[Jeff]

Yoda

In your series of photos, I can see a phenomenon that I have seem many times previously. Before release, the clubshaft is bent backwards and after release the clubshaft is bent forward.

The question becomes - how does one interpret this phenomenon. I personally believe that there is a shaft flexibility issue and a shaft elastic recoil issue in play that disrupts the 100% irefutable causal relationship between the hand thrust action (cause) and the clubhead's sweetspot movement in space (effect). I can picture an S-shaped clubshaft that is 100% rigid, where one can essentially ignore the strange snake-like shape of the clubshaft, and where there is still a 100% correlation between hand thrust forces (cause) and the clubhead's movement in space (effect). However, when a shaft becomes increasingly flexible then I believe that there can be a time-lag phenomenon where hand thrust forces do not have an immediate effect on the clubhead and where one cannot simply imply that a straight line drawn between the hands and the clubface sweetspot at any time point in the downswing accurately represents the reality between "cause" (hand thrust forces) and "effect" (movement of the clubhead's sweetspot in space).

I watched Jason Zuback give an exhibition as a long-drive competitor and as a trick shot artist. He had a special ultra-flexible shaft that could bend into a C-shape. When he swung with that rope-like club he could hit the ball >250 yards - but only if his timing was perfect. He had to get the rope-like clubshaft to become straight at impact - so that the clubhead became like a flying object perfectly timed into impact. However, during the downswing, the clubhead was lagging behind his hands by a variable amount that varied considerably from swing-to-swing, and therefore there was no clearcut relationship between effort and effect (clubhead's sweetspot movement in space) until impact.

Jeff.