History of RotarySwing - Long Version

Take a deep dive into the development of the perfect golf swing that is safe for the body to prevent injury while producing serious power with the fewest moving parts biomechanically possible.

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Hey Chuck, how are you?

David, good.

How are you?

Awesome.

So one of the things that we were talking about is a lot of the Rotary Swing members sort of wanted to talk about the history of Rotary Swing and how you got started.

And although you've had a video that tells you a little bit, you mind going way back?

Well, you want to go all the way back to the beginning.

It's a long story.

I'm turning 44 next month in just a couple weeks.

I've been playing, this is 30 years now that I've been playing golf, and my first time ever playing golf was a little bit different than how most people played.

I went out on Christmas Day as a 14-year -old kid, and there was six inches of snow on the ground.

We had to use orange balls.

The ground was completely frozen.

I never played on green grass like the first three times I played golf.

And the pins were like literally frozen into the ground.

I literally didn't know for the first month that I played golf that the pins came out of the hole.

I just thought they were all stuck in there.

I didn't know any better.

But I immediately, I was totally hooked and became super, you know, just fell in love with the game immediately, even though it was playing on white stuff instead of green stuff.

What inspired you to go out and for the first time ever go play golf in the snow?

You know, my.

My childhood stuff was a little bit different.

I definitely didn't grow up at the country club with the silver spoon kind of thing.

It was pretty much the exact opposite of that.

And so my mom had me when she was really, really young.

I think my mom had me when she was 15.

And so she had to drop out of high school to help raise me.

And so my mom really, really struggled growing up.

And we didn't have.

Any money, I mean, at all.

Like we, we grew up in government housing, we were on welfare, we had food stamps and all of that stuff.

And my mom had a lot of, uh, guys in and out of her life as we were growing up.

And one of these guys who I never.

My dad left when I was two months old, so I didn't really have, like, a father figure growing up.

But this guy who I was trying to kind of bond with and attached to was super passionate about golf.

His brother was super passionate about golf, that's all they talked about all the time.

And I was, you know, I'd never played golf in my life, I'd never even thought about golf, didn't know anything about it.

And he finally asked me one day, he's like, Hey, would you know it's Christmas Day?

would you like to go play golf?

And so for me, I'm like, Wow, like, I get a chance to, you know, get to know this guy and to go and do something different.

And I don't know anything about golf, so why the heck not?

So?

I was super excited to go out and play, but it's definitely not the the country Club upbringing, for sure.

So let's talk a little bit about, uh, that, that metaphor for life and and Well, let's take a step back.

Before that, what made you get obsessed?

Was it magazines?

Was it videos?

I mean, you went from planes in the snow to it has now become your life.

Where was that pivot point where you knew that you became obsessed?

I have always been the kid who took apart all his toys.

I had to know how my toys worked.

I took apart my Nintendo.

I took apart my GI Joes.

I literally, I was like, man, how did these legs move like this?

And I was like, oh, there's little rubber bands in here.

And I'm like, I didn't ever put them back together, but I love taking them apart because I just love how to understanding how stuff works.

And so for me, because I've been like this my entire life, I drove my mom nuts.

And I took apart her TV.

I took apart her VCR when I was a kid.

Like, I just like, wow, you stick something in here and it starts playing stuff.

How does that work?

And so the golf swing for me, as most golfers become obsessed with the swing, it was an instant lifetime pursuit for me because the golf swing has really been one of those things that, in my opinion, has never really been solved per se.

It's been taught so many different ways.

Still to this day, it's taught so many different ways.

But you can go down so many different rabbit holes looking for answers.

I'm obsessive about that stuff.

I have to know how everything works and that's carried through.

Not from the time that I was just, you know, a kid taking apart my toys, but to this day now I just have bigger toys.

I take apart my cars and my gearboxes and engines, and I have to understand how stuff works.

And golf gave me that opportunity to have a passion that I was super in love with.

But also like, man, I want to understand how this stuff works, like, how do you hit a ball?

how does Jack Nicholas hit the ball that way?

And that's actually how I first got my real introduction to understanding a golf swing philosophy, if you will.

You know, when I was in my mom, my grandmother used to drop me off at the golf course.

It was $4 and 35 cents and you could play all day and shoes and shirts were optional.

That was my first golf course I started.

So in the summer, she would drop me off there and I would play 45 holes a day all day.

And when I was waiting for her to pick me up, I'd sit in the clubhouse and read every single back issue of golf magazine, golf digest, all, you know, it was piles and piles of magazines in the clubhouse.

And so I was just reading all this stuff.

And at first I had, no idea what I was reading or what it meant or, but I was trying to get better at golf.

I instantly knew like I had to conquer this game, even though it's a game you can't conquer.

But a cousin of mine had these golf my way tapes by Jack Nicklaus, the VHS tapes.

And since I had taken my VCR apart, I had to figure out how to put it back together and put this VCR tape in there.

And I wore that thing out.

I watched that Jack Nicklaus golf my way tapes so many times that it literally stopped working.

But I loved it because, you know, Jack Nicholas and he had his teacher, Jack Grout on there talking about how, how Jack swings.

And of course, at this time, you know, Jack is the greatest golfers of all time, if not the greatest golfer of all time.

And so if you're going to learn from somebody, it makes sense to learn from this guy.

And so I really started down that rabbit hole.

That was really the catalyst where having these VHS tapes and wearing them out and watching them over and over and over again, made it so that I then had to read.

every single golf book that I could ever get my hands on every single golf magazine.

And I obviously had subscriptions to all the golf magazines and I just couldn't wait to get the next one that each month.

And so I've been pretty much obsessed with the mechanics of the swing from the very first get go.

Tell me about your first golf lesson.

Oh boy.

Ah, my first golf lesson.

Well, I kind of, It was a little bit of a disappointment.

So growing up, we didn't have any money for golf lessons or anything like that, but I got decent enough.

I got to a two handicap by my senior year of high school, played golf my senior year for a high school team, and then was offered a golf scholarship.

And one of the things that.

coach at the college offered was, listen, you know, you obviously have potential, you can play, you know, you've got down to two handicapped working on it on your own, but I'm going to get you, you know, great instruction that's going to help you get to the next level.

You know, I was that kid who was out there because I was out there 45 holes a day.

I get there first thing in the morning, be there all day.

And so I was always imagining myself making a putt to win the Masters and hitting a tee shot on the 18th hole at Augusta.

You know, I have those dreams of playing at an elite level from a very young age.

And so my belief was that the thing holding me back was just getting great instruction.

I knew if I could just work with somebody who was a great instructor.

who could tell me what I was doing wrong because I did as best I could on my own, but I still, if I could just hire a coach that could just show me exactly what I needed to do, that I could play at the next level.

And so my first lesson was our coach brought.

