A Tip

I can't vouch for the accuracy of it, but I saw this tip in Golf Magazine's Complete Book of Golf Instruction:

Bodyguard?

Here's a photo I saw online of Bruce Lietzke with what looks to be a bodyguard.

Lietzke Footage

Someone was kind enough to send me a link to some Lietzke footage they recently uploaded to YouTube.  Good stuff.

Link to Lietzke Swing on YouTube

Bruce Lietzke in the News

Here's a news story about the Bruce Lietzke Junior Golf Classic:

How Bruce Lietzke Learned to Fade the Ball

The following is an excerpt from a 1995 Sports Illustrated article:

[Lietzke] missed qualifying for the Tour on his first attempt by a stroke, but it was for the best. Lietzke took his classic, upright swing to the mini-tours in Florida, where to be competitive in constant heavy wind, he had to learn to lower his ball flight from a towering draw.

Lietzke is the first to admit he knows next to nothing about the mechanics of the golf swing, and it showed in his diagnosis then. Rather than simply moving the ball back in his stance, he left it off his left heel and tried to lower the trajectory of his shots by "covering" the ball with his right shoulder. That move created a slight outside-in action that produced a consistent fade.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1006631/2/index.htm

Over the Top

I remember one discussion in which [renowned golf instructor] John [Jacobs] was talking about how, contrary to conventional wisdom, so many of the most consistent and enduring ball strikers had a slight “over the top” move, rather than the more classic “inside-out” path, in which the shaft flattens out on the downswing.

John clicked off the names of Bobby Locke, Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, and Bruce Lietzke as just a few examples of players who started down with their arms a bit farther from their body, the club taking something close to the “outside-in” path that slicers are always warned against.  John said that way of hitting the ball held less danger for good players than dropping the club down and hitting from inside out.

“Hitting too late from the inside with an open face not only misses the fairway, it can miss the golf course,” he said.  “A little over the top never misses by too much.  In competitive golf, it’s not so much where the good ones go.  It’s where the bad ones go.  You’ve got to build a swing that will eliminate the big miss.” 

Excerpt from, The Big Miss, by Hank Haney, p. 17

  

Tom Kite on Bruce Lietzke

"Bruce Lietzke is the best long-iron player.  He hits the long irons very high and with a natural fade, so the ball comes down softly.  That's very hard to do with a long iron and still make the ball go the distance you want.  But Bruce can use his long irons both from the tee on tight holes and for shots into a tucked pin that other players can't make."

"In my opinion, by the way, Lietzke is about the best player we have from the standpoint of the total game.  He can leave the rest of us behind.  I think it's fabulous for the rest of the Tour that he likes to take time off to race cars and go fishing."

Tom Kite, How to Play Consistent Golf, p. 245