The 'Crashing Out' Fault in Golf: When the Body Rescues a Bad Swing With a Worse Move

On the practice range, the 9-iron ball finished exactly a hand's width behind the clubface. No slice, no hook, just a heavy chunk. But the more telling shot came later, with the driver: it flew far enough right to hit a house beside the course.

Alex Myers, a senior writer at Golf Digest, tells that story not to apologise to readers but to dissect a swing fault I believe seven out of ten Vietnamese amateur golfers carry without knowing what it is. What kept me reading to the end was not the shot into the house. It was the coach's diagnosis: too much vertical force, not enough horizontal force.

One sentence. Short. And it explains almost everything I have seen in myself, in athletes I have tracked, and in hundreds of practice sessions I have watched from the outside over nine years.

Context: an amateur, and a very real fault

Myers is not a tour professional. He is a magazine writer running a personal series called Late Scratch, documenting a year-long attempt to find out how good he can get. That places him squarely in the audience every golf publication targets: recreational players with money for equipment and time to practise, but no ambitions of winning.

The round was at Rye Golf Club with three colleagues. The fifth hole, by Myers's own admission, is never a fun one. He made three birdies that day, a respectable return for an amateur. Yet all anyone remembers is a driver that went into a house.

That detail deserves more attention than it gets, because it is the essence of amateur golf. You can play seventeen holes well and one hole will erase the memory of the other seventeen. You can make three birdies and still be remembered as the guy who hit a house. The way sporting memory works, weighting errors more heavily than achievements, is precisely why this fault persists: it feeds itself on fear.

Myers says the fault appeared earlier in the summer, shows up a couple of times a round, and has a longer history on annual golf trips, where his group awards a buddy-trip green jacket, a play on the Masters tradition. It sounds harmless. That green jacket is what creates real pressure: a social title with no prize money and no world ranking points, but enough weight to make a hand shake on the tee box.

Here is the point I want to press for anyone practising golf in Vietnam: pressure does not need a leaderboard to exist. It only needs an audience. In amateur golf, the audience is always present: three friends, a beer after the round, and a story that will be retold for ten years.

The real mechanism of a bad shot

The diagnosis came from Mario Guerra, a coach listed in Golf Digest's Best In State rankings, which certifies teaching professionals state by state. Myers walked in assuming the problem was in his head. Guerra read the video and said, in effect: you are too steep.

The mechanism, translated into standard golf language, runs like this. When you take the club back too steeply and deliver it too steeply, the shaft does not fall behind you on a natural circular path; it drives sharply down toward the ball. At some point between the top of the backswing and impact, your body, which is smarter than you think, realises it is in a position from which the ball cannot be struck. It responds with a survival instinct: it thrusts the hips forward, stands the torso up, extends the arms, and tries to rescue the swing.

That is crashing out. In international golf literature the closest term is early extension, an early loss of posture. The name matters less than the mechanism: the body does not miss because it is weak, it misses because it is trying to fix a mistake created earlier.

Very few amateur golfers understand this correctly. When you chunk one, you think your hands are clumsy. When you block one right, you think you left the face open. You go to the range and you practise your hands. But the whole story was already over before your hands did anything. The bad shot is the result. The cause is where the shaft sits on the way down.

Guerra prescribed a corrective drill: swing more horizontally around the body, keeping the club as low and as parallel to the ground as possible in both the backswing and the downswing. His description of the feel: almost like making a baseball swing but while in golf posture.

For Vietnamese players, this drill has an unexpected advantage. We understand baseball faster than we understand golf. The average Vietnamese amateur has played three or four sports before arriving at golf: football, basketball, badminton, table tennis. That athletic background is an asset, not an obstacle. Rotating horizontally around a spine in golf closely resembles the rotational thinking of a javelin throw or a chest pass in basketball, a movement you have performed thousands of times without thinking.

The core insight of this drill: you do not need to teach your body a new movement. You need to let it borrow one it already knows.

There is a checkpoint Guerra gave Myers, and I rate it the single most transferable technical detail in the whole story. It is what a swing-analysis app calls the moment of truth, roughly halfway between the top of the backswing and impact, at the point where the shaft should be close to in line with the trail arm.

If the shaft is steepening toward the ball there, you are a steep player. If it is shallower, sitting in line with the trail arm, you are in a position to strike the ball well. In coaching language, this is the P5 to P6 transition, the zone that decides the quality of the entire shot.

Why does this checkpoint matter more than anything else? Because it turns a vague feel into a visible geometric marker. Amateur golfers suffer most from not being able to feel what they are doing. Video and a drawn line can solve what ten feel-based sessions cannot.

Based on my own experience tracking amateur sessions and rounds, Vietnamese amateurs carry one further misconception: they judge a swing by impact feel, when impact feel only reflects the final outcome, not the process. A shot that feels pure can be a shot that dodged a fault through a compensating reflex, and that reflex will collapse on the fifteenth hole when the body is tired and the pressure rises.

And here I want to be blunt: every number can lie; my job is to catch it in the act. Myers looked at the video and said the new swing looked much better than his normal move. He hit a few and said the flight was lower and better. That is a signal, not proof. It takes several hundred balls and three real rounds before a swing change proves it is a change rather than a lucky day.

Then comes the mental layer, and this is what makes the story far more interesting than a standard swing tutorial. Myers worked with Josh Nichols, a mental coach. Nichols confirmed something any mid-handicap player recognises instantly: when the club is steep and open at the top, the natural reaction is to flip the wrists in the downswing to square the face.

That is flipping, and it is a direct consequence of the loop Myers describes as too many swing thoughts.

The loop runs like this. You think one thing before the swing. Mid-swing, your body detects a poor position. It signals: something is wrong. Your brain, instead of staying quiet, issues a fresh instruction: fix it. And so you produce a movement that was never in the plan, a save move, which almost always ends in a worse shot than the one you were trying to avoid.

