PREFACE

There is no better feeling the world to me than smashing a ball dead down the middle of the fairway over 300 yards and watching it fly with perfect balance. It gives a sense of joy and satisfaction knowing all the hard work, patience and persistence has paid off.

As the ball rockets towards the green, there is also a sense of peace – that knowing that you have done something as good as it can be done...even by the best professionals in the world.

Now wouldn't we all like to look, and , more like this?

This book will give you lots of useful tips on how to drive the ball straight without sacrificing distance. It will be much more helpful if you have already read its predecessor, '50 Tips for Hitting Your Longest Drives Ever!'

These nuggets are gleaned from years of experience playing on the professional level, the latest technological advancements, and the most recent biomechanical measurements and understandings by highly educated scientists.

Of course, I would not be anywhere without observing the highest skilled drivers of a , both on the PGA Tour and in Pro , as well as other coaches. I cannot claim credit for every thought and idea I present here – I am just acting as the clearinghouse of good information.

An apology in advance: I'm sorry if I write this text too much from the perspective of a right-handed golfer. I still love all you lefties out there. Please just flip around right and left when necessary.

Someone once said, “The trees are full of long hitters,” and he was right. A long drive without some measure of accuracy is virtually worthless. If you put the ball way out there, but it ends up in the rough, the trees, the water, or even out of bounds – well then you have not gained any advantage at all over your competition, but instead bound yourself with a starting off the hole that you most likely will not overcome.

I remember playing a match against a fellow mini tour pro (who as of this writing is still grinding it out trying to make the PGA Tour) at our local home club. On the 11th I was 1-down looking to square it up on a hole I figured I had a pretty good advantage.

The hole is a 490 yard 5 with a down slope into a gully about 250 yards off the tee. The average pro would hit the slope and roll out to about 300 yards for a mid approach into a well protected, small green. A long hitter would have his big drive catch on the upslope of the dip and would only get a few yards of roll. Therefore the design of the hole essentially equalized the shorter driver with the longer.

Needing the hole badly to tie the match and eventually beat the guy, I really let loose and killed one up into a 10 mph tailwind.

I flat out carried the entire gully and got an enormous first bounce. After carrying around 330 yards, the ball rolled out to 392 yards and sat in the right edge of the fairway. Needless to say there was some shock and awe on the face of my playing competitor. Of course, this is the whole point of understanding an implementing this book!

To continue, my opponent predictably put his 5 iron second shot onto the center of the green for an easy 25 foot two-putt birdie. With only 96 yards left, I had different plans. I wanted to stuff it in there a few feet for a conceded eagle and the hole.

But alas, there was just one problem. Although I was in a 35 yard wide fairway (with OB on both sides) at over 390 yards, which I thought was a monumental feat of athleticism, a small tree decided it was going to grow a branch sticking just out into the fairway. One of my finest moments had become a conundrum – a real pickle.

I could not make a standard pitch shot without hitting the branch. And the punch shot under found me trying to roll the ball through 5 inch deep rough onto an elevated green. Of course it got tangled up and stopped short of the surface – to a front pin which put me short sided.

A good chip still left me a super slick downhill 6 footer that lipped out. No need for the par save as my opponent had already taken the hole.

A nearly 100 yard advantage off the tee, and yet I was unable to cash in for even a tie on that hole! Simply because I did not split the fairway, but was around 14 yards from center.

Needless to say, I lost the match 2 down, and had to pay up. But a valuable lesson was learned that day.

“With great power comes great responsibility.” -Voltaire, or if you'd rather, Uncle Ben from Spiderman.

Your new found distance that was discovered in my first ebook is nothing unless you can also put your drive into proper position.

If you look at the geometry of it, a 200 yard drive that hits a typical fairway (say 40-50 yards) can stray offline over 7 degrees and still keep out of the long grass.

Looking at the image on the right, you can see that at points E and F, we are still in the edge of the fairway at say, 200 yards. But the further we go on that line, the more into the rough we go!

At 250 yards, you'll need a greater degree of accuracy. You can now only make about a 5 and ½ degree error in direction before you go off the fairway.

At 300 yards, the rate of error is now around 4.5 degrees. So a push or a pull, a slice or a hook has to be substantially straighter to find the fairway.

Just for fun, let's go the extreme and see what 2016 World Long Drive Champion Joe Miller encountered when he hit his winning drive of 438. My little triangle calculator tells me that Joe could only go 3.27 degrees offline to keep the shot in play. Those long drivers are actually straighter than we all thought they were!

So we have to be as much as twice as accurate when we decide we're going to be long hitters! There's a lot more to this than I first imagined!

What makes things even worse is that diabolical modern designers often pinch the fairways in tighter at longer distances. We might be hitting into a 30 yard wide area when we are gunning for more.

