How becoming self-reliant helped Ryder Cup rookie Wyndham Clark unleash his best golf

Wyndham Clark won twice in 2023, including the U.S. Open, and one of the most notable characteristics of his ascent was not only its speed, but also what it was missing. In an era when golfers regularly refer to their teams and use the word “we” when describing their performance, Clark’s career year came without a swing coach at his side.

To quote Ben Hogan, Clark has been “digging it out of the dirt” on his own, making him a rare exception in today’s age.

“I’m working on my own on my golf swing,” Clark said from this year’s U.S. Open, where he finished a shot ahead of Rory McIlroy. “It’s myself and my caddie pretty much monitor(ing) my golf swing. I don’t have a swing coach. That’s helped me own my swing and own my game. I worked with some great coaches, and they were very good at what they do. But I didn’t know where the ball was going, and I didn’t own it.”

Within the current world of professional golf, not having an instructor is as rare as a tour player scarfing down a hot dog and soft drink at the turn instead of a protein bar and electrolyte solution. Most golfers at the highest level surround themselves with experts in multiple disciplines, and a swing coach is almost always a part of that supporting cast.

There was a delightful historical symmetry to Clark’s old-school ways, of going it alone as he forged a one-stroke victory at Los Angeles Country Club.

His triumph came a century after Bobby Jones won his maiden major title, the 1923 U.S. Open at Inwood Country Club on Long Island, New York. That major victory – the first of 13 wins in 21 appearances, which culminated with the 1930 Grand Slam of British Amateur, British Open, U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur – marked the end of what Jones’ chronicler O.B. Keeler called “seven lean years” barren of major success.

Multiple factors contributed to Jones winning the first of four U.S. Open titles. He was 21 years old but an experienced championship golfer. Like Clark, Jones had to learn to tame a temper that had poisoned instead of propelled his talent. Importantly, a maturing Jones had become less reliant on his teacher, Stewart Maiden, the native Scot and East Lake Golf Club professional whose swing Jones mimicked as a boy growing up in Atlanta and whose help was a big part of the teen phenom’s development.

Jack Nicklaus, who compiled his mountain of golf achievements with an eye to what Jones had achieved decades earlier, heard about the virtues of self-reliance from Jones himself in 1959, when Nicklaus was a teenage amateur playing in the Masters for the first time.

“Bobby Jones sat with me when I was 19 years old in his cabin at Augusta,” Nicklaus recalled in 2011. “He said, ‘Jack, I had my seven lean years,’ from the time he was 14 to 21 years old. He said, ‘I kept running back to Stewart Maiden, until I learned – and he taught me – how to not run back to him. When I did that, then I became a golfer.’ "

Those were meaningful words from a legend whom Nicklaus greatly admired. But the advice already had been the foundation from the teaching he had been getting since he was a golden cub of 10 from Jack Grout.

“He tried to teach me that from the beginning,” Nicklaus said of Grout, “because he was familiar with what Jones had done.”

In four decades of coaching Nicklaus, Grout’s philosophy never changed. Added Nicklaus: “Jack Grout, from 1950 through 1989, when he passed away, never set foot one time on a practice tee (at a tournament). He came to a lot of golf tournaments. You never saw him on the practice tee. He taught me to be able to make my own changes, make my own adjustments – work on the things I needed to work on so I could concentrate and could understand how to play the game. A lot of times, the guys run back to their swing coach too much.”

Becoming more self-reliant also helped Clark, 29, unleash his best golf. He won his first PGA TOUR title in May at the Wells Fargo Championship, beating a strong field on a major championship venue. The win – over a leaderboard that featured the likes of Xander Schauffele (who finished second), Harris English (T3), Tyrrell Hatton (T3), Tommy Fleetwood (T5) and Adam Scott (T5) – came in Clark’s 134th TOUR start, fulfilling the promise that he displayed during his amateur days. Clark won the U.S. Open a month later and then concluded the FedExCup season by finishing third at the TOUR Championship. He finished third in the season-long standings after never placing better than 64th in any of his previous four seasons. Next week, he will make his Ryder Cup debut for the U.S.

Through history, rare is the successful golfer whose technique hasn’t been shaped to some degree, at some juncture, by someone. Clark worked with coach Boyd Summerhays, who is best known as the longtime instructor for Tony Finau and whose son, Preston Summerhays, is one of the top amateurs in the world.

