The Leadbetter Golf Academy Handbook: Techniques and Strategies from the World's Greatest Coaches

By Sean Hogan, Kevin Smeltz, Allen F. Richardson and David Leadbetter

Certified instructors Sean Hogan and Kevin Smeltz, along with championship golfers Suzann Pettersen and Ian Poulter and World Golf Hall of Fame inductee Nick Price, provide invaluable advice on how to improve upon every aspect of the golf game by gaining a clear and concise understanding for each key element of the sport. The book shows golfers how to improve their full swing, short game, practice routines, and how to better their mental and physical conditioning strategies. The Leadbetter Golf Academy Handbook is a collection of successful blueprints by top-notch players and instructors that will help players of all levels improve their understanding and performance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781623687953

Book preview

SECTION ONE

The First P: Preparation

by Sean Hogan and Kevin Smeltz

The full golf swing is perhaps the most talked about aspect of our game—and certainly the most complicated move a golfer makes during the course of playing a round—in that he or she has to master so many moving parts.

Picture what is involved: as the golfer starts the backswing, the arms and club move away from the ball, the arms gradually start rotating, and the wrists start hinging. When this happens properly, the arms and the clubshaft are set on the proper plane, and the clubface is kept square to the path of the club.

As the golfer continues his or her initial move away from the ball, the upper body is turning and coiling over a stable lower body, and the center of gravity is shifting to the right. All of this activity happens before the golfer even reaches the halfway point in the backswing.

Once at the top, the golfer then goes into his or her transition to the downswing, followed by the collision of the clubhead and the ball, and finally, the follow-through. As our famous mentor David Leadbetter wrote in his first instruction book, The Golf Swing, there are at least 11 identifiable links, or reference points, within that action.

Through the years, others have come up with their own set of numbers, sometimes more, sometimes fewer. But given the complexity of the action involved, it’s no wonder instructors and players—both the famous and the relatively unknown—have been writing about the so-called mystery of the golf swing for more than 150 years.

To date, we’re not sure if anyone—including Lead, as we like to call him—has completely cracked the code, though we think he comes the closest.

But we do know one thing for sure: while the short game, course management, and the mental side of golf are also crucial, it’s the swing that’s the thing.

Simply put, it is hard—even impossible— to be consistent in this great game if a golfer can’t put the ball in play in a manner that enables that player to hit the next shot. And, as a golfer’s ability increases, the need for refinement does so as well. The lower a player’s handicap gets, the harder it becomes to lower it further still.

At a Tour player level, it isn’t enough to just put the ball in play, you must position the ball in the proper place in the fairway or on the green— and literally within a few feet or even inches of a predetermined target. Doing so gives the professional his or her best chance of executing the next shot or putt and producing the lowest possible score.

At the Leadbetter Golf Academy, we try to simplify the full swing by breaking it down into precise elements that we refer to as the four P’s: Preparation, the Pivot, Positioning, and finally, Putting It All Together.

We’ll get around to fully defining and explaining all four elements later in this book. But for now, let’s look at the first one, Preparation. What does this term mean in our world of golf instruction?

Essentially, preparation, as we teach it, is a catch-all term that includes every aspect of the golfer’s pre-swing fundamentals, or set-up: the grip, stance and posture, ball position, alignment, and the pre-shot routine.

Let’s start with the grip.

Chapter 1

The Grip

by Kevin Smeltz

Make no mistake about it, a good grip is vital to executing a good swing, since the hands are the only part of the body in contact with the club. Correctly placing the hands on the club—at what is called the grip end—enables the golfer to swing through the ball so the path of the clubhead travels down the target line, and the clubface is square to that target line at impact. Further, a good grip helps the golfer maintain a consistent angle of attack throughout the swing.

Do it right every time and you will produce that elusive ingredient known as clubhead speed. Or, to put it more precisely—since everyone generates some clubhead speed—the golfer needs a solid grip in order to bring any number of swing elements together in a way that produces accelerated clubhead speed.

For example, a PGA Tour player hits the ball with a driver at about 112 mph of clubhead speed, versus the average club player, who is lucky to get up to around 80 mph. In short, when it comes to golf—and improving one’s game— speed is a good thing. And, it certainly does not kill, except in the colloquial sense of killing the ball, something every golfer wants to do.

