The 'Crashing Out' Swing Fault and the Limits of a Single Practice Session

The Titleist ball left the driver face at No. 5, Rye Golf Club, flew far enough right to strike a house. No glass broke. Only Alex Myers' ego broke. He is a senior writer for Golf Digest, and through the summer of 2026 he assigned himself a project called "Late Scratch?" — one year to answer the question: how good can he get at golf?

The answer arrived on an afternoon between three colleagues, on a hole he himself admits "is never a fun one." He made three birdies that round — meaning the underlying skill was intact. But a single driver shot turned the entire round into the talk of the club.

What deserves analysis is not the ball flying into a house. It is that a player can make three birdies in the same round and still collapse entirely on one shot. I have tracked hundreds of amateur rounds across Indonesia and Southeast Asia, and this pattern recurs often enough that it is no longer random. It is structural.

Alex Myers' driver fault is not new. He describes it appearing "earlier in the summer," showing up "a couple times a round," and having a longer history on annual buddy golf trips — where pressure is invisible but heavy as concrete. On the range, the fault disappears. At hole No. 5, it returns. This is not a pure technique problem. It is a trigger-condition problem.

Before going deeper, one anchor point matters. Global amateur golf is undergoing a structural shift: from purely mechanical instruction toward a three-layer model — mechanics, psychology, and measurement tools. Myers' article mirrors that shift precisely. He does not dissect his own swing. He calls a coach. He calls a mental coach. He uses an analysis app. An ordinary amateur in Surabaya or Jakarta does not have those three resources at once.

And this is the point I want to hold through the whole analysis. The real value of the story is not the swing fault itself, but the ecosystem structure it exposes.

The diagnosis comes from Mario Guerra, a coach named on Golf Digest's "Best In State" list. Myers walks in assuming the problem is "all in his head." Guerra rejects that assumption with one short line: "Too much vertical force and not enough horizontal force in his swing."

Translate that into golf biomechanics: when a player takes the club back too steeply, the body senses it is in a poor position. The self-preservation reflex fires. The pelvis thrusts toward the ball, the torso stands up out of its forward bend, and the wrists must flip a rescue at the bottom. Myers calls it "crashing out." In the industry's standard vocabulary, the pattern is close to "early extension" or "loss of posture," but the coach's label describes the player's subjective feel more accurately.

This is the part I find most interesting methodologically. Guerra does not fix the hands. He redirects the force. The prescribed drill: swing "more horizontally around the body," keep the club "as low and as parallel to the ground as possible" in both directions, described as "almost like making a baseball swing but while in golf posture." That is a rotational, shallowing drill — the exact antidote the whole tour has used for a decade to escape a steep, hands-dominant, over-the-top motion.

There is a checkpoint called the "moment of truth," positioned halfway between the top of the backswing and impact, where a good player's shaft sits in line with the trail arm. Myers uses the Mustard Golf app to overlay the shaft on video and compare. The result after one session: the ball flew "lower and better," and on video the swing "looked much better than his normal move."

The second layer is psychological. Josh Nichols, a mental coach, confirms the mind-body link and names the most common fault: "being too steep and open at the top, then trying to flip things back on track during the downswing." Myers himself admits he has "too many swing thoughts." This is a self-reinforcing loop: the more you think, the more you compensate mid-swing, the deeper the fault. The fix offered is a three-count breath in, three-count out, plus a single cue rather than many at once.

Every crisis begins with a number forgotten in a financial report. Here the forgotten number is not in a financial report but in a scorecard: three birdies. Three birdies is evidence the overall ball-striking ability remains intact. The driver fault is isolated to one club, one pressure type, one specific social context.

And here is the crux. Improvement after one practice session is an early signal, not proof. There is no launch-monitor data. No retention data. No on-course transfer data. Only one eyeball video check, one new force feel, one lower ball flight. That is the start of a hypothesis, not the conclusion of a process.

The "baseball swing in golf posture" drill carries its own risk. It is a deliberate over-correction drill, designed to be exaggerated and then blended. Applied too literally, a player can shift from a steep fault to a flat fault — the ball flies straight but blocks right, losing directional control. Myers himself recognizes this when he says the on-course goal is to "find a blend." That blend has not been found. It is still being sought.

Another layer. The fault is described by the author and those around him as a form of yips — an involuntary, pressure-triggered disruption of a grooved motion. Yips are notorious for relapse. They fade, then flare. One good round cannot measure the durability of a psychological protocol.

The trophy does not measure strength; it measures a group's capacity to endure chaos. In amateur terms, the trophy takes the shape of the green jacket from the annual buddy trip — a tradition parodying the Masters' Green Jacket. Myers once won it the year he used the breathing technique. That says more than any swing metric: for amateurs, pressure is manufactured locally, with no formal tournament system required.

There is a paradox worth facing. The writer has access to elite coaches, a sport psychologist, and tour-grade analysis apps — resources most amateurs in Indonesia do not have. Yet even with that entire ecosystem, the fault recurs under pressure. That suggests the root issue is not resources. It is frequency. A psychological loop etched over thousands of repetitions under low pressure cannot be rewritten by one session under zero pressure.

This is precisely the point golf-market analytics often miss. We measure spending on clubs, on lessons, on analysis tools. We do not measure repetition hours under authentic pressure. People look at the transfer-market price sheet; I look at a player's biological clock to predict the default date. For amateur golf, the technical biological clock runs on frequency, not on tools.

So what is worth remembering here, for a player in Surabaya reading this on a Tuesday night? Three things, in order of practical priority.

First, the steep-versus-shallow conceptual frame. If you see a high ball flying right, and the feel at the bottom is "saving the shot," odds are you are in a steep pattern. That frame is simple enough to self-check on the range without a coach.

Second, the thought-breath pairing. Too many swing thoughts tend to produce mid-swing compensation. A single cue plus a three-in, three-out breath is the lowest-risk, highest-confidence measure in the entire article — and the only thing that ever helped the author win his buddy championship.

Third, the pressure pattern. Most amateurs in Southeast Asia judge themselves on the range, then get frustrated on the course. That is a sampling bias. The range measures technique. The course measures psychology. Two different datasets for two different questions.

Industry-wise, this article functions as soft promotion for the coaching ecosystem: a credentialed instructor named, a mental coach named, a sport psychologist named, an analysis app named. No explicit sponsorship is disclosed. But the structure appears densely enough that a reader should distinguish between ecosystem context and endorsement.

A great champion is not the one who never falls, but the one who knows exactly when he is about to fall and prepares a controlled fall. Alex Myers knows his moment exactly: hole No. 5, Rye, one driver. He did not prepare for that fall. But he turned it into data, into a story, into a practice session, into a conceptual frame. For a writer, that is a controlled fall.

What I want to know next is not in the article itself. I want to know whether the next annual golf trip — high pressure, low frequency, no repetition — brings that driver shot back. The answer to that question is the real data. The rest, including the video shaft line and the horizontal-force feel, remains a hypothesis waiting to be tested on a golf hole everyone knows is never a fun one.