The Driver That Hit a House: When a 'Mental Fault' Turns Out to Be a Vertical-Force Problem

HOLE NO. 5 IS NEVER A KIND ONE Hole No. 5 at Rye Golf Club has never been a kind hole. It is not long enough to make anyone quit, not narrow enough to make anyone scared on the tee, and on the scorecard it looks unremarkable. But it has a particular cruelty: the tee shot forces a player to choose between two versions of himself — the version that knows how to play safe, and the version that believes this time will be different. Alex Myers, a senior writer at Golf Digest, chose the second version. He pulled driver. The ball flew. It flew far. It flew far to the right — far enough to find the roof of a house bordering the course, the first time that house had ever been struck, according to Myers himself. The ball was a Titleist. Its journey ended where no golfer wants a ball to end. The detail that made me stop was not the shot. It was the number beside it. In the same round, Myers made three birdies. Three birdies in an amateur round is a total most players need an entire season to reach once. And yet the memory of that afternoon at Rye — a round played with three newsroom colleagues — does not live in the three birdies. It lives in the driver that hit a house. Myers wrote that the shot became the talk of the town. This is a problem anyone working in sports data knows well: a rare but shocking event carries more memory weight than many common, positive ones. The brain stores the bad shot because it is tied to emotion. The scorecard stores the three birdies because it is tied to a number. Two different storage systems, telling two different stories about the same round. The data does not lie. But reputation whispers into the ear of the person who never reads the table. A SUMMER OF WRESTLING WITH THE DRIVER Alex Myers is not a professional golfer. He holds no world ranking, no tour card, no spot in any field. He is a senior writer at Golf Digest, and he has turned himself into the research subject of a year-long project called "Late Scratch?" — a serialized self-experiment with a single goal: to find out how good he can actually get. That project matters because it produces something most golf content lacks: longitudinal tracking data. Not a static instructional piece, but a continuous record of one player, one fault, across months. The fault has a name in his head: driver. Myers wrote that he had lost confidence with the driver, that the problem had appeared earlier in the summer, that it recurred a couple of times a round. It has a longer history too: every year, on a golf trip with friends, under the pressure of a small but deeply honor-bound competition, the driver abandons him. He had already diagnosed himself. He thought the problem was in his head. This is where I pause, because it is the kind of diagnosis I encounter constantly in both football and golf. When a skill trained thousands of times still fails in a specific context, the player's reflex is to blame psychology. That assignment is comfortable, because it demands no technical change. And it is usually half right. Half right: psychology plays a role. Half wrong: psychology is not the root cause. A DIAGNOSIS FROM SOMEONE CREDENTIALED Myers did what most amateurs cannot: he called an expert. Mario Guerra, an instructor listed on Golf Digest's "Best In State" ranking — the magazine's periodic state-by-state ranking of leading teaching professionals. Guerra's diagnosis was startlingly compact. He said Myers produced too much vertical force in his swing and not enough horizontal force. That sentence, read quickly, sounds like vague gym talk. It is in fact a testable technical proposition. Vertical force pushes the body up and down relative to the ground. Horizontal force, in this context, is rotation around the body's axis. A player generating too much vertical force stands up during the downswing. A player generating enough horizontal force rotates through the ball and keeps his spine tilt. Guerra added one sentence that describes the exact mechanism. On certain swings, Myers gets so steep that his body — without being told — knows it is in a poor position and "crashes out" in a desperate but futile attempt to save it. Here I have to translate coaching language into biomechanics. "Crashing out" maps almost exactly onto what swing analysts call early extension: the pelvis thrusts toward the ball and the upper body stands up out of its forward bend to rescue a shaft that is descending too steeply. When the body stands up, the hands and wrists must flip to square the face. That is a rescue, not a swing. I assign medium confidence to this inference, because the original article never uses the term "early extension." It uses practice-range language: steep, save, flip. But the description and the pattern match closely enough that other readings are hard to sustain. And this is what matters: if the diagnosis is right, Myers's problem is not in his head. It is in his hips. THE