A proper grip also allows the golfer to hit a variety of shots, as and when needed. For instance, after picking a target, judging the wind, and factoring in what hazards or slopes lie between the ball and the target, a golfer might decide that he or she needs to hit a draw—where the ball curves from right to left. Alternatively, the golfer might choose to hit a fade—where the ball curves from left to right.

In each case, in order to pull off these advanced shots, the golfer needs to make small adjustments in his or her alignment and ball position to change the angle of the clubface to the path of the club. (We’ll explain further how this is done later in the book.)

But one thing remains constant: the foundation for these advanced techniques, as with any other standard golf swing, is a solid grip. For now, we want to concentrate on what is called the neutral grip and show you how it’s the best grip for most golfers, and the best way to keep the clubface square to the path of the club in order to hit a fairly straight shot.

We think that mastering the proper, neutral grip is the only way to ensure all the elements of the swing work together, so the golfer can accomplish whatever shot is intended. And beyond that, if the golfer hopes for consistency, he or she has to hold the club in precisely the same way—in order to square the face to the club’s path—from shot to shot, hole to hole, and day to day—especially under pressure. Such advice applies to everyone who plays the game, from the rawest of beginners, to the top Tour professionals.

As Ben Hogan—who was perhaps the most precise ballstriker ever—once said, a good grip is like a work of art. But like any work of art, it takes practice, concentration, and most of all, lots of hard labor to create a masterpiece.

Here’s how we do it, Leadbetter style.

The Neutral Grip

Lead has always maintained that the basic foundation of a consistent golf swing is a so-called neutral grip. And the good news is that adopting this grip is probably the easiest way to go for most new golfers or those trying to change their grip.

But before we tell you how to construct your own neutral grip, we think it smart to acknowledge what you probably already know: there are both good amateurs and Tour professionals who don’t use this grip and yet are highly successful. You can see them at your local course or on television every weekend.

From Asia to Europe to the U.S., golfers employ any number of different methods to wield their sticks. For them, what it boils down to is using a style of grip that matches what their bodies are doing as they slash through the ball. They might use a strong, weak, or even totally unconventional grip, and yet produce good and repeatable shots.

Going back a few years, you might recall that former world No. 1 David Duval had a very strong grip, while the Spanish short-game wizard Jose Maria Olazabal employed a very weak grip. Nevertheless, both men were consistent winners and major champions.

So who are we to tell you the neutral grip is for you?

Consider one obvious fact: both Duval and Olazabal—and any other professional star of today who doesn’t use a neutral grip—had the time, and the commitment, to spend hours and hours practicing each day. Not only that, but they did so over careers spanning several decades. No wonder they learned how to perfect the squaring of the clubface through the ball and a fluid release—no matter how they held the club in their hands. But, of course, golf was their job, and thus they had the time to hone their particular skills, no matter how complex.

We suspect that if you are reading this book, you make your living doing something else.

So please, give our advice a try. A neutral grip, with the hands placed properly on the club, will provide enough mobility in the hands and wrists to allow the club to hinge correctly, and that in turn will give you the leverage needed to make a good swing. A neutral grip also sets your forearms in a neutral position, and that enables your arms to naturally rotate in both the backswing and the downswing.

Just in case you still aren’t convinced, consider this: as we have said, there are always exceptions in golf, as in life. A golfer who typically grips the club too strongly—or has the hands turned too far away from the target—will have a shut or closed clubface in the backswing. That in turn will make him or her open the face in the downswing to square it.

Conversely, a golfer with a weak grip—where the hands are turned too much toward the target—will tend to open the clubface more in the backswing, encouraging excessive hand and arm rotation in the downswing. This forces the golfer’s body to stop, or slow down excessively, to allow for the arms and clubface to square—and that leads to any number of bad shots and limits power through the ball.

Now, who wants to hit it short and crooked?

That being said, as instructors, we often need to make sure our students are not only doing what we tell them to do, but are not fooling themselves—or us—with what might look like a good neutral grip. How is that possible? Over the years, we’ve seen numerous golfers who appear to have mastered a neutral grip. Their hands look great on the club and appear positioned in the correct relationship to each other and to the target. However, when we ask these pupils to open their hands, we find that they actually have not placed them on the club in a way that maximizes the benefits of this grip.

It may sound too simple for words, but the most important element in a good, neutral grip is where the club lies in your hands. Or, if you prefer, where and how you place your hands on the club.

Here’s how it’s done, starting with the left hand, and there are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. The club must lie diagonally across the left hand, extending from under the pad at the bottom of your palm through the first crease of the index finger.

