Gary Edwin: Different Strokes
IN: News | by Grant Dodd | 19 May 2007
If you want an insight into the addictive nature of golf, take a visit to the iseekgolf.com forum page. It’s like a shooting gallery for golf junkies where every craving has a fix.
The golf instruction page is particularly active, but most interesting is that the discussion often takes on tones of semi-religious reverence, with various participants worshipping at the altar of their favourite deity.
It can be pretty deep stuff. Disciples of Homer Kelley’s “Golf Machine” traverse the globe in cyberspace on an evangelical search for new and true believers, whilst defenders of the faith in Australia hold Gold Coast based swing prophet Gary Edwin as their holiest of holies. Debates revolve around method, system and belief, with the most pious generally having the loudest voice.
Being intimately familiar with the Edwin story, it’s somewhat bizarre to see people promoting and defending his teaching by circling the horses and wagons around the high moral ground. He would no doubt find it amusing to be depicted in such a messianic light, given the various slings and arrows that have come his way over the forty years he has been doling out his unique take on swing theory.
When I decided to seek his assistance in 1993, I left my first lesson shanking every shot and with the decided impression that he didn’t like me very much. It was only when I recounted my experience to Peter Lonard a few years later that I realized I wasn’t Robinson Crusoe in this respect.
Peter told me that on the drive back to Sydney from his first lesson in Canberra in the late 80’s (Edwin taught at Yowani Country Club for many years) he said to his dad, “I think this guy hates me”. Perhaps it was some macabre, masochistic fascination with rejection that kept us coming back, but Lonard spent the next 19 years under Edwin in a close and mutually beneficial relationship and I stayed with him until the end of 2004 when I called it a day.
Such challenging introductions lend a small insight into Edwin’s complexities and contradictions . To the uninitiated, he has the charm and detachment of a parking officer. To become an acquaintance takes many years; a friend, much longer. To know him, perhaps a lifetime, if at all. This assessment is also paradoxical in the light of his generosity and warmth as a host, his dry, rapid fire ‘Pete and Dud’ inspired witticism’s and the fact that his house is like a hotel with a revolving door, always full of friends and pilgrims on a journey of golfing enlightenment.
Complexities aside, he’s also an astonishingly brilliant analyser of the golf swing, with a rare ability to dissect its myriad parts. It is one thing to gain a reputation as a coach by having a prodigy land on your doorstep. It is another to do so by taking a player wallowing in the anonymity of pro-am land and help him become a player capable of competing on the world stage. To my way of thinking, that was what made (and makes) Edwin unique. Many coaches have the knowledge through which to identify a problem but fewer the means to solve it. Even less will admit to this failing, resorting to age old mantra’s and golfing clichés as refuge, as though the safety of such entrenched, accepted wisdom is beyond question.
A lesson with Gary was all about cause and effect. Your deficiencies were defined, exposed and dismembered without respect for the fragility of ones ego. If you came looking for a magic salve or a quick fix, you were certain to walk away gravely disappointed. Golfing truisms and esoteric concepts like feel, flow, tempo and rhythm were never mentioned. Everything related to ball flight and ball flight was related to the clubhead, which was, to cut a long story short, controlled by posture and body shape.
Of course, the “formulaic” swing idiosyncrasies that many Edwin coached players bought to the PGA Tour in the late 1990’s raised a few eyebrows. At first they were laughed off, like someone passing the curious three legged man at a freak show and allowing themselves a surreptitious glance and snide snigger . However, the laughing soon gained a slightly nervous, if not indignant tone as a number of unheralded swings started turning up on top of the leaderboard.
Then the analysis began. “You can only swing that way if you’ve got forearms like a grave digger”, was the argument when Lonard was at his ascendant best. Then Paul Gow started winning and shooting 60 with arms that knew only a loose relationship with muscularity. The original hypothesis was looking shaky. Worse was yet to come for the nay-sayers, for when an un-athletic, thirty-ish Gavin Coles rose from his job in a rural pet food factory and worked his way onto the US Tour there existed a model that no-one could pigeon hole. Too small, too short, not strong. He certainly couldn’t swing it the Edwin way, could he?
Not that Edwin has spent his life in search of validation, either. From the beginning, he held an unwavering certainty that a system of teaching built around the geometry of the swing was fundamental to his future success, whilst admitting that his style and theory was not suited to everyone. Failures, successes, detractors and fans have emerged in roughly equal parts for most of his career. The vogue-ish temple of Edwin that some currently worship at is a relatively new phenomenon.
Should a coach be judged in relation to what and how they teach, or of whom? Our celebrity obsessed world tends to value the latter, but regardless of which school of thought takes precedence, Edwin qualifies for recognition in both respects. His has been a life long search for substance over style, and, if validation has finally arrived, it’s hard to support any conclusion other than that it is well earned.