Sheesh Steve, start the 50 tips already! 50 Tips for Hitting Your Longest Drives Straight!

1. Where you place your ball on the tee box will place you at an advantage or disadvantage for hitting the fairway depending on how your usual good shot (or poor shot) flies. If you typically fade or slice the ball, it is smartest to tee the ball up on the right side of the tee box so that you are hitting towards the left side of the fairway. This allows your ball to curve some and still finish up straight.

2. The shape of the hole should also influence where you place your ball on the tee box. Optimally we would like to use tee placement to 'straighten out' a dogleg. So given a hole that curves left, we would tee the ball up on the right hand side of the box so that we don't have to curve the ball so much to keep a long drive in the fairway.

Keep in mind that you can actually stand outside the tee markers to hit a drive, as long as the ball is teed up in between. It is a little awkward, but may give you enough angle so increase your chance of hitting the fairway.

3. And one more thought about teeing it up. Unless you're playing on a really well manicured course, you have to be careful to find a spot where you can both stand flat and in balance, and where your takeaway will be unimpeded by any dips or bumps.

Playing on a lot of public courses growing up, I figured out quickly that I didn't want my driver to snag or encounter resistance as I started back. This would ruin my rhythm and give me little chance to hit it dead straight. The same thing goes for foot placement – standing in a hole or on uneven ground will create an additional degree of difficulty.

I will even go back a yard or two if I have to in order to find flat smooth ground. Remember that you can tee up as much as two club lengths behind the markers and still be within the rules.

If your course looks more like this, this tip will come in really handy! 4. The less loft any given has, the more that the face angle at impact will influence both the starting direction and where the shot lands.

For example, a 7 iron has a loft of around 35 degrees. The angle of the face at the moment the ball is struck is around 75% while the path is 25%, given a centered strike.

A driver, which is usually around 8-11 degrees of loft, goes up to 80% of the influence in the face and 20% path. A pro long driver using a 4 degree driver may see as much as 83-85%!

Therefore, the biggest influence on whether or not your ball hits the fairway is the orientation of the club face at impact – by far. If you can get the face of the driver reasonably straight, your longest drives will be consistently in play.

5. The 2nd biggest influence on how straight a golf ball goes is the location on the face of the ball strike. Any error, no matter how small, introduces twist. The further from the center you contact the face, the bigger the twist is, and the further offline the ball goes. Missing the sweet spot by even a half of an inch will cause the clubhead to noticeably twist on a slow motion video.

I've seen shots that actually ended up long and straight where the club was 45 degrees open or closed just after impact!

6. The good thing about today's modern 460 cc drivers is how much bulge and roll they have built in. Your driver's face is not flat – it actually has a slight curve to it.

Here is a great diagram on what bulge and roll are: Bulge and roll are what give your off centered hits some self correcting spin. Without it, your mishits would push or pull and head straight into the rough.

Some drivers have more bulge and roll than others. However, a bad enough mishit towards the heel or the toe will eventually overcome any possible correcting spin. Miss it bad enough in the heel and the ball will get pulled – out on the end of the toe and the ball will get pushed to the right for a right handed golfer.

So while you can hit the ball fairly straight with a slight off center strike, it is best for us to learn how to connect dead center!

7. The of the driver you play can have a great deal of effect on how straight you consistently drive the ball. While there are too many variables and different shafts than we can discuss in the scope of this text, let's try to keep the discussion on shafts fairly general.

The faster your swing speed, the stiffer the shaft you should be playing. I recommend the following:

55-70 mph – ladies flex 70-80 mph – senior flex 80-90 mph – men's regular 90-105 mph – men's stiff 105-120 mph – men's x stiff 120-135 mph – men's xx stiff

Some brands tend to be stiffer than others.

If your tempo is fairly smooth and even (say like Ernie Els or Jason Day) these are pretty good guidelines. If you are more violent in your transition (Sergio Garcia), it wouldn't hurt to step up a flex.

A club shaft will bend as you start to swing down to the ball. It will then rebound a 'kick' into the ball thereby creating more speed than if you were swinging a rigid stick.

If you swung 110 mph with a regular men's flex, you would bend the shaft a lot more and have a more difficult time judging the kick point and thus need more impeccable timing to square up the face.

If you swung an x stiff shaft 70 mph, you wouldn't get very much added speed from the kick of the shaft. It would feel like a rigid bar, or as some people would say, 'a telephone pole.'

Someone once asked why he doesn't play a regular shaft. His answer was, “I'm just not good enough.”

8. Another aspect to driver shafts is the amount of torque they effectively have. Shafts will tend to twist under a large amount of force. The bigger 460 cc heads add to this issue, as their centers of mass are further away from the hosel. A higher torque shaft will be more difficult to square up.

