Unlock the wisdom of golf instruction with Mike Malaska, as he shares his transformative journey from baseball diamond to the golf course. Our conversation with the acclaimed coach unveils the profound philosophies that drive his approach, shaping the way we think about nurturing talent and customizing coaching to fit the mold of each unique player. This episode isn't just about improving your swing—it's an exploration of the intersections between mental fortitude, physical technique, and the pure joy of the game, all guided by Mike's seasoned insights.
Feel the thrill of competition as we dissect the psychological prowess of golf legends like Jack Nicklaus, revealing how elite athletes transform pressure into peak performance. Mike's personal anecdotes and the tales of those who've walked the fairways before us shed light on the invisible forces at play in a golfer's swing—the momentum, gravity, and instinctual adjustments that often go unnoticed. As we navigate through the complexities of golf swing concepts, our discussion underscores the importance of embracing golf as an art, trusting one's body to perform the dance between control and letting go.
Let's demystify the jargon and tech advancements in golf, picking apart the language and the latest gear that promise to elevate your game. Mike's insights into equipment, particularly the drivers that offer forgiveness on mishits, will change how you perceive your toolkit on the course. Wrapping up with a nod to Mike's educational platform, we spotlight the resources available to golf enthusiasts seeking structured yet passionate learning. Join us for a session that pays homage to the transformative power of golf, inspiring you to pass on the love for the sport to the next generation of players.
To best find Justin, email him at justin@elitegolfswing.com or on Instagram @elitegolfswing. To find me you can also email me at jesse@flaghuntersgolf.com. You can as well find me on Instagram @flaguntersgolfpod
Unlock the wisdom of golf instruction with Mike Malaska, as he shares his transformative journey from baseball diamond to the golf course. Our conversation with the acclaimed coach unveils the profound philosophies that drive his approach, shaping the way we think about nurturing talent and customizing coaching to fit the mold of each unique player. This episode isn't just about improving your swing—it's an exploration of the intersections between mental fortitude, physical technique, and the pure joy of the game, all guided by Mike's seasoned insights.
Feel the thrill of competition as we dissect the psychological prowess of golf legends like Jack Nicklaus, revealing how elite athletes transform pressure into peak performance. Mike's personal anecdotes and the tales of those who've walked the fairways before us shed light on the invisible forces at play in a golfer's swing—the momentum, gravity, and instinctual adjustments that often go unnoticed. As we navigate through the complexities of golf swing concepts, our discussion underscores the importance of embracing golf as an art, trusting one's body to perform the dance between control and letting go.
Let's demystify the jargon and tech advancements in golf, picking apart the language and the latest gear that promise to elevate your game. Mike's insights into equipment, particularly the drivers that offer forgiveness on mishits, will change how you perceive your toolkit on the course. Wrapping up with a nod to Mike's educational platform, we spotlight the resources available to golf enthusiasts seeking structured yet passionate learning. Join us for a session that pays homage to the transformative power of golf, inspiring you to pass on the love for the sport to the next generation of players.
To best find Justin, email him at justin@elitegolfswing.com or on Instagram @elitegolfswing. To find me you can also email me at jesse@flaghuntersgolf.com. You can as well find me on Instagram @flaguntersgolfpod
Hello and welcome to this great edition of the Flag Hunters Golf Podcast. This is one of my favorites. Our guest this week is a man by the name of Mike Malaska. None other than the Mike Malaska, one of the original great holistic coaches that has come about to help us all get better at this game, and we so Justin and I were really quiet. If you don't notice that we didn't ask a ton of questions is because that Mike was already answering him and what he had to say, and what Mike had to say, was very profound. I'm not going to spoil it here with this introduction, but I'm truly blown away, and when you listen to this, I'm going to encourage every single one of you to listen to this more than once, because Mike's information is rich. It's very, very rich, and I would encourage you, if you hear something that really you resonate with, pause the podcast and really deeply think about what he's saying. The man is full of wisdom and hard earned knowledge that he really displays freely on this podcast, and I, for one, I'm truly grateful to Mike for coming on. I speak for both Justin and myself, so the easiest way to get ahold of Mike I'm going to keep this short and sweet is to go to his website. He has a fantastic website, with teaming, with just phenomenal information. As he says, he's got his many decades plus of learning and teaching all tied up into this website, and the way you can find it is wwwmolaskagolfcom. That's M-A-L-A-S-K-A-G-O-L-Fcom, and I just want to give a special thank you to Mike you for coming on and really helping us all become better players and better people as a result of this great game. I, for one, am deeply grateful for your contributions to the game of golf and hope to continue to carry that message forward via this podcast and the other people that we have on. Cheers to you. I also want to thank our sponsors TaylorMade, adidas. Go out and pick yourself up the new TaylorMade driver. I can't wait to get mine and I've heard it's pretty different. So shout out to TaylorMade, shout out to Adidas. Keep on making the great equipment and apparel that you do.
Speaker 1:And I also want to extend my sympathies, my deepest sympathies, to the Burke family. Mr Burke passed away today on this recording, and that is Friday, january 19th. It's incredible that we have this podcast, that we try to connect all of the great minds in the game to you, the listener, to help you get better. And Jackie Burke. Mr Burke was one of the originals, the original greats, who taught a lot of instructors today, as well as players and some very significant players out there that he has worked with over the decades, and once again, he created a great club down there in Houston called Champions Golf Club. So rest in peace, mr Burke.
Speaker 1:We are incredibly indebted to you and thank you for listening to this great podcast, this episode with Mike Velasca. Cheers everybody and have a great week. Hello and welcome to another great edition of the Flag Hunters Golf Podcast. I'm your host, jesse Perryman, along with my esteemed co-host, justin Tang, who is in Singapore, located at the Tan Ameri Golf Club, one of the great young emerging minds in the instructional landscape coming from a holistic view, and our guest today perfectly segues into that intro, as he's one of the original holistic teachers. As we know, his name is Mr Mike Velasca. Mike, welcome, we're honored to have you on, my friend.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:It's always a pleasure to talk about golf Sure is and were you teaching currently in the Arizona area?