I think there was eight or nine guys on our golf team and our coach brought in somebody who worked at a local golf store, you know, selling clubs and things like that.

He was a PGA professional and he, I think he fitted clubs and he basically came in and sit on the range in front of us all and said, okay, well, you know, you really want to strengthen your grip.

And you know, if you're slicing aim left and if you're hooking aim, right.

And, and that was the lesson.

I'm like, What, what that doesn't like?

Those are just like these weird band-aids.

And even back then I had this idea, like, listen, there's got to be like some sort of right and wrong in doing that stuff, right, like, but it wasn't.

It was just like, if you're doing this, you do this, and if you're doing that, then you do it this way.

And I'm like, So we all just kind of figured out our own, we dig it out of the dirt, as Hogan said, and and we all just kind of find our own way.

And I'm like, Oh, that's Okay.

I mean, I don't know.

He's a PGA professional and he's the first golf lesson per se that I've ever had.

And so we had a few more guys that our coach brought in like this.

And I later came to realize that our coach who had sold me on taking this golf scholarship, well, this guy couldn't break a hundred to save his life.

He owned a couple of TCBYs.

And the only reason he was our golf coach is he was the only one that would do it for 1500 bucks a semester.

So it was really just volunteer work for him.

He just loved golf, you know?

And that's how a lot of people get into golf and coaching and things like that.

And I was in an NCAA is a division two school.

And like, here's our golf coach making, he owns TCV wise and he doesn't know anything about golf.

And so he was doing the best he could, but he would just bring in these random people who he knew who fitted clubs or worked at a golf store or worked in the pro shop.

And we got all these random things.

After that, my first paying lesson, the first guy I ever hired and wrote a check to and said, all right, now we're done with this nonsense over here.

I'm going to go hire the real deal.

Was in Denver.

And this guy worked with a lot of LPGA players.

He was a well-known coach in Denver, famous guy in the magazines and all this stuff.

And he was expensive.

It was like 150 bucks.

And I think I was, I think I'd just gotten out of college and I was ready to like take that next step.

commit and spend the money and I didn't have the money to spend, but, but I wanted to hire like a real golf pro.

And so I hired this guy for a lesson and I still remember the whole thing to this day.

I was hitting the ball.

I would hit, I went to him and you know, they say, Hey, well, what's going on with your swing?

What can I do to help you?

I said, well, I said, sometimes I hit my pitching wedge 130 yards and sometimes I hit 160 yards and I have no idea why.

And he's like, okay.

And so he looks at my clubs and he watches me hit a couple of shots.

And, you know, I, I, just like I had said, I hit one pitching wedge, like 170 yards.

I just nuke this thing.

And then I hit another one and it was like 130 yards.

And I'm like, it's kind of hard to play golf when your pitching wedge is going 30, 40 yards, different distance.

And he's like, here's what you need to All you need to do is imagine that there's a table in front of you and you're just trying to hit it under that table.

That was my lesson.

That was the whole lesson for 150 bucks.

And obviously that didn't fix anything.

The problem was not only in my swing and how I was flipping my hands at the bottom that was changing the loft of the club, but also my clubs.

I was using regular flex graphite Callaway clubs that would, they were so soft that the club was just flipping all over the place at impact.

And here's this guy working with LPGA pros, making all this money on the tour and the whole lesson didn't look at my clubs.

Didn't do anything about the flipping at the bottom.

It was just imagine you're hitting it under a table.

And, and that was the first time where I realized that golf instruction for, you know, it was the first step in many lessons that I took later on that it was based on nonsense.

It's like feels and visualizations and, but for me, I don't work like that.

I want a scientific reason.

I want a black and white definitive answer.

This is what you're doing.

Here's what's causing it.

Here's how to fix it.

And I didn't get that.

And so that was the first lesson I ever took.

And I still to this day, it's been 20 something years, 25 years.

And I still have not forgotten that lesson.

Well, let me ask you a question because you were also really big into snowboarding back in college.

And in fact, if I recall, you were a pro.

Yeah, so I actually turned pro when I was 19.

I was a professional snowboard mountaineer for the North Face, Patagonia, K2 Snowboard.

I had a bunch of sponsors, but basically what I did is I was climbing these mountains all over the Northern Hemisphere, all of North America.

I went to Norway, Mexico, and was climbing these mountains and trying to be the first to climb and snowboard down them.

And in Colorado, we have 54 peaks.

Now it's 55, 56, when I count it, but 54 peaks over 14,000 feet.

And I was trying to be the first person ever to climb and snowboard down.

They'd already been skied down, but nobody had ever snowboarded down them.

And so as a 19 year old kid, I did like eight of them.

The first year that I moved to Colorado, the next thing I knew I had done 35 of them.

And and so snowboarding became snowboard, mountaineering, really, it was, you know, rock climbing and ice climbing.

And doing all these technical things was really a huge part of my life.

So I was also, while I was golfing, I was snowboarding and doing both, and The cool thing about snowboarding for me is that it taught me two really important things.

One, it taught me how to learn.

Anytime I would go and learn something snowboarding, if I was learning a new trick, there was a very systematic approach of how we learned everything.

It wasn't just like, oh, well.

Just imagine that you're, you know, if I'm going to go and throw myself off a cliff and I'm going to do a 540 inverted spin off of that cliff, just hope for the best or just imagine it.

Envision in your head.

If you just do this, you'll land.

I mean, this is life or death stuff that I was doing.

And so for me to just huck myself off a cliff and hope for the best and envision it, it didn't really make a lot of sense to me.

So we went through a really simple process.

We would start out and we would do things on a trampoline.

So if I was going to learn a trick.

I would literally start without a snowboard, without anything.

And we'd just be on a trampoline and we would do like the first half of that rotation.

So like if I was doing a 540 spin, like one and a half spins, I would start out and I would learn and tuck my shoulder and land on my back.

So we do a little half spin.

And once we had that technique down, we'd add to a 360 and then we'd go to a 540.

And then once I had that safely on a trampoline, we would go onto a foam pit where we would snowboard down this big thing, this big jump, and then land into a foam pit so that it was safe in case I hooked myself incorrectly.

I wouldn't die landing on snow and ice.

I landed on a nice soft foam pit.

Once we had it down on the foam pit, we would take it outside and we'd go to an airbag where you could do it off snow, but you would land on this nice cushy airbag, but the airbag would allow you to ride out of it if you landed it properly.

And then eventually I would go to the snow.

But this process to learn like a single trick, sometimes it would take a couple of days.

Sometimes it'd take a couple of weeks, depending on how complex it was.

But the thing that was cool about it, is that there was a systematic approach to it.

It wasn't just huck yourself off or envision hitting under a table and hope for the best.

And so I was very lucky to have that experience really early on in my life.

To learn.

Like, there's coaches out there who teach things in a way that's not only safe to learn, but it's very specific and systematic and process oriented.

