The 'crashing out' fault of a golf writer: three birdies can't save one driver swing

Rye, New York. The fifth hole at Rye Golf Club has never been a pleasant one. Alex Myers put it plainly in Golf Digest: the tee shot there is squeezed between houses, and nobody stands on that tee feeling comfortable. That day he played alongside three colleagues. His round included three birdies. Then came the driver: the club rose too steeply, his body fell into a position it could not rescue, and the Titleist ball flew right and struck the roof of a house. No damage except to the hitter's ego. But the story stayed, spreading across the course, becoming the topic of the whole afternoon.

What makes me stop when I reread this is not the roof. It is the distance between two ways of seeing the same round. Outsiders look at the scorecard and see three birdies — a good round. Insiders know that one club, in one situation, repeated exactly the fault Myers had carried all summer.

The story at the fifth hole

Alex Myers is a senior writer at Golf Digest, and he is running a series called “Late Scratch?” — a personal, year-long project to find out how good an amateur golfer can get if everything is done correctly. He holds no amateur ranking, plays no professional events, has no major start. His “tour” is the series itself.

The driver fault has a history. It appeared earlier in the summer, shows up a couple of times a round, disappears on the range, and gets markedly worse on the annual buddies' golf trip — where his group keeps a tradition: awarding a Masters-style green jacket to the trip champion. To outsiders it is a joke. To the men in that group, it is real pressure.

I have watched amateur rounds in the Vietnamese community around Massachusetts long enough to recognize this pattern. The fault does not belong to the whole swing. It belongs to one club, in one situation, under one specific kind of pressure.

The club in the wrong place

The fix began on the range, with a 9-iron that took a huge chunk of turf. Myers describes himself as a player carrying too many swing thoughts — too many ideas in his head over the ball. He believed that was the problem.

Mario Guerra, an instructor listed in Golf Digest's Best In State ranking (the magazine's annual list of leading teaching professionals, published state by state), saw the root somewhere else: “too much vertical force in his swing and not enough horizontal force.”

Vertical force is the body pushing down and up through the ground. Horizontal force is rotation around the torso. When a golfer takes the club back too steeply, the body instinctively recognizes the poor position and reacts: the pelvis thrusts toward the ball, the torso stands up out of its forward bend, the hands must release early to square the face. In coaching circles this is called loss of posture, or early extension. Guerra uses a shorter phrase: “crashing out” — the body lunging outward in a desperate but futile attempt to save the swing.

The core point sits here: Myers's fault is not in his head, it is in the position of the shaft at the delivery moment — and the body is only trying to rescue a position that was already wrong before he could think.

Guerra's drill runs completely against natural feel. Swing more around the body. Keep the club low and parallel to the ground in both the backswing and the downswing. “Almost like making a baseball swing but while in golf posture.” This is a deliberate exaggeration drill: not a new swing, but a medicine designed to pull a too-steep motion toward the opposite direction.

The measuring stick is a swing-analysis app. The checkpoint the app calls the “moment of truth” sits roughly halfway between the top of the backswing and impact — the zone analysts label P5 to P6. For a steep player, the shaft there points sharply down at the ball. For a good player, the shaft runs in line with the trail arm. The app is a visualization aid, not a validated measurement; what is being judged is a line drawn on a frame, not launch-monitor data.

The early result: a lower, tighter ball flight, and video showing a motion that looked considerably better than his normal move.

The mental layer comes from Josh Nichols, a mental coach, who adds an important piece. The most common complaint he encounters is a player who is too steep and too open at the top, then tries to flip the hands through in a hurry to square the clubface. Every extra thought added mid-swing is another correction — and that correction breeds a new fault.

In 2026, when the pandemic shut the courses, I sat alone in the empty grandstand of a practice range and recorded the wind howling through it. The wind I recorded that year still blows in me whenever the course is empty. It taught me something every technical analysis must remember: most of what happens inside a swing never appears in the frame.

What outsiders do not see

Outsiders will read the round at Rye and conclude Myers is fine. Three birdies. A good round.

But three birdies are proof that the ability is intact, and at the same time a curtain. In amateur sport, one explosive performance does not prove the system is working — it proves the player can explode once. An amateur team reaching a final on a lucky draw and one inspired match does not thereby acquire a foundation. At Rye it is the same story: three birdies and a driver into a roof coexist inside one round, and only one of those two things is a problem.

What was recorded after the range session also deserves to be read at the right weight. No launch monitor, no ShotLink-style data, no round on a real course. What exists is a feel and one video frame. This is an early signal, not proof. And the exaggeration drill carries its own risk: pulling the motion too far around can create a new fault — an open face, a block to the right. Myers himself admits he still has to “find a blend” between the old move and the new one.

The largest risk, though, sits in the head, not in the mechanics. The fault is framed as a form of yips — an involuntary, pressure-triggered disruption that vanishes on the range and returns at the worst possible moment. Yips are famous for coming back.

A useful, imperfect comparison comes to mind. Five substitutions make a squad deeper and give a coach more options, but they also turn the final twenty minutes into a war of attrition. For a golfer, every added swing thought is one more option inside the roughly one and a half seconds of the downswing. More options do not make a better swing. They make a later one.

Based on my experience following matches, the only low-risk, high-confidence item in this whole story is the breathing routine: breathe in for three counts, out for three counts. Myers says he once played some of his best golf with it. It does not square the clubface. It only stops the head from adding its own options.

What the Myers story reveals most clearly about the amateur golf industry is the resource gap. A Golf Digest writer can summon a Best In State instructor, a mental coach and a sport psychologist at the same turning point of a season. An amateur in Massachusetts has one lesson a month and a group chat. Improvement here is presented as a coached process — and it is also a business model inflating faster than a rolling ball.

What to watch

Two things will hold my attention.

One is whether the drill transfers to the course. The range teaches the shape of a motion; pressure only tests whether he can keep it. If the fault returns on the annual buddies' trip, then what was fixed was not the root.

The other is whether Myers stops turning embarrassment into content long enough to look straight at it. The new generation watches golf with their eyes; I still listen with my ears, and both are ways of loving the game. But ears hear rhythm, while eyes only see posture.

An empty course, and the wind still keeping time for the ball. What remains open is simple: when a bad shot only appears under pressure, is the practice range — a place where pressure never exists — the right place to fix it?