Generally, the lighter the shaft the more it will torque on the downswing. Shaft companies have been able to make great breakthroughs in the way they weave and shape the graphite so that they can make fairly light shafts that have lower torque than in years past. You will usually have to spend a lot of money to get this combination in a shaft – sometimes up to $300-400 or more!

But hey, if you are really serious about becoming the straightest driver you know, you'll be putting yourself at a disadvantage with that sporting goods store quality driver you got for $99.

A quality low torque shaft is now about 2.5 degrees. A lower quality driver shaft may go as high as 8 degrees. But beware – companies measure torque differently sometimes.

I personally recommend House of Forged shafts by Matrix. I like how strong they are at the tip section.

Owner Robert Kent will use the latest Matrix technology and design a spec that will hold up to the rigors of really powerful golf swings and perform.

They are one of the only shaft companies in the United States. You can get them on my website by going to www.hititlonger.com/pro-shop.

9. Hitting the ball high or low on the face will not really influence a shot's direction. The ball will be affected by vertical roll in the clubface, and this will affect launch angle and spin rate.

If you strike it low on the face, the ball will launch low as the top of the club twists over the top of the bottom. This makes your drive launch low. However, the vertical curve, or the roll, will add extra backspin to keep your shot in the air longer.

A high strike towards the crown of a driver will launch higher than normal, with lower spin. To reiterate, this won't cause your ball to curve off line, but it will lose a bit of distance overall.

10. The less the loft of a driver, the more potential is has to curve. A 12 degree driver will curve off line less per degree of error in the clubface than a 5 degree driver.

Does this mean you should use a high lofted driver? No, you should use the loft that fits your swing the best. However, better golfers must try to strike a balance between distance and accuracy.

If a PGA Tour player is playing a course with relatively tight fairways, a slightly higher lofted club maybe allow for a little more face angle error while still keeping the shot in play.

11. Similarly, a lower lofted club (even if it's the perfect fit for you) will roll more once it hits the ground. If your ball is headed towards the rough, that lack of backspin will cause the ball to continue running on right off the fairway. A little bite upon landing can sometimes come in handy.

It becomes a balancing act between maximum distance and fairways hit leading to better scoring. This principle generally only applies to good golfers who are already long hitters.

For example, if was playing in the U.S. Open, with 35 yard wide fairways, he might up his loft by a degree. His typical drive might go from 325 back to 315, but the gambit might pay off on the scoreboard by Sunday as he hits a couple more key fairways. His ball would stay online a little better, and not roll out into the rough as often.

Probably 90% of all golfers can just go for max distance. But it's stuff you may have to start thinking about if you stick with me and learn to hit it longer!

12. Adjustable drivers are a really great technological advance, but not many people understand how deceiving it is to twist the shaft two clicks to the right in order to change the loft of the driver.

If you were to lower the loft on your driver with the adjusting tool, it simply makes the driver sit open at address. When you come through with a square face, you have essentially delofted the club.

So you can either choose to sit the driver off balance at address so it looks square, or you can let it sit flat on its faceplate, but you will then need to rotate it slightly through the impact area to make it go straight.

13. The 3rd most important factor at impact in making a drive go straight is the path of the club. While the optimum track or the clubhead is on an arc from the inside, it will be moving in the direction of the target precisely at the moment of impact.

After impact, the clubhead should be curving back to the inside again as it moves upwards into its journey around to the finish.

If you remember your geometry at all it will come in handy here. Consider the diagram on the next page:

In this diagram, O would be the center of the golfer's stance.

P represents the ball.

L is the target line, the direction you would like to hit your drive. You can see that although the club is following a curved path, at the moment it strikes the golf ball it is moving towards the target. This is a called a straight path.

Many golfers think that a straight path requires the club to approach the ball straight up the target line. This usually makes them swing outside to in and start to develop a bad slice.

14. We've talked early on about the importance of face angle, club path, and centeredness of impact.

The bottom line here is, if you have all three of these, you will hit a perfectly straight drive. Now, it is incredibly difficult to do this. We are simply looking for a technique that will be reasonably close to perfect most of the time.

You can be a few degrees off with the path, say +/- 4 degrees, a little off with the face, say +/- 3 degrees, and up to ½ inch off center in any direction.

If you can get your swing good enough to meet all three of these criteria 80% of the time, you will be a very straight hitter.

15. Another great thing about some of today's adjustable driver's is the ability to change the weighting towards the heel or the toe.

This M1 driver made by Taylormade was a very high selling club in 2016.

You could adjust the loft and spin by sliding the red weight forward and back, and create a directional bias by sliding the black weight side to side.