So for me, that was one of the things that really had a huge impact on how I started thinking about learning the golf swing later on.

Well, you also, when you were doing that, if I recall, you had some serious injuries that made you rethink a lot of things.

I've broken a lot of bones, David.

I've broken a lot of bones.

I've had a lot of surgeries.

I've done a lot of different.

What other people would consider crazy things?

To me?

They're fun things.

But I mean, I'm a downhill mountain bike racer.

I've won a bunch of races, mountain biking and and dirt jumping and doing all these big tricks and flying in the air and hucking myself off of things.

But, um, very early on I started experiencing pain in my body, and it's actually it was way less.

From snowboarding.

Sometimes, I definitely hurt my back and my neck, snowboarding several times, but the thing that hurt my body the most was actually golf.

And that was one of the things that, like, I was in a bad car accident when I was 19.

I had a, I was stopped and a guy hit me doing 65 rear ended me doing 65 and pushed my car, you know, off the end of a guardrail and all this stuff.

And it was really, it was a big, big deal for me, but it really messed up my hip.

And so golf obviously is super important.

Your lower body, your hips are everything in the golf swing.

And so.

From that very moment, I always had issues with pain in my back, pain in my hips from the time that I was pretty young.

And then as I started playing golf, I could find that I could play golf for like a day and then need to take two or three days off, even when I'm in my early 20s, because my body would be so sore, I'd be so achy that I would just need to take days off to rest.

And it became, the snowboarding thing didn't bother my back as much.

As golf did, which was kind of crazy, I'm hucking myself off 30 and 40 foot cliffs and landing on ice and all the stuff.

But golf did all the damage to my, to my body.

It was aggravating my body more than anything else I was doing.

And so I started looking into trying to figure out how to address those issues with my golf swing, because if I didn't golf, I wasn't sore.

I could snowboard.

I could jump a bike.

I could hike all day.

I could ice climb.

I could rock climb.

And golf was the thing that was doing the most damage.

So yeah, early on, that had a huge influence on my coaching that I later received and pushing me down the road to injury prevention.

All this happens and you still decide you're going to go pro in golf and you move to Florida.

Yeah.

So after I graduated college and I played a little bit of amateur golf in Colorado, I'd taken the lesson with the Colorado golf pro.

And I was like, you know what?

I just need to go to a place where I can practice year round.

I can play 365 days a year.

I need to go where all of these top golf pros are.

The guys I'm seeing in the golf magazines, the guys I'm seeing on TV.

I want to have access to that.

And in golf, you kind of got a few options.

You've got California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida.

We ended up choosing Florida as our home base, and there's tons and tons of high-level golfers there.

The mini tours are full of super, super great golfers there, great ball strikers there, and tons of coaches.

And so I started flying back and forth from Colorado to Florida interviewing golf pros.

And I had one simple criteria because at this point I'd taken some lessons and I kind of was starting to form my own ideas about the swing.

I mean, I already, I started teaching when I was pretty young, but of course I didn't know what I was doing.

I was just teaching based on what I was trying to do in my own swing.

Right.

But I started looking for somebody who I felt could really help me get to that next level and turn pro.

And so my only criteria was before you give me a lesson and before I write you a check.

All I ask is you go play one round of golf with me.

And not a single person would do it.

Not a single golf pro would be willing to go out and play golf with me.

And I finally found one guy after interviewing a dozen different teaching pros.

And these are guys that are on TV all the time.

These are guys in the magazine.

None of them would play.

And so I found this one guy who was working under David Ledbetter.

and working with a bunch of tour pros that I later became to work with, Robert Gomez and Ernie Els and Trevor Elmom and all these big name guys.

And he's like, yeah, I'll go play with you.

And he went out and absolutely played lights out in a cold, windy day in Florida.

And I played my absolute best as well as I could play.

I shot even par and he shot a 68 and made it look as easy as pie.

And I said, this is my guy.

This guy can teach me something, you know?

And so having that experience of seeing somebody that can not only talk about the swing, but could actually do it was everything to me.

I've always been the believer that if you can't do simple math, you can't add, I'm not going to try to learn algebra from you.

If you can't do what you're asking me to do and demonstrate it to me, then you can't teach me what you're asking me to learn.

You have to be able to do it.

Experience is the most important thing in the world to me.

And that experience with him taught me another important thing because he was a phenomenal golfer.

We ended up doing a couple golf DVDs together back many, many years ago.

But I realized another important lesson is just because you can do it.

doesn't mean you can actually teach it.

So there's a mixture here of being able, in the ideal world, You find somebody who not only has the experience in proving track record that they can actually do what they're asking you to do, so they know that it works, but they also know how to explain it and articulate it in a way that's digestible and you can learn.

So tell me about your first pro tournament.

That was a little frustrating as well.

I think golf has got a lot of frustrations in it.

I certainly had a lot of frustrations early on, but my first pro tournament was in Orlando.

I was still working with the same coach and I went out and I've been preparing for this for a while and I was really excited about it.

It was a one day event.

And I went out and shot 72.

I had four birdies and four bogeys.

And I was pretty frustrated because had I just not made those four bogeys, I would have won a check.

I would have made some money.

But in these one day events, it's kind of like an all or nothing.

The first, the top three or four or five guys get paid and the rest, you know, we're all sent home packing.

I shot 72 and I called my coach right after that.

I said, man, you know, here's what happened.

You know, I shot this.

I'm walking him through my round.

And he's like, I asked him, you know, what do you think?

You know, I still was missing the ball out to the right.

That's always been kind of my miss.

And he said, you know, what do I need to do?

And he literally said to me, I still remember to say, he said, make fewer bogeys.

I'm trying.

What do you mean make fewer bogeys?

No kidding.

I, obviously I want to make fewer bogeys, but how, you know, why am I still missing these shots that we've been working on for eight hours a day?

I'm hitting ball.

I'm hitting, you know, six, 700 balls a day.

I'm practicing eight hours a day.

I've been practicing for months.

I still miss the exact same shots.

I miss the same way.

It's costing me these bogeys.

And you're telling me make fewer bogeys.

And I'm asking you to tell me how to make fewer bogeys if we need to fix my ball striking issues.

And, and that, that was.

Not the answer I was looking for because he just didn't have the answers.

He didn't know exactly how to fix my issues.

He could hit the ball great himself, but getting somebody else explaining it to them is completely different.

It's a completely different skill set.

And, you know, like the first lesson I ever gave in my life, I kind of got that first taste of trying to teach somebody.

but not really knowing how to teach.

My first golf lesson, I was 19 years old and I didn't know anything about golf.

I hadn't even taken a golf lesson yet.

All that happened was I was in between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college.

I'm getting ready to go off to college, and I'm doing the typical summer work, right?

I'm doing handyman work around the neighborhoods, and I was cleaning this lady's gutters.

