Andrew Rice reveals the "secret" of all great golfers in It's All About Impact

The cornerstone of empiricism is observation. In his new book It’s All About Impact, golf instructor and author Andrew Rice begins with a few basic observations.

One is that golf swings vary rather dramatically, even among professional golfers, and even among the top 25 players—both male and female—of the modern era (after the introduction of steel shafts), as identified mainly through major championship wins.

Another is that all of these golfers, despite any individual variation in the swing as a whole, return the club to ball squarely and with a descending blow.

The question that fascinated Rice was, essentially, how do they ensure this club position given that they do so many other things so differently?

So Rice examined every aspect of every one of the 25 players on “The List” and discovered one striking similarity: At the moment before each of them initiated the downswing, their bodies were flush up against an imaginary 84-degree line. Rice notes that a couple of these players were at 83-degrees, and a couple at 85, but the vast majority shifted their weight and loaded their swings up to this 84-degree point.

That’s the “84-degree secret” that Rice seeks to convey throughout the book: why it’s important, and how to achieve and maintain it for swings with all clubs.

The book ($27, Bally Down Publishing, itsallaboutimpact.com) is concise (113 pages) and easy to read and follow, with copious illustrations (line drawings of champion golfers with their faces whited out so that they are less identifiable) and photos. Rice moves from abstract and theoretical to concrete and attainable, via explanation, illustration, exercises, and drills.

A couple of questions naturally arise, though. For example, how can average players even hope to feel whether or not they are at 84-degrees when actually swinging a club on the course, considering that none of them have the finely-tuned hand-eye-body coordination of an elite golfer? And why is the golfer in all the photos (Rice himself?) wearing such hideous pants in every shot?

Rice’s answer to the former question is to provide practice and drills to get the feeling for the perfect 84-degree position. As far as I can tell, though, there’s no explanation of the latter.

Which brings us back to another fundamental tenet of empiricism: Correlation does not equal causation. There’s no positive evidence offered that the 84-degree commonality is the “secret” – it is a striking, and perhaps insightful, correlation with great golf swings, but the possibility always exists that it is actually incidental to whatever it is that is the real secret.