Speaker 2:I'm here in Phoenix. I'm at two places Fire Rock Country Club and then at a place called Akatio which is a semi-private resort course. So I'm at two places now. So it's fun because it's two totally different groups of people and then my majority of what I teach are people coming in from out of town. So that's a good, so I can take them either place, so it's a good mix.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much, mike, for someone who has influenced my career so much, I'm literally geeking out at the moment. Can you give our listeners a very quick background and then how you've gotten to golf?
Speaker 2:I got into golf because I was hurt in baseball. I had a picture and I had a kid on the high school golf team. They needed a fifth player and he talked me into playing on the high school team and I ended up being the number one player on the team that year and won our state championship. And so when I went to college they allowed me to try out for the golf team. I went there to maybe do a couple of other things and I tried out for the golf team, won the qualifying by quite a long way, so they gave me a scholarship to play and it's been pretty much Katie Barthedore from there. So I mean, I played a little golf when I was younger, but not much. I was a big into baseball and football and tennis and basketball. Golf didn't become first on my list really until my second year of college when I became an All-American. I won her state open and I started going well, you know what, maybe I can do this for a living. So then I started taking lessons, which was quite an interesting deal which derailed me to a great degree, and so got injured trying to play the tour, working on my game, go to all these different teachers, and so my whole career has been about trying to figure out what I had as a kid. Why was I so good when I started, when I had no idea what I was doing technically but I had control of the ball and so the game was just about you know, the short game and managing things. But it wasn't about swing because I could hit it well. And when they started giving me lessons and changed what I had, it made the game much more difficult. And now I understand from all these years of study, working on my own game, studying the golf and construction, learning the physiology I mean I understand what I had as a kid and why it was so easy for me. Now there's a lot of ways to swing a golf club. I mean I did five of them that I took to the finals of the tour school, five totally different methods. I played tour events with every one of those methods and they were very different. The question becomes you know, how was I able to be that good with that many different methods?
Speaker 2:Which that part, when we talk about how you teach golf, is probably the biggest missing link, I think, in where instruction is today, because the assumption is that people have a certain level of face control and hand-eye coordination that they don't have. So I was lucky because I had good hands. I trained him in other sports. I hit thousands of balls so I mean I could make my body do anything they wanted me to, and my hands would then say well, if you're gonna do that, here's what I have to do to get the club to the ball.
Speaker 2:95% of people that I work with, which we were talking just a minute ago, I mean through the golf schools and everything I've put my hands on maybe not our lessons, but put my hands on somewhere between 450 to 500,000 people in my career that's a lot of cadavers, you know. So you start to understand and you start to build a understanding of what the average person can and can't do and even what some of the tour players miss, and so it's been interesting, you know. And then understanding the fitness part. When I got involved with that, I was one of the first guys to even get into it and I actually got tattooed big time with the PGA because of my approach and what we were doing. They said, no, you're not right. Well, now, everything that I was talking about back in the 80s they've all accepted now is important. So that really helped me to to understand why some methods are a lot harder to learn than others. So and that's kind of where I'm at now. I just keep learning, I keep trying, I keep seeing people every day.
Speaker 2:You know had an unbelievable lesson today with somebody people will probably know in the tennis industry, pete Sanfress, and was absolutely somebody like that, struggling. I showed him a couple of things. It was absolutely incredible how much better he got in just a few, like 20 or 30 balls. But I approached golf like tennis so I said we're gonna turn your tennis into golf. We're not gonna tell you, forget your tennis and learn a new swing. So and he was amazing. I mean it's incredible, these guys same with baseball players, I mean they can hit a 90 mile an hour fastball to any field and they come to golf and they can't hit the ball or they they don't. They're not very good. How's that possible?
Speaker 3:well, so that's where I'm at. So you mentioned a ten I coordination. I often joke about it as the curse of the good player, where you get them to perform wrong concepts and then, at the last moment, they compensate for it right, that's.
Speaker 2:I mean, like I say I can, I, I could take pretty much any method. I could move my ball any or move my body any way. You want me to put the ball in any position you want me to put it in. If you gave me two or three tries, my hands would figure out. Okay, if you're gonna do that, mike, here's what I have to do to get the club face square on the back of the ball, because I've, I've, I have the connection between the club face and the ball and I can put the club face square on the back of the ball.
Speaker 2:And I started, when I was a kid, learning little things that you know whether it was baseball, hitting the baseball, or it was ping pong, tennis, I mean. So your hands are trained to control the face. Now, if you don't have good face control, I don't care how good your body moves, you're never gonna be a really good player. See, the superstars are the ones who have good face control and have good body mechanics. You know now you've got something, and the industry now is teaching more that they go first after the body and how the body pivots and the core, and how important it is, and I'm not gonna say it's not important, but it for most people it's not their number one priority. For sure, in my opinion, for what I've seen, seeing hundreds of thousands of people so let's talk a little bit about the paradox of getting better.
Speaker 3:I've seen so many better players 12 players included in trying to get better, they actually get worse. So can we discuss some of these bad concepts that you were taught?
Speaker 2:well, I can tell you some things that complicated. Number one most important thing that complicated what I was doing was the grip. So I went from they. Everybody said when they saw me is a couple of TOL, you've got a really a fairly strong left-hand grip, not nearly as strong as Dustin Johnson or a number of these guys, but they said well, you got a strong grip. Your club face is a little shut and you come into the ball and you hit it and you have a throw release. We've got to get your grip more neutral, get your forearms to rotate, hold the angle a little longer than rotate and turn the face down.
Speaker 2:I'd never done that. I mean, I didn't hit a baseball that way, I didn't hit a tennis ball that way, I didn't do a ping pong ball that way. So all of a sudden now I'm trying to make my body do a pattern that it's never done and anything I've done relative to hitting something, and so it complicated it dramatically because it didn't fit. And here's developmentally okay, by the time you're like four years old, you learn the three basic patterns that you need to do everything with hit, throw and catch the rest of your life. It's about applying those basic patterns in different planes of motion, but that your body is a pattern machine, that it doesn't know what sport you're playing, it just knows patterns. Well, when you start get, when you ask it to do a pattern that it's never done before, then, neurologically and joint wise, the body doesn't starts going. I don't want to do this. I mean, this is hard to do.