I was up on her roof cleaning out all the leaves on her gutter, and she said, hey, I heard that you're a golfer.

Would you mind giving my husband a lesson?

I said, I'm not a golf instructor.

I'm just.

I'm a decent golfer, but I don't know how to teach.

And she's like, listen, here's the deal.

He had a stroke.

He lost the use of his right size, right arm.

And he hadn't left the house in like two years.

And this guy, his name was Don.

And he used to be the guy up there cleaning his gutters and taking care of his house.

And just a typical man.

And he now, after this stroke, this debilitating injury, it made him half a man.

He didn't want to go outside anymore.

He didn't want to do anything.

He used to be athletic.

He used to work out.

He used to go do things.

And now she just couldn't get him out of the house anymore.

And so I was like, first of all, I don't know how to give a golf lesson.

I sure as heck don't know how to give a golf lesson to a guy that's only got one arm that he can use and that has never played golf.

And she's like, well, listen, I'm paying you 12 bucks an hour to clean these gutters.

I'll give you 20 bucks an hour.

I said, I'll do it.

I'm in, of course, you know, I had to take it.

I'm a broke college, soon to be college kid.

So I said, you know what I said?

I told her up front, I don't know what I'm doing, but I'll do my best.

So I go out to the golf course, take Don out there and we do.

We hit a few balls in the range and then he wants to go and play, and Don doesn't really talk much either.

He had a speech impediment after after a stroke.

And and so We go out on the golf course to play like nine holes.

And I thought it was an absolute disaster.

He's topping shots.

He hits a couple of good ones, but it's random, right?

I'm like, I'm trying to do, I'm doing everything I can to try and help him hit the golf ball.

But again, I only know how to teach him based on how I swing.

And I swing with two arms, right?

I don't know how any other way.

But what was cool about that.

Is that he didn't say hardly anything the entire lesson?

The whole time we're out there on the course, he hardly said a thing.

And I'm like, he hates me, I don't blame him, I don't know what I'm doing.

And this is going to be a one and done kind of thing.

And so I take him home and, you know, say thanks.

I hope you had a good time.

He doesn't really say much, and I get a call later that night from Don's wife, and she's like, Don hasn't smiled this much in years.

And it actually still, kind of, still, kind of makes room a little emotional about it.

Because for this guy to literally go from having his life taken away from him from the stroke to all of a sudden being able to get outside again and wanting to go outside again.

And for golf to have an impact on his life positively, to be like, Yeah, I can still do stuff and I can be outside and I can do things that I enjoy.

It had a huge impact on me.

And then so after that, she's like, would you mind working with Don?

You know, two or three days a week?

And I'm like, of course, I'd love to, so that's how I literally got into my golf.

Instruction was teaching a stroke victim who only had the use of his left arm.

So, which obviously had a huge impact for everything I did later on in life.

But all these little things, they kind of all started adding up to your life.

Experiences on my injuries that work with with Don, with the stroke victim, my my lessons.

With all these coaches who didn't help me get any better and just said, make fewer bogeys, like, OK, no kidding.

They all had they were all just kind of leading me down the path to where I am today.

When you look at that, where was that dividing where you go from being a pro to being a teaching professional?

Yeah.

So after my time with Adrian was the instructor I was working with, I went to several other instructors after that because I was trying to find somebody who could tell me.

what to do.

Like, how do I do this?

I know, obviously, you know, in college, I was a two handicap before I went to college.

I was, you know, maybe two or maybe I got down to scratch in college.

And then after I turned pro, I couldn't break 82 days in a row.

And I was taking more lessons.

I was, that's when I really started taking lessons.

And I became so frustrated that I went from being able to shoot par.

On any course to not being able to break 80 and playing as a professional.

And it was all because I was taking lessons and the lessons were making me worse, and it was infuriating for me and it was costing me a fortune.

I didn't have any money, so for me, every lesson that I was taking was like a serious investment.

And so I really, really, really got frustrated.

But at the same point, while I was playing, even though I wasn't scoring as well as I could on every, I mean, I won several tournaments and I, you know, I played some tournaments and I was traveling around playing state opens and things like that.

And Monday qualifiers for the PGA tour, but I started picking up students because of the guys that I played with, because they would see me hit the ball.

They liked my swing.

And they said, dude, I, I want to hit the ball like that.

So I started picking up a lot of other pro students.

So my, I went from Don, having only use of one arm, to, you know, very quickly.

Thereafter.

Most all of my students were tour pros, which was really straight.

It's not a normal pathway to golf instruction.

But it just happened to be that.

They were like, Dude, I like the way you're hitting the ball, I want to hit it like that.

Tell me more, tell me what you're doing.

And again, because I, even while I was working with these other instructors, I was reading every golf book under the sun, buying every golf DVD, constantly tinkering with my swing.

I'm in a lifetime tinkerer.

I'm always in front of a mirror working on stuff, trying to understand how stuff works.

And so I could explain the swing the way that I understood it.

And I was actually seeing better results with my students than I could with myself because I was still being taught by somebody else.

So I kind of got to this point where I had this little teaching practice going and this playing career.

And I was like, you kind of have to make a decision of going one way or the other.

And I got to the point where with my own playing career that I was just like, you know what?

After all of these guys that I've worked with, and I'm working with guys who are teaching major championship winners, you know, guys who are on TV beating Tiger Woods head-to-head in an event and getting just the most nonsensical teaching advice.

Like, oh, well, just imagine that you're moving a two-by-four back with your belly button.

What?

Like, that's the lessons that I'm spending all this money on.

Like, it's not making any difference.

I'm not getting any better.

I finally just came to the conclusion, wrong, right, or indifferent.

I don't think any of these guys know what the heck they're talking about.

And I just am wasting time.

I'm wasting money.

I'm a worse off golfer than when I started.

And I'm just going to start from scratch.

And I'm going to figure this stuff out my own way.

I'm going to not take any more lessons.

I'm going to do it.

What I think I need to do in the swing and the stuff that I'm working on with my students, these guys who are playing professionally and the benefit, the stuff that I'm seeing working for them.

And I'm going to keep working on my own swing.

And so I finally made that cutoff, right?

You know what?

I'm going to start teaching.

I'm going to teach myself.

And I'm going to teach my tour pros and decide that I'm going to figure out my own way of doing this.

I'm going to start with a blank slate.

I'm going to start from scratch and say, I don't care what any book that's ever been written about the golf swing says.

I don't care what anything in the magazines that I've been reading for the last decade say.

I'm going to start from scratch and say, what is the body designed to do?

What can it do?

Because again, during this whole time, my body is just a wreck.

And the more lessons I took and every lesson I took after.

After that lesson, my hip was really hurting.

Like, oh, yeah, you know, it's just part of the game.

I'm like, really?

Like, and I don't know, you know, how do you know any better at this point?

