The modern game is often talked about as a power game and you can’t play good golf unless you’re 6 foot 5 and 200 pounds. Well a player like Graham Delaet really flies in the face of that. Now this guy’s what in the — one of the top 20 long drivers on tour, yet he’s 5 foot 11, that’s 4 inches shorter than me, he’s only 165 pounds, he’s not a big guy. And when you actually see his golf swing, he’s got a three quarter swing. The club very rarely gets past the horizontal position it’s here, yet he crunches his irons you know, unbelievable distance from his irons and even more from his driver. So when we look at his swing, we might be able to identify, well, what does he do so well, how does he create so much power. So if we look at Graham’s set up, when he addresses the ball, he actually flies in the face of the, the sort of teachings of people like Ben Hogan, in terms of where his feet get positioned. Hogan often talked about the fact the right foot should be square, the left foot should splay out, to provide some resistance, and to provide some flexibility to turn through the ball, Delaet’s almost the opposite to that. He squares his left footing quite aggressively, and opens up his right foot to this position.

Now from a teaching perspective, as I would look at this, I don’t really see how this can actually work for him. Because for most golfers in this position, they would sway back off the ball and they would never be able to turn back through the left foot. It would provide too much resistance from the hips, unless you’re very, very flexible in the hips, and that’s Graham’s secret. From he’s address position, he squares that left foot open, opens the right foot out to almost 20 degrees, then as he turns into his right side, he has a big movement over his right leg providing the flexibility through this right hip. And then coming in to the impact phase, as his left foot almost blocks him from sliding into it, it produces a very fast rotation, it’s like hitting a blockade against that left hip and the left hip spins out of the way very quickly, and he really fires through the ball aggressively. The right heel lifts off the ground very early. And that’s maybe something that a lot of club golfers are scared of doing. So a lot of club golfers when they watch themselves on video and they see this impact position, they’re scared of this lifting and they say, “Oh no that should be on the ground.” That’s not really the case, if you’re struggling to get forward through the golf ball, one of the things that you could really focus on is lifting that right heel quite early, driving that right heel for the right handed golfer of course, driving that right heel forward into the ball, getting all the body weight against that left leg.

Now for Delaet, because he turns that left leg in, he has to really rotate very quickly. Flexibility wise, that’s quite difficult for a lot of golfers. So for most club golfers, I would encourage a square right foot, and a 20 degree open left foot. That provides more resistance in the backswing and more ability to turn through in the downswing. Well like I say, with Graham Delaet, he proves that, you know, you don’t have to be the biggest golfer in the world, you certainly don’t have to have the longest golf swing in the world. Fast feet and good hip action can certainly generate a huge amount of club head speed.