Speaker 2:And so there were that that's changing my grip and the concept of what how my hands work through the ball was probably. It definitely increased the degree of difficulty substantially relative to what I was trying to do. So I would get out on the golf course under pressure tour school or tour events or wherever I was playing and all of a sudden the ball would start. I start losing control, the ball, and so the first person I would blame was me. You know you, choking dog, what the heck's wrong with you? You know you, you must be mentally weak. Well, no, the technique was so complicated, and there are a few guys that have gotten away with it that have been really good, but for me the first person I would blame was me.
Speaker 2:So then it was my confidence got less and less, where the method that I was using was extremely difficult, timing wise, and so now I understand what I had as a kid and I'm actually a better player now than I was when I was playing the tour. I just can't hit it as far. I have more control of the ball now than I did when I was playing and I'll practice it, and I was. I don't practice anymore. So I'm back to where I was as a kid ball striking wise, control wise. But I'm, I'm old, I'm 70, you know. So I mean I've got, I've been beat up now. I mean you know this all these years of sports and hitting balls and stuff. So but it's fun still on a daily basis to be better than I was yesterday. So I keep loving to do it.
Speaker 2:You don't look like you're 70 well, some of that was all the years of really working out and being, you know, with a goskew and what I did and the company we had. It also allowed me to see the very best athletes in the world the Bo Jackson's, the Billy Ray Smith's, the, the Michael Jordan type athletes and then then go that same afternoon back to the clinic and, as a therapist, working a clinic with somebody who's 70 years old, with major physical problems, or the average person on the street, and you started to understand you're not dealing with the same issue, the same people.
Speaker 2:And to think that those people we were working with in the afternoon we're gonna be able to do some of the things that those superior athletes could do is just crazy, you know when you guys well, when you see him close up and you see the athleticism and the hand-eye coordination and the speed, what they have access to, and then you see a normal person, you go okay, well, you know, this is, this is not a fair fight, this is a different deal.
Speaker 2:So that's when my teaching got a lot better, when I realized that most of people that I was teaching weren't gonna be tour players and I just needed to make them better than they were so they could have fun with it. And everybody now I mean everybody's trying to be a tour player and they're trying to swing like tour players and they want to see their numbers and they want I'm going okay, great, good for you. I think that's actually probably making a lot of people worse than it's actually helping, because they feel worse about themselves. Well, the tour players do this, the tour players do that. I go well, they're not normal human beings, they're dysfunctional human beings. So they they. That's a terrible model to model something after because they model a tour player.
Speaker 2:Well, tour player physically are dysfunctional human beings they have flexibility and strength in areas that the average person walking the street does not have. So the first assumption you're making is that the model's correct. It's incorrect because it's not based off function. It's based off the people that are doing it. Well, that aren't functional individuals. And then the second assumption is that, assuming that that one was right, that the average person can actually duplicate what those people are doing they can't. So this quest to have a swing that's closer to the tour average which I find interesting, what that actually means, that nobody does it but it's an average to try to make a swing like the average tour player is just ludicrous. So other than that, I don't have an opinion.
Speaker 3:I like what you talked about concepts. So there's one thing about getting your concepts correct and there's another thing about getting your players to execute the concepts. And despite the bad concepts you have that as a player, you still manage to play in a few major championships. So yeah, you are that, the prototypical pro you were describing earlier that you have out of this vulnerability.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I mean again, I spent my whole life in sports. So when I was a kid, I mean my dad was an athlete, so we played basketball, we pitched pennies, we threw darts, we played basketball, we went bowling. I mean everything was all hand-eye coordination. And when I came to golf it was boring. The ball was still. I mean I couldn't understand why people had a hard time hitting the ball. I mean it wasn't moving.
Speaker 2:Every ball I'd hit up to that point was coming at me. You know tennis balls coming at you fast, the baseballs come, ping pong ball, they're all coming at you and I could hit those pretty well. So when they put it on the ground now, what made it easy for me is I made some parallel, some assumptions about, first grip, how I held the club and, second of all, I never saw the club shaft okay, as the bat. I saw the club face that was sitting down at the end of the shaft. That was the bat. So here was the heel of the bat and there was the toe of the bat and here's this ball sitting there and all I had to do was hit it to right field, hit it to center field, hit it to left field. I mean I'm going. It's like playing t-ball. Now golf's a little harder because the ball's sitting on the ground, so your angle of approach it's a little off. Okay, but I got to wear. Hitting it solid in the middle of the face and making it go pretty much the direction I wanted it to go was freaking easy.
Speaker 2:What enamored me about the game was all of the little nuances, the different lies, the wind, the clubs. You know there's so much to golf Once you learn how to hit the ball which most people never really do that once you have some control of the ball, then it's the, it's the strategy and it's the the uncontrollable things that you know how a ball lands on the green, where it hits in the green. You know the trajectory it comes in at how much spin you put on a shot. I mean there's the art form behind it's astronomical, I mean, and that's what enamored me with it was this creation of shots and different clubs and different trajectories and playing around with a club and see how many different shots I could hit with one club. These guys today don't don't do that. I mean it's it's interesting how they progressed as, or de-gressed as players.
Speaker 3:You earlier mentioned about mental game and technique. I think these days the mind and technique are thought of as either black or white and thought to the exclusion of each other. So, to give you an example, people go like oh you know, you just relax, you got to visualize a shot. Or you didn't visualize and or it's just technique, it's nothing to do with your mind. I think there's an intersection there. What are your thoughts on mental game and technique?
