of talent and potential. It’s a quintessentially Rory one, too. He’s an impossibly good ball-striker by any objective metric; the No. 3-ranked player in the world with the most consistent major record of any player of his generation. Only with Rory could we wonder if he’s leaving even more on the table.

Main Image: Jared C. Tilton

The post The confusing case of Rory McIlroy’s golf swing, explained appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

Why is that?

Bryson’s not the first golfer to hover his driver like this: Greg Norman, Jack Nicklaus, and Nick Faldo were hoverers, too, and there are various reasons why golfers may do it.

The most common reason golfers chose to hover their driver is because they were worried about the ball falling off the tee, and being penalised. Hovering the driver means that golfers never technically grounded their club, which meant if the ball did move, they wouldn’t be penalized (though this rule has since changed anyway).

Bryson “chipping a few” drives after his round.

187 mph ball speed here.

He’s working on preventing his hips from sliding too much towards the target. Says pushing his body up towards the sky allows him to release his arms more, and square the face easier for his power draw. pic.twitter.com/vFNikBGsRI

— LKD (@LukeKerrDineen) June 14, 2024

For Bryson, his reasoning is slightly different. He hovered the club because that’s the height he wants his driver to be at impact.

“I’ve done it forever,” he says. “I’m just positioning my club and body at the level I want it to be at impact.”

Even though the club takes a long route to get back to impact, starting the club where he wants it to finish just made more sense to Bryson than the other way, so that’s why he does it.

Main Image: David Cannon

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