Moving weight into the toe keeps the toe from rolling over as readily and therefore makes it harder to hook a drive. Setting the weight all the way to the heel allows the toe of the club to more freely pass the heel and 'roll over' through impact, giving you an anti-slice bias.

The weight will only correct so much however, maybe a few degrees of curve. User error can easily overwhelm this small adjustment. In otherwords, no club will be able to magically cure you of a slice or a hook – you've got to get your fundamentals of path and face under control. 16. How you grip the club is an enormous factor in hitting a straight drive. You're going to sense a trend here over the next several tips that you just can't avoid or bypass good fundamentals if you are going to be a consistently straight hitter.

A good neutral grip has the club resting at the base of the fingers of both hands, with the thumbs at 1 and 11 o'clock.

A good grip, sometimes called a 'neutral' grip, sees the creases between the thumbs and index fingers pointing up just inside the right shoulder.

Sidebar: Golfers dedicated to hitting long and straight will routinely check their grips in front of a mirror. Use of a large mirror is highly recommended for reviewing all fundamentals.

Repetition without a golf ball is key to learning or grooving the grip, takeaway, or virtually any other aspect of the swing. The ball often acts as a distraction at first.

17. A strong grip sees the hands turned more clockwise or to the right from the golfer's perspective. Thumbs will be at 2 for the left, and 12 for the right. While golfers have made millions of dollars with this style (Paul Azinger, David Duval etc.), your odds are better sticking with neutral.

The strong grip creates a hook bias as the hands can more easily turn over to close the face of the club. Successful tour golfers who play with this grip simply modify the wrist and forearm action going through impact to create a straight shot. 18. A weak grip sees the hands turned over to the left more. Ben Hogan may be the most famous user of a weak grip. It features the left hand turned so that the thumb is on top at 12 o'clock.

This grip causes you to be biased towards slicing or fading the ball. While there's nothing wrong with a little curve if intended and consistent, most average golfers tend to slice badly with this style grip.

19. Having a great setup over the ball is a great way to eliminate many bad patterns of movement once the swing starts. There are several elements of a good setup that should not be overlooked! Check out this great photo of PGA star Rickie Fowler:

Rickie is displaying a fundamentally very sound address position that has already skyrocketed his chances of hitting a straight drive.

His feet, hips and shoulders are all parallel to each other, and perpendicular to his intended flight line.

It sounds pretty silly to say, but probably half of the golfers I teach do not line up straight with where they are trying to hit the ball.

Although it is not within the rules to lay down an alignment stick or club of any kind during a round of golf, I encourage my students to periodically check this during practice rounds.

If you pick the stick back up before hitting your tee shot, you are within the . But I think its perfectly ok to do this on every hole if you are really having trouble with correct alignment. The just doesn't provide us with a realistic enough environment.

20. A shoulder line that is open to the target (pointing left of center for a righty) is a common error that makes it much more difficult to hit a straight drive.

This golfer is displaying an open shoulder line at address. He already has about a huge chance of hitting a crooked tee shot from this one error.

Open shoulders will usually create a swing path that is outside to in and promotes pulls and slices. Even if he does hit his drive straight, it will probably be a weak slice that really wrecks his distance.

You would have to do some serious rerouting to get your path straight again from here.

Fred Couples spent much of his playing career setting up with open shoulders. He could easily circle the club back to the inside for strong draw. So sure, it can be done. There are always exceptions.

I suspect right eye dominant golfers tend to line up this way. Habits like these gradually creep into your setup over time. The longer you let them linger, the more normal they feel, and the more work you will have to do to correct them.

I cannot stress upon you enough to check your alignment in front of a large mirror regularly to nip setup errors in the bud.

21. Conversely, an overly closed hip and/or shoulder line will usually cause you to swing too much inside to out. Your club path at impact will point too far to the right and you will pick up a pushing and hooking pattern.

22. Creating a straight swing path is much easier if you take the club back correctly. The first check point for this will be when the club shaft reaches parallel to the ground for the first time.

Consider this golfer. If you were to put a laser beam in the handle end of the club, at the top of the grip, it would be pointed at your intended target.

Remember, lots of golfers have made a million dollars or more without this being perfect.

I heard a politician once say, “Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” and this applies very well to a as well as a Senate bill.

As long as you can get fairly close to pointing the clubhead straight back like this, the easier it will be to return it straight.

Everything has moved in an arc here, from the clubhead to the grip and the arms. Even the shoulders and hips are rotating on an arc.

23. The next check point during the swing to make sure you have the best chance of hitting a straight drive is at the top.

When you reach the top of a full swing on a driver, you would ideally like to see that the clubhead in pointing horizontal parallel.