Speaker 2:Well, I spent a ton of time on the mental game and I, you know, I I can tell you that whatever level you're at, whoever mentally deals with what's going on the best wins. So at some point in time, if you're a 15 handicap and you're playing a bunch of other 15 handicaps, it's more, who mentally handles what's going on the best and who reacts to what happens the best is usually the one who wins. So, no matter what level you're at, the whole concept of go to your quiet place then and then and then, and then I'm going are you kidding me? There is no quiet place out there. I mean, when you're competing, it's, it's you're in a high energy state. So the people who are really good, when you get out there and you walk in front of 25,000 people I've been lucky to do this a few times in the US Open or something you walk in front of 15, 20,000 people and somebody says go to your quiet place. I got to tell you there's no place to go. You can't, there is not one. And but what happens is you're not really nervous. See, what happens is, if you coin it nervous, then you're afraid of it. So I hope this plays into what you're talking about, but the people who are really good.
Speaker 2:And I've been around Nicholas now for 35 years and I've talked to Jack a ton about how he perceives things and in that kind of a situation he's not nervous. You know, he looks at it as heightened awareness. So when you get in those, you're in the club championship, you're out playing with your buddies and you're on the first tee and you walk and you feel nervous. You're not nervous. That's adrenaline, that's an adrenaline rush. So you want to take you don't want to subdue that, you want to. You learn how to use that high energy to be able to elevate yourself, to do things you can't normally do. See, that's where the superstars live. They, they love that feeling. The average amateur doesn't want to be nervous. I'm going. Well, then forget playing competitively, because you have to embrace the fact that you're in a high energy state and then you have to use that to be able to have whatever you do with that, to be able to elevate your performance.
Speaker 2:Nicholas used it to eliminate distractions. So he you ask him if he concentrated. He said no, I didn't concentrate. Well then you focus, I didn't focus, I go. Well, what the heck did you do? He says, I didn't get distracted and the higher the the, the more more important the situation is. The less I was distracted, so the okay. So he used that high energy state to put him in a mind frame where he didn't even hear things going on.
Speaker 2:At the masters in 86, when he won on the fourth hole I think it was the third day I talked to Jack. He was cadding for him and just over the fence he was over a three or four foot putt and he took the putter back and there was a car that crashed on accident just outside the fence and Jack went ahead and hit the putt, made it and they're walking to the next tee and Jack he said oh dad, that was awesome, man, I can't believe you made that putt right in the middle of that car crash. And Jack goes what crash? He didn't even hear it. Okay.
Speaker 2:So when you talk about the mental side of the game, see the people that get really good and I've been around a lot of them, even outside of golf, because everybody's the same they, they are prepared for those situations, they embrace them and those situations to create an environment that elevates their ability to sort through or to create performance. The other one who struggles feels that and they are afraid of it and they're trying to subdue it, get away from it, um, parallel it rather than use it. And I think that's the biggest difference between the superstars in all fields and people who struggle is one's trying to subdue it and one is trying to magnify it, to use it to do things they can't normally do.
Speaker 3:So you were the outside director of the Nicholas Academy's Worldwide for the Golden Bay. Yeah, how long was that for?
Speaker 2:Well, I still do it. I don't travel as much with it. I started in 06. So what's that? 10, and 16, 17 years. And I did the Nicholas Flick golf schools prior to that, from 1989 until 2006.
Speaker 2:I met Jack in 1984. And then again I met him in 82 and 84. The US opened in 1982. The PGA in 84 and the US opened in 86. And then our company kept him out of back surgery and so I got to spend a lot of time with Jack on his exercises.
Speaker 2:So I learned I probably know as much, if not more, about Jack Nicholas physically than Jack does. So I can explain to you why his swing developed the way it did, because you're subject to who you are physically, and he accommodated who he was. He was able to figure out for him what was the best way to go at it, and so it's been. My relationship with him has been phenomenal because I've been able to talk to him, asking questions which he's willing to answer, and you learn that these people, when they give answers, they sound cocky, they sound conceited, they sound arrogant. No, no, that's not the point. See, jack Nicholas isn't normal. Normal people don't win 18 majors. Okay.
Speaker 2:So when I finally learned that I was going to listen to the answers he gave and then I was going to say, okay, what did his mindset have to be for him to listen to that question and give that answer? Then you start to understand where these people are coming from and why they've been able, because they're not normal. Everybody tries to judge them on a normal type, but they're not normal. So if you're trying to figure out who these people are, you can't come at it as well. We're going to see where they're different. We're going to judge them on normal or be surprised by what they say, because Jack doesn't live in the same world from a perception he doesn't perceive when things happen.
Speaker 2:The way he reacts to what happens is very different than most. And when he tells you what he does, a lot of people will say, well, that's bullshit. No, it isn't. It's exactly what he believes. That's why he does what he does. So they're not. They're telling you what they think. And then you're going well, that's ridiculous. Well, no, yeah, it is ridiculous. That's why they can win 18 majors, and most of them I haven't played in 18 majors. So it's a different. It's an ability to sort through what happens and make adjustments to be able to be good when you're bad, and Jack was one of the best at being good when he was bad.
Speaker 3:Let's talk a little bit about the instructional side of things. I know Jack was a massive influencer in you. So was Joe Nichols, Jim Flick and Bob Toskey. Were there any other coaching influences that impacted you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I had. I mean the golf machine, which is what I got into now. It was also what trained me to, because some of the concepts in it I'm not saying they weren't correct, but they were very difficult to do. They were based on, supposedly, how Hogan swung the golf club and Hogan was an interesting individual, but the golf, the golf machine, had a lot of influence on where I went and what happened. There's a number John Schlee, who was a Hogan disciple.
Speaker 2:I spent a lot of time with John Schlee for about three years great ball striker, certain concepts, and there were two or three of the head pros that were good players that got me involved with different people that you wouldn't know their names, but I had a lot of influences and took lessons from Eddie Marins. Eddie Marins was swinging the handle. I took some lessons from Eddie. So I worked with and took lessons from a lot of people, especially when I started, like everybody does, when I got into the search mode and nothing was working. You go for a few months and nothing's working. So you see somebody who's on the range who's hitting who you're working with. Well, so-and-so Well, can I get in to see him? Sure, here we go. So there was a period of about five or six years there where I mean I'd see anybody who'd watch me, including other players on the range.
