Instruction
How Hall of Famer’s frightening umbrella drill fixes dreaded two-way miss
Kevin C. Cox
Vijay Singh may be 61 years old, but the turf at any tour driving range doesn’t know the difference from a 30-year-old Singh. Arguably no professional golfer has hit more balls over his career, and Singh continues to grind on his game, including this week at the PGA Tour Champions’ Boeing Classic in Washington.
All of that practicing includes plenty of drills, one of which caught our eye on Thursday, when the PGA Tour Champions social media team posted a clip of Singh on the range.
Aside from being incredibly scary, this umbrella drill serves an important function for Singh. When asked what it does, he said, “Have to swing left through the ball.” Notice how the umbrella is virtually directly on the target line, perhaps slightly to the right.
Singh is working on a common flaw among many good players—from juniors to amateurs to pros—which is getting the club a little stuck on the downswing. This causes an excessive in-to-out path, which causes the hands to take over to try and square the clubface. The resulting ball flight is either a block if the face is open or a quick hook if the hands get too active.
Tiger Woods notably fought this issue as a junior and young professional, which is why you can often spot him working on a similar drill even today. Ludvig Aberg recently explained to Golf Digest how he would get too in-to-out in the downswing as a junior and how an indoor drill set him straight.
Often this excessively in-to-out swing is caused by a body that stops turning through the ball. When the hips, in particular, stop rotating, the club flings out to the right. In fact, Singh’s umbrella drill has us recalling a June 2005 story in Golf Digest, where he explained the importance of his lower body movement. You can check out Singh’s story and thousands of others in the complete Golf Digest Archive here.
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“Getting the hip movement right was the biggest breakthrough in my swing. It happened about four years ago. I learned how to really fire my hips for a true, full release. When your hips slow down, you have to flip your hands over to compensate, and that’s when the ball goes left. When I clear my hips fast, I can swing as hard as I want, and the ball never goes left.”
By rotating his hips harder through the ball and swinging left, Singh eliminates the left miss. Which brings us to an interesting point for the rest of us. To eliminate the left miss, you should work on swinging the club more to the left through impact. But most golfers flight the opposite, a weak slice to the right.
Those golfers would likely do well to actually feel like they are swinging more to the right through impact. Could the umbrella drill work for you if you’re a slicer? It depends, and be careful, but if you want to try, move the umbrella (or an alignment stick) to the left of the target line, somewhere behind your left heel. Then, take some swings feeling like you swing to the right of the umbrella. Keep in mind that the proper swing path is on an arc, so the club should move to the left through impact, but with this drill you are working on exaggerating a feel of it moving more to the right.
Your version might need to be different than Singh’s, but we’re all trying to get to the same place.