Decoding 'Crashing Out': When a Golfer's Body Lunges Outward to Rescue an Overly Steep Swing

The drive on the fifth hole at Rye Golf Club in New York State left the clubface at an angle Alex Myers knew was wrong the instant it happened. The ball did not climb. It flew low, well right, cleared a line of trees and struck a house beyond the property line. No windows broke. Nobody was hurt. There was just a driver, a Titleist ball, and a senior Golf Digest writer standing in the fairway with a feeling every amateur knows too well: his body had just done something very strange, and it had not asked permission. What makes this story worth dissecting is not the bad shot. It is what came before it, in the same round, when Myers made three birdies. He struck the ball well. He played a solid overall round. Then one drive erased the memory of everything else. Three of his Golf Digest colleagues were on the course that day, and the shot quickly became newsroom folklore. A few days later, it became an article. I have read a great many pieces like this in nearly forty years in the business. Most stop at recounting the miss and advising readers to keep their head still or breathe deeply. Myers goes one step further, and that step is what deserves analysis: he took his shot to a credentialed instructor, put it on a technical operating table, and came back with a diagnosis most amateurs would never arrive at on their own. A writer who makes himself the protagonist Myers writes a series called Late Scratch?, a year-long personal project to see how good he can get. The format has matured in golf media: a journalist turns himself into the protagonist, confesses a weakness, and documents the repair. It is cheap to produce, highly shareable, and renewable instalment by instalment. It also places the writer in a rare position: insider and observer at once, with firsthand experience and the standing to call elite coaches on demand. The fault is not new. Myers says it appeared earlier in the summer, shows up a couple times a round, and has a longer history on annual golf trips, where the invisible pressure far exceeds that of an ordinary round even though nothing is at stake but pride. The driver is the club he trusts least. On the range the fault all but vanishes. On the course, facing a hard tee shot, it returns. The round at Rye Golf Club involved three colleagues. No tournament system, no world ranking points, no purse. The fifth hole is described by Myers himself as never a fun one, a difficult tee shot that reads as a psychological threat before the club is even drawn. The only championship the piece mentions is the buddy-trip green jacket, a play on the Masters' Green Jacket. To outsiders it is a joke. To those involved, it is the most valuable thing in the year. The diagnosis: too much vertical force, not enough horizontal Myers walked into the lesson with an assumption: the problem was in his head. He believed he had too many thoughts standing over the ball, and that clearing his mind would restore the swing. Instructor Mario Guerra inverted that assumption. Guerra's diagnosis fits in a sentence: Myers applies too much vertical force to his swing and not enough horizontal force. When the body senses it is in a poor position, specifically too steep, it responds instinctively, lunging outward in a desperate but futile attempt to save the shot. Guerra calls this crashing out. This is the pivot any golfer who has fought the driver should pause over. What amateurs call losing composure, getting tight, or having a busy head is usually framed as a mental problem. Guerra's diagnosis says the opposite. The body is not betraying you. It is trying to rescue you. It is simply rescuing you the wrong way, because the starting position was already wrong. Translating into biomechanics Crashing out is vernacular. Set beside the standard vocabulary of motion analysis, it maps almost perfectly onto early extension, a loss of posture. In a healthy swing the hips hold their distance from the ball, the upper body keeps its forward tilt through the downswing, and the club descends on a shallower plane. When a golfer is too steep at the top, the body does the reverse: the pelvis thrusts toward the ball, the torso stands up out of its forward bend, and the hands must perform a rescue at the bottom to square the face. The swing looks like an effort. It is an effort. It is simply an effort in the wrong place. Confidence levels matter here. Myers' article never uses the term early extension. Mapping Guerra's language onto the industry's standard concept is my inference, drawn from the descriptions in the piece: too much vertical force, the body lunging out, the shaft too steep. Confidence is medium. But the direction is consistent at both ends: the force feel Guerra describes and the video checkpoint Myers uses point to the same root cause. Across years of watching amateur events around Boston, I have seen this pattern repeat almost intact in players with handicaps between 10 and 20. They do not lack strength. They do not lack practice. They are fighting a faulty starting position, and every