Speaker 2:My problem was I seemed to be able to help the other players more than they could help me, and I used to get pissed at me because I'd be on the range and she'd come to pick me up at a tour event and I'm out there and she'd come and I'd pick me up. I'd been working with one of the players and she'd go. Could you please explain something to me? I said, yeah, what she goes. Why are you helping your competitors? And I said, well, they asked me. And she goes well, then sabotage and give them something bad. I can't. So she says, what really pisses me off is most of the time when I see you helping somebody. Sunday when we finish the tournament, they finish ahead of you, which means they made more money than you. And I said, well, if I helped them, great, I want to beat them when they're at their best. She goes you're out of your mind.
Speaker 2:But so so I always seem to have an eye for others and I was pretty good with myself, but I was too critical of myself and expected too much because I knew what I could do when I'd done it once before. And when I didn't stay up with those standards and I was below what I knew I could do, it was really hard for me to accept what I felt was very mediocre. Even though I was playing tour events and playing in majors, I still felt like man, you're not even close to as good as you were at 19. What the heck's wrong with you? You need to practice more. You need to get more mentally strong and when I think back on it now, what I did with what I was doing was pretty fricking impressive.
Speaker 2:Because, I think back on it now, I wouldn't have mattered how much I practiced. I was still going to have a tendency to misfire, especially under pressure. When you get jumpy and everybody does, and anybody who says they don't get jumpy and they don't get nervous and their swing feels great all the time is total BS because they all fall apart. Everybody does.
Speaker 3:So let's talk a little bit about Joe Nichols, his rotor drill and your signature move, the Alaska move.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting, I got coined the Alaska move, which is not mine, it was Joe's and it was just a feeling of what you were doing with the club.
Speaker 2:I wish more people had an opportunity and I may do a series on Joe Nichols, because the guy was brilliant. He could get people that couldn't hit it, couldn't compress the ball, to hit it and compress it. He knew how to give you things that were exaggerations to get you to feel something. That didn't sound right, but you felt it and when you try to do it at full speed and you felt like you were doing one thing, x, something else would show up and the ball would start going really good. And I, you know he was just unbelievable and he was a great player himself. So the guy could do, he could back up what he was saying. And that whole Alaska move you hear guys talking about it all the time keep the club in front of you, don't get out ahead of it, don't get stuck. It was the concept or a feel with what you were doing with the club and the handle on the clubhead to make the transition and get the club in the right arc, and the drill itself didn't look anything like you wanted a golf swing to look, you know. But when you put it to speed and you put force into it, which the golf swing? Slow motion. If you swing slow motion and you put to speed is the speed ramps up. Forces change. So what you have to feel like you're doing at high velocity to get the club to do what you want it to do are very different. The biggest thing I've learned in 60 years of doing this, this whole thing, is that a golf swing is invisible. You can't see it. You see effects, you don't see causes. So if you try to copy emotion, activity and you stop it down and say, oh yeah, see, right here, that's right where I want to be, I'm not going to argue with the position, but I'm going to argue dramatically with how you get there or what caused it. And we have gotten trapped to where we take a golf swing and maybe on the backswing and get away with it. But as soon as you change directions, as soon as the body changes directions, you're we're talking a whole another world now, because that club jumps and speed and force and what you have to feel like you're doing in your body and what you have to feel like you're doing with the club to get it to do what you want to see on the video isn't what you see on the video. That's why people get lost, because they keep practicing what they see good players do at full speed, in slow, and they stop it down and go oh see, that's I want to get right there. That's the. I'm going to practice that spot right there. I'm going to just keep practicing that. Well, you're done, because if you try to hit that spot and then hit it, you got no chance, no chance of catching the face up consistently.
Speaker 2:So you know, I've been lucky and unlucky because I've tried so many things and as I started to understand Joe Nichols and what he was doing, he knew what a golf swing had to feel like to get it to work and he wasn't afraid to do drills that were exaggerations and I, like I say he helped me more than anybody. But he also wasn't the type of person he wouldn't give you the answers. He would. He'd ask you so what did you feel like you did there and you'd say something. And he, he was, you know, pretty brutal, but he would go no well, and then you try something, you say something else and finally you'd say something that was close to correct, he'd go. What would you say? That's better, okay, do it again. What Now tell me? Tell me what you're feeling, what are you doing now? And finally you'd hit on it and then he'd tell you Okay, but he wanted you to learn. He wasn't going to just tell you what to do, he wanted you to figure out, he wanted you to own it, because when you're out on the golf course, you're out there by yourself.
Speaker 2:That's another thing I find interesting with these kids today and these new players. They got these entourages and they're monitoring every shot and every swing. Well, they're not very good at making adjustments. You know Phil Blackmore I don't know if you know who he is, but oh yeah, good player, one of my best friends. He studied the last group, the last round of tournaments for an entire year and the last. The top four players the last round shot higher than the average score of the top the whole tournament players on that last round. So what that means is and they were three, two to three shots higher than they were relative to strokes gained, the whole thing. Then they were the first three days of the tournament.
Speaker 2:So what that tells you is here you got the best players in the world with a chance to win and they're playing worse than the average score of everybody else in the field the last day. Why? Because they don't know how to make adjustments. They don't know how. If they're good, they're good, but if they're off, they don't know what to do, and a lot of that's because of the way golf's taught today.
Speaker 2:So these guys are reliant on their, their team. You know, tell me what I'm doing wrong. Well, okay, what have you? And you really can't tell somebody. Nobody can tell me what I'm feeling like when I'm standing on 15 T or 16 T and there's water left and the winds in my face and I'm, I'm nervous. You can't, you don't know what I'm feeling. So for you to try to tell me what I'm supposed to do, you see, that doesn't work. I have to know. I've been here, I've felt this before. This is what's probably going to work for me, you know, and a lot of these kids just try to get up and make a good swing.
Speaker 2:Well, that doesn't work a lot of times. So what swing will work? What swing is going to keep you from making a bogey or making a double? What shot can you hit. It's not what's the best shot to hit. The best shot to hit is the, the shot that you feel like you can hit and pull it off. You know.
