By STEVE TRIVETT, DAILY SUN
THE VILLAGES — I winced just a little when Joey Hidock told me to take a practice swing just to make sure all the cameras were in the right place and the computer was up and running.
Most of us have seen a video playback of our golf swing — most times with a lot of angst — but when Hidock threw in the word “computer” a chill went up my spine.
While the job of journalist forced me to embrace the computer age, I went there kicking, screaming and clutching my typewriter — much in the same way Linus won’t let go of his blanket.
I hate computers — they crash at the wrong time.
I don’t tweet.
I don’t twitter.
I don’t Facebook.
And I hate junk e-mail as much as I hate junk regular mail and unsolicited phone calls.
Speaking of phone calls; I hate high-tech cell phones, too. The last time I got a new cell phone and it rang, I took a picture of my ear when I pushed the button I thought would allow me to say hello.
Needless to say, technology and I haven’t had a love affair.
But Joey is a good guy so I went along with his instruction.
He’s one of the instructors of golf at The Villages Golf Academy, and he has a new program called Swing Model that requires the use of a computer.
It’s not like I haven’t gone through things like this before — where they superimposed the perfect golf swing over my swing where I could see the 100,000 ways my swing didn’t match Tiger Woods or Phil Mickelson.
But Swing Model is different — the stick-figure swing used as the model is your swing — or at least the way your swing should be.
Because even before I took that first nervous swing, Hidock asked me a few questions.
He wanted to know my height, weight and if I had any physical problems.
I told him the truth about height and weight, but I left out a couple of physical problems because the list had gotten very, very long after listing a full set of blown-out knees, a myriad of broken bones from a wild-and-crazy youth and the absence of any kind of flexibility.
He didn’t laugh — but he wanted to.
He then took some measurements — my shoulder width, the length of my arms from my shoulder to my fingertips and then from my fingertips to the ground and the length of my 5-iron.
He punched all those vital stats into the computer and all of a sudden there was a stick figure me on the computer screen.
He didn’t look bad. In fact, he looked pretty good — he was skinny, something that hasn’t happened since my mother found out one jar of Gerber’s applesauce wasn’t enough to fill up her oldest son.
“The Swing Model was developed by filming the swings of the greatest players in the world,” Hidock said. “We’ve used everyone from Ben Hogan to Jack Nicklaus to Arnold Palmer to Tiger Woods and broke down all of their swings into 57 points. And it wasn’t a one-swing thing; each player took 25 to 50 swings with every club in their bag.
“We then applied their physical characteristics into their swing to form their own model and I’m talking about 185 of the best players in the world.
“Using those points, we could then make a model of where those 57 points should be in everyone’s swing regardless of their physical characteristics.”
Now all you have to do is keep your model within your body throughout your swing.
“It’s like I tell my daughter, ‘you have to color between the lines.’”
If all that sounds a little too simple, it really isn’t.
Swing Model grew out of a program developed by bio-kinesiologist Dr. Ralph Mann. That’s the same Ralph Mann who won the silver medal in the 400-meter hurdles at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Mann’s first model was naturally used to improve performance in track — it’s been used by Olympic athletes for almost two decades — but applying the philosophy to the golf swing was a natural progression for the technology.
“The first time I saw the program I thought it was awesome,” Hidock said. “And the putting model is better than the full-swing model.
“It’s all about facts, not about opinions.”
I now had to make that first swing — while trying to remember those thousand things I had learned over five decades of slashes, lunges and jerks that had previously driven some of the best golf instructors in the world into the nearest bar.
With the push of a button, the stick-figure me was imposed over the real me.
There were a few — OK, maybe more than a few — things wrong. But the biggest was that I was standing too far away from the ball which put my spine angle out of line.
A couple of adjustments, and all of a sudden the skinny me stayed inside the fat me.
And the ball actually went where I was looking — and the data were a lot easier for my feeble mind to process because I could see it all happen on the computer screen.
“The Swing Model also proves that many long-standing beliefs about what a perfect swing should be aren’t exactly correct,” Hidock said.
Things like swing plane, balance and keeping your head down.
“A plane is something you get on to fly to Vegas,” Hidock said with a laugh. “And balance is overrated because when people hear the world balance they go very static in their swing.
“Look at both Arnold Palmer and Gary Player — neither of them had perfect balance in their swing because things are moving all the time. But they are moving correctly.”
Then came the big surprise.
In slow motion, the swing model shows that your body should be moving in two directions at the same time if you are doing it right.
“It’s like rubbing your belly while you are patting your head,” Hidock said. “While the upper part of your body is still going back, the lower part of your body is already starting down.
“It’s like throwing a baseball — and we have a model for that, too — as your arm is going back, your leg is going forward.
“You have to make that move to make a good golf swing.”
And getting people to make a good golf swing is Hidock’s goal.
And he and all his high-tech stuff are now part of The Villages Golf Academy.
“I just want to help people play better,” he said. “And I try to keep it simple. I don’t use a lot of big words because I don’t know any big words.”
Especially if you don’t let the word “computer” scare you.
Steve Trivett is a sportswriter for the Daily Sun. He may be reached at sports@thevillagesmedia.com.
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