If there was a laser beam in the bottom of the club, it would be pointing down the middle of the fairway.

Many golfers are not flexible enough to get the club to parallel properly. In these cases, like Phil Mickelson in the plaid pants, the club will be pointing a little to the left because it is in ¾ position.

Of course, here are three of the all-time greatest breaking the horizontal parallel ideal. Nicklaus, Palmer, and Watson all pointed the club a little across the line to the right.

Everything about your swing should just be within a reasonable range.

24. How much the clubface rotates during the impact zone is called the rate of closure (RoC). Technology is just now getting to the point where we can measure this. Faster frame speeds on cameras and special 3d capture software is starting to give us some insight on how much a golfer's clubface will rotate as they go through the ball.

Ideally we would like to have the rate of closure low, as this would make the club face easier to square up to the target consistently. And if we were to be a little off with our timing, we will only make a small error in club face angle.

Keep in mind that face angle is highly related to the shot's direction – around 80% with a driver.

If your club rapidly went from open to closed during the impact zone, you would get a square face less often and a bigger error when your timing was a bit off, which happens all the time – even to the best professional players in the world.

25. A fade tends to decrease the rate of face closure through impact. The face angle can stay a bit open to the path it is traveling on. In most cases you will have a to give up a little distance, so you are hopefully a long hitter already.

Dustin Johnson and Jack Nicklaus are great examples of players who favored a fade off the tee – and 10-15 yards really doesn't hurt you much when you can smash it way over 300.

26. A draw tends to increase the rate of face closure. To hit a draw we must have the face of the club closed relative to the path it is on, so we must twist the grip and shaft more to achieve this measurement. 27. A golfer can still be really good with a high rate of face closure. Some players on the PGA Tour have higher RoC than others. However, the level of consistency one can achieve is limited by this factor. Take that same high level player and reduce his closure rate and he will probably make a big jump forward in performance off the tee.

28. Top 100 teacher Brian Manzella has proposed calling different torques that can be applied to the grip of the club alpha, beta, and gamma. His testing shows we need all three to square the clubface at impact.

Manzella's fellow teaching pro Michael Jacobs, also highly ranked, and their science expert Dr. Steven Nesbitt have greatly contributed to our knowledge of when the different torques applied by the hands to the grip of the club peak, and when they drop.

One interesting find here was that torque, or rotational force, is being applied into the club by the hands as early as shoulder high, just after the start of the downswing. Finally we can say that the idea of 'holding the lag' or 'delaying the uncocking of the wrists' is both false and bad form. My mentor Mike Austin has been proven right after all these years!

If you still subscribe to the notion that you must hold or sustain lag deep into the downswing, or retain wrist angle, then you will never be able to catch up at impact and the ball will go offline.

Gamma torque is simply applied by spinning the shaft around itself in place. This will rapidly open and close the face without advancing the clubhead around the arc. Therefore this type of torque applied by the hands to the grip will increase the RoC without contributing to overall clubhead speed much.

29. When we swing down through the ball, everything needs to move on an arc, from the body's center of mass (belly button area) to the club head. This includes the hands and arms which guide the handle around the turning body in an arc shaped journey (this is simplified – in reality this path is much more complex).

The motion of the club's handle, sometimes called the hand path has been the subject of advanced study by some of the top teachers and PhD's in Biomechanics over the last decade or so. Before that we really didn't have enough computing power to support 3D modeling and apply it to a golf swing.

I can remember working in the biomechanics lab in grad school only being able to model a stick figure with 3D measurements! Now we have really cool tools like GEARS and the like to measure with.

Chris Como, working on a Master's Degree under his mentor Dr. Young-Hoo Kwon at Texas Women's University, has studied handle path in depth and not only how it changes the torques necessary to square up the face, but how having an ideal hand path will make a golfer hit straight more consistently.

You may have heard of Como as a consulting swing coach to Tiger Woods recently. The two have parted ways and Tiger currently has no formal coach. 30. So the secret to hitting long straight drives consistently is simply to apply a large amount of the correct right types of torque along an optimal handle path. Got it? Easy game right?

31. I realize the concept of handle path is highly technical and easier explained on video, but bear with me for just a bit longer.

In a down the line view, a good handle path sees the hands staying fairly close to the right thigh just before impact, and then exiting up and to the left to disappear behind the golfer after impact as the golfer's applied torque at the grip causes the head to catch up and pass the handle.

The golfer pictured here is Lee Trevino, regarded by many as one of the best motions through the impact zone for consistent straight hitting.

Notice how shallow the shaft is halfway to impact. It is pointing at the ball.

Notice the hands and shaft exiting up and left after the ball is struck. These elements allowed him to have an extremely low rate of face closure.