You know, I'm in my late 20s, and I'm still taking these lessons from these guys who are teaching guys on the tour making millions of dollars, and they're telling me that pain is just part of the game.

And I'm like, wow, this is really tough.

Like, I can go huck myself off a 30-foot corner of snowboarding, and that doesn't hurt.

But hitting a ball with a stick, that hurts like hell.

And I just said, there's no way.

And the final straw for me with that was, I think I was at maybe 30 years old, 31 years old.

And I, my hip was bothering me so bad.

And all of these coaches I had gone to didn't have an answer for it.

They had no idea what was causing it or, and they didn't even try to address it.

And I went to an orthopedic surgeon like, man, maybe there's just something mechanically wrong.

Maybe, you know, something's in there that I just don't understand or don't know.

And this guy, orthopedic surgeon in Orlando said, yeah.

You've got no cartilage left in your left hip basically.

And you're probably gonna need a hip replacement soon.

Oh, wow.

And I was like, dude, there's no way you're cutting my freaking femur in half.

I'm a kid.

I'm 30 years old.

And you're talking about replacing my hip already.

And it only hurts when I play golf.

There's no freaking way.

There has to be something that I'm doing in my golf swing that's causing this pain.

And that really became a huge.

Catalyst for me because I'm like, I'm not letting anybody cut my femur in half.

I've already had enough surgeries by this point and had five more shortly thereafter.

But that really became kind of the foundation.

Because I had had so much pain for so long, and since I was 19, of having all this hip pain and back pain from my golf swing.

I'm like, there has to be a better way to do this, there has to be.

So.

From there, you actually had an opportunity to work in some performance labs, didn't you?

And really test some of these theories?

Yeah.

So as I became more enamored with getting out of pain, pain is an amazing motivator.

So I'm like, dude, I love golf.

Obviously I want to play for their lifetime.

I still wanted to play professionally full time and win on the tour and all of those dreams that you have as a kid golfer.

But I really had to figure out how I could play and not be in pain every day.

Yeah, you can't practice, you can't play.

And so the first really big opportunity for that came with a guy named Dr.

Jeff Broker, and he was a P.

h.

D.

biomechanist from the U.

S.

olympics committee and he had seen a bunch of stuff that i'd published on my website.

My website's been up since 2005.

We were the first golf instruction membership site on the net.

And so I was publishing a lot of my ideas and I started picking up a lot more students and a lot more tour pros who liked what I had to say.

And so Dr.

Broker had also seen a lot of the stuff that I'd published on there.

And he was doing a ton of research at the University of Colorado.

He was asking me like about some of my ideas and he's like, I would really love to sit down with you sometime.

And I was also the teaching pro at Castle Pines Golf Club.

And so, which was just, you know, 45 minutes away from where he was based at.

So we started doing a lot of work together.

He was coming out to Florida.

We did a really, a ton of really cool research on grip pressure and hip feet using.

Pressure plates using understanding weight, shift and and dynamic ground forces and all these things.

And so he was like me, he was an inveterate inverter tinker he ought.

He wanted to understand how everything worked and realized that the stuff that was being taught pretty commonly in the golf industry of.

Just imagine you're hitting it under a table, and if you're aiming, you know, if you're hitting it right, aim, left and that kind of nonsense.

He's like, Dude, this doesn't make any sense, and the cool thing about him was that his background in the Olympics Committee, he worked with the best athletes in the world.

He was training Lance Armstrong when Lance Armstrong was dominating everything, and all these top -level performing athletes at the U.

S.

Olympics Committee, he was working with them, and everything they did was completely objective.

There was no gray area.

It was not like, oh, well, my personal preference is that you kind of do this.

Or if you have this issue, maybe try that.

It was like, no, no, no.

Here's the biomechanical research.

Here, we're going to go put you in the lab.

We're going to put you on force plates.

We're going to look at this thing objectively.

And here's the most efficient way to do it.

Here's the safest way to do it.

Here's the biomechanical issues that you're going to run into.

Here's the anatomical issues you're going to run into.

And so he took that same, you know, very staunch black and white scientific approach that he had at the U.

S.

Olympics Committee.

to his research he was doing in the golf swing because he was teaching a golf course at the University of Colorado.

And so he and I hit it off instantly.

I'm like.

yes, this is my guy.

I want to dig down with you and start really looking at, I want to, you know, you obviously like my ideas about the swing and the direction that I'm heading, but now I can get your input on this and look at it completely objectively in black and white.

And so working with guys like Dr.

Broker were huge.

I also worked at the TaylorMade Performance Lab because they had, they bought the system called matte technology.

And basically it was these nine infrared cameras that could measure the swing in real time in 3d and measure everything to like.

A tenth of a degree.

And they had all this Tour Pro data and they could look at everything completely objectively.

And we could see not what we thought people were doing, but in real time, frame by frame, exactly what the body's actually doing and what was leading to injury and all of those things.

And that led to a medical panel we had Dr.

Brian McKeon We had all these medical panel experts who came in and started providing their expertise on injury prevention.

Because obviously it was still a huge deal to me.

And so we had, you know, we have all these neurosurgeons, orthopedic surgeons who came in and said, yes, these ideas that you're talking about, this is what will lead to injury.

This is what doesn't.

And one of the biggest things we ever did is sitting down and asking those guys, what's the number one surgery, golf swing related injury surgery that you guys do?

And for me, I had always had hip and back problems.

And so I had my own personal bias.

I'm like, oh, I bet the number one injury that these guys have is.

going to be related to the hip and back.

And that's what most people think of when they think of golf is some sort of golf back and hip injury.

But the reality is all of them, all of these orthopedic surgeons said it's lead shoulder impingement.

And at the time I had no idea what that even meant.

But it became clear as we started looking at things from an anatomical perspective and looking at what the body can and can't do safely.

And what type of movements lead to these impingement issues and all of these other injuries that we looked at, it became clear to me that this was the only way to teach the golf swing is that if it's doing something that's going to cause you to get injured, I don't care.

I don't care if it's going to be a way to hit the ball 20 yards further.

You can't do it forever.

That's what matters.

Golf is a game for a lifetime.

And if you're doing things that are getting you injured, then you can't play golf for a lifetime.

A lot of people were discussing on our Facebook group really recently has been coming up quite a bit actually about Freddie couples.

Freddie Couples is an awesome golfer, obviously he's one of the masters.

He's been one of the most desired swings on the tour because he's got this beautiful tempo, this great rhythm to his swing.

It looks like Fred Astaire hitting a golf ball, you know?

But Freddie Couples has had back injuries his entire career.

And now I think he, I think he's 60 now.

But a couple years ago, there was an article in Golf Digest.

He was 58 years old and basically said, I can't play golf anymore.

Just, It's not worth it.

It hurts my back so much I don't play anymore.

Here's a guy who's a major champion, won tons of tournaments on the tour, millions of dollars.

