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Maverick McNealy's Golf Swing Evolution and Injury Recovery
SportsGrid
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12/31/2024
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Sports
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00:00
And we actually ripped a video from Scott Hamilton's Instagram.
00:04
This was you working with him, I believe, was it yesterday?
00:07
Yes, it was yesterday.
00:08
So we're going to get into a little bit of your injury history.
00:12
But the text I got from Scott Hamilton
00:16
when asking about you, Maverick, was your shoulder injury,
00:21
how it kind of happened.
00:23
Your swing got like the face got open and the club got underneath.
00:27
And now you are trying to work on just hitting hitting a fade.
00:30
I mean, was that something that you did in collegiate golf and early pro golf?
00:35
Like, have you always seen fade?
00:38
So it was.
00:41
I give the kind of 30,000 foot view of my golf swing.
00:44
And it makes everything kind of make sense.
00:45
In college, I was very much over the plane
00:50
and kind of steep and left.
00:52
And I would always try and hit draws and they'd always come out like little fades.
00:55
I wasn't a great driver of the ball.
00:58
I think that was partly equipment related.
01:02
Started working with Butch
01:05
and that really turned around my driving a lot more dynamic move.
01:09
And that's, you know, what got me on to the PGA tour there
01:12
and allowed me to compete and drive a good drive.
01:15
What do you mean, dynamic move?
01:17
What was the dynamic move you're talking about?
01:19
It's just a lot more hip turn, shoulder turn and a better weight transfer.
01:24
You know, you look at those early, early videos of Tiger.
01:26
That guy rotates a ton and really just increasing
01:30
that rotational speed helped me a lot.
01:34
So you were hanging back a little bit.
01:35
Is that what you're kind of saying there?
01:38
Staying on my left side a little bit
01:40
and more than anything, got ahead of the ball.
01:44
And when you get ahead of the ball, I had to back up through it.
01:48
So that kind of happened that I got a lot stronger, gained a lot of speed,
01:53
worked out a bunch.
01:54
And unfortunately, I started to get really underneath
01:59
and that club got really under the plane, stuck behind my hands.
02:02
And the way I'd shallow from being ahead of the ball and under the plane
02:06
was to back up out of it harder and jam my left shoulder up and in.
02:11
And it was twenty, twenty
02:15
two at Pebble on the
02:19
thing is a 70 at Monarch Peninsula.
02:21
There was like an hour backup because there's always a backup on that team.
02:25
That's a tough part. Three, two.
02:27
It's like always like a four iron to that back left pin or maybe left.
02:31
It's always on the left side.
02:32
It is. And I really wish I had a four iron because I sat there waiting for,
02:36
you know, almost an hour.
02:37
Like it's cold. You get tight.
02:39
And I think I tried to smash a five because at that point, I wasn't.
02:44
You know, when you're way underneath and flip in the face,
02:46
it's not comfortable to to hit a nice little soft hold off.
02:50
And yeah, so I try to rip the five.
02:53
I felt something weird in my shoulder.
02:55
And then by the 10th hole, it felt like someone was sticking a knife in my chest
03:00
every time I took a backswing and I tore the ligament
03:03
that connects my collarbone to my sternum and try to play through it.
03:07
A bunch golf is hard and it's really hard when you're hurt.
03:11
And I realized that I wasn't doing any favors for myself at the point.
03:14
At that point, I was 28 in the FedEx Cup, like having a great year.
03:18
You had like six top 15 or something.
03:21
Like it was almost like the you know, you're finally
03:25
really like trending towards a win.
03:27
Like so that had to be so deflating, right?
03:30
A little bit. I was number one on tour putting.
03:32
I was getting more than a stroke around putting.
03:34
So I was just making everything up.
03:36
You're just hooping. Yeah, I was just hooping.
03:38
It wasn't like I was maxing out everything I could out of my golf game,
03:41
especially when I was hurt.
03:44
And then, you know, I still see Butch and talk with a bunch,
03:49
go hit some with him every once in a while.
03:51
But I kind of, you know, he's
03:55
the best to do it ever, but he just doesn't travel as much.
03:58
And I don't see him as much.
03:59
And I started spending a bunch of time with Scotty Hamm
04:03
and got on a 3D with him in Cartersville.
04:06
And he's like, yeah, I mean, the way your left shoulder is working,
04:08
of course, your shoulder is going to hurt.
04:10
So he really wanted to get this left shoulder
04:11
working down and around as opposed to up and in.
04:15
And it kind of floated me the idea of hitting cuts.
04:18
And I was like, you know, how I see his draws now.
04:20
I've been hitting draws for six years and
04:24
coincidentally not been hitting it very good.
04:26
But eventually I kind of took my medical PRP done
04:31
and used that to kind of rework my golf swing,
04:35
retool my golf swing to get the swing direction from,
04:39
you know, way right to significantly left.
04:42
And and so the phase started.
04:45
It started to come out the joint for you.
04:47
It did not initially, but eventually.
04:50
And like, you know, I talk six degrees of swing direction.
04:54
That's like a mountain in terms of golf golfers feels like.
04:58
Yeah, that's the difference between a 15 yard draw and a five yard fade,
05:02
which is huge. And
05:05
so that's kind of where we went with it.
05:07
My brother Scout's been catty for me the last couple of weeks.
05:10
And Jackson, he was like, yeah, we get it going
05:14
really good Monday through Wednesday, but then Thursday through Sunday,
05:18
we start to see more and more of these kind of push draws,
05:20
which turned into pushes, which turned to blocks.
05:24
And he's like, we need to be hitting like steep,
05:28
you know, scuzzy cuts Monday through Wednesday
05:31
so that when you get up on the tee on Thursday, you feel right.
05:35
So that was another kind of breakthrough.
05:38
But yeah, that's just kind of what we've done.
05:41
We just move the swing direction left.
05:44
I'm hitting down on it more.
05:45
That's what Scottie says.
05:46
We compress it just like, you know, going shallow to steep
05:49
as opposed to, you know, steep a couple of ways and shallow late.
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