IN KENYON, HAROLD SWASH FOUND A PROTEGÉ.
portant rounds, and they like that Kenyon is a man of details. For each Ryder Cupper, Ke- nyon had tailored a specific way to warm up that they’d come to depend on.
up with one of the more innovative designs ever: “C-Grooves” curved and milled into the putter face in such a way that they would impact more of the top of the golf ball, rather than the middle or bottom. The intent was to make a ball topple over the moment it was struck, thus reducing skid and making it roll end-over-end. High-speed cameras validated this effect. Swash licensed this technology to the company that became Yes! Golf. Of course, Swash was also interested in the stroke. How much should the put- terhead rise by impact? At what speed should it move through the stroke? Word of the obsessed scientist spread, and soon golfers didn’t just want Swash’s putters, they also wanted his coach- ing. He retired and founded the Harold Swash Putting School of Excellence and would become known as “Britain’s Putting Doctor.” At Hillside, Swash was accessible. Young Phil, eager to rise the competi- tive junior ranks, took lessons from Swash, and he and his father played a lot of golf with him. Young Phil hung around observing Swash teach, too. Getting up-close looks at Swash’s elite students along with five years struggling as a tour pro himself nudged Kenyon to a sober realisation: He wasn’t good enough. But as the proverb goes, with every door that closes another opens. Swash knew he couldn’t do this forever. He was supposed to be retired, after all. In Kenyon, Swash found a full- time protegé. “Failed golfer,” Kenyon says. “Like most coaches, I failed at golf.” It was a well-timed failure because Swash had a lot of information to upload. Swash had developed a series of prin- ciples that were all designed to improve the quality of the roll of the ball off the putter. They’re the kind of things lots of golfers take for granted today, but we know them in large part because of pioneers like Swash: • The putter face should be square at impact. • The stroke should move on an arc. • The putter face should stay square to the arc through the stroke. • The putter should rise slightly through impact. • The putter should accelerate smoothly during the stroke.
HEAVEN’S GATE To train a square face at impact, students roll putts through a structure barely wider than a ball.
When you’re coaching players in six of the Sunday singles matches, it’s a busy morning coordinating how each guy gets what he wants. American and Eu- ropean golfers hardly looked at each other at Bethpage, yet they had to stom- ach sharing Kenyon. Kenyon prepped Justin Rose, Matt Fitzpatrick and Tommy Fleetwood. Kenyon used to coach Rory McIl- roy and Robert MacIntyre, too. For the Americans, Kenyon’s clients in- cluded World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler, Russell Henley and Patrick Cantlay. He also boasted Keegan Bradley, the U.S. team captain, as a student. Opposing vice-captains and current Kenyon students Gary Woodland and Francesco Molinari watched from the sidelines. Past Ryder Cuppers Brooks Koepka, Max Homa, Henrik Stenson, Lee Westwood, Martin Kaymer and Padraig Harrington have all worked with Kenyon, too. Putting-specific coaching has a long history of smart pioneers, such as Dave Pelz, James Sieckmann, Dave Orr and Stan Utley. Today, Stephen Sweeney coaches Shane Lowry and Collin Mori- kawa, and John Graham helped Justin Thomas win a major. Yet Kenyon has found an edge through a combination of hard-to-define skills, and because success begets success—every player wants to hear what the top coach of the moment has to say about him—Kenyon has established rare influence. So what, exactly, does the leading putting coach on the planet know? The origin story starts at Hillside Golf Club, which neighbours Royal Birkdale on the Merseyside Coast of northwest England. Kenyon’s parents were mem- bers at Hillside, and so was a man named Harold Swash. Swash was a golf-loving automobile engineer who oversaw a GM plant in Teeside, North Wales. In the 1960s, he started developing putters in a clut- tered and cold corner of his home workshop. By the 1990s, he had come
Kenyon’s genius wasn’t in copy- ing and pasting Swash’s methods but in knowing how to modernise and apply them. At John Moores University in Liverpool, Kenyon began studying how biomechanics could affect these core putting principles and explored new three-dimensional technologies to pinpoint golfer deviations. Swash was in his 70s when Kenyon began working hands-on with Swash’s students, travel- ing and running the academy as Swash started to slow down. The handing off of students can be a tricky business. Players usu- ally stick around for a bit out of some combination of loyalty, curiosity and benefit of the doubt before inevitably slipping away. Kenyon bucked this trend. Darren Clarke’s surprise 2011 Open Championship victory delivered Ken- yon his first major as a coach. As a former elite golfer dealing with elite golfers, Kenyon also mastered his bedside manner. Whereas Swash had more of an engineer’s mindset (“Fol- low these instructions because it’s the best way to do it”), Kenyon learned to operate with a softer touch. “I’ve talked to people who say that when they have worked with Phil, it hasn’t been technical at all; I’ve talked to people that said maybe it was too technical,” Max Homa told PGATour.com in 2024. “He has a lot of range. I think that’s important.” When Swash passed away in 2016, Kenyon took over his put- ting school, which still carries the Swash name today. That same year, Swash-turned-Kenyon student Hen- rik Stenson set the Open Champion- ship scoring record. While two Open winners would’ve been enough to cement the reputation of any golf coach, Kenyon’s career was about to accumu- late more and more such success sto- ries. From each we can glean something important about putting.
GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA 91
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