And at 58 years old, he can't play golf anymore.

Yet so many people still look at his swing as a model.

And that's the problem with golf instruction is we don't look at the swing, or at least most people don't look at the swing inside out and objectively.

They say, well, he's a great ball striker, so we should just copy him.

If, you know, Tiger Woods became that model.

Tiger Woods is the best of the best.

We should just copy him.

Look at Tiger's back now.

I mean, all of these things, they all come with a price.

And unless you start looking at the swing black and white, objectively looking at what prevents injury, what causes injury, then to me, that golf instruction is worthless because if it leads to injury first, there's no point.

It sounds to me like the pain that you've gone through and went through almost became your purpose.

It kind of did.

And obviously I had a really, really big whoopsie in 2011.

I broke my neck.

I had a C1 burst fracture, which is a really, really bad idea.

Very few people survive that.

And then those that do are typically on a ventilator or paralyzed.

And I see one's your top vertebrae.

I was mountain biking.

I was jumping off a big jump, a 20 foot jump.

And I came up short and my bike went into the.

This wooden and steel ramp that I was landing on and I flew over the handlebars and landed on top of my head.

And so I broke C1 like an explosion.

It's called a burst fraction.

I broke it in five places, three places in the back and two in the front, and that led to a bunch of surgeries.

I had four cervical surgeries, I broke my hand, I had nerve damage, I had all kinds of stuff.

But the thing about it, as bad as that was for me, and I spent 11 days in the neuro ICU, and that's not a place you want to hang out.

The mortality rate after three days in the neuro ICU goes up exponentially.

And I was there for 11.

I mean, I bled out twice on the operating table.

I had a blood clot that nearly killed me and all this horrible stuff.

But after that, as bad as that experience was, it completely changed every single aspect of my life in a good way.

Not just the stuff that I was doing, but from my golf instruction, obviously, I've had an impact on millions and millions of golfers who've seen my videos.

But they've seen that that passion comes from experience.

You know, if you go through something like that and it doesn't change your life, there's something crazy wrong with you.

So for me, after those first two surgeries, I wanted to get back out and play golf, but I had been on a couch for six months in a neck collar.

Couldn't move.

Just watching Netflix all day.

So my muscles completely atrophied.

I went from 178 pounds to 138 pounds.

Oh my gosh.

I had no muscle.

I couldn't walk.

I sure as heck couldn't play a golf club.

Wasn't allowed to play golf.

I wasn't allowed to drive for six months.

And it was a really, really messed up deal.

Not to mention the horror that my wife had to go through watching me choke.

You know, as you break this, you can't swallow.

So I had to swallow all these pills every single day and I would choke on them every single day.

My wife just had to sit there and watch me choke.

And I'd be like, no, no, just give me a second.

It's going to go down in a second.

But it had such a huge impact on every single part of my life, but probably nothing bigger than the way that I taught the golf swing.

Because as a result of my neck fusing over all of this, over the injury, I developed scoliosis as a result of this.

And so now my spine is pretty severely curved.

And so.

Obviously, when you have scoliosis and just gravity working on your spine every single day and being fused, I'm fused at C1, 2, and 3 now, that other discs in your spine start taking up the load because other stuff is fused together, right?

So for me, to be able to come back and play golf at all was pretty much a miracle.

And if it wasn't for the stuff that I was doing with rotary swing and trying to figure out.

And having such a huge slant towards injury prevention and swinging a safe and powerful way.

Without all the biomechanical research with Broker and all these other orthopedic and neurosurgeons, I would have never been able to play golf.

There's no way that I could have ever come back and played.

But not only was I able to come back and play and get back to a plus handicap, but I still hit the ball as well or as far as I ever have.

And I do it pain-free and I can hit balls all day long.

and have no fatigue, no pain.

And that's purely a result of this.

So going through that was really, really bad.

I don't want to do it again, for sure.

But I can now play golf and I wouldn't have never taken that deep of a look at the spine.

And the neurosurgeon who did all the surgeries, he and I became really, really close friends because somebody's cutting into your spine and looking at your spinal cord every day, you become pretty close buddies.

But I had.

Access to him all the time.

And I just grilled him on my spine because not only did I want to heal, but I saw this as like, well, if I can understand, if I'm what I'm going through, I can understand what's really going on in my spine.

In the golf swing, I can understand how to get back and be able to play golf, and then I can understand how to teach others who have gone through this stuff.

And I've taught hundreds and hundreds of golfers now who've had, you know, all types of little spinal fusions and things.

And I've been able to understand exactly what they're going through and how to work around those issues.

So how did that inspire you to write your first book?

So the first book I wrote in 2007, and that was luckily before I broke my neck.

But by this time, I was already having a lot of back and hip problems.

I mean, I was having back and hip problems when I was 19.

So that stuff in the first book was all about coming back to a way to learn to swing the club.

That was simple and that made sense because all the instruction that I was receiving at this point.

Didn't make any sense to me.

I've always had two questions about the golf swing.

When somebody tells me something during a golf lesson or just print something in a magazine or says it on TV.

First, why?

And second, how?

First of all, tell me exactly why you want me to do that.

Tell me how that's going to affect what's going on in my swing.

And then tell me exactly how you want my body to do it.

And if you can't answer those two questions, then I'm not going to listen to you anymore.

You have to be able to explain to me why you want me to do something.

And I think, again, this goes back to me taking my GI Joes apart.

Like, why do these legs work this way?

How does it work?

And how do I put them back together?

Not that I really cared about putting them back together.

But with the golf swing, that book in 2007 was all about making something really simple.

I want people to play golf.

I was so frustrated and so confused because every teaching pro I went to would tell me something not only different than the other teaching pro.

but literally the exact opposite in most cases.

And then I would open a golf magazine and on one page, you'd have one instructor saying, oh, if you want to do this, do it this way.

And then literally on the very next page, this instructor would be saying literally the verbatim, the exact conflicting opposite.

And to me, that was insanity.

It's lunacy.

How can you have a magazine printing literally two completely conflicting things?

One page apart.

And so when I wrote that book, I'm like, dude, let's get away from all this nonsense and just make the swing simple.

Here's what you really need to do.

Here's all it needs to be.

It doesn't need to be this complicated thing.

And so that book was really my first step in publishing my own ideas on how to make the swing understandable, how to make it simple.

Rotary swing, simplifying the golf swing.

That's what it was all about.

That to me.

was stop struggling with your swing.

The rotary swing makes learning the game fast and simple.

That's what I cared about because I was so freaking frustrated with all of my experience that I'd gone through.

And the more lessons I gave and the more people I started talking to, I realized that there was this commonality that There are so many people with this exact same experience.

They go to so-and-so instructor and he tells them one thing and they go to another instructor and he says the opposite.

And they're frustrated because they don't have the time to look into this and figure out who's right, who's wrong, or if there is a right and wrong.

