The standard advice when things aren’t going your way is to keep looking forward, but for me, I had to look back. Back to my old coach, Butch Harmon, and back to the things that worked when I was playing my best. Once I figured that out, everything started to click. When Butch stopped travel- T ling on tour in 2019, I asked another teacher, John Tillery, to help me. John showed me things in a new way. But every player has their journey and mine led me back to Butch – just not how you might expect. For the better part of three years, I was fighting my swing, and I would wear out the range at the Medalist, my home club in Florida. I always seemed to run into one member there, Butch’s brother Craig, who’d recently retired as the longtime pro at Oak Hill in New York. One day in September of 2022, I saw Craig on the range and got an idea, so I called Butch. What if we started working together again, but this time, Craig could be his eyes? Butch and I could send swing videos back and forth, and Craig could keep me on track when I prac- tised. Butch loved it, and that’s how we reunited. Butch saw right away that I had slipped into some old habits, so the fixes he mapped out were things we’d worked on years ago. The results came fast. I went from missing five of eight majors in 2021-’22 to finishing top-10 twice in the first month with Butch. Then, I got a win this year and made the Ryder Cup. I’ll show you what we did, but my big message is this: What worked once will probably work again.
SETTING UP MORE CONNECTED
One thing about the golf swing – it’s a chain reaction. It’s not so much isolated positions, but what you did to cause those positions to hap- pen. My takeaway was getting off-track (hands going inside, club- head staying outside), but we could correct some of that in my setup. We focused on setting my shoulders square, parallel to my target line, not to the right, which was my tendency. I also like to feel the upper part of my right arm pressed against my rib cage (above). Butch calls this “screwing in the right elbow.” That connection helps the arms and body start back together and keeps my hands from getting inside too fast.
42 GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2024
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