Things of beauty: Swings nobody could teach make a comeback

Bubba Watson has never had a formal lesson. He's not bragging, just citing an actual, increasingly rare, fact.
Rickie Fowler's coach is an obscure, septuagenarian driving-range instructor.
Jhonattan Vegas learned how to play on a nine-hole course in the wilds of Venezuela.

Tommy Gainey's baseball-inspired swing approach (complete with two gloves) is a thing of beauty to some. (Getty Images)

If Tommy Gainey has ever had a lesson, no swing coach in his right mind is boasting about it to his peers.
At some point over the past two decades, after the advent of video cameras and saturation coverage on television, form became as important as function in the modern golf swing, as evidenced by the seemingly interchangeable moves on display at tour practice ranges.
Contrived stands next to robotic, one slot down from the technician, who stands near the guy obsessed with aesthetics. Good luck trying to identify them from the bleachers, because the clones are hitting balls like metronomes.
"Little by little, we've seen the PGA Tour being robbed of unique golf swings," Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee said. "Maybe the pendulum is being swung back."
With all the nuance of a sledgehammer, pal. Don't look now, but over the past few weeks, the organics are killing the mechanics -- and the game is absolutely the better for it.
Led by gritty feel players like Watson, Fowler and Gainey, guys whose only swing thought is to get the ball in the hole as fast as possible, the tour is in the middle of a welcome renaissance.
And, unlike their golf swings, this development is a thing of beauty. It really hit home last weekend when CBS, in an attempt to illustrate how Gainey had somehow morphed his baseball background into a tour-worthy golf swing, compared him in a side-by-side sequence with Albert Pujols of the St. Louis Cardinals.
The perfect swing? That notion is going, going, gone.
"There's no one swing for everybody," said Peter Kostis, a CBS analyst and tour swing coach, "but everybody needs one swing."
Maybe this is just a one-month novelty act, but here's hoping it isn't, because the tour's surge of success from homegrown players serves to inspire every self-taught muni hack. And there's a lot more of us than there are of them, right?
In an age where the pursuit of swing nirvana has spawned a legion of famous gurus, instructional aids and videos, at the moment, minimalists are topping the charts.
"Last year, the PGA Tour Player of the Year was Jim Fuyrk and the world Player of the Year was Graeme McDowell," Chamblee said. "Those are 1960s golf swings."
Exactly right. Some of the most successful moves of the postwar era would generate some giggles these days: Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino, Lanny Wadkins, Miller Barber and Ray Floyd, just to name a few. Hubert Green looked like he was trying to decapitate gophers. In each of those swings, style never trumped substance.

PGA Tour

Related links

Video

"It was always about the shots, and now it's more about the swings," said Kostis, who coaches several tour players, including Paul Casey.
Gainey, a hardscrabble pro from South Carolina who once worked on a factory assembly line for $10 an hour, plays with two gloves and doesn't give a crap about the method. Just the math.
"You know, I play a mix between baseball and golf out here with my swing. I'm not like other guys out here who are ranked 10th or 20th in the world," he said last weekend at Phoenix, where he contended until the 71st hole while in search of his first tour title. "I don't really care about that. I just feel really lucky to be out here on the PGA Tour and am trying to make the most of the opportunity."
Chamblee cracked last week on air that Gainey looked like "a man wearing garden gloves, trying to kill a rattlesnake." Rest assured, he meant it as a compliment, because Chamblee believes the notion of an ideal swing template is nothing short of a myth. The blue-collar brigade of the past three weeks mostly figured that out on their own.
"Not only is it more fun to watch from my perspective, because you can readily identify players by their golf swing -- from three fairways away," Chamblee said. "Most of the players are looking for some way to separate themselves, be it by a particular way they wear their hat, or wear wild colors here and there.
"It used to be the golf swing that made you stand out. But it's become homogenized."
Maybe there's an expiration date on that carton. For gosh sakes, even Sergio Garcia, a guy who has a helicopter loop at the top of his swing, finished T9 last week in Europe and is climbing back up the rankings rungs. Maybe a new age of old-age swing mindsets is taking hold.
"There were a lot of funny-looking golf swings back in the '60s and '70s that produced a lot of great golf shots," Kostis said. "Now we have made the transition, with all the technology and such, to where we have all these great golf swings that produce a lot of funny shots.
"It's backwards."
In crazy contrast stand Tiger Woods and Padraig Harrington, who have combined to win nine of the past 24 major championships yet seem to be jointly chasing a golf-swing Valhalla that probably doesn't exist.
"It's a drug," Chamblee said. "Tiger Woods is addicted to this drug of change, he is addicted to perfection. You could see it with Tiger at Chevron last year, and even though he tied and lost in a playoff, every swing looked to me like he was giving birth.
"I needed an epidural just to watch it. It looks like a lot more fun to play golf the way Rickie Fowler plays, or Jim Furyk, or Rory McIlroy."
Woods, who hasn't won on the PGA Tour in 16 months, is working with his third swing coach since turning pro and stands at the fore of yet another transition period. The past two teachers, well-regarded Hank Haney and Sean Foley, espouse some unique swing thoughts.
"Tiger Woods is the first, dominant, world-class player of any generation to buy into a swing method -- and he is doing it for a second time," Kostis said. "Look at Hogan, Snead, Nelson, Nicklaus, Watson. They all swung the club in their own unique way and they had a set of fundamentals that were right for them, and they tried to do what they could, to the best of their ability.
"Every world-class player in every generation created copycats who were thinking, 'If I could swing like Hogan, I'll be a champion. If I can swing like Nicklaus, I will be a champion.' And yet, those guys never swung like anybody else -- they swung like themselves."
Same for this new batch of new originals. Interestingly, the quirky-swing brigade is mostly composed of guys from humble economic means, players whose inner fires presumably burn hotter.
It's like silver spoons vs. sporks, which only helps the storyline: Watson's dad was a former military man and Bubba grew up hitting wiffle balls with big hooks and slices that he still employs with his ad-libbing style. Fowler rode a dirt bike into his late teens, so golf fundamentals were not an early fixation. The ultimate grinder, Gainey, played money games with public-course chops. Vegas, who possesses the most visibly sound swing in the bunch, learned by playing alongside gritty oilfield workers.
"He comes from Venezuela, and there is a difference between wanting to play good golf and needing to play good golf," Kostis said.
To some degree, that applies to all of them. Nothing better than sticking it to the players with pretty swings who grew up with every possible economic advantage.
Maybe this is just a one-off streak that ends before the West Coast Swing is concluded. Even so, at least it has served to remind us that there's more than one way to skin a cat. If not kill a rattlesnake.
"The golf swing, with all due respect to some people who believe it is, it's not science," Kostis said. "Sure, the more unique your golf swing is, the less options you have -- but you can still get it done with one shot."
Woods has repeated a phrase several times over the past few weeks about his latest pursuit of perfection: "It's a process."
Damn the aesthetics, man. Lately, process has taken a whipping from guys who are far more focused on the result. The ends are beating the means.
"Folks, this alternative is just as good as the other one," Chamblee laughed of the homegrown approach. "In fact, you can even make an argument that it's better."