Whereas for me, this was my passion from the time I was a kid.

And so I was going to figure out a way to help all these people who had gone through the same experiences that I had gone through.

So what changed then from when you wrote that first book to you writing your second book?

So when I wrote the second book, that one was my other passion, and that was teaching teachers.

So this was the Rotary Swing Certification Manual, and it was called The Anatomy of the Swing.

And what was important about this was that I realized that there was something really missing in the golf industry as a whole, in my opinion, and that was people don't know how to teach.

Being a golf pro.

And teaching at driving ranges and different golf clubs, you're around all these different people teaching different things.

And then all of the hundreds and then eventually thousands of students I had, I hear from their experiences of what they're being taught.

And I'm like, dude, that doesn't make any sense.

Why would your pro teach you this?

Why would he tell you that?

It doesn't make any sense.

So I started looking into how people learned how to teach.

And what I realized, like a lot of experiences were kind of similar to mine, that they just kind of get roped into it because they're a good player.

And somebody says, hey, will you help me with my swing?

Well, I didn't have any credentials that teaches a 19 year old kid.

I had no idea what I was doing.

And so a lot of people kind of run through that same thing.

I thought, well, the PGA of America, this is their job, right?

They teach people how to teach golf.

And then I realized that's not really true either.

The PGA of America program, while it's a great program for teaching you how to run a golf business, the amount of teaching that they get.

to learn how to teach is minuscule because they have two years to teach you how to run a multimillion dollar business.

That's what a golf pro does.

He learns how to run a pro shop, how to run inventory, how to manage staff, how to manage the golf cart batteries and golf course agronomy.

I mean, that's in two years, you're learning how to run this multimillion dollar business and that's what you graduate with.

And you become an assistant pro working 16 hours a day, making no money, sitting in the pro shop all day.

And you realize the worst truth about the golf industry, if you work in it, The more you work in it, the less you actually get to play golf.

You know, most people go into the golf industry because they love golf.

They want to play.

But when you actually go to work in the industry, you just end up behind a cash register in the pro shop all day.

And so people are desperate to get outside and be able to teach and play golf and help people.

Because that's what they got into the industry for and didn't realize that's not really what the job actually entails.

So a lot of times these assistant pros take golf lessons because, you know, a starting golf lesson might be 40 bucks an hour.

Well, this guy working in the pro shop working 16 hours a day, all day, weekends, giving up his life to sit in a pro shop all day.

He's probably making effectively six bucks an hour.

So for 40 bucks an hour to go give a golf lesson, even whether he's qualified or not, he's all over.

I get to get outside.

I get to make a lot more money.

but I didn't really get much training in the golf industry.

I got really outdated information.

I mean, the PGA of America taught really outdated stuff for a long time, even though it was proven scientifically with TrackMan, for instance, a launch monitor, that the old ball flight laws were completely wrong and all these things, but they still taught that stuff.

They just didn't really update their teaching curriculum.

So that was a huge issue for a lot of people understanding that they don't get trained how to teach.

And so when I wrote the second book, I realized that if I was going to help more golfers, it wasn't by, it was only so many lessons I can give.

And I used to spend 10 hours a day giving 10 lessons back to back all day in the hot Florida sun.

And that's working as hard as you can possibly work giving golf lessons, but I could still only work with 10 people a day max.

But if I could teach other teachers how to learn how to help their students.

play better, play more consistently and prevent injury and swing properly and be more consistent and have more distance, have more fun.

That was the pathway that I wanted to go.

So I started flipping my ideas from how do I help the individual student to how do I help teaching pros help their students?

And that's what the second book was really all about.

Now you worked with, you know, by that, yes, doctors who worked with.

with the US Olympians and getting into the biomechanics there as well, didn't you?

Yeah, for sure.

And that was a huge part of the foundation for writing that book was having some real scientific evidence.

I really became obsessed with the TaylorMade Performance Lab.

Luckily, we had one in Orlando.

And the guy that ran it there was a member of the site and was super, super cool and loved the work that I was doing on the swing and the research.

And he let me have full access to there.

I could go in there anytime I wanted and start.

Travis Kent was the guy's name.

And he would allow me full access to lab and full access to all their tour pro data.

I could look at it.

exactly what all the top-level players were doing.

And then I could look at it, and I started extrapolating the data.

I could see what their hip speed was, their hand speed was, how fast their shoulders were moving, how fast their hands were moving.

And then I could start looking at it and saying, okay, out of these people that have this level of rotational speed and whatever, look at what their performance is.

Because I obviously knew who these tour pros were, and I could see, oh, I know that that guy's got a really bad hip problem.

I know that guy's got a really bad back problem.

That guy's got a shoulder issue.

He's got a wrist issue.

I could see what they were doing in their swings and now I could quantify it.

And so that gave me even more tools and ammo to say, not only can I see what I believe they're doing in video that's causing these injuries and causing their inconsistencies and so on, but I can actually quantify it with data and I can see real hard numbers to say, well, you move your hips like this at this time in the swing at this speed.

And here's six guys that are doing that.

And five of those six are injured.

And that's the thing that people don't realize is that.

Most golf instruction is based on tour pros.

You see somebody on TV who's the hot stuff right now.

And if he's the guy that's playing better than anybody else, then that's the guy you copy right now.

And that's been something I've been against for a long, long time.

But when I started out, I did the same thing.

I looked at Tiger Woods or Ernie Els or whoever, Jack Nicklaus.

It's how I learned how to play.

I looked at his swing and said, oh, well, that's how you swing because he's the best player.

Because there's no right or wrong way in the golf swing as it's been commonly.

Believed?

And so I could start to look at this stuff and say, well.

81 of the PGA Tour pros miss nine weeks for a golf swing related injury.

That's in.

Research from the National Golf Foundation has been published forever, but nobody reads this stuff.

This foundation, the National Golf Foundation, proved that the golf injury, the injury rate, is probably higher than the NFL rate.

How many guys?

If you miss nine weeks in the NFL, you're out for the whole season, it's done.

But golfers regularly are getting injured, and it's 81% on the PGA Tour.

So to me, The whole idea of looking at somebody who we know has a four out of five chance of getting injured.

And modeling your teaching model off of that is completely flawed.

You have to step outside and say, look, you can't use a flawed model that's going to lead to injury and inconsistency.

And use that as the way that you teach.

There has to be some more science to it.

And the TaylorMade Performance Lab, all of that stuff and the research with Dr.

Broker.

And then I started, I'm a pretty obsessive guy, as you can tell.

So I started reading tons and tons of college textbooks on biomechanics and anatomy and physics.

And so I really became super obsessed with this stuff.

Sort of taking it apart.

What's that?

Sort of taking it apart.

Taking it apart.

I did have to learn how to put the golf swing back together.

But you got to take it apart first.

