A Tip from This Week's LPGA Pro-Am

The LPGA is gambling the JTBC Founders Cup this week, and I found this interesting little tip at the internet site.

And believe it or not, it came from football players, of all people.

Several football players took part in the Wednesday Pro-Am. One of them was Washington Redskins wide receiver and return specialist Andre Roberts. During a Q&A afterwards that included a couple of other NFL players as well as Juli Inkster and Nicole Castrale, Roberts had this to say:

"Swing easy,” Roberts said when asked of the main thing he learned. “Their swings are so easy and so smooth, and they get all the distance they need and all the accuracy they need. As guys, we always want to swing the club as hard as we can to get it to go far, and you know, watching the guys like Dustin Johnson just blow it past people swinging so hard, looks like it, but he’s probably swinging easy. But that’s one of the biggest things I see. They have got this smooth swing path. They swing easy and get everything they need out of it."

Got that, folks? Roberts is a fast, strong NFL player who weighs around 200 pounds... and he's impressed by how far the ladies hit it.

Please understand that he isn't saying that they make weak swings. Far from it! The ladies just aren't swinging as if they had to hurl a 20-pound ball and chain down the fairway. They simply keep their muscles as relaxed as they can, because relaxed muscles can move more quickly and create more speed. This is a basic tenet of martial arts, and it's one that more golfers need to understand because that's how you get more distance. Note that Roberts realized that even DJ must be doing the same thing; that's an athlete putting two and two together!

You may not be tall and strong. You may not be superfast. But I feel pretty safe saying that you CAN swing smooth and easy.

BTW, GC will broadcast the first round of the Founders Cup tonight at 6pm ET . (More primetime golf!) And as usual, Tony Jesselli has done a preview of the event at his blog.

The photo came from the Andre Roberts profile page at NFL.com.