32. The most common error in handle path is when the clubshaft is too steep or vertical halfway down. Notice how the golfer below has the shaft of the club nearly vertical that it lines up with his neck.

From this point, the golfer would tend to swipe across the ball outside to in without easily being able to close the face enough to hit straight. He could easily shank it from here because the face will tend to be so wide open at impact.

This is the general look that slicers have halfway down. Distance and accuracy will suffer big time! 33. Another common error in handle path that makes a golfer's accuracy drop greatly is when the left arm swings way out away from the chest in the slot.

This golfer's hands are far from his pocket and he's very tall having blown his original posture at address.

If from here the handle of the club goes around him to the left he will hit down and across with lots of low pulls.

If after he hits the ball the handle of the club goes more straight up the fairway after impact, the club head won't have enough passive torque to come around and square up. He will constantly be plagued by blocks off to the right. Shots low and towards the heel will be common.

Gamma torque, or the twisting of the shaft with his hands, will be his emergency parachute. He must use this torque to help get the face of the club around. This rapid open to closed scenario makes it hard to hit consecutive shots really straight, and makes a two way miss very prominent.

Not much good can come from this form halfway down. And yet it is pretty common among beginning and intermediate golfers.

It's awfully hard to pick on Justin Thomas pictured on the next page in the red shirt. He just crushes the ball and is currently in the top 10 in the world rankings.

But you can see how the handle is going up the fairway on a more linear path, while the toe of the club has rotated past the heel quite a bit. However we are talking about an athlete with world class hands who has been hitting like this since he was a kid.

At this point he's got to be be careful with any swing tweaks or he may lose his edge. Remember what happened to Tiger Woods when he did this?

34. The forearms must cross over as we go through impact to properly line up the clubface with the target. In a right handed golfer, the right forearm will straighten at the elbow and cross over the left arm as it folds.

Here is Justin Thomas again showing how the finish will be when the forearm cross over is allowed to happen naturally.

Without this motion through impact and into the follow through, a golfer would have a hard time keeping the ball from slicing. This is one of the most common skills I teach to new students. Now I can think of a few techniques where the forearms don't have to cross through the impact zone, but these involve huge grip changes or modifications in wrist action that may hinder distance and accuracy.

35. Speaking of this, the late teacher Dan Shauger, a disciple of Mike Austin, advocated an alternative wrist action where the forearms never rolled the clubface open during the backswing. In fact, the forearms would actually rotate counterclockwise while the left wrist would palmar flex. This resulted in a very bowed left hand at the top. He believed it eliminated unnecessary club rotation.

It is controversial whether or not Dr. Austin taught this action later in life. I have a student who says Mike was teaching it, although Dan told me flat out that he made it up. Whichever story is true has gone with both of them to their graves.

To this day, I have not seen a golfer use this action to strike the ball competently. I highly recommend you use the wrist and forearm motion used by Austin during his prime, which is similar to many long hitting stars on the PGA Tour and Long Drive Tour today.

36. All the elements of hitting a golf ball straight – neutral path, face control, and center face contact are accounted for in the swing method I advocate: The Mike Austin Swing.

Mike Austin was in the Guinness Book of World Records for decades for the longest drive in the history of tournament play at 515 yards. Since he was 64 years old at the time, it illustrates how powerful his technique was. Mike was still swinging 150 mph at the time of the record.

But Mike was a very straight driver as well. When he toured the country with the 350 Club during the years 1984 to 1987, he averaged around 310 yards per drive in exhibitions and competitions. He claims to have never missed the fairway during that period.

Long drive legend and Hall of Famer Bobby Wilson knew Mike well during that time since he was also in the 350 Club. Wilson told me, “Bones was certainly straighter than all of us.”

If you haven't already, you should definitely check out Mike's swing video here.

37. The Mike Austin Swing has many components that make it a very accurate method for driving a golf ball while simultaneously gaining length.

He recommended we bend at 30 degrees from the hips with a minimum of knee flex. This immediately allows us to set up in a solid way that will eliminate many bad movement patterns right off the bat. When one knee or the other is straight, the head can stay more level and allow us a greater chance at striking the sweet spot.

38. The Austin swing has a very unique compound pivot that sees the hips joints tilting and turning while many other methods just suggest turning the hips only.

While this pivot allows for a very aggressive windup and weight shift through the ball, it is also helping to control the swing plane – this leads to a neutral path at impact which accounts for about 20% of the ball's direction.

39. In the Mike Austin swing, the compound pivot allows for the shoulders to wind up a bit steeper than the traditional weight shift, but always perpendicular to the spine.

When this happens, it becomes very easy to establish a good swing plane that will return the club to the ball straight.

