Coming over the top is one of the main mistakes that high handicappers (such as myself) make on their downswing. Essentially, rather than shallowing the club and coming through with a lovely, closer to the body in-to-out golf swing, the upper body is over-utilized, the swing steepens instead, and the arms get too far from the body. This leads to a hack-down out-to-in swing, where the first part of the club to make contact with the is…(drumroll please)… THE HEEL. Now, my lovely new driver has been causing me a lot of grief. One, of many, reasons that I love it so much, is how visible the ball mark on the club face is after drive – so you always know where on the club face you hit the ball. This was great, until EVERY SINGLE DRIVE (even the straight ones), left a perfect little white mark on the heel of my club.
After chatting with my partner, he mentioned that I may need to address the ball at the toe of the club head instead of the centre of the face. I TRIED IT. To no avail. The heel hit remained. Now to go back, when I first tried this Callaway Rogue Driver, the shaft was a little long for me and it had a massive tennis-style grip on it (often used for people with arthritis). That was when it hit it pure basically every time. That was a nice feeling. When I decided to buy it, I had it cut down a bit, and had it re-gripped (with a normal sized grip). That’s when the heel hit issue began. After having it cut down, my golf instructor happened to be in the clubhouse by the window when we were on the 17th tee box (conveniently, the most perfect viewing area). He watched me pull a drive 40 yards left into the trees. Then he sent me a text saying my arms were getting to far away from me in my downswing. I asked him how to fix this… and he sent me a video explaining that I needed to keep my arms closer to me. On course lessons? WOW! Anyways, that was a few weeks ago. And I didn’t realize until this week that I was doing this constantly, instead of just the odd time.
Like many golfers, when I have a problem with my game I look up what to do on Youtube. I found this little gem (which echoes what my golf guru told me to do), embedded below, and plan on trying what he suggests. I will report back! Wish me luck.
I’ll close with a quote on a Golf Digest post that really hit home with me: “Whatever your fault when you go hard with the driver, remember that making good contact is the biggest power issue. More speed means nothing if you don’t hit it flush.”
