Decoding 'Crashing Out': When Vertical Force Overwhelms Rotation in an Amateur's Driver Swing

The ball left the clubface, travelled far enough right, and struck a house. Alex Myers, a senior writer at Golf Digest, recorded that this was the first time in his life he had done such a thing. The shot came at the fifth hole of Rye Golf Club, during a casual round with a few colleagues from the newsroom. What made me stop when I read the account was not the mishit. It was the datum sitting right beside it: in that same round, Myers made three birdies.

Three birdies and one ball into a house, same round, same player. Only one of the two became the story. This is the first thing I check in any amateur's self-report: what got recorded, what got dropped, and why memory chose to drop it.

Context: a serialised self-experiment

Alex Myers holds no OWGR ranking, no major start, no ShotLink table attached to his name. He is a senior writer at Golf Digest, running a series called 'Late Scratch?' — a year-long self-improvement project in which the author is also the subject. The format is familiar to amateur readers: the writer turns himself into an experiment and publishes both the progress and the embarrassment.

Myers's driver fault is not new. He describes it appearing a couple of times a round since earlier in the summer, with a longer history on annual golf trips — higher pressure, fewer reps, no familiar caddie at his side. He admits he lacks confidence in the longest club in the bag. The fifth hole at Rye, as he writes it, is never a fun one.

Reading this took me back to Nagoya in 2026, when I was 24 and building a manual xG model from video footage for a recently relegated football club. I left the home-field factor out of a four-game losing streak. I got six of the final ten rounds wrong. Watching the footage back, I understood the problem was not the numbers but the question I had asked. Data is never wrong; I simply asked the wrong question.

With Myers, the wrong question was believing the problem was 'all in his head'.

The core: too much vertical force, not enough horizontal

Instructor Mario Guerra, listed in Golf Digest's Best In State rankings, offered the opposite diagnosis. He told Myers he was creating too much vertical force and not enough horizontal force in his swing. When the body gets too steep, it instinctively knows it is in a poor position and 'crashes out' in a desperate but futile attempt to save the shot.

I translate that into biomechanics: this is a loss-of-posture pattern, in which the pelvis thrusts toward the ball, the torso stands up out of its forward bend, and the hands are forced to flip at the bottom to rescue the face. To be clear, the article never uses the technical term. This is my inference, mapping lay coaching language onto established terminology. Confidence: medium.

The corrective drill is also described in plain language. Guerra asked Myers to swing more horizontally around his body, keeping the club as low and as parallel to the ground as possible in both the backswing and the downswing. His phrasing: almost like making a baseball swing while in golf posture. In essence this is a rotational, shallowing drill — the category professional instruction uses to cure a steep, hands-dominant, over-the-top move.

The Mustard Golf app supplied the checkpoint. Its line showed that a good swing has the shaft in line with the trail arm halfway between the top of the backswing and impact. That is the 'moment of truth'. In swing-position numbering, it falls roughly between P5 and P6. There, a steep player's shaft is still steepening toward the ball; a good player's shaft is shallowing in line with the trail arm.

What Myers observed after the session: a lower, better ball flight, and on video a move that looked much better than his normal one. Based on the swing footage I process every week for the Nagoya market, the direction of this fix matches a trend that has run through elite golf for more than a decade — away from a steep, hands-driven, over-the-top delivery and toward a shallower, more rotational one. In other words, Myers's fault is a mainstream amateur fault, not an exotic defect. That is an analogy-based inference, medium confidence, since the account cites no professional dataset.

And this is where I have to stop, because the entire record contains no numbers. No clubhead speed. No attack angle. No smash factor. No path, no face angle. Not a single gain figure from a launch monitor. Every piece of evidence is an adjective: lower, better, looked better. For a technical lesson, that is the weakest evidence tier on my scale. When data hides its face, error becomes the guide — and here the guide is the eye of the very person doing the fixing.

The only equipment detail is a Titleist ball. It appears as the object that struck the house, not as a rules subject. No dispute arose; the only damage was to the author's ego. But set beside liability norms at courses bordering residential areas, this is a topic amateur golf usually avoids: who pays when a ball leaves the property.

The mental layer arrives later, when mental coach Josh Nichols confirms the mechanical-mental link. His most common complaint: amateurs who are too steep and open at the top, then try to flip the club square during the downswing. Myers himself admits to 'too many swing thoughts'. His remedy is a three-count in, three-count out breathing routine. The year he applied it was also the year he won the green jacket on his buddies' trip — a recreational tradition modelled on the Masters' Green Jacket, but carrying outsized psychological weight for its participants.

The contrarian angle: the wrong suspect

The popular reading will be: a steep swing is the root cause, so flatten it. I do not go that way.

The three birdies matter more than the ball into the house. They show Myers's ball-striking and scoring ability are intact. The fault is localised to one club and one type of situation, not a global collapse. Add two more details: the fault does not appear on the range, only on difficult tee shots, a couple of times a round. That profile sits closer to a situational disruption than to a stable mechanical defect. The swing is the carrier here, not necessarily the cause.

What did NOT happen often tells more truth than what did. No retention test after several weeks. No on-course round to see whether the drill converts into a score. No before-and-after comparison table. One practice session, one video review, one new feel — that is the entire dataset.

The corrective drill carries its own risk. The 'baseball swing in golf posture' feel, applied too literally, can push the miss the other way: too flat a plane, a block to the right. Myers himself writes that his on-course goal is to 'find a blend' — an admission that the transition period has not ended. And 'crashing out' is memorable, but a name is not a diagnosis. It is a description repackaged for easy retelling.

The forward view

I will track three signals. First, whether the next instalment tests the durability of the drill. Second, whether the driver fault returns on the annual golf trip — a high-pressure, low-rep environment. Third, whether the three-count breathing routine survives several rounds or is abandoned after one good day.

Three signals, one shared condition: at least a few rounds of real data before anyone calls this a successful fix. I do not believe in luck; I believe in cultivated probability.

If Myers brings launch-monitor numbers for the driver at the fifth hole in his next piece, I will be the first to reread the whole thing — and this time I will read the lines he did not write.