CORRECTIVE DRILL Guerra prescribed a drill: swing more horizontally around the body, keeping the club as low and as parallel to the ground as possible in both the backswing and the downswing. His description: almost like making a baseball swing, but while in golf posture. This is what coaches call an over-correction drill. You do not practice the target move. You practice an extreme version of the opposite move, so the body forgets the old habit, and only then do you blend the two. The rationale is clear. Elite golf has moved in one direction for over a decade: shallowing the shaft in the downswing, increasing rotation, reducing the dominance of the hands. A steep player needs exactly the opposite dose — a horizontal feel, a low-club feel, a sense of rotating around the torso rather than chopping down at the ball. But the drill is only half the job. The other half is a measuring tool. Myers used a swing-analysis app to check the position the app calls the "moment of truth" — roughly halfway between the top of the backswing and impact. There, a good swing shows the shaft more in line with the trail arm. A steep player at that same checkpoint shows the shaft steepening toward the ball. I rate this checkpoint highly as method, because it turns a vague feel into a line you can see on a screen. Amateurs make the mistake of trusting feel. Feel is the most easily deceived thing in the entire body. Myers reported the result: a much lower, better ball flight, and on video, a move that looked far better than his normal one. That is a positive signal. But hold on. We will come back to that number. THE MOST SUSPECT LAYER IS PSYCHOLOGICAL Alongside Guerra, Myers worked with mental coach Josh Nichols. Nichols confirmed the physical-mental link and named the most common fault he sees in players like Myers: being too steep or too open at the top and trying to flip things back on track during the downswing. That fault has a uniquely poisonous consequence. When a player has to flip to save the face, he needs one more thought in his head. And once he has one thought, he will have two. Then three. Myers admitted to having too many swing thoughts. In data terms, this is the worst class of fault to fix, because it feeds itself. A steep player must compensate. Every compensation adds a variable. Every added variable increases error. Analysts call this a positive feedback loop — in the bad sense. A poor input generates an adjustment. That adjustment generates a new, more complex poor input. The system does not self-correct; it self-complicates until it collapses. The driver flying into a house was the moment the system collapsed. AND HERE I HAVE TO BREAK THE NARRATIVE Myers's article has a coherent technical thesis. I re-checked the whole chain: a steep position at the top leads the body to stand up, standing up leads to flipping the wrists, flipping leads to losing control of direction. The corrective drill targets the first link. In theory, it is right. But I have to be blunt about the sample: one practice session, one drill, one video review, no launch-monitor data, no retention data, no on-course transfer data. The only trustworthy number in this story is three birdies. Three birdies is not evidence the driver is fixed. Three birdies is evidence Myers's underlying ball-striking is intact and the fault is isolated to one club, one context. Two other facts stand out. First, Myers wrote that the driver problem had lasted since earlier in the summer. Second, it appeared only a couple of times a round — meaning most of the time, the driver works. A fault appearing a few times a round, absent on the range, and spiking under the pressure of an annual trip — that is not the profile of a fixed mechanical defect. That is the profile of a situational problem, closer to a yips pattern than a technical error. And yips is the most stubborn problem in movement analysis, because it is highly relapse-prone. A player can fix it on the range, transfer it to the course for three rounds, and lose it entirely on one windy afternoon. The empty stadiums of 2026 made me ask: does home advantage come from the pitch or from the crowd? The data has an answer — and the answer says pressure is not in the ground, it is in the player's head when someone is watching. At Rye, hole No. 5 is not frightening. The fear comes from colleagues standing behind you. PLAN B: THE FIX CAN CREATE A NEW FAULT This part is for any golfer reading this and planning to copy Myers's baseball drill tomorrow morning. Over-correction drills have a predictable side effect. When you teach the body to swing too horizontally, you can shift the miss from one side to the other. A steep, flipping player typically misses right or off the heel. An over-flattened player typically misses the other way: shaft too flat, face closing late, ball flying low and left, or blocking right because the wrists cannot return in time. Myers recognized this. He wrote that he still has homework on the range, and that