I interviewed Scottish golf pro Kendal McWade for my tennis website www.AutomaticTennis.com about his unconventional methods of teaching. Kendal mentioned that he was influenced by Fred Shoemaker, and that he made the trip to America to learn his (Shoemaker's) methods.

With a little research I found that Shoemaker had written a book call "Extraordinary Golf". In this book Shoemaker describes an exercise that has his students throwing golf clubs, instead of swinging them.

His discussion of this exercise along with the "before" and "after" pictures is one of the things that inspired my own experiments.

The realization came to me that I was in a perfect position to experiment.

There was absolutely no part of my swing I was afraid of screwing up or losing.
I felt willing to try just about anything, even while out on the links.

But I was especially interesting in seeing what this club throwing actually felt like.
To this end I went to a local indoor driving range and tried to imagine I was throwing the club while still holding onto it.

I was surprised by both how much more natural swinging this way felt and how different is was from my normal swing.

I was hitting a 5-iron and was stunned when my first two shots were as close to perfect as I had ever come. Effortless. Smooth. Long, high shots with just a bit of draw.

Then things went to hell. Almost instantly.

I don't know why, but for the remaining 25 minutes we were at the range there were but a few jewels mixed in with the mud clods of my "normal" wild slices and sidewinding worm-burners.

Those few great shots were enough however to convince me that I was on to something.

I felt that this "throwing" swing was at least the right approach to the problem.

Throughout the week I found my thoughts returning to the driving range experience, and one morning threw my driver and six iron into the trunk of my car.

I thought that the ceilings at our store might be high enough to swing a club and that I didn't really need a range to get a feeling for what I had started thinking of as the "throwing swing".

After playing with the swing on a couple of mornings before work I decided to record my thoughts, feelings and progress in a diary.

The following posts will be those first diary entries.