The Slot Swing: The Proven Way to Hit Consistent and Powerful Shots Like the Pros

By Jim McLean

Top golfing instructor Jim McLean shares the secret to a better swing and a better game

It's what every great golfer knows and every struggling player wants to know: how to find "the slot," the perfect channel through which the shaft and club head can meet the ball on the downswing for a more powerful, accurate, and consistent swing.

Great ball-strikers like Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, and Jack Nicklaus were slot swingers. Today, Tiger Woods, Sergio Garcia and Jim Furyk provide dramatic examples. Now leading golf instructor Jim McLean shows you how to find the slot to take your game to the next level. With step-by-step instructions and more than eighty illustrations by leading golf illustrator Phil Franke, The Slot Swing makes it easy.

• Shows you how to find the perfect channel for a more powerful and consistent swing
• Shares McLean's secrets from more than twenty years as a top instructor to the greatest pros
• Features stunning two-color art by Phil Franke and a full-color foldout showing how the dramatically different swings of Tiger Woods, Sergio Garcia, Bruce Lietzke and Jim Furyk all end up in the slot
• Written by the author of the classic book The 8-Step Swing, named one of the 20th Century's top 15 golf instructionals by Sports Illustrated

This book helps you get out of a golfing rut, get locked in to your slot, and find the sweet spot in your game.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Mar 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781118031674

Jim McLean

Jim McLean is a freelance artist / illustrator based in Chicago, Illinois. He is a graduate of Southern Illinois University with a BA in Fine Art, and he studied advertising art and design at American Academy of Art in Chicago.

Book preview

The Slot Swing: An Introduction

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One of my goals as an instructor is to demystify the swing: analyze its key parts and break them down and make them easy to understand so that you can incorporate the necessary moves into your technique quickly and with minimal effort. Thanks to digital high-speed photography and video and the advent of sophisticated swing-analysis software, the goal is easier to accomplish—I can see things that previous generations of instructors could only guess about. It’s an exciting time in swing study, evaluation, and assessment.

Of course, high-tech machinery helps only to a point. In the end, you have to know what you’re looking for. In fact, I made one of my most important discoveries—the one you’ll read about in this book—with just an old TV and a pen. A computer? The most advanced piece of equipment in my office at that time was a calculator.

The year was 1980. My research partner, Carl Welty, had devised a way to analyze Tour-player and amateur swings on videotape (which, at the time, was a breakthrough technology itself). Carl had spent years filming—first using an 8mm camera and later a video recorder—almost every Tour player during West Coast Swing events (he’s now based in Palm Springs, California), and he owned the most complete library of professional swings on tape. If a player agreed (and not many refused back then), Carl, camera in hand, was at the ready. He was relentless, and we spent hundreds of hours playing, fast-forwarding, and reversing tape, looking for clues, answers, and the hidden secrets to high-level swings. We watched and compared virtually every PGA Tour professional, frame-by-frame, from very exact camera angles.

One of Carl’s tricks was to make marks on the TV screen with a dry-erase pen at different points in the swing. (I know it sounds elementary, but believe me, nobody had ever done this before. It was the first baby step toward the computerdriven 3-D programs we use today.) Carl’s main interest was in the path the clubhead took from address, to the top, and then back down. I was inclined to study the position of the shaft; how it leaned at address, the angle it made at different points in the backswing and the downswing, and how players controlled it at the top and at impact. Mark. Erase. Mark. Erase. Within months, we had exploded a number of myths commonly held about the swing and had generated a few eyebrow-raising observations.

One thing that really caught my attention was the change in shaft position from what’s often referred to as three-quarters back in the backswing, to the same position in the downswing (about the time when the hands are even with the chest). In nearly every professional swing I analyzed, the shaft-position lines crossed, making an X. Not only did the positions cross, but the shaft positions going back were often much more vertical than were the shaft positions coming down.

In nearly all swings, the shaft position in the backswing and the shaft position in the downswing cross when the hands are at chest height. In 99 percent of professional swings, the downswing shaft position is flatter than the backswing shaft position.

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A few instructors had preached flattening out the shaft on the downswing, but here was the proof. Visible proof. Catalogued proof. Yet it really told only half of the story. Thankfully, Carl and I also had hundreds of our students’ swings on videotape—swings just like yours. We studied these as well. The problem was that most of the amateurs we studied didn’t come close to achieving the same shaft action. In fact, many of the amateurs’ clubshafts crossed in the opposition direction!

In numerous high-handicap amateur swings that we analyzed, the shaft position at the three-quarters position going back was flatter than the shaft position at the same point coming down—the exact opposite of the positions featured in professional swings. This is the instructional equivalent of finding the Holy Grail: earmarking moves pros make that amateurs don’t.

I spoke on the change in shaft position and the research I did with Carl at various PGA seminars throughout the 1980s. It was my original X, coming long before the now-famous X-Factor cover story on shoulder and hip turn that I wrote for the December 1992 issue of GOLF magazine. I mentioned it in my 1996 book, The X-Factor, and have incorporated it into the lesson plans we use at each of my schools. This is the first time I’ve devoted an entire book to the subject, however, because I believe some modern instruction theories are doing golfers like you a bit of a disservice. Several well-known methods promote a one-plane swing and use the Iron Byron machine, with its theoretically perfect swing, as a model for you to copy. The problem is that very few great players swing straight up and down on a single plane. There’s always a plane shift from backswing to downswing. Not many players ever achieve perfectly matching back and down planes.

One main reason recreational players suffer and frequently hit slices, pulls, and pull-slices is that they swing over the top. In a majority of the amateur swings I’ve seen and analyzed, the downswing shaft position is steeper than the backswing shaft position.

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The basic element of my shaft-position research is that the shaft swings on one plane going back and on another one coming back down. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about one-plane swings, and maybe you’ve given the idea of swinging on one plane some thought. I wrote this book to clear the air and show you that there’s more than one plane to your swing and that it can be much more natural and powerful to change planes than to stay on the same one. (It might seem counterintuitive, but please read on.)

One way to visualize the swing is to establish a perfect backswing plane and then match it on your downswing. This can be a great way to improve your motion. This book, however, focuses on how to change planes so that your shaft positions cross just as the pros’ do. This book shows you how to flatten out your shaft during your downswing, just like Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Nick Price, Lorena Ochoa, Jim Furyk, Tiger Woods, Camilo Villegas, Sergio Garcia, and Anthony Kim, among others. It also presents an alternative method that has worked for many accomplished players, including golf greats such as Bobby Jones, Bobby Locke, Hale Irwin, Bernhard Langer, Cory Pavin, Bruce Lietzke, and Sam Snead.

Most important, this book teaches you the one move that makes it all happen: finding the Slot.

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The Slot Swing Blueprint

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Two important elements define the Slot Swing and make the whole thing work:

1. Your shaft position flattens in your downswing and finds the most effective delivery line to the ball.

2. You change your shaft position by dropping into the Slot after you complete your