You got to have this exploded view of, okay.

I like to look at things from like a 30 ,000 foot view first and say, okay, what's the big picture?

What am I really trying to accomplish?

And then I can start putting the pieces together.

But I think so many people, we just, we are, we have view like this, right?

We just kind of only see what's right in front of our face and people don't take the time to step back.

And fortunately with golf, I made that decision only again, because I was so frustrated with my own teaching experience to say, you know what?

I'm done with all this nonsense.

I'm going to step back.

I'm going to take a 30,000 foot view.

I'm going to look down on it and say, all I'm trying to do is hit a ball with a stick.

And I want to do it pain free.

I want to do it consistently.

And I want to hit a ball a long ways.

I want to be powerful.

What's the best way to do that?

And to me, the biomechanical research for that was everything.

So then you wrote a third book.

So the last book that I wrote, which is just published this year in 2009 or 2020, I guess it is already, was called The Dead Drill.

And so that's kind of coming full circle.

For me, as I started getting very, very technical about the swing, which was inevitable with all the research I was doing, I mean, I understand being, I look at the facet joints in the spine and I'm like getting down to the nitty gritty.

That's really important for the instructor to know, to be able to help their students avoid injury.

But at the same point, the student doesn't need to know every single little biomechanical detail.

And so I wanted to take everything that I had learned, all of this complexity, and make it really simple and compress it down into the tiniest package that I possibly could.

And that really was the culmination of what I called the dead drill, which stands for the drill to end all drills.

I wanted one drill.

And that was all you needed to do.

And if you just learned this one drill, it encompassed everything that you truly needed to learn about the golf swing.

You didn't need to do 15 different drills.

I mean, over the years, I've developed dozens and dozens of different drills on how to fix certain issues in the swing.

I'm like, man, this is a take forever for somebody to go through every single little thing that I've spent my life studying.

how can I take all of that and make it really, really simple?

And the culmination of that, the test bed for that was in 2018, I think it was, I went and did what we called the Rotary Spring Roadshow, where I left my home in Telluride, Colorado, and I drove across the country all the way down to Miami, Florida and back, and I gave free lessons to anybody that asked.

So I went, I'd spent a fortune doing this, but what I wanted to do was take somebody who I'd never met before, A golf somebody had never given a golf lesson before.

And in 30 minutes or an hour, completely reinvent their golf swing.

And do it completely for free.

And do it incredibly fast, faster than anybody else had ever seen.

Because I had these ideas that I got the golf swing as.

Even though I understand it at a very deep level, what really matters is just a couple of things, just a few things.

And so I wanted to test these ideas out on a completely objective basis, people I had no experience with.

And prove that I could get somebody to swing like a Tour pro, or better than the average Tour pro because of.

Avoid injury and do it in a single lesson.

And the results I posted on YouTube.

I had no intention of filming the lessons at first.

It was kind of just a random thing.

I was like, you know what?

The first lesson I went to was in Denver.

It's like, you know, I have my GoPro here.

I'll just set it up and see if he's cool with it and see if, uh, I don't think anybody was going to want to watch a golf lesson.

I really thought that would be pretty boring.

I was very surprised because I sure as heck would not watch anybody give a golf lesson.

There's no way.

I don't even watch golf.

I haven't watched golf in like 10 years.

It's the fastest way for me to go to sleep in the afternoons and put golf on.

But for me, I wanted people to see that the swing could be really, really simple, that you could learn how to play, shoot in the 70s every single day, hit the ball 300 yards, do it pain-free, do it in a way that's going to prevent injury.

Learn it really freaking fast.

And so I filmed the first lesson, I put it up on YouTube.

Like, I'll see what everybody thinks.

And people were like, Dude, this is awesome.

I want more, and I'm like, Really, this is 30 minutes of me yammering and giving a golf lesson.

It's pretty boring and they're like, No, no, so next thing?

I know I did, like, I did like, three dozen roadshow lessons on that trip to Florida and back, stopping all over the place, Kansas and Tennessee and Georgia and everywhere.

And These videos got millions of views and people were enamored with it because they saw like, okay, now I see like the culmination of everything.

Yes, there's a lot of things.

The golf swing is really complex when you get down to the details of it.

There's a million things that have to work right in order to hit the ball straight.

But in order to hit the ball straight, there's really only a few things that you need to understand and know how to do right.

And those million other things fall into place.

And that to me was my best accomplishment.

In my career as a golf professional was taking everything that I knew and boiling it into one simple drill.

So where, what's next?

where's where's rotary swing?

Go from here?

Well, it's probably pretty obvious that I'm pretty much like a dog with a bone.

I don't, you know, I'm not stopping anytime soon.

I have set some pretty, Pretty extraordinary goals for myself.

My biggest goal that I'm working towards now is that I want to help a million golfers break 80 for the first time.

And that's pretty extraordinary.

But as you've seen like in the Facebook group.

We have guys, I had a guy post today, shot 69, guy last week shot 62, shot 67.

These guys have never broke 70 before.

Some of them haven't broke 80 before and they're shooting in the 60s and they're doing it in an unbelievably short period of time.

And it's all a result of the dead drill.

And so we created that Facebook group so that people could go in there and get help really quickly for free.

And learn how to do the dead drill right.

And get community support from other people doing it, and then see the results that people are getting from this.

So that's really the thing that I'm working towards next is I feel like the Dead Drill has given me that platform to make the golf swing super easy to learn, super fast to learn, really simple in a way that gives you a powerful, consistent swing that's safe for the body.

And so now my goal is getting results from that.

And so we've had.

thousands and thousands of people tell us, you know, our Facebook comments or YouTube comments and emails and all our testimonials, which you see all the time.

We get hammered with testimonials.

I shot my best score.

I made a whole amount, you know, excited, you know, that's where I'm going next.

I want to take this to the world and I want a million golfers to break 80 for the first time.

And that's not even good enough.

I want a million golfers to consistently shoot in the seventies, every single time they go out and play golf and with the dead drill, it's possible.

Awesome.

Any final thoughts?

No, I, you know, it's been a wild journey, I guess.

It's been kind of fun to see as I haven't, I've never actually gone back through this.

And so doing this interview has been kind of fun to go back and remember stuff that I haven't thought about in literally decades.

You know, I've had a, I've had quite the run so far and I can't wait to see what the next 30 years of my golf career takes me.

Well, I can, if I had a crystal ball, I'd say this.

You're going to touch those million golfers and help them based upon the results that I see that are coming in on your testimonials.

I would be very shocked if you don't touch the million golfers and help them break an 80 and get a 70.

Well, thanks for sharing, Chuck.

I appreciate it for giving me a peek on the inside.

Yeah, for sure.

Thanks.

I appreciate it.

It was fun to kind of go down memory lane a little bit for me.

So it was fun.

Thank you.

Thanks.