A search that didn't come up empty
Larry Rinker's instruction makes sense—and made a difference in this golfer's game
In the spring of 2021, frustrated with how poorly I was playing, I spent time on YouTube. Golfers, most of us anyway, are always searching, and I was in high hunter/gatherer gear eager to find something.
A couple of months earlier, on a beautiful winter day in Florida in the company of two friendly former tour pros, I had played one of the ugliest rounds of my life. Sure, a cold-weather hiatus at home had something to do with how badly I played, but rust couldn’t come close to explaining the overall mess. The course had lots of water, and I donated more than a dozen balls to the hazards—many to the right but also left and short of my targets. Counting everything, I would have been north of 110. After 50 years of golf, I felt like a rank beginner, overloaded with futility and embarrassment.
Come spring, I booked a session with a respected club professional in my home area, the kind of experienced and popular instructor whose lesson calendar is full because he usually gets results. But I wasn’t going to be one of his success stories. The gist of my 45 minutes with him: He said that I needed to turn my body more coming through impact. I haven’t been better than a high single-digit handicap in a long, long time—more like a 12 the last two decades apart from a lone season when I played about 40 rounds—but the more I thought about the pro’s advice, the less I wanted to embrace it.
Online one evening about a week after my lesson, I stumbled upon some short golf instruction videos by Larry Rinker. I had lost track of him after he stopped playing the PGA Tour 20 years ago. Rinker, whose brother, Lee, and sister Laurie also played professionally, had started his career in the early 1980s just a bit before I began working for Golf World. At TPC Sawgrass in 1985, in what was then called the Tournament Players Championship, he was in contention deep into the final round, eventually finishing third behind winner Calvin Peete and runner-up D.A. Weibring. Rinker was 30th on the 1985 money list in what turned out to be his best year over two decades on tour, during which he had two second-place finishes.
Larry titled his 2020 memoir The Journeyman. Indeed, he kept at it for a long time without lifting a trophy: 525 PGA Tour starts, 283 cuts made, 26 top-10s. As Rinker points out in his book, the only other golfers to play more than 500 events on the PGA Tour without winning are Bobby Wadkins, John Adams and Jay Delsing.
But if there had been a ranking of musicians on tour, Rinker, an accomplished guitarist—he took his first lessons when he was 8, soon after he began playing golf—might have been No. 1. In 1988, then-commissioner Deane Beman asked Larry to put together a band to perform at a barbeque for players and their families. With Peter Jacobsen, Mark Lye and Payne Stewart, they became “Jake Trout and the Flounders,” known for doing parody numbers with golf lyrics such as “Slow Play” and “Hitting on the Back of the Range” to songs made famous by Eric Clapton and Otis Redding.
Rinker, who is now 65, had to forge a new path after his game deteriorated in the early 2000s. In The Journeyman, he recalls receiving a frank but necessary critique from his wife, Jan, after he averaged 76 over three Korn Ferry Tour events in 2004. “I think it’s time you did something else,” she told him. He eventually set out to become a golf instructor, landing at Colorado’s Red Sky Golf Club in 2010. In 2015 he became the Director of Instruction at The Ritz-Carlton Golf Club in Orlando, site of this weekend’s PNC Championship. I’m sure he’ll be on the range checking in on the actions of some of the stars who are teeing it up with family members.
Larry Rinker has been busy as a golf instructor after two decades playing on the PGA Tour.
When in my pursuit of something that might click for me, I found Rinker’s videos on YouTube. I was intrigued by a phrase he used a lot: “Upper Core Swing.” As I watched several lessons in which those three words featured prominently, I began to grasp why Rinker was using the term and what he meant by it.
The description comes from the work of Dr. David Wright and his company, Wright Balance, which uses a measuring system to determine if someone is an upper-, mid- or low-core player. As Rinker, whose instruction is now based on the Wright Balance philosophy, writes in The Journeyman: “It’s based on where you have strength and balance, and the best indicator today is external shoulder rotation. In the measuring, they get height, weight, shoe size, shoulder width and sternum width and put all that into an algorithm. It then spits out nine stance widths for the core regions: 1-2-3 low core, 4-5-6 mid core, 7-8-9 upper core. Where you have the most strength is your dominant core region.”
I didn’t have that summary and hadn’t been measured when I began viewing Rinker’s upper-core instruction on YouTube. But his videos made sense to me through the way he explained the characteristics of an upper core swing. As I interpreted the videos, it seemed as if the biggest thing was that the hips aren’t very rotated at impact in an upper-core swing. And that, Rinker said lots of times, was fine.
Thinking back to when I was a teenager in the 1970s, immersed in the game and playing and practicing a lot, I didn’t rotate my hips a great deal coming through the ball. Lateral leg drive was a popular thing back then. As an older golfer, certainly not as limber as I was 45 years ago nor playing and practicing as much, how was I going to develop more hip turn through impact? I’m not, and it was liberating to hear Rinker say the trait wasn’t necessary to hit the ball well.
Many tour pros have mid-core actions, their hips rotated about 40 to 45 degrees at impact. That is the “ideal” most people think about when considering how the best players in the world swing the club. Adam Scott is a great example. Larry’s sister, Laurie, who won two LPGA tournaments, looked that way coming through the ball. Some elite golfers rotate their hips even more at impact; Jordan Spieth and Dustin Johnson are two examples. There aren’t many current tour pros with upper-core actions; Webb Simpson and Patrick Reed come to mind. We see mid- or low-core styles all the time when watching men or women competing in person or on television. It’s natural to want to emulate them.
