AFTERWORD BY BRIAN MANZELLA
I have listened to explanations of what is happening in the golf swing for nearly half a century. Some folks use a lot of detail and some use less, but in my opinion, the vast majority miss the mark by a large margin. Wouldn’t be great if someone made an analysis and you could find out exactly what happened in the golf swing? When Dr. Steven Nesbit used his knowledge of rigid body dynamics and robotics to solve this mystery for the United States Golf Association back in the 1990s, it was done for the purpose of applying the answers to equipment standards. That project was the foundation of Dr. Nesbit’s published papers on the golf swing. One of those papers, Work and Power Analysis of the Golf Swing, is one of the main reasons I was part of a group of golf professionals that traveled visit Nesbit in 2010. We were looking for those answers. Another golf teacher in the group was my dear friend Michael Jacobs. We were both long time students of renowned instructor Ben Doyle. Ben had told me about this “up-and-comer from Long Island” for several years before we finally met, six years earlier. Michael and I had very similar backgrounds. We grew up playing public golf courses, knew we
wanted to teach golf for a living before we graduated from college, and found the book The Golfing Machine in our search for answers about how the swing really works. We got along famously and started doing golf schools together in 2006. I’ll never forget the day we went to see “Dr. Steve” for the first time. When Mike and I got in the car on Long Island with two other pros for the three-hour trip, I opened an email from Golf Magazine that informed me that I had finally been named to their Top 100 Teachers in America list after many years of trying hard to hone my craft and be recognized for it at the national level. At the meeting, we all sat at a long table and Dr. Steve used an overhead projector and a blackboard to explain concepts to us. One of those explanations stuck with me. It was Nesbit’s simple explanation of the force the golfer applied to the club. Dr. Steve explained that the golfer essentially pulled the club more or less along the path of the hands early in the downswing and then more and more inside that path of the hands, and then finally a right angles or “normal” to that path—right back at the golfer—by impact. And I knew even before his explanation was complete that I had inadvertently tried to get a lot of students to do something very different. And obvi-
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