The dreaded slice haunts most weekend golfers and the majority of the golfing public, but how do you get rid of it? One GOLF Top 100 Teacher has a quick drill you can use on the range to train your muscles to make the swing you want and finally close that open face.
Here’s Dale Abraham, the director of instruction at Bighorn Golf Club in Palm Desert, Calif., to explain:
“Any time you have a slice, typically the face is going to be open to the path, and for right-handed golfers, the vast majority of the time they are going to be swinging to the left of the target,” Abraham said, while on site for GOLF’s Top 100 Teachers Summit at Talking Stick Resort in Scottsdale, Ariz., last week. “So, outside in, left path, face open, hitting it somewhat towards the center of the face — it’s going to slice. Right? So they have to learn to swing more to the right.”
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That’s where it gets tricky. Abraham says the problem is that golfers don’t internalize how much they have to swing to the right to fix the issue.
“To get a path to move four, five, six or even 10 degrees sometimes, if someone is swinging eight or 10 degrees left, and you want them two or three to the right, they have to make a massive feel change,” he says.
The drill
So how do you get a massive feel change like that? Overexaggerate.
“Have them swing 90 degrees to the right of the target, so that whoever is beside them on the range, they would get hit with divots if they are taking divots,” Abraham says. “And as long as they learn to turn it over with that, with swinging 90 degrees to the right, they can really change a path a lot, and in a hurry too, which is great.”
Take several swings on the range perfecting this drill — take your club back like normal but use Abraham’s drill for the downswing — and see if that motion can transfer to when you actually start hitting balls. While a long-term fix might be best solved by seeing a teacher, Abraham says this quick solution might be just the ticket for some.
“People nowadays, they don’t have the attention span,” Abraham says. “They want to change immediately. They want to make one or two swings and, boom, I got the ball flight I want and they are off. So that’s a great way to kind of accelerate that change to swing right for a right-handed golfer if you want to hit a true draw.”