It is astonishing to me that after nearly 8 years of scientific certainty on the matter, that golfers and their coaches are still quite uninformed about what makes a ball fly like it does.
Specifically I’m talking about the face to path relationship which controls not only the way a golf ball will curve, but where it starts and finishes as well.
It was often written in golf instructional books and magazines that path created the initial direction of a shot, and face determined the curve or end direction. Both statements, as we now know, are patently false.
All of my statements and examples to follow are based on a perfectly centered strike on the face of the club. Mishits and the way they cause differences in launch and flight are for another day completely! But for the purposed of this article, we are eliminating that as a variable.
Trackman concluded by 2010 or earlier, that the orientation of the face has the most influence about not only where a ball will end up, but what direction it launches as well.
On a iron shot, they stated in their educational newsletter that face is about 75% of the influence, while path was the other 25%, of the initial launch vector. On a driver it ramps up to 85%. It would be safe to assume that the amount of spin loft greatly affects this number. A long driver hitting a 2 degree driver would probably see higher than 85%.
This is fairly similar to the findings of Dave Pelz about the putter. He states that 86% of initial direction is due to face angle.
So a drive that has a path of 4 degrees rightward, or inside out, and a face 4 degrees closed at impact will launch initially around 2.5 degrees left of target. It would then go on to curve fairly dramatically further left.
In this case, a golfer following the old ball flight laws might think that he pulled the ball with an outside in path, and therefore believe he needs to swing even more inside out. This will simply make the left miss even worse, and introduce a more severe push to the right as well.
We can also say that a ball that starts left and fades back to the target has a closed face. And one would actually draw the ball back to center with a clubface that was open. This is not what most golfers, amateur or pro, would have guessed before 2010.
And contrary to their belief, a drive that has an inside out path and a clubface square to the target will NOT finish at the target, but will overhook the target and finish left.
The way the ball curves after the initial launch has to do with the face to path relationship, which I will cover next time. Until then, please don’t keep living in the 70’s in your understanding of basic golf physics – it will make it much more difficult for you to improve.
