Matt Kuchar wins the Barclays Championship in a playoff over Scotland’s Martin Laird. Kuchar makes birdie on the first playoff hole to win and continue outstanding play as he enjoys his best season on tour. Matt has one of the P.G.A. tours most unusual swings and once again I have cued up a slow motion video of Matt’s move in order to educate Guru Nation on how these unusual golf swings work and further highlighting the fact that there is a lot of ways to get it done out there and play great golf. Matt has what we would call a Reverse Slot/One Plane Swing. Let me clarify what I mean by both of these labels and see if I can help you understand some of the terminology behind the two.

One Plane Swing – Top teacher Jim Hardy coined this phrase as a certain style of swing. First off, one-plane has nothing to do with the golf club swinging on a particular plane throughout the swing as a lot of golfers (and some teachers) think. The golf swing has many planes. Shaft, hands, arms, shoulders etc. One plane is a reference between the shoulder plane and the left arm plane. When the left arm and the shoulder plane match at the top of the swing it is considered One-Plane, that’s it. When the arm plane is higher than the shoulder plane it is considered Two-Plane (see past post on Carl Pettersen). So as you can easily see, Kuch is a big time one-planer. When the left arm is below the shoulders, I call that a ZERO PLANE (I made that up). Other pros that use this style are former president of one-plane nation, Chad Campbell, and current president : Zack Johnson (because he has won a major). I think this is a great way to swing if you are a chronic over the topper. But I still have one criteria. I don’t like the shaft of the club to get below the right forearm or behind the hands in the takeaway. This can and usually makes the downswing too steep. But there is always the exception to any rule……which leads me to my second point.

THE REVERSE SLOT SWING PATTERN

“The slot is an area of the downswing about half way down where the club shaft is parallel and slightly on top of the original shaft plane”. (depending what camera view you use……post for another time. Every golfer wants to find the slot and the majority of touring pros are there in the downswing. The largest portion of PGA players have a swing pattern where the backswing is outside of the downswing. In Kuchars case, it is reversed…..We call this the REVERSE SLOT SWING PATTERN. He breaks the guru rule and lets his club shaft get lower than his right forearm and couples that with a very low arm plane. So how does he make this work? ALL OF YOU OVER THE TOPPERS (EARMUFFS). Key Move: In order to get the club back in front of him and back into the slot, he must rotate his entire torso (shoulders, chest and hips), very aggressively to the left. If he was too slow with his body, the club would come in too shallow or swing too much inside/out. Kuchar makes this work beautifully as you wouldn’t think this style would work out of the deep rough as he demonstrated in the playoff. Other players that use this style are, J.B. Holmes, Joe Oglvie, Bobby Jones, Sam Snead (going old school on you).  As this post is getting a bit lengthy, I will cut it off and accept any comments. So the moral of the story  is………If you are consistently finding the slot on your downswing, don’t let anyone change your backswing!!!!!

See you on the lesson tee,

Guru