The Loop

Stack & Tilt Part Two

August 14, 2007

Our offices are tilting from the stack of mail we've received about Stack & Tilt, Part Two in the September issue. Suffice it to say there is no agreement out there on the merits of this new swing. Here are three letters that suggest the oceanic range of opinion:

Leaning "No" is Robert Barber of Phoenix:

Having just read this months deeper explication of the so-called "Stack and Tilt" golf swing, I am convinced that the proponents are charlatans who have backed off > their original claims about their "radical new" golf swing... Nowhere in their original article do they include a "hip slide" to shallow out the swing--and if there's a hip slide, then they are simply passing off the old "reverse C" as something new.  What's the point?  When I tried the swing, I liked it because it really kept my hands passive through impact--and because it was easy to get a "feel for", ie load weight on front knee while swinging back to the inside and straightening the right leg--then pulling around and slinging the club from the inside as the hips rotated fast because of the straightening of the left leg and the lifting up that was said to shallow out the swing through impact.

I know that when I tried the swing they proposed, it did NOT require any hip slide, but only a turn---and when I watched Aaron Baddeley swing at the United States Open, there was no hint of a hip slide, either.  Johnny Miller commended Baddeley's great , simple "action" during the TV broadcast, and if there was a "reverse-C" hip slide in Aaron's swing, there's no way that Miller would have missed it. These men are lying about the swing to cover their own tails, which suggests that they stole it and are pretending now that they didn't.

Shame on these ideologues for trying to con people, especially since the original 'Stack and Tilt" without the hip slide is a good swing that really makes things simple. Requiring a "hip slide" makes the swing much harder to repeat--and pretending that this was really their teaching all along is a con that few people can buy.  They sold the swing as a rotational swing around a fixed axis, and now they are changing that claim... >

Leaning "Yes" is Ron Nay of Hickory, N.C.:

Dear sir, I am a 67-year-old golfer who has been doing the Stack and Tilt swing for 2 months.  I have a back condition called spondylolithesis. I have had no back problems with this swing, in fact, it makes it better with the upward stretch on the follow through. I have improved my distance and accuracy with this swing. It may be interesting to you that Mac O'Grady learned alot of his swing from not only Homer Kelly but from Joe Norwood, a great teacher in L.A. who was still teaching late in his 80's and into his 90 years old. Thank you for the Stack and Tilt articles. Plummer and Bennett have made an outstanding contribution to the game of golf and to golf instruction...

Waxing philosophic is Pete Ginieres of Hampton, NH

Messrs. Plummer and Bennett should take some comfort in the words penned by Jonathan Swift nearly 300 years ago- "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."  Amen to that.

Personally, I liked what Butch Harmon said in the new issue: "I don't believe there's one set of fundamentals for everyone. And I don't think Stack & Tilt is for everyone." But I am glad that Plummer and Bennett, with Peter Morrice, created these articles. They've got a bunch of people playing better. We even had one fellow on this blog who said he made a hole-in-one the first time he tried it. I'm leaning "skeptical" on that. On the other hand, he made the hole-in-one and I can't play to my handicap.

--Bob Carney

/content/dam/images/golfdigest/fullset/2015/07/21/55adb240b01eefe207f8c095_magazine__editors-images-2007-08-15-insl01_stacktilt_2.jpg

(Photo: Chris Stanford)