Vertical Force, Horizontal Force and the "Crash Out": Reading an Amateur Swing Fault With Data

The ball flew right, far enough to hit the roof of a house beside Rye Golf Club. The shot came off the 5th hole, a hole that, in the words of the man who hit it, “is never a fun one.” The man is Alex Myers, a senior writer at Golf Digest.

What made me stop on this story was the scorecard that came with it. In the same round, Myers made three birdies. A player with a globally broken swing does not make three birdies in a round. A player with one localized fault does.

Numbers do not lie. Reputation whispers into the ear of anyone who will not read the card.

The context of a fault pattern

Myers is running a series called “Late Scratch?” — a project in which he gave himself one year to answer a question: how good can he get. The format is familiar in American golf journalism: the writer turns himself into a research subject and turns a personal fault into a public lesson. The byline becomes the protagonist of his own story.

Myers’s fault is not new. He describes it appearing since earlier in the summer, a couple of times a round, and getting noticeably worse on the annual golf trips with his friends. He calls it a driver problem — the club he admits he lacks confidence with.

That description matters, and most readers skim past it. A fault that shows up a couple of times a round, disappears on the range, and surfaces only on difficult tee shots does not match a permanent mechanical defect. It matches a pattern tied to situation and tied to confidence in the shot.

Based on my experience tracking and logging data, this is where amateur analysis usually goes the wrong way. A player sees “driver fault” and assumes a purely technical problem. But frequency of occurrence is data. It tells you the trigger does not sit inside the swing mechanism. It sits inside the conditions of the shot.

I have seen something similar in another environment. In 2026, as a student in Binh Duong, I built a spreadsheet model to read 26 rounds of the V.League and found a champion side averaging 48 percent possession — the lowest of the leading group. The lesson that year was not that possession is useless. The lesson was that a metric only means something beside its context. Myers’s shot is the same case.

Diagnosis: vertical force, horizontal force, and the crash out

Myers called Mario Guerra, an instructor on Golf Digest’s “Best In State” list. He brought his own hypothesis: the problem is in his head.

Guerra dismissed it in a single line: too much vertical force in the swing and not enough horizontal force.

This is the technical point worth pausing on. Vertical force is the component the body produces up and down — the player pushes into the ground, the ground pushes back, and the torso stands up. Horizontal force is the rotational component that keeps the chest and hips turning around an axis instead of popping upward. A typical amateur swing has too much of the first and too little of the second. The club arrives at the ball on too steep an angle.

On some swings, Guerra said, Myers gets so steep that his body “instinctively knows it is in a poor position and crashes out in a desperate but futile attempt to save it.”

“Crash out” is the lay term. In golf biomechanics, the pattern maps onto early extension: the pelvis thrusts toward the ball, the upper body stands up out of its forward bend, and the hands are forced to flip at the bottom to save the clubface. The shaft is too steep on the way down, the body has nowhere left to rotate, so it does the only thing left: it stands up.

Guerra’s diagnosis is not a gut-feeling tip. It describes a testable chain of cause and effect. A steep position at the top produces a steep shaft on the way down. A steep shaft on the way down creates the need for an in-swing rescue. The in-swing rescue produces a ball that flies right. No step in that chain is random.

The corrective drill and the measurement

Guerra gave one drill: swing more horizontally around the body, keep the club as low and as parallel to the ground as possible in both the backswing and the downswing, with the feel of almost making a baseball swing while in golf posture.

This is a textbook over-correction drill. The player is asked to push the feel past what is needed, then find the blend himself. In motor learning, this is standard practice: you do not fix an old pattern by edging toward it, you overshoot it and come back.

The checkpoint Myers used to measure progress is the most interesting part. He used a swing-analysis app to look at a marker it calls the “moment of truth” — roughly halfway between the top of the backswing and impact. At that point, a good swing shows the shaft sitting in line with the trail arm. A steep player sees the shaft diving toward the ball.

One thing needs to be said about the nature of that measurement. The “moment of truth” line is used here as a visualization aid, not as a validated instrument. Myers judged improvement by eye against that line, not by launch-monitor numbers. That does not make it worthless. It just puts the confidence level in the right place.

What he observed: a lower ball flight, a better-looking trajectory, and a move on video that “looked much better than his normal move.”

The mental layer and the self-reinforcing loop

Alongside the mechanical work, Myers talked to mental coach Josh Nichols. Nichols confirmed the physical-mental link and named the most common amateur fault: being too steep and too open at the top, then trying to flip the club back on track during the downswing to square the face.

This is the most transferable idea in the whole story, and it is a self-reinforcing loop. A steep player senses a bad position mid-swing. That sensation creates a thought. The thought creates a compensation. The compensation makes the fault worse. And each time it happens, the player loads another thought into the next swing. Myers calls his own problem too many swing thoughts. Nichols did not argue.

The tool he uses to break that loop is almost embarrassingly cheap: breathe in for a count of three, breathe out for a count of three. He used it the year he won the green jacket of his annual golf trip — a friends’ tradition, the amateur echo of the Masters’ green jacket. As data, that is anecdote. As risk management, it is the lowest-risk intervention in the piece.

The contrarian angle

Most golf instruction presents technical improvement as a straight line. A practice session fixes the fault, the fault disappears, the player improves. Data does not work that way.

Myers improved after one practice session. He has no retention data. He has no on-course transfer data. He says himself that he has homework to do on the range and that his on-course goal is to “find a blend.” The experiment is not finished. A good result in one session is an early signal, not a conclusion.

There is one more detail that is easy to skip: the three birdies. In data analysis we are drawn to the dramatic incident and forget that the rest of the sample is fine. Three birdies in the same round as a ball into a house is evidence that Myers’s scoring ability is intact. His fault is not a global collapse. It is a club-specific, situation-specific fault.

And here is the risk the article does not name. An over-correction drill carries over-correction risk. An exaggerated baseball swing in golf posture, taken too literally, can push a player to the opposite side: too flat a shaft, a face that closes late, a ball that goes left or gets blocked. Myers’s talk of finding a blend already admits this.

I also have to address the word “yips.” When a fault is described as appearing under pressure, vanishing on the range, and recurring a couple of times a round, that is the description of a pressure-linked pattern rather than a fixed mechanical defect. Such patterns tend to fade and relapse with stress. One good round does not close the file.

There is one more layer of risk nobody mentions. An early-extension pattern, if it persists, is commonly associated with increased load on the lumbar spine. There is no injury history in the story, so I keep that at the level of a warning, not a conclusion.

What I will be watching

What I will watch in the next installment is not the feel of the swing. I will watch whether the driver fault reappears on the next high-pressure golf trip. I will watch whether the breathing routine is sustained or dropped after a few weeks. And I will watch whether a new fault appears in the opposite direction.

I do not predict. I read the data and accept the consequences.

In Vietnam, where the amateur game is expanding faster than the habit of logging data, this story has a practical use. Amateur players tend to ask an instructor “what is my fault” and get back a description of a feeling. A better question is: where does the fault appear, with which club, under which conditions, and how often. Three birdies and one ball into a house in the same round is a dataset. It is small, but it is readable.

I hate uncertainty. But 2026 taught me that an unforeseen variable can be stronger than any algorithm. For Myers, that variable has a name: the 5th hole.