Behind the scenes: Swings made from scratch
Practitioners of homemade golf swings are hard to find on the PGA Tour these days. Even fewer are in this week's Masters Tournament, which has a limited field because it is an invitational.
The top players in the Masters with homemade swings are Chad Campbell and John Daly.
"There aren't many," Vaughn Taylor said. "Chad Campbell (is one). I don't think he's ever had a golf lesson in his life. That's pretty impressive. He hits it so good, too."
"I like Lucas Glover and Chad Campbell, guys who just get up there and hit it," Davis Love III said. "They're not mechanically thinking about their swing; they're just playing golf. I really like watching them play."
Jim Furyk, despite the loop in his swing, doesn't qualify under the definition of a homemade swing. To be in the homemade swing club, a golfer must be self-taught. Furyk's father, Mike Furyk, a club pro when Furyk was taking up the game, taught him the fundamentals.
HOMEMADE SWINGS HAVE gone the way of persimmon woods as youngsters who show promise receive instruction early through golf academies and private lessons.
The new breed of golfer has a more mechanical swing than "feel" golfers of the past such as Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino, Raymond Floyd, Ben Crenshaw and Miller Barber.
One of the rare exceptions of a homemade swing on the tour this year is rookie Bubba Watson, a former Georgia player. Watson, who leads the tour in driving distance with a 319.3-yard average, said he'll quit the game before he takes a lesson. Unfortunately, Watson didn't qualify for the Masters, where it would be interesting to see how he fared against the beefed-up 7,445-yard Augusta National Golf Club.
"You're not going to see as much of that in the future," golf commentator Bob Murphy said. "There aren't going to be many Bubbas of the world coming through with their own swing."
The 31-year-old Campbell, a three-time winner on the PGA Tour, proudly proclaims that "I've never had a teacher."
Campbell grew up playing baseball and basketball before he took up golf. He thinks that has something to do with the way he swings.
"I just grabbed a club and that's the way I swung it," Campbell said. "That's the way I did it. That's the way I felt I needed to swing it."
There are touches of Ben Hogan's swing in the way Campbell sweeps the ball at impact, but he said the swing is not patterned after anyone.
"There is such a nice rhythm about his swing," Luke Donald said of Campbell. "He's such a consistent player and he knows how to get it done even though it's probably not a textbook golf swing."
Furyk said the key to the swing is that the golf club has to be coming down the correct line and the clubface has got to be square at impact.
"Chad's got a very pretty flight on his shots," Furyk said. "He's a very good ball-striker, so you better believe the path of his club is in good position."
DALY, A TWO-TIME major championship winner, doesn't have nearly as sweet a swing as Campbell. Daly goes well past parallel at the top of the swing, but his fundamentals are sound.
"Jim Hardy, who's my golf instructor, says nobody has a better golf swing to the ball than John Daly, bar none," said Tom Pernice Jr. "He drives it so straight. He's phenomenal. Chad is very similar."
Murphy, who played the PGA Tour in the 1970s and 1980s and won five times (and 11 more times on the Champions Tour), believes it's advisable to have a "feel" swing. Those with mechanical swings can become too robotic.
"The good news is knowing your swing," Murphy said, referring to the Campbells of the world. "And I must tell that most of these young guys do not know their swing, because when things go wrong they cannot fix them. You need to be able to fix your swing when it's off. I will tell you, the swing changes every day. Your body changes every day. Did you sleep well, did you wake up stiff?
"Guys of my era, we fixed our swing on the golf course better than the youngsters are today. Because they've got someone telling them basically what to do all the time.
"In my humble opinion they (natural players) will have better feel than a guy who has a very mechanical swing. It's a little harder for him to build feel into that. He has to follow a lot of ABCs to get to the end."
Shaun Micheel doesn't have a homemade swing, but he agrees with Murphy.
"I think those type of players are better able to cope with things that go on during the round," he said. "Let's say they're hitting it well. Because they're feel-type players, they can make an adjustment where a real mechanical person might spend the rest of the day trying to work his swing out.
"Like Nick Faldo, he was a great player, but he changed his swing so much and he was technical and very rarely did he get off," Micheel continued. "But it seemed to me if he did get off, it might be a little bit more difficult to play. You might see him taking practice swings."
Faldo, who won all six of his major championships after he almost completely altered his swing under the supervision of instructor David Leadbetter, doesn't agree with Micheel's assessment.
"That's the idea," Faldo said, when asked whether a mechanical player can fix his swing during a round. "You're aware of what's going on in your game. You should be able to analyze your tendencies pretty quickly.
"I suppose Daly's is the (prime example of a) homemade swing, really, isn't it?" Faldo said. "If it works on Sunday, that's fine. That's the important thing. If you believe it will work on a Sunday afternoon, then good. But if it's a homemade swing and it's all over the show on a Sunday afternoon, then you need to change it. You can look good, but if you don't know what's happening when the pressure's on, it doesn't mean anything."
