Last Shot

‘Put your feet together. Swing back, and step in as you swing through the ball.’

Please Hold for a Call (and a Lesson) From Bob Toski

by jerry tarde / Editor-in-Chief

took my first lesson from Bob Toski more than

I40 years ago in a Golf Digest School near his home in Boca Raton, Fla. My most recent lesson was a phone call this morning. He wanted to talk about the skins game at Seminole. “That boy [Dustin] Johnson, he’s going to have arthritis before he’s 50, the way he shuts the clubface at the top. Hogan said you never see a good player with a closed face. And the kid [Matthew Wolff]—that swing won’t last.” Toski says watching the match reminded him of an exhibition he played with Sam Snead in Kansas City .

“This was back in the ’50s,” says Toski, now 93, 5-7 and 145 pounds. “I hit a low, slinging drive down the first hole. When we got to it, I was only about five yards behind Sam, who was a long hitter.”

“Hey, Mouse,” Snead said, “how’d you hit it so far? I thought you were doing a high jump off the tee.”

Toski said, “I was on my toes, but I never left the ground.”

“What kind of book you reading?” Snead said.

“A good one,” Toski returned.

That’s why Bob was calling: “Do you notice the pros keep the left heel planted on the backswing? In the modern swing, it’s anchored to the ground. Almost all tour pros today play with the left heel down.”

That’s a bad image for the average golfer, was his lesson. It makes sense for a pro who’s young, big and athletic. It’s more consistent—one fewer movement to account for. “They think about turning the hips instead of moving the legs, knees and feet, which the average golfer needs to generate clubhead speed,” Toski says.

Because Toski has seen so much—imagine, he was the leading money-winner on tour in 1954—a phone call with him shifts seamlessly from one era to another. “Jack Grout taught Jack Nicklaus as a teenager to ‘reach for the sky,’ ” he’s recalling now. “If you reach for the sky, the force of your arms stretching pulls your left heel off the ground.”

Nicklaus’ left heel lifted probably as high as anyone on the backswing—and planting it, Jack often said, signaled the start of the downswing. Toski swung the same way, with even more foot movement and very active hands.

Bob and I wrote a forgettable instruction book together in the 1980s. Unforgettably, he once bit a student, leaving teeth marks, to make a point— “Can you feel that?” We’ve played many rounds over the years as partners, and I’d say pound for pound he was the Sugar Ray Robinson of golfers. On the phone, I tell him, one time we played against Snead and another writer, Don Wade, at The Country Club outside Boston. We won the match, and Sam was so hot afterward, in the locker room, Snead threw his $20 bill on the floor for Toski to pick up. “You remember that?” I ask Bob. “No,” he says.

I was interrupting his lesson. “I’ll give you a case in point,” he continues. “A few years ago, I was talking to Nicklaus in his office. He said, ‘Watch me walk across the room.’ And then he got up from his desk and walked naturally, heel to toe, heel to toe. Then walking back, he said, ‘Now I’m going to keep my heel down. What do you see?’ I said he was shuffling. Jack said, ‘Exactly! I don’t know why they teach that way.’ ”

Toski’s point—and it’s a critical one—is that most of us aren’t as athletic as a tour pro to keep our feet flat to the ground. Our body is tighter. We have tension and anxiety, and it only gets worse as we get older and the swing gets shorter. Tour pros start the downswing with a hip turn. Tiger used to have flash speed with his hips—it probably led to some of his injuries. The average golfer would be better off swinging the hands and arms, in sync with the lower body, allowing the left heel to come off the ground, building extension and arc and ultimately clubhead speed.

How do you get that feeling? I ask. Toski says, “We used to teach the step-in drill. Put your feet together. Swing back, and step in as you swing through the ball.”

I ask him if he’s still teaching. “I’m down to one patient,” he says. “I’m like a doctor; I refer to my students as patients. But I sing one night a week at Arturo’s restaurant in town, classical music—not bad for a little Polish kid who went to Catholic school. Listen to this,” he says, bursting into a rich baritone of “How Great Thou Art.” He says on a 6,000-yard course, he plays to a 5-handicap today. “On a firm fairway, I hit it 230.” He lives at home by himself, still in Boca.

“Come see me. You’d be surprised at how many people come by every day to talk golf,” he says, before a goodbye.

I don’t think we’d be surprised. This mouse will live forever .