If you follow a more traditional turning pivot, your shoulders should still turn on a 30 degree slant.

Notice the tilt in the belt in the picture above, causing the shoulder wheel to be between 35 and 40 degrees of inclination.

40. In the Austin swing, the hands start one spread hand width from the thigh to the butt end of the club. On the takeaway, the hands should pass the right thigh maintaining the same 6-7 inch gap.

Coming into impact, we should return to the same gap at the right thigh just before impact, and then to the left thigh just after impact.

If our arms get separated from the chest, so that the hands look like they are reaching way out, the odds of us hitting a straight shot greatly diminish.

41. Tension during a golf swing is not just a distance killer, but makes squaring the club face up much more difficult as well. Most golfers that I have trained, especially strong men, grip the club much too hard.

When tension is carried throughout the swing, it impedes the release of the clubhead which generally leaves the clubface open at impact. Tension is definitely a key characteristic of slicers. 42. Once the proper 30 degree bend at the hip is established, it becomes a neat chain reaction for the rest of the setup. The arms can now hang down vertically directly under the shoulder sockets tension free, like noodles. This will establish the hand span gap off the thighs for the club to sit.

43. At the top of the swing, the club should sit above the shoulders in a parallel position. Jason Day is pictured here demonstrating a slightly more upright position.

Upright swingers like Day and Jack Nicklaus, as well as flatter swingers like Matt Kuchar and Ben Hogan, have all had great success on the PGA Tour, and were all straight drivers.

So you have leeway here. The club at the top, as with most things, just needs to stay within a range for you to have good control coming down.

If your club gets too low below the shoulder, you will need to turn much harder in the downswing to get the club path back around to neutral. Too steep (high) and you will tend to be too vertical through impact as well as risk an outside to in swing pattern.

44. Let's look at some of the best players and longest drivers of a golf ball right now and see what we can learn. Below are the Trackman reports which detail 24 measurements and calculations detailing both the flight of the ball and the delivery of the clubhead and shaft.

We are mostly interested in the big 3: path, face angle, and how close to the sweet spot they hit it.

Here is the Trackman report for two-time World Long Drive Champion : Jamie had ramped down the speed several notches while going for his PGA Tour card. See, even he knows that a massive drive needs to stay in the fairway! He used to be able to swing 150.

Notice how the club path is very close to 0 or neutral. The face is open 3.1 degrees but there is only 1.2 degrees of rightward spin axis, indicating a slight toe hit. Remember the tip on gear effect earlier?

Trackman measures club face at maximum compression, in otherwords while the ball is on the face. Jamie's clubface was probably very straight 1/8 of an inch from contact, and then a tiny off center hit twisted it open during impact. You can actually see this on a slow motion video.

The smash factor is a perfect 1.50 indicating a dead center strike. You will see this is, of the three musts, what good players are best at.

He's still hitting it nearly 380, which must feel pretty nice when you're just bunting it. God bless fast twitch genetics – some of us have to work very hard for that!

45. Here's the report for both Justin Thomas and Rory McIlroy side by side:

Both players have plenty of power, so they really need to shine when it comes to path, face, and contact. Justin Thomas has a perfect smash factor of 1.49 while Rory's drive is was near perfect at 1.47.

Thomas has a path near 0, while McIlroy has always been more inside to out. Here his path is 4.4, within reason and much better than when he first came up. 46. Multiple tour winner Jimmy Walker, while not the household name, is no slouch either with over $20 million in earnings already.

Notice Jimmy's club path is very straight at 1.4 degrees in to out. His face angle on this swing was basically perfect at 0.1 degrees open. He got a perfect smash factor of 1.49 for dead center contact. This shot was a 5 or 6 yard draw that finished up a yard or two from dead center at 311 yards. Impressive.

47. Hitting the sweet spot is crucial for both distance and direction. This club face has been sprayed with Dr. Scholl's Odor X foot powder. It's a much better tool for getting feedback than a face sticker, which changes launch and spin characteristics.

Only one of these strikes is even remotely close to being quality. Can you guess which one?

Even the best of the group is still high and towards the heel a full ½ inch. The others are far beyond the club's ability to create a saving spin axis. A couple of them will darn near snap your shaft off!

Pick up some Dr. Scholls at the local drugstore. A bottle may cost you $2-3 and is small enough to keep in your golf bag. Simply spray it on the face every 5-10 drives.

48. OK a couple more Trackman looks. This is newcomer Xander Schauffele who recently turned pro and won his first PGA Tour event. He's another young ball smasher. Check out how close to zero his face and path are! Most of the rookies nowadays have grown up grooving their swings on Trackman.

A 1.46 smash combined with the launch and spin numbers tells me he caught this one a groove high and a 1/8th inch towards the heel. And it still went 337. Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting.