shot afterward is just a chain of reactions. The baseball swing in golf posture Guerra did not ask Myers to fix a dozen small details. He gave one drill, and it was deliberately polar. Myers had to swing more horizontally, rotating around his body. He had to keep the club as low as possible and parallel to the ground in both the backswing and the downswing. Guerra described the feel as almost making a baseball swing, except in golf posture. To a beginner, that is a strange instruction. To a coach, it is a familiar prescription. Whatever is too steep must be pulled toward flat. A hands-dominant player whose club descends from above is asked to do the exact opposite so the neuromuscular system registers a new feel. The drill is intentionally exaggerated. It is not meant to become the real swing. It is meant to create a reference point on the opposite side, so the player can later find the balance in between. That is also why improvement in a single session should not be read as a conclusion. It is an early signal. In motor learning, acquiring a new pattern always involves an overshoot phase, and that phase tends to create a new fault before things settle. The checkpoint called the moment of truth Alongside the drill, Myers uses a swing-analysis app to check the shaft position on video. The checkpoint the app calls the moment of truth sits roughly halfway between the top of the backswing and impact. In a good swing, the shaft at that point is in line with the trail arm. For a steep player it steepens down toward the ball. For a sound player it is shallowing and matching the trail arm. This is an eye test, not launch-monitor data. It is useful because it gives the player an image to compare against, but it has limits: the eye readily believes what it wants to see. Myers reviewed the video and found the new swing looked much better than his normal move. The ball flew lower and better. He wrote that it did not take long to produce improved shots. This is where I want readers to slow down. One session, one drill, one video review. There is no data on how long the improvement holds, no data on whether it transfers to the course, and not a single launch-monitor number to check against. The mental layer: the loop of swing thoughts Alongside the technical section, the article introduces a second layer: the mind. Myers admits to having too many swing thoughts. He talks with mental coach Josh Nichols and sport psychologist Josh Brant. Nichols confirms the body-mind link and names the most common amateur complaint: being too steep and too open at the top, then trying to flip things back on track during the downswing to square the club. That flip is a compensation. And compensation mid-swing is almost always late. The striking part is the self-reinforcing loop. A steep player senses the bad position mid-swing. That sensation produces a thought. That thought produces a correction. That correction deepens the original fault. More thoughts, more compensations; more compensations, more thoughts. Myers calls it a mental problem. Guerra calls it a vertical-versus-horizontal force problem. Both are describing the same circle from two sides. The mental fix Myers uses is a three-count in, three-count out breathing technique paired with a single cue instead of many thoughts at once. He says this breathing routine previously produced some of his best golf, including the year he won the buddy-trip green jacket. It is a small but important detail: it is the lowest-risk intervention in the entire story, and the only one with a repeated track record. In 2026 I realised the second grandstand has no seats but real people in it. Amateur golf forums, Facebook groups, comment threads under swing videos: all of them now do the work local clubs once did, giving players a place to say I have that too. In that space, Myers' story is read not as a technical lesson but as confirmation. A decade of the PGA Tour moving the other way Set against the wider picture of elite golf, Guerra's diagnosis is far from foreign. It aligns with a decade-long PGA Tour trend: away from a steep, hands-driven, outside-in delivery and toward a shallower, more rotational move. Today's leading players are judged by their ability to keep the shaft plane shallow and stable through impact. Coaching academies teach shallowing as a foundational skill. Myers' fault, technically speaking, is not exotic. It is the most common amateur fault there is, simply diagnosed in the language of a credentialed coach rather than in academic terms. What is notable is that the same trend faces counter-pressure at the top. Courses keep getting longer, the ball keeps flying further, and the question of equipment limits still hangs unresolved. Amateurs practise shallowing while the industry argues about rolling the ball back. The two stories run parallel and never meet, yet both say one thing: personal technique and industry policy are independent layers of motion. The contrarian read: that shot was not the failure of a system There is a way to read this article that I believe is wrong, and it is fairly common. It turns the fifth-hole shot