Speaker 2:So I asked Nicholas one time. I said so, jack, you get up on a whole par four, dog leg left. Are you going to fade it into the fairway or draw it? He goes I'm going to get a fade. And I said, well, but it's a dog leg left. He goes. I don't understand your question. I go well, okay, it's a dog leg left. Don't you want to draw it around the corner? He goes Mike, I've got to get the ball from point A to point B. What does it matter which way it curves? And he said under pressure, there's no way I'm going to try to hook it.
Speaker 2:Well, who is the best player in the world? Okay, maybe the best player of all time? And what's he telling you? I'm not going to hit a shot. I'm not comfortable with under pressure, where a lot of these guys are trying to hit the perfect shot and if the perfect shot's not working, they keep going with it and that's why their stroke average isn't as good, because they don't know how to make adjustments and play really good when they're bad, in my opinion, for what it's worth. And again, again, joe helped me so much in understanding how to hit shots and what shots I could hit and what I couldn't, and how to avoid where I could be aggressive and really go at it hard and know it was only going to do one thing. So once I could do that, I could play, because if you've got a double miss you can't play, not at a high level.
Speaker 3:So you talked about the invisible swing that's the title of your second book and you're also fond of talking about the magic in your golf swing. Things like momentum, acceleration, gravity, inertia and centripetal force. These are things that are largely cannot be seen with the naked eye, and it's really interesting that the concepts that you teach golf being a momentum game, many instructors do not teach about the club head going from the right side of the trail side of the body to the lead side of the body, and instead there is this huge misunderstanding about lag handle dragging, however, in tennis, back to your Pete Sampras lesson. You never hear things like oh, let's have a racket lag in tennis. Why do you think that is such a bone of contention in teaching today?
Speaker 2:Well, a lot of that comes. You know, you got to look at how teaching evolved and it evolved through players, and players said what they felt like they were doing and you know and there's still a lot of that hanging on today is what they feel like they do and what they actually do. When it comes to creating speed and force, we're driven by those forces that I did you just said gravity, momentum, acceleration, centripetal force and inertia. And what a golf swing really is is it's a balancing out of these forces to create a consistent circle. And when I see golf swings, I don't see golf swings like most people do, I don't I mean the positions, but I see circles of force and there's a blend of how those circles work and if they work, you're good, and if they don't work, you're struggling. And you know, and those forces gravity, I mean I always say take an object and I hold it like this and I let it go and I say, okay, unless you go out someday and you let go of this pencil and it floats off the screen, then if you can learn how to tie into these forces, they're going to be really consistent. They're never going to let you down, so they're going to act the same way. I don't care if your wife screamed at you, if you didn't sleep, if you were up on the night drinking. If you're in good shape, bad shape, those forces are going to be consistent. So if you know how to use those and you know what it feels like, because you're constantly with a golf swing, it's this offsetting, it's this dance that you're doing with a club and you're offsetting. It's almost like a tug of war that you're creating. So the club's pushing you one way and you're pushing the other way to offset and balance those forces out. Once you feel how that works, you don't forget it. And it doesn't change that much from day to day. Now, little things change. I mean your eyesight changes a little, your hand-eye coordination, but once you tap into that and you understand what that is, the game becomes. That's what I knew as a kid, See. I knew how to direct momentum, I knew how to control the face and my body moves. So it kept the circle really constant. So I hit it solid all the time. When they started changing my body mechanics and changed how my hands work. None of those circles work. So the forces were fighting each other. And so, because I was fighting different forces. It was harder and harder, at high speeds, to be consistent. So I've just learned so much about the human body and joints and how they react to force that now I see a golf swing in a different way than most people do. And it's motion. It's constant motion and it's not.
Speaker 2:Swinging a golf club is not a science. It is not. It's an art form. Science is the study of what's happening. It's not necessarily the way to do it. Say, swinging a golf club is an artistic expression of you through a game. It's an artistic expression. It is not a fricking science.
Speaker 2:And when you try to turn it into a science and you become a robot, you lose feel for what's going on. You take a golf swing. You think about this circle that's going around you. If your spine moves one inch and your pelvis moves two inches, it changes the dynamics of where the club bottoms out. Now do you think you're good enough to stand there and constantly make this circle where it is exactly the same every single time? Nobody can do that, so you have to allow yourself. With all this practice and hand icon, your brain works fast enough. If you get out of your way and you've trained it, your brain can make corrections so quick, much faster than you can think when, when your spine angle gets a little off and this it's a little off, it figures out it's seeing that ball and it's this damn computer going click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click and it reallocates forces and it puts the club right on the back of the ball. Now if you're standing over the ball giving yourself fricking commands and you're going OK, I got to get this here, this here, this here it can't do that because now you're distracting your instincts. So you know it's the human body is amazing what it can pull off. But you have to help it and you can't get in its way. You have to train it and then you have to let it go. And if you train it but you don't let it go, you're no good, and if you try to override it, you're also no. You never reach your potential.
Speaker 2:And that's what I had as a kid. I didn't know what I was doing, but I knew the feel of these forces and I trusted that it was going to work. And it did. When they changed me around, it never felt. And then they'd say change my hands and change my grip and and they say, ok, now just be athletic, just make a swing and let it go. I go, ok, so I'd stand up and do it, let it go in the ball, go sideways. And they go no, no, no, no, no, no. You see there, you didn't trust it. I go. Yes, I did. It doesn't work. I have to. I have to do something, because if I just let it go and athletically try to hit it, it doesn't work. It used to, but it doesn't anymore, where you don't practice enough. So you know, so it's interesting.
Speaker 2:I like I say this game is an art form, it's a self expression. That that hitting that ball, seeing it, seeing a picture and seeing a ball do something and getting the feel in your hands and what are you going to? How are you going to do it? To curve the ball and then standing up there and creating the picture that you saw. I mean that is gosh. That is a connection with with these forces around. I'm getting goosebumps. I mean it's, it's not this. Everybody's trying to turn it into this robotic thing and I'm OK with studying those things, but when it comes to performance, you better be. You better be allowing yourself to be part of the universe that's around you and not fighting it.
