Hole No. 5, a Rooftop and the 'Crash Out': Anatomy of an Amateur Swing Fault

Hole No. 5, a Rooftop and the 'Crash Out': Anatomy of an Amateur Swing Fault

A Titleist ball left the driver face, flew hard to the right and landed on the roof of a house. The sound was not loud, but it was enough to make four men on the fifth tee at Rye Golf Club turn and look at each other. Alex Myers, a senior writer at Golf Digest, stood still with the club still in his hands. He had just produced something close to a complete whiff — a shot that, by his own account, travelled only far enough right to hit that roof.

The irony lay elsewhere. Myers' round that day was not bad at all. He made three birdies and called it an "overall solid round". But among four professional golf writers, the thing that got replayed on the drive home was the bad shot. In track and field, people remember the stumble at the final hurdle more than the three thousand metres that preceded it. In golf, people remember the driver that flew into a house.

Context: a personal project and an old fault

Myers is not a tour professional. He is a sportswriter pursuing a series called "Late Scratch?" — a year-long project to see how good he can get at golf. In other words, he volunteered himself as the experiment.

The driver fault appeared earlier in the summer, striking "a couple times a round". Its history runs deeper. Myers admits he carries a fear of the driver into his annual golf trips with friends — outings where there are no leaderboards to lose, but plenty of social pressure to make the hands shake on the tee.

The fifth hole at Rye, in his words, "is never a fun one". It is the kind of hole designed to let the club and the tee position do most of the psychological work before a player has even put the ball down. Japan, where I live and host golf events, has holes like that too. They are not longer or narrower, but they sit exactly where a player has just lost rhythm.

Here is a professional confession. In Moscow, I shouted so much that people mistook me for a reporter — meaning the line between covering sport and living inside it is thinner than we admit. Myers does the same thing in reverse: he does not shout, he writes himself into the middle of the story so that his worst shot becomes the material.

The technical core: the body does not lie

What stands out is that Myers walked into his lesson with a wrong hypothesis. He believed the problem was "all in his head". Mario Guerra — an instructor on Golf Digest's "Best In State" list — reversed that. Myers' swing carries too much vertical force and not enough horizontal force. The fault is in the geometry of the movement, not in the will.

The mechanism Guerra describes matches a familiar biomechanical pattern. When a player approaches the ball too steeply, the body senses a poor position and "crashes out" in a desperate but futile attempt to save the shot. In technical terms, that is early extension with a loss of posture: the pelvis thrusts toward the ball, the upper body stands up out of its forward bend, and the hands are forced to flip the club at the bottom to rescue the face. The shot looks like a moment of panic. In fact it is a survival reflex deployed in the wrong place.

The drill Guerra prescribed runs against most amateurs' instincts. Myers had to swing more horizontally around his body, keeping the club "as low and as parallel to the ground as possible" in both the backswing and the downswing — "almost like making a baseball swing but while in golf posture". This is a shallowing drill, the same family of work that tour coaches have used for more than a decade against steep, hands-driven, over-the-top deliveries.

The key checkpoint came from the Mustard Golf swing app, which the group called the "moment of truth". Roughly halfway between the top of the backswing and impact, a good swing shows the shaft almost in line with the trail arm. A steep player at that same point has the shaft steepening toward the ball. A player who has shallowed shows the shaft flattening into the trail arm.

Early results were positive. After the drill, Myers produced "a much lower, better ball flight", and on video his move "looked much better than his normal move".

What I find most valuable here is the mental layer stacked on top of the mechanical one. Mental coach Josh Nichols confirms the link and names the most common complaint among his students: players who are "too steep and open at the top, then try to flip things back on track during the downswing to square the club up". Myers himself admits to carrying too many swing thoughts. A technical barrier does not block emotion; it only dams it up — and a head full of thoughts on the way down will generate one more compensation, which then feeds the original fault into the next round.

The fix Myers returned to is the simplest thing he has ever used: a three-count in, three-count out breathing routine. He says it once gave him some of the best golf of his life — the season he won the "green jacket" of his annual buddies' trip, a tradition that imitates the Masters' Green Jacket without anyone awarding it or checking it. I used to think being an MC meant holding a microphone; it turns out it means holding other people's heartbeats. In golf, your own heartbeat is one you have to hold too.

The contrarian angle: an untested patch

This is where I have to lower my voice. All the evidence for Myers' fix comes from a single practice session, a single drill and a subjective feel for ball flight. There is no launch-monitor data, no precise numbers, no driver-accuracy tracking across later rounds. He admits there is "homework to do on the range" and that the on-course goal is to "find a blend" between the old and the new feel.

The biggest risk is not in the club but in the head. Myers' fault behaves like a situational, club-specific yips pattern: it vanishes on the range, appears on difficult tees, recurs a couple of times a round and is worst on the annual golf trip, where he has too few repetitions to build a new reflex. Yips are notorious for relapsing. One improved round is not a closed verdict.

The second risk is technical. An extreme counter-move such as "a baseball swing in golf posture" can easily create a new fault if over-applied: too flat a shaft plane, a low ball flight and a persistent block to the right. Myers seems aware of this when he talks about finding a blend, but an amateur reading the piece could easily skip that second half.

There is another layer worth naming. This story operates inside an ecosystem: a Best In State certified instructor, a mental coach, a sport psychologist, a swing-analysis app. No sponsorship is disclosed, but every contract in the golf instruction business begins with a backyard story like this one — a player confesses a failure, an expert arrives with a diagnosis, and what follows is a market of purchasable services. If "Late Scratch?" continues, it will be a repeatable promotional channel for that very ecosystem.

What remains after a bad shot

Amateur golf has a feature that football or track and field do not: it manufactures pressure without needing a leaderboard. One rooftop, three friends in the group, one trip that comes around once a year — that is enough to make the hands shake on the tee.

The thing I take from Myers' story is not the baseball swing drill. It is the habit of asking a different question: "what position is my body in" instead of "what must I do next". A descriptive question is always lighter than a command, and in a sport where the ball sits still waiting to be struck, lighter usually travels further.

And if that drill does not survive the summer, will Myers dare to write about it again — or will he choose to tell us about another shot into a rooftop?