into evidence for a grand conclusion: that Myers has a serious technical problem, that the Late Scratch? project is failing, that amateurs broadly cannot improve without a coach. Three birdies in the same round say otherwise. They show that Myers' ball-striking and scoring ability remain intact. The problem is isolated to one club and one type of situation, not a global collapse. That is the difference between a player with a localised fault and a player with a broken swing. The two look identical on a single hole's scorecard and are entirely different to repair. And that is why the piece deserves a little structural caution. It is one instalment in a multi-part series. The format has a built-in engine: it needs an open loop. The bad shot is the hook. The diagnosis is the payoff. And the question of whether the fix sticks is what brings readers back next time. That does not make the article wrong. It means readers should distinguish a story designed to continue from a conclusion already proven. There is a second contrarian layer, and it matters more to me. Guerra's diagnosis is correct, but it is also convenient. It converts a situational problem into a mechanical one. Once a problem has a name, it can be taught, measured and sold. That framing is not technically false. It simply chooses one half of the story to tell. The coaching ecosystem and a free ticket for brands The article names a Golf Digest Best In State instructor, two mental specialists, and a swing-analysis app. No sponsorship is disclosed. But the phenomenon should be named accurately: the piece is at once a personal story and a promotional surface for the coaching ecosystem. That is not sinister. It is how the industry runs. But readers should notice that the sequence of I have a problem, I call an expert, the problem gets a name, I get a drill reinforces an expectation: amateur improvement is a coach-mediated process. That expectation is partly right. It is also a business model. And here is a practical gap the article leaves unstated. Myers can call a credentialed instructor, a mental coach and a sport psychologist, then synthesise all of it in one article. That is a privilege of working in golf media. Most amateurs do not have it. They have one range session, a phone, and a half-finished video. Looking back at the amateur events I have followed, professionalised coaching is spreading fast in the United States and slowly in the Vietnamese golf community. That is a gap. It may also be an advantage, because players without a coach are forced to learn to read their own swing rather than delegate it. The risk of over-correcting A word on technical risk. The baseball-swing-in-golf-posture drill is designed to exaggerate. Applied too literally and for too long, it can create a new fault on the opposite side: too flat a shaft plane, too much hip rotation, balls pushed right or blocked. Myers himself uses the word blend. He knows the new feel is not the destination but one end of an axis. The destination is in the middle. And the way to know whether you have arrived is the video checkpoint. Players should not judge by feel, because feel is the most distorted thing right after learning a new motion. The second risk is mental. The way the article describes the fault, recurring under pressure, vanishing on the range, appearing with one specific club, brings it closer to a yips-like pattern than a fixed mechanical flaw. Yips are notorious for relapse. One improved round does not break the pattern. It only quiets it temporarily. The wind from that recording still blows through me whenever the course is empty. I once sat on a wooden bench at a practice range at five in the morning, listening to an older golfer hit two hundred balls without saying a word. On the last one he turned to me and said he was no longer fixing his swing; he was teaching his body to trust a new position. That is what Guerra's diagnosis is trying to do. Signals to watch So what is worth waiting for in the next instalment? First, data from the course. Whether the fault returns a couple of times a round. Second, whether the breathing routine and single cue are kept or dropped. Third, whether a new fault appears in the opposite direction, a sign the correction has passed the balance point. And fourth, and most interesting to me: whether Myers stops calling his problem a mental one. There are recordings we never release, because they are the soul of the field. The shot into the house at Rye is one of them. It will never appear on any leaderboard. It exists only in the memory of four men on a New York fairway, and in one article. But the article achieves something worth crediting. It turns a moment of embarrassment into a clear technical question. It does not claim the swing has been fixed. It claims the root cause has been named. For an amateur, naming the root cause is most of the journey. An empty course, and the wind still keeps time for the ball. Every driver will one day betray the person holding it. What is worth knowing is whether, when it happens, you can read what your body is trying to rescue, or only manage to curse it.