AFTERWORD, by Brian Manzella

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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Afterword

ously very wrong. If “normal” was where I needed to get my students and myself to wind up at impact, then I needed to create a different set of conditions at nearly every point along the way so we all could “go normal.” Not long after that, “going normal” became the first catch phrase of the modern era of science-based golf instruction. And the first set of “science-y” words that many golf teaching professionals ever heard of or learned were the “alphabeta-gamma” terms from Nesbit’s Work and Power.

But poring over the graphs in that Dr. Steve research paper was never going to be enough to really understand the detail inside the Nesbit analysis. The next step was more examination and Michael Jacobs had the gumption to begin to making this study his mission.

Years later after finally looking at good raw 3D data from Mike’s new optical capture system— Nesbit told Michael that he could put “something” together to compute the forces and torques we had been studying.

Six months later, Dr. Nesbit emailed Mike and told him, “Your program is ready.” I went on the trip to pick up the program and on the ride back we were filled with anticipation for what was to come. We got back to Mike’s place off the Long Island Expressway and ran inside to run a swing. As luck would have it, the first one we did was that of long drive phenom Jamie Sadlowski.

Mike pulled up the graphs for Sadlowski’s forces and torques, picked up a club and worked his way into Jamie’s extreme top of the backswing position. Looking at the readouts on a big monitor, he started to try to duplicate what the graphs said the long driver did in transition. Two seconds into Michael following the force and torque directions, I could clearly see—and he could easily feel—that he was replicating the exact movements of the longest hitter in golf.

It was a moment I’ll never forget. It was the real deal, and we now had the tools to find out the secrets of the golf swing that have eluded golfers, teachers and theorists over the centuries. A little more than four years have passed since that day. We have taught across the USA and in quite a few countries around the world with the findings we’ve discovered with Jacobs 3D. We’ve vastly improved our teaching and our own golf games. The software and the math that makes it go has been a constant source of interest in the golf instruction world.

As Director of Instruction for Jacobs 3D, I’ve improved my understanding of the material and how I use it in lessons by leaps and bounds. And, in my opinion, Michael Jacobs has become the world’s foremost authority on the subject of golfer applied club kinetics. The cherry on top of the cake is Michael’s business collaboration with Dr. Nesbit has resulted in Steve building the keys to another research tool—Alpha Man—which computes the forces and torques of the whole body.

I wrote that one day Mike’s Elements of the Swing book would “be talked about... as one that changed the game of instruction.” It is my view that The Science of the Swing will be the reference for club kinetics for decades. I’m sure you’ll learn a ton from it, as I have. It’s been great being part of this fabulous team and I relish my role in helping folks understand how knowing what really happens in the golf swing can be powerful and liberating.

Brian Manzella

Golf Digest 50 Best Teacher Golf Magazine Top 100 Teacher New Orleans, La.