Crashing Out: When a Golfer's Body Tries to Save Itself with a Fall

On a weekend practice range, I stood behind an amateur hitting a 9-iron. The club dug deep into the turf and a slab of grass flew up. He laughed it off and switched to driver. The ball sailed far right, landing near a fence. He turned to me: “It's all in my head.”

That answer is half right. The other half lives in body position, and it only became clear when I read Alex Myers' piece in Golf Digest — the veteran writer describing his own bad shot at Rye Golf Club.

Myers is not a tour player. He is an amateur pursuing a year-long personal project to find out how good he can get. At Rye he made three birdies, a decent return. But the 5th hole was a disaster: his drive flew far enough off line to hit a house beside the course. No damage beyond his ego, but the story spread through the clubhouse.

The telling detail is that the fault was not new. It had shown up a couple of times a round since early summer, and long before that under pressure, on annual buddies' trips, on difficult tee shots.

In Vietnam I meet the same story every weekend. The domestic golf movement has grown fast in recent years, pulling a new generation of players onto the range. Amateur events and the VGA Tour system have expanded, weekend ranges are busier, but the foundational faults repeat just as often. And most amateurs still blame “the head.”

Pressure at Vietnamese amateur events has its own character: it comes not from prize money or rankings, but from the people standing around the tee box. A tight opening hole, a group waiting on the adjacent fairway, an internal scramble with side bets — those are where the driver fault surfaces. No world ranking points, no cut, but enough social pressure to tighten the grip.

What makes the technical section of Myers' piece worth reading is that it reverses that order.

Mario Guerra, an instructor on Golf Digest's Best In State list, delivered the diagnosis: Myers creates “too much vertical force and not enough horizontal force.” In plainer language, on certain swings he gets so steep that his body — sensing a bad position — stands up and crashes out in “a desperate but futile attempt to save it.”

What is called crashing out is not a random reflex; it is the body defending itself against a steep position it knows it cannot handle.

In modern golf analysis this pattern resembles early extension and loss of posture: the pelvis thrusts toward the ball, the torso stands up out of its forward bend, and the hands are forced to flip and save at the bottom. You fall because your body refuses to let the club dig into the ground.

Guerra's fix is equally counter-intuitive: swing more around the body, keep the club as low and parallel to the ground as possible in both the backswing and downswing, almost “a baseball swing in golf posture.” This is a shallowing drill, the antidote that has spread across professional tours over the past decade to treat exactly this steep, hands-dominant pattern.

The checkpoint is something few Vietnamese amateurs have heard named. Halfway between the top of the backswing and impact, a good swing shows the shaft in line with the trail arm. On a steep player, the shaft is still tipping toward the ball at that point; on a good player, it is shallowing along the arm. Myers' swing video showed exactly that: when he held the horizontal feel, ball flight came down and looked far better.

Two different instruments — the ground-force feel and the video plane line — point to the same root cause. That is the piece's most persuasive move.

Then comes the layer amateurs shorthand as “mental.” Josh Nichols, a mental coach, confirms the link with precisely the pattern Guerra described: players who are too steep and open at the top, then try to flip the club square during the downswing. Myers adds his own diagnosis: too many swing thoughts.

The loop closes on itself. A steep player senses the bad position mid-swing and adds a compensation, which makes the fault worse. The more you think, the more you compensate; the more you compensate, the steeper you get.

Following the framing of sports psychologist Josh Brant, the pattern carries the shape of the yips — a movement disruption triggered by pressure, not by missing technique.

The three-count breathing routine — in for three, out for three — is the lowest-risk item in the whole piece, and Myers credits it with one of the best rounds of his life; the year he used it, he won the traditional green jacket of his buddies' trip, a playful take on the Masters' Green Jacket.

Based on my experience covering rounds and training sessions in both Indonesia and Vietnam, this is where idealization creeps in easiest. The technical lesson is sound, but the evidence is thin, and three gaps deserve a straight look.

First, there is not a single launch-monitor figure in the piece. No ball speed, no distance, no accuracy data. The “better” shot was judged by eye, against a line drawn on a swing-analysis app.

Second, the improvement came after one practice session. Myers himself admits he still has “homework on the range,” and his on-course goal is to “find a blend.” The transition is not finished.

Third, the horizontal drill is a deliberately exaggerated over-correction. Applied too literally, it can create a new fault: low ball flight, a pull, or a block right.

The outside reading is simpler: a driver that fails under pressure is a mental problem, and the cure is a calmer head.

But the real lesson of this case runs the other way: the body reaches the wrong position first, and the head only reacts after. When an amateur feels “tight hands” on a hard tee shot, what changed is not the thought but the position of the hips and torso in the second half of the downswing. Telling yourself to stay calm while the pelvis thrusts toward the ball solves nothing.

There is a second misunderstanding, and it costs more in Vietnam. The golf instruction ecosystem — credentialed coaches, mental coaches, swing-analysis apps — is packaging improvement as a purchasable service. That helps, but it also pushes amateurs to copy someone else's feel. Myers' “baseball swing in golf posture” is an exaggerated drill, not the final swing. A Vietnamese amateur who copies it verbatim on the course will create the very opposite fault he is trying to avoid.

The voice of the community is never noise; it is the drumbeat of the match. And that drumbeat, this time, only speaks when you are willing to film your own swing instead of telling yourself it is all in your head.

The open question for the next installment is simple: will the fix travel to the course? One session on a mat, one pretty line on video, three birdies and a 5th hole say nothing yet about the driver under pressure on the next golf trip.

For the amateur, the internal signal worth watching is not “did I stop thinking,” but the checkpoint halfway between the top of the backswing and impact — whether the shaft sits with the trail arm. If it is still tipping toward the ball, the body will fall again. The year 2026 taught me that an empty course means the one who leads must speak more; on an empty range, it means looking harder at your own image.

The fall in Indonesia did not cost me my job; it taught me how to stand up in silence. With a broken driver, standing up works the same way: in silence, with video, and one checkpoint.