According to Wright Balance, the reality is that most golfers—two-thirds of us—are upper core. The percentage skews higher with older golfers. Of the approximately 1,300 golfers Rinker has measured, many of whom are 45 or older, more than 90 percent are upper core.
Rinker listens to the science—if a student is mid or lower core, he doesn’t encourage him or her to make an upper core swing, purposefully limiting hip turn through impact—but he can relate well to upper-core swingers.
That’s because he is, and always has been, one himself. When he was measured by Wright Balance, he came out as a 9, at the extreme of the upper core. When you watch Rinker swing from a down the line view, it’s clear that his hips aren’t rotated much at all as he moves through impact. He worked with a variety of instructors over his quarter century as a tour player. Some worked with his natural tendencies, but others wanted him to turn his body more aggressively as came into the ball. In one of his videos, he shows a still of David Toms at impact. Toms’ hips are rotated 45 degrees or more, the antithesis of what Rinker’s body allowed him to do, yet one instructor suggested Larry model his downswing after the way Toms swung the club. It didn’t go well.
In The Journeyman Rinker laments have listened to instruction encouraging more body turn and more club lag on the downswing because that exacerbated, rather minimize, his usual misses. In contrast, Rinker’s journal notes from a 1987 lesson with Peter Kostis, with whom he worked off and on during the 1980s, detail some thoughts that were productive:
Turn setting hands and wrists going back
Swing down from the top and let arms separate from body.
Keep body back. If body turns too soon on forward swing, I’ll hit left hooks or push fades.
“Boy, if I had only stayed with that,” Rinker writes in The Journeyman, because that is all correct for the way my swing works.”
Although “upper core swing” might be a relatively new term that came from the Wright Balance research, its characteristics—turning the hips fully on the backswing; letting the big muscles support rather than control the arms, hands and wrists; hips not rotated that much at impact—have been tenets of classic instruction theories since the hickory-shaft era.
Bob Toski (a longtime Rinker mentor) and Davis Love Jr. with Robert Carney published How to Feel a Real Golf Swing in 1988, not long before Love perished in a plane crash. After becoming interested in Rinker’s instruction, I re-read the book by the two teaching titans. It was a great complement to what I was absorbing from Rinker, who quotes something Toski had written in Larry’s golf journal: “Golf is a non-violent game—played violently from within,” Toski wrote. “Brute strength must be replaced by touch. An ounce of touch is worth a ton of brawn. The little muscles are the sensitive muscles. The big muscles react and support and assist the smaller muscles. They work in harmony. They work to support each other to create the perfect swing.”
In his videos and in-person lessons, Rinker is fond of what Jack Nicklaus espoused in his instruction over the decades in books and magazine articles: trying to keep his back at the target as long as he could on the downswing, feeling like he was releasing the club right away from the top because it gave him “room” to swing his arms. That thought worked well for the Golden Bear. Rinker passes along an image along those lines that has worked for him—to imagine a flashlight shining from your chest that remains pointed behind the ball as the club is swung from the top with your arms. I also found it a helpful key as I began trying to take what I’d gleaned from Rinker’s video to the course.
Rinker’s ebook covers what he teaches his many pupils who have upper core swings.
When I found out I was going to be in Orlando on business this past January, I decided to schedule a lesson with Rinker. From watching the videos and keeping them in mind when I practiced and played from the summer of 2021 forward, I had self-diagnosed myself as upper core. I didn’t transform into a scratch player; I still had some rounds where things didn’t go very well. Overall, though, I felt like what I was trying to do made sense for me, which instilled some long-misplaced confidence. I broke 80 for the first time in years. A couple of weeks before my session with Larry, I shot 74, my lowest score in nearly 40 years. The terrible driver miss to the right was making cameos instead of playing a starring role.
This progress was tempered by what I saw in a smartphone video taken by a friend the same week I had that 74. On a tee shot that was about my Sunday best that flew slightly right to left and finished in the heart of the fairway, my left arm still collapsed post-impact, a flaw that Rinker emphasized in my lesson; I have a lot of work to do to improve that aspect of my action. He also confirmed through the Wright Balance measurements that I was a “9,” extreme upper core, same as him. He said my flying right elbow at the top, a tendency since I was a teenager, was an upper core trait and not to worry about it.
“You nailed it that you were upper core and therefore didn’t need that many tweaks to you swing,” Rinker emailed after our session. “I’m glad the set-up felt natural, and I hope the swing did as well. The most awkward part of the upper core swing is the arms disconnecting from the chest. The arm swing turns the chest; the chest cannot swing the arms. Keeping the flashlight will get rid of your high-handle blocks. I look forward to talking to you more about the upper core swing. Most of us are upper core!”
Since my lesson with Larry, I’ve bettered 80 a few more times. Oh, there are still days when the game is more deep mystery than solvable puzzle, when the final tally is north of 90. I don’t practice as often as I should. At times, I remain a nervous putter. The high-handle block, sadly, is not extinct. But I finally understand why it happens and have a better chance of keeping it at bay. I don’t feel helpless, dropped into a deep jungle without a compass. No matter how much we admire how 21st century tour pros go about their work, most of can’t swing like them. Not trying to rotate my hips through the ball has rotated my golf disposition from sour to sunny. If it’s possible for an 11-handicapper’s game to come with an exclamation point, mine does, thanks to some new-old instruction that emphasizes what I can do instead of what I can’t.