Alex Myers' 'Crash Out': When the Body Tries to Rescue a Broken Swing

HOOK

At the fifth hole of Rye Golf Club, the ball left Alex Myers' driver on a trajectory nobody wants to draw. It flew right, far enough to reach a house along the property line, and became famous enough to be replayed in conversation by the foursome for the rest of the round. The irony: in that same round, Myers made three birdies. A round any amateur would dream about, stamped by a shot so bad that the man who hit it had to write a whole column confessing it. The Titleist ball caused no damage beyond the hitter's ego, and by Myers' own account, that was the first time it found that particular house.

In more than twenty years sitting in press rooms and watching practice rounds nobody televises, I learned one thing: bad shots tell you more than good ones. A good shot shows you a player's ceiling. A bad shot shows you how that player's internal system operates when everything collapses. When the stands are empty, the match exposes what tactics conceal.

CONTEXT

Myers is a senior writer at Golf Digest and runs a series called 'Late Scratch?', the diary of an amateur who handed himself a one-year assignment: find out how good he can actually get. This is the content format American golf media has lived on for a decade — the journalist becomes the protagonist of his own improvement story. Amateur readers do not need a new Tiger Woods. They need someone who hits it bad like they do, but has the access to call the coaches they cannot call.

Myers' driver fault is not new. He describes it appearing since earlier in the summer, a couple of times a round, with a longer history on annual golf trips with friends, where the pressure comes not from the leaderboard but from being watched. The kind of fault anyone who has held a club recognizes: it disappears entirely on the range and only shows up when someone is standing behind you. It shows up almost exclusively with one club.

Rye Golf Club sits in suburban New York, where homes run close to the lines of play, and the fifth hole is described by the author himself as never a fun one. Long, narrow, demanding a precise tee shot — exactly the hole a player losing confidence with the driver fears most. In that round Myers still made three birdies, which means his underlying ball-striking and scoring ability were intact. The problem was isolated to one club and one context, not a global collapse.

CORE

The man called in was Mario Guerra, an instructor listed on Golf Digest's Best In State roster. His diagnosis inverted Myers' assumption that the problem was entirely mental: Myers produces too much vertical force in his swing and not enough horizontal force. On certain swings he gets so steep that his body instinctively recognizes a poor position and crashes out in a desperate, futile attempt to save it.

That term needs translating into technical language. 'Crashing out' describes what golf biomechanics calls early extension: the pelvis thrusts toward the ball and the torso stands up out of its forward bend to rescue a steep shaft, forcing a flip at the bottom. It is the most common amateur pattern, and the thing tour players have spent over a decade curing. An entire generation of modern swing theory was built around flattening the shaft and moving the club around the body rather than up and down.

So Guerra's prescription is not new, but it is packaged simply: swing more horizontally around the body, keeping the club as low and as parallel to the ground as possible in both the backswing and the downswing — almost like making a baseball swing while in golf posture. This is the classic shallowing drill, a deliberate over-correction designed to be rehearsed at an exaggerated scale and then blended back into the real motion.

The checkpoint Myers used to grade himself lives inside a swing-analysis app: at the point halfway between the top of the backswing and impact, a good swing has the shaft more in line with the trail arm. The app calls it the moment of truth. In technical terms it is the delivery position. Its practical value is bigger than its name: it is a checkpoint an amateur can see with a phone camera, something only a laboratory could provide fifteen years ago.

The observed result is concrete: when Myers rehearsed the horizontal feel, ball flight came out lower and flatter, and on video the swing looked much better than his normal move. He says it did not take long to produce improved shots.

In motor-learning literature this is the standard sequence: create an exaggerated feel, repeat it until the brain accepts it as the new default, then shrink the amplitude until it blends into the old motion. The problem sits in step three, and Myers' piece stops right before it. He still has homework on the range, and the on-course goal is to find a blend.

Alongside the mechanical layer sits the mental one, and this is the part I consider most valuable. Mental coach Josh Nichols confirms the link Myers identified himself: the more swing thoughts in the head, the more likely a mid-swing compensation appears. The most common pattern Nichols sees is a player who is too steep or too open at the top and tries to flip things back on track during the downswing to square the club up. A player who senses a bad position mid-swing reflexively adds a rescue move; the rescue move makes the fault worse. That self-reinforcing loop explains why one fault can survive for months despite heavy practice.

The countermeasure Nichols offers is the cheapest piece of golf equipment there is: a three-count in, three-count out breathing rhythm, plus a single technical cue instead of five or seven competing thoughts. Myers credits that breathing technique with producing one of the best rounds of his life, the year he won the green jacket of his annual buddies' trip — an amateur replica of the Green Jacket at Augusta.

Amateur golf has its own pressure system, requiring no world ranking and no purse. A green jacket on a trip with friends creates real tension, and the driver collapses under that tension in a completely real way. When I rewatch footage from events that never got televised, the same thing repeats: players do not break down from lack of skill, they break down because the decision system gets noisy.

One observation from where I sit — a Korean writing about golf for an American audience — is that the two amateur cultures carry two different blind spots. American players romanticize Asian-style discipline and believe volume solves every fault. Asian players idealize Western competitive freedom and believe psychology solves the rest. Myers sits exactly between those two beliefs: he practices a drill and he practices breathing.

CONTRARIAN

The thing worth questioning is the evidence, not the technique. Myers describes improvement after a single session, judged by eye on video, with no launch monitor numbers, no Strokes Gained data, no measurement showing the fault is gone. For a professional writer, that is a far lower bar than the one he applies to others. People doubt the voice before they hear the argument; I learned to gather the evidence first and expect things second.

There are three specific risks. First, the baseball-in-golf-posture drill is an over-correction; push it too far and the miss can migrate from steep to flat, from slice to block. Myers himself admits the on-course goal is to find a blend, which is another way of saying he is not certain. The video checkpoint exists precisely because of this: it is the safety brake on a drill with a tendency to overshoot.

Second, his fault carries the signature of the yips: situational, pressure-linked, absent on the range. Yips patterns have a high relapse rate, and one good practice session is not resolution. Next summer, on the annual trip, the driver will answer on video's behalf.

Third, the story quietly promotes an entire ecosystem: a Best In State certified instructor, a mental coach, a swing-analysis app, all named. No sponsorship is disclosed, but the effect is clear: readers are taught that golf improvement is a purchasable service, and buyers need the right seller. I do not read that as a flaw in the piece. I read it as the structure of the industry — and the reason I always read the sourcing before the advice.

TAKEAWAY

The thing worth carrying out of this story, even for a weekend player, is not the baseball drill. It is the idea that a bad shot leaves a mechanical trail, and that trail can be read if you are willing to go back and look. One season is a single sentence in a book that runs a decade long.

Myers still has to answer his own question: will the horizontal feel survive a buddies' trip, where there is no instructor, no app, only four people watching. The answer will arrive on some summer morning, on a narrow hole, with a driver in his hands. As for me, I will keep reading the next installment.