Let’s repeat the most important point here: the club extends diagonally across the hand. If it is placed too straight across the hand—or too high in the palm—the golfer will have difficulty hinging his or her wrists properly. Plus, the golfer’s posture is adversely affected, forcing the hands either too low or too high, positions that make it more difficult to turn the body, or get the club on plane.

That’s why there are no exceptions for most ordinary golfers. Anything less than an exactly right grip and your ball is heading for the trees.

Lead has a foolproof test for detecting if a golfer is holding the club too much in the palm. He always checks the gloves of his pupils. If there is a hole worn through the leather at the palm, they’re busted. The only other explanation for such wear and tear is that the golfer is holding the club too far off the end of the grip. But that’s much rarer than holding it too much in the palm.

Now it’s time to finish off the left hand part of the neutral grip. As you fold your hand over the club, make sure the left thumb sits slightly down the right side of the shaft, with the thumbnail showing on top. You also want the top of your left thumb and the top of your left index finger to be touching slightly—with the left index finger forming what looks like a little trigger. This will give you a shorter-looking left thumb, and that allows you to hinge your wrist the proper amount, but avoid doing it excessively.

As we said, though it bears repeating, holding the club in this fashion allows the golfer to hinge his or her wrists freely, and properly. That, in turn, creates leverage, encourages the proper angle into the ball, and gets the club moving in sync with the body.

Set the left thumb slightly down the club’s right side.

Why is that important? Keep in mind that the club has to travel farther than the shoulders in the golf swing, and that the shoulders travel farther than the hips. For everything to sync up, the club has to move faster in relation to the other parts. Gripping the club in a manner that enables you to properly hinge your wrists allows this to happen.

Now that you have placed your left hand on the club, raise it slightly by hinging your wrist upward. You should see two to two-and-a-half knuckles on the back of your left hand. But don’t twist your head to the left to look. That’s a common mistake that gives the appearance there are more knuckles showing than there actually are.

Place the club in the right fingers at a slight diagonal.

Another common checkpoint you can use at this point is the position of the little V formed by the crease between your left thumb and index finger. When you place the clubshaft on the ground, as if you were lining the face up behind a ball, that V should point to your right ear. If it does, your neutral grip really is, well, neutral. And that’s a good thing.

Now let’s look at how the right hand is placed on the club, and this is an area where some individual choice comes into play. Essentially, there are three ways to unite your right hand with the left in a strong, dynamic grip.

The first, and most popular is the overlapping (or Vardon) grip, where your right pinky sits in the crease or slot between the index and second finger of your left hand. The second variation is the interlocking grip, where right pinky and left index finger intertwine. The third is the ten-finger, or baseball grip, where the right pinky simply lies above the left index finger.

Checkpoint: the lifeline is at the same angle as your left thumb.

We prefer the overlapping grip, because we believe it gives the golfer the most stability and blends both hands together in a single unit. If you are a right-handed person, the natural tendency is for that hand to be stronger and try to dominate the left. As we said before—though it bears repeating—we want your neutral grip to be just what the word says: neutral.

Once you have decided what grip variation is right for you, put the club into the fingers of the right hand at—once again—at a slight diagonal, so that the grip end of the club runs from the base of your pinky finger to the first crease of the right index finger. A good checkpoint here is to see if the lifeline of your right hand is at the same angle as your left thumb.

The little V’s of both hands should be parallel.

If it is, finish off your neutral grip by folding your right hand around the club, making sure the left thumb nestles inside the thumb and palm pads of your right hand. If you’ve done everything correctly, you will see that this time, the little V of the right hand points at your right shoulder, and both V’s are parallel to each other. Make sure as well that the right index finger sits slightly down the clubshaft with your right thumb just opposite—leaving a small gap between it and the right middle finger—again, to form a little trigger.

This subtle arrangement will give you a little more support as the pressure naturally mounts in your downswing, and you increase the angle between your arms and the shaft.

Three (and More) Variations on the Grip:

The Overlapping, or Vardon Grip

The hands can be linked in several different ways, but we believe that the overlap, or Vardon grip, is the best choice for amateurs and pros alike. Again, this is where the right pinky is placed in the crease between the index and middle finger of the left hand.

This grip is almost as old as the game of professional golf itself, and was made both famous and popular by Harry Vardon, the most successful English golfer of all time. The Stylist won six Open championships—still the record—and a U.S. Open.

Who are we to argue with such success?

