Recently, one of our Certified Instructors, George Porter, asked me where the concept of the “inner circle” came from. After finishing my response to him, I thought other folks might be interested to hear how it came about. Often times, we as instructors come up with ways to explain concepts to others that seem to stick. This one did and the story behind it is interesting. Hope you enjoy….
****
I am not sure of the exact date when the concept came to me. It was in the early 90’s. I was playing poorly. Coming into impact, I had the club stuck behind me, too flat, too open and too far from the inside. I had to flip like crazy to hit it and if I didn’t, it was straight right, in the heel. I tried forever to swing more left but would still get the same impact problems, just in a different direction.
One day, I rehearsed going to the bad pre-impact position and kept looking at it. I would then reverse this bad position of the handle and the club head. I tried to get the handle in instead of out with the club head out instead of in. This got the club face square to the plane instead of wildly open. I kept repeating the two moves to feel the dramatic difference. Of course to achieve the correct pre-impact position it felt like I was chopping the shaft over my arms with the club face dead closed. I just kept concentrating on the right elbow staying up and back to accomplish it and would look at it on video. It of course did not look anything like it felt and the ball flew great. All I had to do was keep moving the handle during impact and not let it stop. The harder I turned the club down with the right arm, the higher and with more fade the ball flew. My mind kept looking for a very low shot left!
After a few days of this I recalled Hogan talking about his secret in a Life Magazine article that I had read years earlier, where he actively used his right hand as hard as he could right from the top of the swing. I researched the article and figured I had stumbled onto the same thing he must have. Instead of the club coming into the ball very shallow, wide open and too far from the inside, the club was steeper, the face was square (it felt dead closed!) and there was none of the late desperate hand action. It felt the face was de-lofted and square to the target for miles. I guessed what Hogan felt was what I was feeling. Hogan must have been thinking “they will never figure this one out....how to stop hooking....close the face with the right hand as early and as hard as you can right from the top.” Wow, was that an opposite concept!
The inner circle and outer circle concept came when I tried to explain it all to my wife. So she could fully understand it, I drew two arcs on the ground. I explained that my problem (and all one planers that were under) had the club handle on the outer circle and club head on the inner circle coming into impact with the shaft flat and the face wide open. I then showed her how to reverse the position by getting the club head on the outer circle and the handle on the inner circle and that this had to be initiated very early in the downswing. If you waited too long to do it you would always be too late. I also explained all she had to do once she had initiated the motion is to keep both hands (i.e. the handle of the club) close to her body and moving around to the left on the inner circle.
When she first tried to do it, she would turn it down but just stop the handle and the club head would just flip past the shaft. She immediately felt the difference when she would turn it down and keep moving the handle around to the left. The good news was the ball went perfect. The bad news was she felt as I had, that everything was the dead opposite of what your instincts were yelling at you. Your mind seems to be saying “wait a minute, the club face is too closed, too de-lofted and I am swinging through impact way too far left....the ball is going to go along the ground to the left.” It just took awhile to believe the perfect ball flight. To believe that you now had a club face that was trapped square, a ball that couldn’t do anything but go straight or a slight fade and you could truly feel the in-to-in nature of a side-on game.