I’ve posed a question on a bunch of forum’s about this topic and I haven’t received enough of a reply to be happy with. I’m gonna say for the record books that I believe players know/feel face relative to path more than they know/feel face relative to target.
Here’s my reasoning. I tend to try and picture the first day a player says they’re going to take the game seriously and they head out to the range. I believe they look at a target and try to make the ball go there. It could be argued that they try to make contact first then try to make the ball go in the air. Fair argument. Let’s say they have conqured those two and now they want the ball to go to a specific place.
I don’t think it is reasonable to imagine that this golfer would figure out the face first. I think it is much more likely that they get some path that is relatively toward the target with a face that is so far open that the ball goes way right. They are starting to build a relationship between what the club face feels like relative to the direction it is going. They probably don’t know they are building this relationship but they are.
I agree with Brian Manzella when he says all the other stuff that people do on the way back to the ball is to try and get that ball to go where they are looking. Most slicers will choose some sort of swinging left to try and make the ball go less right.
They usually get to a point where the ball starts close to or left of the target. Some D Plane people and Trackman would call that a closed face because they choose to use the target line as the line that determines open and closed. However, to the golfer, there is no way it feels closed. I believe closed is relative to the swing not the target.
All slicers need to learn how to feel closed relative to the path to begin to fix their slice. I know a great many teachers that will choose to fix a slicers over the top move before they fix the face. The golfer will feel no change in the face/path relationship with this method. I do believe that some may figure out they need to do something with the face different if we swing more right but most will not.
As teacher’s, we need to teach them how to feel face relative to path because this is how they can relate to the club during the motion. The clubface is trying to open for most of the downswing. We need to teach them how to fight this feeling(coined gravity torque by Damon Lucas) so they can get that face more square.
I want my slicers hitting pulls and pull hooks as soon as possible so I know they know they are doing something different to the clubface. After they see a bunch of balls go way left, they will be much more willing to try and swing a little more right.