Speaker 2:And I don't know how else to explain it, but I just see too many young players now that can, they can't hit shots, that they can't adjust their wedge games. Distance control is not that great. They overpower golf courses. I mean anymore, I mean the way they got, the way the game is now. I mean a golf course that's par 72 isn't par 72. These guys are hitting irons into par five. So there is what's par 68. So when they shoot 64, they're shooting four under you know. So it's not the game.
Speaker 2:If they changed par now, they did this. If they said, ok, a par five is six hundred and say 20 or 650 yards and longer, they just did that, ok. So that would mean that almost every golf course that they play doesn't have a par five on it. So par would become 68. Now watch what they shoot. Because, relative to what these guys were doing when I was playing and we were hitting our drivers to 72, 80. And that happened again with the next club and plus the ball curved more. Ok, so par fives. You had to hit a really good drive in a three wood or something like that, a spinny ball, to get it there. Now these guys are hitting drivers seven iron and so if all of a sudden par was 68, which is what it really is with the ball they're playing, the equipment then that'd be. We'd be having a different conversation about what these guys are doing to the game. It's par fives are too short, so par is not relevant because the par fives there virtually aren't any par fives. They're long par fours at best.
Speaker 3:Let's talk about the greatest player of all time, Jack Nicklaus. He always talked about releasing the club head hard and early from the top of the swing and a lot of instructors have misconstrued that to become passing. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Speaker 2:Well, I've had the opportunity to put my hands on Jack and ask him questions, so you know, that was when I saw. I heard that and he said you can't release the club too soon. I, like everybody, thought he meant this, so I thought he meant casting. And then I was able to get a hold of his hands and I took his up at the top of his swing and I'm looking at him. I said so, Jack, you said it was impossible to release the club too soon from the top and he goes.
Speaker 1:Yeah you're right.
Speaker 2:And I said, ok, so here we go. So I did this to him and he goes what's that? I said, well, that's release. He goes that's not my release. I said, ok, so what is your release? Well, see, what he did is, it wasn't this. He didn't throw the club this way. When he got to the top, when he started down, he tip them. He directed the momentum of the club back out in front of him. So it wasn't about unhinging his wrist, it was about redirecting the momentum of the club so it was back in front of him so he could turn through together. It had nothing to do with unhinging his wrist.
Speaker 2:So where we run into problem in golf, major problems you think about this. There isn't an industry in the world that doesn't have a definition of terms, vocabulary, where everybody agrees on one term. If you're an attorney and you call somebody from LA to New York and you say a term, they know what you mean. If you're a golf professional in LA and you call somebody in New York and you say, hey, I was working on release today. Okay, what do you mean by release? Unhinge your wrist, rotate your forearms? I mean, what are you talking about? So all these terms shift your weight All the release the club, stay behind the ball. What do they mean? So we have this confusion of terms, and release is one of the biggest ones, because release means to let go of Well, hopefully you don't let go of the club, and so this. So I've had one guy say well, what do you work on your release pattern? I said let go of the club. I never let go of it. I don't even use the word anymore because it's not release, it's how do you direct the momentum of the club to get it in the correct arc or circle relative to your center.
Speaker 2:That's what Jack did. He didn't want his body to get out ahead of what he was doing with the club. Tiger did it forever. Tiger was on the golf channel with Butch back in 2000, 2001,. And he made the comments when he got here. He felt like he got the club going out in front of him as fast as he possibly could. He said he couldn't get the club going too fast. He felt like the club went faster than his body went. Now it's too bad he got away from that because he'd only won the Masters by 15 or won the US Open by 15 shots. I mean why the guy would all of a sudden start going the other way with Haney is beyond me, but he did. But so these guys know what it feels like to have forces line up. And so you know, jack, again Jack would say things Just another.
Speaker 2:For instance, jack said when he warms up, he's getting ready to play, right. So he says, well, first few balls, I just I'm just getting loose, I just hit shots. So I'm, I'm, I'm with him one day, and he's, he's warming up, and he hits a shot. I said, do you like that shot? He goes, no. I said, well, you're going to change something on the next one. Oh yeah, I'm going to change the fate, I'm going to change my angle of approach, because I didn't like the flight of that.
Speaker 2:I said I thought you said you were just warming up. You're not just warming up, you're calibrating, you're getting control of the phase. Well, of course you are. I said, well, no, no, no see. You said you're warming up. We all think you're just warming up, but you're not really just warming up, you're tying your feel into what you want the ball to do. And if you make a swing and the ball doesn't do exactly what you wanted to do with the exact trajectory you saw. You fix it. Well, of course you do. That's just common sense.
Speaker 2:I said, well, no, no, but why didn't you say that? Because those guys, they've forgotten what they learned and they think that everybody thinks the way they do. So it's just. It's just like I say, it's a fascinating game. I've never lost the fascination which I think is important. It's not passion. Passion comes after fascination. Fascination is what drives you and I've always been fascinated with hitting a ball and I became more fascinated with golf than any other game because of all of the variables involved in it. And to this day I'm still fascinated with the whole concept of the game and how much fun it is to play. And it never loses its you never. You can always get better than you were yesterday. Now I may not get as good as I was when I was 19, but I can be better than I was yesterday and that's what makes it so much. Fun is how long you can play it, how long you can consistently get better than you were yesterday.
Speaker 3:Let's shift gears and talk a little bit about equipment. Taylor Mead, our sponsor, just released its new driver, the QI. What do you like about it?
Speaker 2:Well, I've been with Taylor Mead for 25 years. I'm a national advisory board. They keep I mean this one, they keep doing they every once in a while. I mean they all always. In theory they're better, okay, but I hit them and I don't see much difference in my performance. And I understand the theory behind the different. You know this one's going to do this and in theory they do, but how much do they actually work?
Speaker 2:This driver, from a mishit perspective, is by far the best driver that I've they've they've ever put in my hands, because it, when you miss the center of the face, what it does to the spin and the direction is the ball goes a little farther, but it doesn't curve as much, so you don't lose as much distance and it goes straighter than than the other drivers.
