Butch Harmon is an undisputed Hall Of Fame instructor.
Tour players have flocked to Harmon and his results speak for themselves. Tiger Woods’ most successful years were the ones spent with Butch Harmon.
These days Butch is in semi-retirement. He’s passed the torch to son Claude III and if you want to find Butch, you have to go to Las Vegas to seek him out.
Recently Butch talked about the “secret” to the golf swing.
His “secret?” It’s repetition. No, not hitting thousands and thousands of golf balls. No, you need to have a swing that simply repeats itself time after time, especially under pressure.
“Anybody who loves golf should go to St. Augustine to the World Golf Hall of Fame, because there’s hundreds of strange-looking swings in there, and they all work. Because the secret to golf is repetition,” says Harmon.
Harmon used Jim Furyk as the perfect example of a strange swing that simply repeats itself, over and over.
Harmon made this observation on Furyk:
“Look at Jim Furyk, he’s just about to turn 50, he still competes on the PGA Tour with a swing that, if his father had changed that swing to make it look perfect, we’d have never heard of Jim Furyk. The legends of golf had a lot of strange characteristics in their swings. The common thread was getting the club square at impact and being able to repeat it time and time again.”
Getting that “repeatability” is the hard part. Harmon says you shouldn’t try to copy another golfer’s swing. You need to perfect the tools you have and work with a good instructor.
Butch said the key is to get the clubhead squared up at impact.
And Butch’s final words regarding that:
“I don’t care how you do it,” Butch says, “just do it.”
Typically every golf swing has a loop in it. That loop needs to start on plane then drop slightly to the inside in order to square the club face at impact.
Furyk’s swing has a big loop but it goes in the proper direction — starts outside but drops perfectly to the inside and at impact — he’s perfect.