However, through the years, some golfers have tinkered with successful variations on the Vardon grip. Ben Hogan, of course, is the most famous example. After years of fighting off a hook, he came up with his own innovation, angling his right pinky across what he called the knuckle knob of his left index finger.

Sound complicated? It was, but then Hogan was the most cerebral and studious of golfers. We recommend you keep it simple and follow the typical Vardon grip.

Two views of the Vardon grip

The Interlocking Grip

Yet another grip variation is the interlocking grip, used by three rather successful pro golfers: Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, and the Irish phenom Rory McIlroy.

This grip calls for the right pinky and left index finger to lace around each other, or interlock. However, this style is more beneficial to a specific need: it gives players with smaller hands a more secure hold on the club without gripping too tightly.

Interlocking grip

The Ten-Finger Grip

The third and least popular type of grip is familiar to anyone who has ever played baseball, where the bat is much thicker than a golf club, and the hands simply sit adjacent to each other, rather than link up in the fingers. Popular with juniors and some women, the baseball grip can create leverage for those golfers without a lot of forearm and wrist strength.

A handful of successful professionals have also used this grip, and they include winners in both America and Europe—Art Wall, Bob Estes, Ronan Rafferty, Scott Piercy, and crowd favorite Tommy Two Gloves Gainey.

However, with the exception of Gainey and Piercy, no one in recent years has adopted the baseball grip, perhaps due to the higher level of athleticism on the Tour, and new and lighter clubshafts.

Ten-finger grip

Unconventional Grip Variations

On a side note: Steve Jones won the 1996 U.S. Open with a sort of reverse overlap grip—placing his left index finger on top of his right hand, or what he once jokingly called his reverse overlap Vardon Jones grip—whatever that means. He did this because he had severely injured his left hand in a dirt-bike accident.

Yet another successful PGA golfer with an unconventional grip—and swing—is Jim Furyk, who uses a so-called double overlap grip. He places both his right pinky and right ring finger over his left hand. Go figure.

Grip Pressure

As we explained, how a golfer holds the club in his or her hands greatly influences the swing. But beyond that, we want to point out some subtle, yet important ways the golfer can help his or her swing action—and control the clubface properly—by applying varying amounts of pressure with particular fingers, and to some extent, one of the palms.

Let’s start with the left hand. At the Leadbetter Golf Academy, we typically tell our pupils to hold the club more firmly with the last three fingers of that hand. This provides more stability at the top of the swing. It also gives the golfer the sensation of more control as the clubface slashes through the ball, and the ability to keep the clubface square to the swing arc for as long as possible.

A little extra grip pressure also helps when the golfer hits the ball offline, and it lands in the rough. Getting out of jail is the goal here, and gripping the club a bit firmer with those last three fingers helps control the clubhead better, and keep it square against the resistance of the longer grass.

Now let’s look at the right hand. We like to see our golfers exert a bit more pressure with the middle of their right palm, and the middle and ring fingers of their right hand. If a golfer does this, he or she will feel a corresponding pressure on the left thumb. This allows the golfer to maintain some width at the top of the backswing, but also keep the arm swing short, as the right hand is pushing against the left.

Once we give golfers these subtle triggers, we emphasize that they are meant to provide stability in the swing, but certainly not to create tension. Think of the old analogies about grip pressure: you want to hold a tube of toothpaste in your hand, but not squeeze any out; you want to cradle a baby bird there, but not smother it.

The modern version is perhaps less poetic, but more to the point, and certainly more precise: today, we tell our pupils that if their grip pressure—or the degree of force with which they hold the club—could be quantified as a number, it would be a four to a six, on an imaginary scale of one to 10. That’s the sense we want them to develop for the perfect way to firmly hold the club.

It might surprise you, however, to learn that PGA Tour players hold the club much tighter than the average golfer. Simply put, they are much stronger than most people—especially in the hands—and therefore exert more grip pressure. But the difference is they can still keep their arms relaxed. That’s the key. Tension is the enemy of every swing. But some pressure, properly applied in the grip, allows any golfer to have a free and powerful action.

Grip Drill

This drill helps the golfer correctly position his or her hands on the club.

For starters, grab a club with your right hand, placing that hand on the metal part of the shaft, about three inches down from the end of the club’s grip. Now hold the club in the air—and in front of your chest—at about a 45-degree angle.

The next step is to bring your left hand in from the side and place it on the club as you would in any good grip,