And that, Lee Trevino says, is one way to check your grip. He even sells the idea well.
“I’m going to give you a tip here you’ve never heard of.”
If you’re new here, those 12 words introduce Trevino well. He’s a player, with six major wins and dozens of other victories, and he’s a teacher, with the entries under ‘Lee Trevino tips’ on Google more than enough proof there. To the latter’s end then, we’ll try to add another, thanks to a video shared this week by the Golf Manual Instagram page (where you can also find countless other insights).
To begin, Trevino, a right-handed player, held up his right forearm.
“You see this forearm?” he said on the video. “You put a dot on this forearm. If that forearm is facing up and you’re a pretty good player, chances are you’re going to hook this ball because this is the rubber-band effect.”
The rubber-band effect? We’ll let Trevino continue.
“This arm — you ever see a guy walking down the street this way? [Trevino motioned with his right forearm facing palm-side up.]
“No. If he is walking down the street this way and he lets it go, watch. The arm will go [Trevino flipped his forearm over] — it’ll go back to there. See that’s the thing. The hands and the arms will always want to go back to the natural position.
“So when you want to hit a weird shot, you change the position to where it’ll work back to your benefit.”
[Editor’s note: The author, also a right-handed player, often hooks shots, so he played around with the tip on Saturday — and he may or may not have noticed something. Let’s continue.]
Notably, the Golf Manual Instagram post summed things up well.
“The theory here is that the hands have a natural hanging position [like the normal man walking down the street], and it is this natural position that they will return to upon impact.
“Therefore, if a player grips the club with the right hand rotated clockwise, it will naturally want to return to its natural hanging position by rotating anticlockwise, causing the face to point left.”
Editor’s note: To view more tips on the Golf Manual Instagram page, please go here, and to go to the Golf Manual instruction site, please go here.
Nick Piastowski is a Senior Editor at Golf.com and Golf Magazine. In his role, he is responsible for editing, writing and developing stories across the golf space. And when he’s not writing about ways to hit the golf ball farther and straighter, the Milwaukee native is probably playing the game, hitting the ball left, right and short, and drinking a cold beer to wash away his score. You can reach out to him about any of these topics — his stories, his game or his beers — at nick.piastowski@golf.com.