49. And last but not least, long drive champion Tim Burke:

How about 410 yards off the tee? Burke just needs to hit the ball straight once out of 8 tries to win his matches. He doesn't need to find and play his bad drives. So his face and path numbers do not have to be as consistently tight as a tour player.

And yet here his path and face angles are still pretty close to 0. Notice the fundamentally sound setup?

50. PSST! Hey buddy... OK here's a really great tip for hitting your drives dead straight. But you didn't hear it from me...got it?

Vaseline or Chapstick applied directly to the face of the club eliminates most of the friction that is responsible for changing a golf ball's spin axis at impact and making it curve. However, it's massively against the rule of golf.

You can probably think of ways you could use this to win a match off your buddy, but if you get caught....well....let's just say you're own your own.

The one exception where I do recommend using this is if you have paid a good deal of cash to play a nice and you're down to your last golf ball. Just understand that your score is not official under the rules. BONUS TIPS!!!

51. Many golfers fail to maintain their original posture over the ball. It's very common to see the hips push forward into the ball as the club goes through impact.

The golfer on the right has suddenly gotten very tall as his club comes down to the ball.

His hips have 'extended' away from the imaginary wall behind him. His head, conversely, will go up and back away from the ball so that he can keep in equilibrium.

This move creates a HUGE problem for hitting accurate drives, and insidiously affects all other swings, making it hard to even hit wedges close and score.

In a less experienced golfer, the typical miss here will be a block high and to the right. When a golfer has better clubface awareness, he starts to learn how to flip the hands over in an effort to square it up. This is when the duck hooking starts.

On video, the clubface will look abnormally pointing off into the right trees just before impact. If the golfer's timing is poor, the toe of the club will flip over too soon, causing it to be closed at impact and the ball can go severely left.

This is what is known in golf as a 'two way miss'. Now you can't favor one side of the fairway or the other because like Forrest Gump, “You never know what you're gonna get.”

But with talented golfers, where there's a will there's a way.

Even the greatest golfer in history, Jack Nicklaus, had a bit of early extension. He simply started the ball left with a slight outside-in path, and then let the ball block back towards the middle. If he blocked it badly, he would maybe make the right rough. But he never tried to flip the club over too much, and very seldom would miss left.

Can you see in this early photo how Jack's hips have extended towards the ball and he's gotten taller? 52. I've detailed many different swing faults that would keep you from driving the ball super straight. None of the superstars on tour who play for big money every week have built a perfect golf swing.

These players generally figured out early on how to manipulate the clubface or create other variances from perfect form to cancel out the first error. Then they practiced it for thousands of hours until it would repeat over and over. An imperfect machine.

While I believe in always striving for perfection even knowing you will never achieve it, you will need to develop course management and a great short game for extricating yourself from difficult spots off the tee on occasion.

Bobby Jones once said, “Golf is a game of recovery.” He knew on certain days he wouldn't have his A game, and planned contingencies around this fact. You should too.

53. I strongly encourage you to get your swing measured and tested on a Trackman launch monitor. Get the entire report with screen shots of your best drives, and send it to me for a swing analysis. I'd love to help you become the best driver you can be. I can tell a tons of things from your data.

Almost all of the players who have made it on the PGA Tour in the last 5 years grew up on a Trackman, and have avoided many of the pitfalls that veteran players made during their formative years playing golf. Most of the veterans, however, will consult Trackman at least on occasion.

Professional Long Drivers get on Trackman at least once or twice a year to get spin rates and accurate clubhead speed. Many of them, as well as numerous PGA pros own their own units now.

Dustin Johnson warms up for tournaments with his set up simply so he can see how far his wedges are flying that day.

Trackman Locator

And that's it! Together with my first Ebook, '50 Tips for Hitting Your Longest Drives Ever!', this should point you in the right direction to control those longer drives.

It should be obvious that learning how to control the face of the club is both the most important key to straight drives, and the most tricky and time consuming to develop. Developing power is actually quite easy in comparison. This is where all the hard work pays off – the drilling, the mirror work, the blisters formed just from mastering a great grip.

We've simply got to get enough control over the face of the club so that we hardly ever make a drastic error.

Golf is certainly not about perfection. Tiger Woods recently said he's lucky if he hits two perfect shots in an entire tournament. The guy who hits the fewest really crappy shots usually wins. Be that guy.

Thanks for reading! I'm very passionate about helping golfers get longer and straighter off the tee because I know what an amazing feeling it is.

If you'd like to learn more about the Mike Austin Swing Method and how you can learn it online from the comfort of your own home, simply click here.

COPYRIGHT By Steve Pratt and Hititlonger.com 2018, All rights reserved.