27/07/2023
FOS David Leadbetter has a new training aid and our other FOS Andy Brumer wrote about it!
Straightaway to Better Play: a look into David Leadbetter’s new training aid, the Straightaway
by Andy Brumer
Sometimes the answers we’re seeking to solve difficult if not seemingly unsolvable problems lie right in front of our eyes, though that’s often the last place people think to look for them. When you think about it, the only portion of the golf swing that lies right in front of our eyes is the takeaway, those first two or three feet that the club moves back from the ball. Even though the takeaway, then, allows golfers to monitor this crucial initiation portion of their swings, too many of them remain blind to the takeaway’s role, importance, and method of ex*****on. It’s for no small reason that the great Ben Hogan described the takeaway as one of the two “crossroads” of the golf swing, the other being the transitional first move down from the top toward impact. Hogan knew that if golfers got this make-or-break movement at the beginning of their swings right, they would have a good chance of completing their backswings and pouring, as he put it, all of their energy efficiently into the ball. Get it wrong, and the chance of playing consistent golf becomes slim and none, and Slim left town last week!
It was just this type of Hoganesque perception that led David Leadbetter, one of the game’s most creative instructors, to invent the Straightaway, his newest (and by Leadbetter’s own assessment, his best) training aid quite literally points golfers in the direction of playing better golf. A small colorful clip-on device that for golfers of a certain age might trigger memories of those small well-crafted Tinker Toys they played with as kids. Indeed, the Straightaway may be just the key golfers need to return the joy of a free-flowing golf swing and solid contact back into their games.
The trainer simply clips on to any golf club shaft just below the grip, where it sits poised to correctly guide golfers through the crucial first part of the backswing. Without physically contacting any part of golfers’ bodies and thus not physically manipulating them into predetermined position(s), the Straightway provides a mental roadmap to a faultless beginning of the swing. Just as you can’t birdie all eighteen holes if you don’t birdie the first one, Leadbetter understands that you can’t make a quality and repeating full swing if the first part of the swing veers immediately off track.
A right-handed golfer has employed the Straightaway correctly when the device’s blue-on-yellow arrow points parallel to that golfer’s swing plane line at what Leadbetter calls “the 9 O’clock position” (and the club pointing at 6 O’clock in its address position). The arrow will also point parallel as well to (though slightly to the inside of) the golfer’s toe line, when he or she has addressed the ball with feet, knees, hips and shoulders all parallel to their swing plane line. Thus golfers will be able to SEE with the help of the Straightaway when they have made a correct or an incorrect takeaway.
As Leadbetter explains on an accompanying on-line Straightaway demonstration, golfers MUST use their core, not just their hands and arms, to move the club back from the ball. Doing so establishes the quality of swing synchronization that they must sustain throughout their entire swings. Unfortunately, it has been Leadbetter’s perception than many if not most golfers fail to do this and this is an underlying principle of his golf teaching practice .
Indeed, it’s because many golfers fail to use their cores to synchronize the essential first stage of the golf swing and instead use their arms, shoulders, and hands to pull and flip and roll the clubhead too sharply inside of the plane line, that the dream of consistent ball striking eludes them.
None other than Jack Nicklaus said that he wanted his clubhead to “maintain a relationship” with his plane line not only at the start of his backswing, but throughout his entire swing. Jack knew that failing to do so required him to make compensating, awkward and energy consuming compensations SOMEPLACE ELSE during his swing to get the club back on plane through impact. Nicklaus’ strategy to keep his club connected to his plane line involved the ex*****on of a unique forward press, where he engaged his core before deliberately drawing his club straight back from the ball.
How important was the correct Corr-Rect-core-driven takeaway to the great Arnold Palmer? In his classic instruction book My Game and Yours Arnie lists moving the club two feet straight back from the ball in a connected core-driven manner as one of his five golf swing fundamentals (the other four being a good grip, a steady head, a compact swing and accelerating into the ball). Sam Snead, whose swing many consider to be the greatest swing ever taught golfers to synchronize their movements away from the ball by moving their arms, hands, and club all together. Snead’s overall philosophy of the golf swing would become known as “the One-Piece Swing,” but Sam knew you can’t move all the parts of the body in a rhythmic unified and fashion throughout the entire swing if you didn’t do so at the start of it.
The great Canadian ball striker Moe Norman understood that the movement of the club for the first two feet away from the ball played such a vital role in a good swing that he did away with his takeaway completely. Moe just started his swing with his clubhead resting on the ground already two feet behind the ball. The heck with the takeaway, Moe reasoned, I’ll start right away from (what would become) Leadbetter’s Straightaway takeaway finish slot! And some have questioned Moe’s mental acuity! Geez!
What about the maestro Byron Nelson, who in 1945 eighteen golf tournaments on the PGA Tour, eleven of them in a row, and is often referred to as “the father of the modern golf swing”? Nelson’s consistent ball sticking was so greatly admired that when the True Temper Golf Shaft company wanted to find a name for their ball hitting/shaft testing robot, they asked Sir Byron if they could name it after him. Thus the Iron Byron was born.
Nelson’s swing breakthrough, which may to us now seems both obvious and conventional, had to do with his conviction that he could achieve his optimum blend of consistency and power by, as he put, it taking the club “straight back and straight through the ball.” In other words, Nelson eschewed the then than strongly rotational pivot-driven swing favored by most of the best players of his day. Nelson’s straight-back-straight-through method may seem simple to us, but it revolutionized the field of golf instruction in the years to come.
Therefore, it wouldn’t be long before we find Ben Hogan advocating a strong pushing strongly off the right foot and leg in an act of initial lateral thrust to begin the downswing. Nicklaus (again!) followed in the succeeding to Hogan’s generation of great players by teaching a lateral shuttling of his knees forward at the initial stage of his downswing before he rotated his hips, which he writes in his book Golf My Way that he did AFTER impact.
Lastly, Lee Trevino, whom along with Hogan and Moe Norman many consider the greatest ball striker ever, and for whom starting the club straight back from the ball was so important that he set up to his shots with a stance thirty degrees open to his target line. Lee’s strategy in doing this was to thoroughly eliminate any tendency his swing might have to in its initial takeaway stage overly pivot away his club from his target line. Doing so, Trevino writes in his book Swing My Way would whip his club excessively to the inside, again, making it unnecessarily difficult to get it back on line through impact.
In conclusion, while David Leadbetter insists that the takeaway, the first part of the golf swing, is today much overlooked, he isn’t saying that the subject is one that has always been ignored. He simply points out that today not enough attention is paid to this vital part of the golf swing. Perhaps too many golfers have become subsumed in an abstract barrage of launch monitor and ground reaction force numbers and data. But what golfer doesn’t long for a straightforward solution to their swing struggles? David Leadbetter’s Straightaway points us to that solution.