“A lot of people say I have a good swing,” Clark said. “I believe I have a good swing. My first few years on TOUR, it actually really bothered me because people would say, ‘Oh, you have such a great swing,’ and I didn't know where the ball was going, and that was really frustrating for me,” Clark said. “So when I decided to go on my own – I do work a little bit with my caddie, but typically it's on my own – I learned about my game and my swing, and that's what I did when I was younger. I knew how to hit shots and I got away from that when I was with a coach.”

Clark said the key for maintaining his game is returning to “neutral.” If he is drawing the ball too much, he’ll hit fades on the practice tee and vice versa.

“I (feel) like I've kept my swing in those parameters to where regardless I can play good golf if I'm hitting a little draw or a little cut, and my stats have improved immensely by doing that,” he said.

Hogan is a mythic figure in the game, a man who was nearly bankrupt before he used relentless dedication to become a robotic ball-striker. But even he needed help from his peers. If a fellow professional named Henry Picard hadn’t helped Hogan tame a vicious hook, the Hawk might never have taken flight, might not have won a single major much less nine of them while becoming an iconic presence in American sports.

In more recent times, Carlos Franco and Bubba Watson won on TOUR while being among a small minority of tour players who didn’t receive swing guidance. Franco, from Paraguay, would famously hit just a handful of balls before his rounds on TOUR. Watson learned to shape shots by curving plastic balls around his childhood home.

Although golfers have imitated others and traded tips forever, they probably tended to own their swings more years ago because they were on their own. The independence was by choice and because of circumstances – independent streaks and financial limitations.

“If I was the CEO of my company as a TOUR pro in my time, I was a small business,” said Gary Koch, a six-time PGA TOUR winner who played fulltime from 1976 to 1990. “Now these guys are the CEOs of big businesses because they make a lot of money, with the potential to make a tremendous amount of money. If there are guys who are successful with having teams of people around, then you probably figure, ‘I need that too.’”

Not until the 1980s were instructors coming out on TOUR with any regularity and in any numbers.

“Players did figure it out for themselves more,” said Koch, who observed what came later in a long and respected career as a golf broadcaster. “What limited instruction we had was more geared to the individual. When I started working with Peter Kostis, it was about taking what I did naturally and improving that and making me be as consistent as I could be.”

TOUR players would go to their instructor, rather than the other way around, as is so often the case now. Ben Crenshaw and Tom Kite took lessons from their sage hometown pro, Harvey Penick.

“In the ’70s, you might see an instructor or two at a major, but it was a very limited presence,” Koch said. “Week to week, they weren’t out on TOUR. By the mid- to late-’80s, Kostis would be out more because he started getting more players.”

Throughout his career, Nicklaus started each season with an intensive session with Grout, going over the fundamentals. Paul Azinger would travel to see his instructor, John Redman, who had apprenticed under the legendary Tommy Armour.

“I would go to Redman three or four times a year,” said Azinger. “They were all-day sessions, but I was usually fixed in five or 10 minutes. Then I’d spend the rest of the time showing off.”

As the preferences of golf’s best players continued to evolve in the 1990s, the change coincided with swing instructor-as-celebrity. In the 1990s, it was common to see one of the era’s top golfers, six-time major champion Nick Faldo, closely followed by the swing guru who had overhauled his game, David Leadbetter. Some coaches had begun to embrace emerging technology since the arrival in the 1960s of the Graph-Check cameras that could spit out an eight-frame sequence of small photos on Polaroid film. As smaller, more affordable video cameras became available, the devices became essential equipment for student-pupil combos such as Faldo and Leadbetter.

“That’s the beauty of it, you look at it right there,” Faldo told reporters after Leadbetter and a videographer had followed him around for a nine-hole tournament practice round in 1995. “He has got that little playback screen, and we can look at it right there. I’m trying to do a couple of moves, so it’s nice to see what you are feeling, basically. You get good feedback.”

The invention of smart phones with video capability in the 21st century has made everyone a camera operator. A swing tune-up is only a FaceTime or emailed swing away. Whether going it alone or with a coach, the goal hasn’t changed much from Jones to Nicklaus to the current generation.

“You know, a coach can tell you the perfect way to swing a club,” McIlroy said in 2014, “but once that little light bulb in your head comes on where you start to get it as well, you start to own your own swing. Once you understand it yourself, understand your feelings and understand what you need to do, it’s not until that point where you can become really comfortable with it.”

Then, as Jones and Clark demonstrated a century apart, you can show off in the best of ways.