Speaker 2:So it's better on mishits. Now, when, when you build a driver like that here's the downside what are the tour players going to do? They're going to swing harder because when you miss it and it doesn't curve much and it goes pretty good, then speed is like not an issue because they're always going to be pretty close with what they're doing. So when the this driver is the most forgiving driver by far and they've got the, the QI 10 and the max. The max is even more forgiving than the QI 10. And you know, I put it on a launch monitor and it's about two to 5% better. So I get 5% more distance and less curve with the same hit in the face over, say, the, the, the, the stealth or anything else I've hit.
Speaker 3:And that's why Colin Morica was using that very model, the 10k model.
Speaker 2:I mean I I don't know what to say. It's just, I judge clubs. I've always judged clubs not on what they do when I hit them. Well, I intentionally hit them poorly and I see how they perform when I hit it high in the face, high in the toe, low in the toe, low in the heel, high in the heel. So I'm decent enough where I can make the club hit different places, the ball hit different, and I watch what does the ball do when I miss hit it. And if the club performs a certain way, when I miss hit it, I can play it. Now I've had tons of clubs where they gave me where for sure I hit them farther, no question.
Speaker 2:But when I miss hit it, the miss hits weren't very good. I didn't like the miss hit. So I ended up going to a shaft or a club that they said didn't fit me. Well, no, it didn't maximize my distance, but I could play with it because when I miss hit it the miss was playable. See, I'm more into where does it miss than where does it go when I hit it. So I intentionally miss hit it to see what the ball does. Now, if the misses get good, put it in my freaking bag. Now, if the misses don't get better or the misses are worse but the hits are better, I don't want it. Don't want it because I want miss hits to be better. This driver I haven't hit the fairway woods yet, but the driver is the the best club they've made, the best driver for miss hits by far that they've ever made. I mean it's, I don't think it's even close.
Speaker 3:Well, as they say, golf is a game of mistakes, and if we can minimize our mistakes, we'll score better. Let's talk a little bit about your membership site. Okay, malaska Golf, yeah, and what you cover? What can our listeners expect to learn when they purchase a membership on your website?
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, I'm one of the first who came. Who's had? Now I've seen some guys silly, interesting on my career. I, when I came, got really involved in teaching. I talked about sports and how they cross over and everybody thought you know, oh my God, you're the anti Christ. You know? No, they don't golf different than anything else.
Speaker 2:And I put together a site and the reason it took me so long is that it's a process, it's a step by step learning. It's called the M system. So it takes you through step by step M. One First thing you need to understand. Most important thing do this, and then it walks you through the whole process of understanding and learning a swing. Now it's not complicated, but once you go through it and you understand what it is, you're never going to get really bad again, because it gives you road. It gives you a roadmap into how to how to be consistent. Everybody wants to be consistent. Well, what? How do you do that? How do you practice? How do you build your swing on a daily basis? So it has the M system. And then there's all other parts of this. I mean, if somebody wants, how do you hit your driver? How do you hit a bunker shot. It has all of those things in it. Plus, it also has interviews that I've done with Jack, interviews that I've done with Black Mar, mental side of the game. I mean it's pretty much has everything in it.
Speaker 2:The M system is the most important part and we're adding to some things with that we're about to do on the M system we're going to do we're not quite sure we're going to call it it may be M system light, and the reason for that is the M system has about 60 videos. So people look at that and they go, oh my gosh, that's too much information. Well, it really isn't, because it's a process, but I'm going to do the M system in five videos. So I'll do the most important five things. You know what's the first thing you need to know. That's the most important about golf.
Speaker 2:What, what, what's the number one task? You should understand. Number two, what's the second part? Three, four, five and that's it. So you get it. You get it concise. Here's an overview of what this is all about and it's a lifetime of knowledge put into a website. So I don't see anything out there. You know and I'm pretty critical of myself and other sites, but there's a lot of them that have a lot of information but no process, and that would be, that would be malaskagolfcom.
Speaker 2:Yeah that's all they got to do. There's right now, until the end of this month, there's a discount a 30% off the yearly membership. So they're paying about 140 some odd dollars for a yearly membership, which is really nothing, I mean, when you think about it. My, my goal with it was to create a website and a system where, even if you don't play golf, you could actually teach somebody to play. So a father can teach his child you know, you can teach your child, you can teach a sibling, you can teach a friend and to give people an understanding of what golf really is, because there's so much confusing data and information. It's so complicated and it really isn't. I mean, if you know what you're trying to trigger, most everybody has a really good golf swing in them inherently, but we've talked them out of it.
Speaker 3:It's not so much about finding a golf swing. It's about letting what's inside come out. That's right.
Speaker 2:Right, jesse, can I use? That was good, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Jesse closing thoughts. I'm I'm just blown away. Everything that you said, mike, really deeply resonated with me, and I will encourage our listeners to listen to this conversation more than once, because it's there's a lot of depth to it, a tremendous amount of knowledge, and I for one, mike, and completely and and and unconditionally grateful for what you've brought to the game. All of us are benefiting through your, through your lessons, through your instruction and all your years of trial and error. So a big thank you to you and and thanks for contributing to this game that that not only challenges us on the golf course but deeply challenges us off the golf course.
Speaker 2:We can't run for ourselves out there. No, and the game guys? The game gave me a life. It saved my life as a kid. I had some things happen and the, the golf course became my serenity. It came my safe place and the game then I. I fell into it and it's it's created an unbelievable life for me, and anything I can do to give back to it, to hope that it does that for somebody else Nothing better than that.
Speaker 3:Well, you've impacted one guy from Singapore. That's what I can tell you.
Speaker 2:Singapore Island Country Club. I had my first big in the. I played the Asian tour. That was the first cut I made over there and the people were really nice to me, and then the city was, so my wife wanted to go back and live there. I was before you. That's awesome, probably.
Speaker 3:Well, I was born in 1979.
Speaker 2:Oh, my goodness, that's the year. Okay, so I was. That's the year I was there 79.
Speaker 3:Oh, what an amazing coincidence. Yeah, so there you go. Such an honor, mike, such an honor. I can't thank you enough for gracing our show with your presence, and I'm sure, I'm sure, our listeners will feel the same way.
Speaker 2:I hope they do. It's a great game and it's given me a lot, and anybody I can help I'm more than willing to do it.