Alex Myers' “Crash Out”: When the Body Stands Up to Rescue a Too-Steep Swing

The frame freezes at the point halfway between the top of the backswing and impact — the position the swing-analysis app calls the “moment of truth.” On screen, Alex Myers' shaft plane tilts down like an axe stroke, well off the ideal line. He tells instructor Mario Guerra that the problem is in his head. Guerra shakes his head, points at the frame, and talks about force: too much vertical force, not enough horizontal force. One diagnosis, and the story of the Golf Digest senior writer changes course entirely.

Data only tells us where to stand; emotion tells us why we stay. That frame was both.

One round, one tee shot, one crack

Alex Myers is a senior writer at Golf Digest, working through “Late Scratch?” — a year-long self-improvement project in which he makes himself the protagonist of the coaching story. In a round with three colleagues at Rye Golf Club, he made three birdies and called it an overall solid round. But the round entered the group's memory through one tee shot: the ball sailed right, cleared the trees and struck a house. No broken glass, no one came out. The only damage was to his ego, and the story quickly became the talk of everyone present.

The interesting part lies elsewhere. The fault was not a one-day event. It appeared earlier in the summer, recurred a couple of times a round, and had a longer history on annual buddy trips — where the pressure comes not from a leaderboard but from a green jacket the group awards itself. The 5th hole at Rye has never been a fun one for him. The tee shot there always carries something no statistic records: the fear of standing over a shot you know will go wrong.

One more detail is worth noticing: the group that day were colleagues from the same newsroom. When the ball struck the house, it did not stay a bad shot. It became an event inside a small circle, then a story retold, then an article. The value of that mishit was measured not in strokes but in how many people heard about it.

On the range, that fear disappears. This is the detail I notice most, because I once wrote 2,000 words about tactics and then realised a single pointed finger told more. A swing fault that shows up on the course but vanishes on the range goes beyond pure mechanics. It is a body fault in a specific state. And state, in golf, is harder to coach than technique.

The diagnosis: too steep, and the body rescues itself

Mario Guerra, listed by Golf Digest among its “Best In State” instructors, reads it differently from the “it's all in his head” theory. He says Myers puts too much vertical force and not enough horizontal force into his swing. The result is that on certain swings he gets so steep that his body instinctively senses a poor position and crashes out — standing up, thrusting the pelvis toward the ball, lunging out of the swing in a desperate, futile rescue.

To a long-time observer of golf, that description maps almost perfectly onto the early extension pattern. The pelvis moves toward the ball, the upper body stands up out of its forward bend, and the hands are forced to flip the club at the bottom to save the face. One clarification: the original article never uses the term “early extension.” This is my translation from a coach's lay language into golf biomechanics, and I attach medium confidence to it.

The prescription is just as telling: swing more horizontally around the body, keep the club as low and as parallel to the ground as possible in both the backswing and the downswing, almost like a baseball swing but in golf posture. This is a shallowing drill — the type the professional game has used for years against steep, hands-dominant, out-to-in deliveries. In other words, Myers' fault is a mainstream amateur fault, not an exotic one.

The trend is not new. For a decade, professional instruction has been moving away from steep, hands-driven, out-to-in deliveries toward shallower, more rotational ones. Myers sits right in the middle of that current: he is not making a strange mistake, he is making the mistake millions of amateurs make every weekend.

The video checkpoint is the most transferable detail. At the position roughly halfway between the top of the backswing and impact — around P5 to P6, where the app places its “moment of truth” — a good swing keeps the shaft roughly in line with the trail arm. A steep player keeps steepening the shaft toward the ball. One frame, two fates. One club, two stories.

Early results were clear enough: a lower, better ball flight, and a move on video that looked much better than his normal one. But Myers is honest that he still has homework on the range, and that his on-course goal is to find a blend between the new feel and the old move.

The mental layer comes from coach Josh Nichols, who confirms the body-mind link: the most common fault he sees is a player who is too steep and too open at the top and then tries to flip the club back on track during the downswing. Myers himself admits to too many swing thoughts. The self-reinforcing loop is obvious: the player senses the bad position mid-swing, adds a compensation, and the compensation deepens the original fault. Technique and mind are not separate: the same swing, named two different ways, leads to two different drills.

The contrarian read: things called by the wrong name

The popular read from outside is that this is a mental problem. That label is not wrong, but it points people in the wrong direction. When a fault appears only with one club, in one situation, and then vanishes on the range, it is tempting to conclude that the player just needs to relax. The three birdies in the same round say otherwise: the underlying ball-striking and scoring ability are intact. The problem does not sit in the whole swing. It sits in one club, under one kind of pressure.

The second contrarian point concerns the cure itself. A shallowing drill is a balancing drill, which means it is designed to be exaggerated and then blended. Applied too hard for too long, it can create a new fault: too flat a plane, and a block to the right. The article itself quietly admits this risk with the word “blend.”

The third point is evidence. The improvement was recorded after one session, by eye, on one video frame. No launch-monitor numbers. No retention data. For anyone who has stood on enough ranges, this is an early signal, not yet a conclusion. And because the fault is framed as a form of yips — a family of faults famous for fading and recurring with stress — the relapse risk stays fully intact.

Finally, one professional detail deserves an accurate reading. The piece names a credentialed instructor, a mental coach, a sport psychologist and a swing-analysis app. No sponsorship is disclosed. But the repeated appearance of those names across a serialised project shows that the instruction ecosystem has a highly effective marketing surface. Readers should take those mentions as industry context, not as endorsement.

What to watch

An empty stadium is a body without a heart: it still beats, but no one hears it. Myers' story is the same. If the drill cannot survive the annual trip and the tee shots at the 5th hole, it is just a pretty frame on a screen. The real test comes the next time he stands over a tee shot he knows he fears. Will that horizontal feel travel to the course with him, or does it only live on the range?