This brings back something of my own. In November 2026, at seventeen, I was a 400-metre runner on my school team. In the city semi-final I led until the 350-metre mark, cramped, fell, and finished last in 62.14 seconds, four seconds off my personal best. My coach said a line I still remember: you train on inspiration.

His analysis was identical to Guerra's, in a different sport. I did not lose because I lacked speed. I lost because at 350 metres my body detected a bad position, beyond its tolerance, and responded with a compensating movement. That compensation broke my breathing rhythm, broke my stride frequency, and ended in a fall.

The fall of 2026 did not stop me; it redirected the whole track. What I learned was not don't fall, but a principle common to every sport built on repeated movement: when the body has to rescue itself mid-motion, the mistake happened several hundredths of a second earlier.

Nichols offered a solution I rate as the highest-return mental tool per unit of effort: three-count breathing. In for three, out for three. Myers says that on an earlier golf trip, when he used the technique, he produced one of the best rounds of his life, the trip on which he won the buddy-trip green jacket.

What stands out is the symmetry of the fix. Guerra's drill works on the hardware, the shaft path. Nichols's breathing works on the software, rhythm and focus. Two different tools, both aimed at the same enemy: the space in which a thought can appear mid-swing.

The contrarian angle: swapping one trap for a nicer one

Now the part the original piece does not say, or does not say clearly enough.

The story is built as a search for technical truth: the fault is found, diagnosed, corrected. That structure is tidy, readable, and to my eye a little too tidy to be entirely right.

One detail sits in the background but is the hinge: Myers's driver fault does not appear on the range. It appears on the tee box at the fifth hole, in front of three colleagues, and it appears more often on annual golf trips, meaning always in situations with social pressure and the longest club in the bag.

What does that mean? It means the fault is not a global defect of the swing. It is a movement pattern specific to a context and a club. In the same round, the same player still made three birdies. You cannot simultaneously own a steep, broken swing and make three birdies in an amateur round.

So what actually needs fixing? The driver under pressure, or the whole swing?

Guerra diagnosed from swings Myers hit on the range, swings with which he has no problem. The coach saw a technical tendency, and he is right about the tendency. But a technical tendency does not automatically explain why the fault appears only in two specific situations.

I believed the textbook for five years, and the 2026 World Cup smashed all of it. The way it smashed it mirrors the way this story tells itself. The problem is not that technical theory is wrong. The problem is that technical theory explains everything, including things it did not cause.

There are two competing hypotheses here, and the original piece picks only one.

Guerra's hypothesis: the fault originates in too steep a backswing, creating a bad position that forces the body to rescue. Fix the shaft path and the fault disappears.

The other hypothesis, rarely voiced: the fault originates in a pressure-response pattern, closer to yips than to a biomechanical defect. And what is called fixing the shaft path is really fixing belief, not fixing the body.

Why do I lean further toward the second hypothesis than the original piece admits? Because Myers's pattern matches the yips profile on three counts. The fault is absent where there is no pressure. It appears where there is pressure. And it recurs cyclically, fading and returning, exactly as a psychological phenomenon behaves rather than a fixed physical flaw.

And here is the counter-intuitive point I want to press: if the root cause is pressure, the baseball drill may not be a cure at all; it may be a distraction. A new feel, a new image, something fresh to focus on. Novelty releases the player from fear for a few weeks. Then the feel becomes familiar, fear returns, and the old fault returns with it.

If that is right, the value of the drill is not technical. It lies in the gap it opens in the mind, a gap with no room for a spontaneous thought mid-swing.

This sounds absurd. But in sport, the absurd is usually a window rather than a hole. And the absurd here is this: perhaps nothing was fixed at all, only one trap swapped for a more comfortable one.

I am not saying Guerra is wrong. I am saying a story told after one practice session is not enough to separate two hypotheses. And if readers, especially Vietnamese readers with very limited access to certified coaches, rush to convert that story into technical doctrine, they may be fixing the wrong thing.

The specific danger is clear. Apply the baseball-in-golf-posture feel too literally and you do not cure steepness. You create a new fault: too flat a swing, the shaft stuck behind you, the ball going right in a different way. Myers himself concedes the remaining homework is to find a blend between the new feel and golf posture. That is a quiet admission that the transition period is not over.

There is one more layer. This story operates inside an ecosystem. It names a coach with a Golf Digest Best In State credential. It names a mental coach. It names a swing-analysis app. No sponsorship is disclosed, and I am not alleging one. But it is worth recognising that this kind of content has a market side effect: it turns golf improvement into a guided process with paid tools and a roadmap.

For an amateur in Vietnam with one practice session a week and a range with three mats, most of that process is unattainable. What remains attainable is two free things: a geometric checkpoint, the shaft in line with the trail arm, and a breathing technique. Two tools, zero cost.

And if I had to carry one thing to a Vietnamese range this week, I would choose the breathing. The reason is pragmatic: it is the only variable in the whole story you control completely, immediately, with no coach, no app and no video. Three counts in, three counts out, before every tee shot.

What remains

What I take from this story is not a swing drill. It is a way of seeing: your fault is almost never where you feel it happen.

You feel the fault in your hands. It happened on the way down. You feel helpless at impact. In truth you ran out of options half a second earlier. And you try to fix it by thinking more, when the only thing that has ever worked is thinking less, in the right place at the right time.

Golf teaches this more clearly than any other sport, because it is the only one in which a player faces their own reaction machinery in complete silence. No opponent, no team-mate, no referee. Only you, the club, and a decision already made before you noticed you were making it.

From a failed starting line to the commentary box: every scar is a map. And the most reliable map is always the one drawn where you once hit a ball into a house.