his on-course goal is to find a blend — not a replacement. That is the right mindset. An exaggerated drill is medicine, not food. You take a high dose briefly, then taper to a maintenance dose. Sustain the baseball feel too long, and you build a new fault on top of an old one. My Plan B for this case has three steps. First, use the same measuring tool Myers used — the shaft line at the checkpoint between the top and impact — as the calibration standard, rather than trusting feel. Second, limit the exaggerated feel to short practice blocks and always interleave normal swings so the body learns the blend. Third, and most important: do not judge results from one session. Judge them from at least five real rounds, with the number of fault occurrences recorded. THE MENTAL LAYER: LOWEST-RISK INTERVENTION If I had to rank every intervention in this story by benefit-to-risk ratio, Guerra's swing drill would not finish first. The breathing technique would. Myers described a breathing routine counting three in, three out. And he recorded one important detail: in the year he used it, he won the green jacket of his buddies' golf trip — an amateur tradition mimicking the Masters' Green Jacket, awarded to the champion of the group's annual trip. I have no data proving the breathing technique produced that win. The sample is one. But I have a methodological reason to prioritize it: the intervention carries near-zero risk. It does not alter swing geometry. It does not create a new fault. It does not require the body to relearn anything. A technical intervention like the baseball drill may offer greater upside, but it carries the risk of creating a new miss. In risk management, when two measures have comparable expected value, you choose the lower-variance one. That is the principle I apply when advising teams, and it holds in golf. One more note on the psychological picture. Myers did not only work with mental coach Josh Nichols; he also referenced another sport psychologist within his support ecosystem. The presence of a mental layer beside the technical layer reflects a structural shift in how amateur golf operates: improvement is no longer a purely mechanical problem. That has value. It also has a price. THE TRAP OF THE APPEALING STORY This article has a good technical thesis and a reasonable psychological layer. It also inadvertently creates a false expectation in the reader. That expectation is: your fault can be diagnosed in one phone call and fixed in one practice session. In reality, the top instructors I have interviewed all say the same thing: swing diagnosis requires multiple observations, in multiple conditions, with video from at least two angles. A 1,500-word article can recount a diagnosis. It cannot replace one. I wrote about Germany's collapse before the tournament. Not because I was clever — only because I did not believe the myth. The same applies here: the biggest temptation is to believe the beautiful story, a man finding the root of his problem and fixing it in one afternoon. That story may be true. It may also be merely the opening of a much longer process. And one structural fact pushes me toward the second possibility. The "Late Scratch?" series is a year-long project. Each article is a link in a longer arc. That means Myers has an editorial incentive to report a positive result — and an equal incentive to return to the question of whether it holds in the next installment. That is why this article ends with an ellipsis, not a period. WHAT TO WATCH If you read data for signals rather than for inspiration, this is what I would track in the series' next installments. Signal one: does the fault return under pressure. Myers wrote that the problem appeared a couple of times a round. If that number falls across the next five rounds, the drill is transferring. If it stays flat or rises, the mechanical diagnosis was not deep enough. Signal two: does a new miss pattern appear. A new left miss, a new block, an unusually low trajectory that persists — any of these indicates the correction has been overdosed. Signal three: is the breathing routine sustained in competition. This is the easiest psychological metric to measure and carries the highest predictive value in the entire story. And here is what I would leave for Vietnamese golfers, on courses around Binh Duong or Dong Nai, who have one club that keeps them awake at night. A shot that flies into a house is not proof you are mentally weak. It is a data point. To know what kind of fault it is, you must film it, count it, and place it beside your good shots in the same table. The data does not lie. But you have to read it yourself before someone else — including you — tells you a different story. I do not predict. I read the data and accept the consequences. Myers, meanwhile, is still mid-round. He has a plausible diagnosis, a well-directed drill, a low-risk breathing technique, and a hole No. 5 waiting for him next season, with the house still intact — at least for now.