Barkley’s Swing Demons Finally Meet Their Match

Charles Barkley for 2020 Comeback Player of the Year?

Okay, so the PGA Tour no longer hands out this award, and Capital One’s The Match: Champions for Change, is not an official Tour event. It’s not even an unofficial one. But what the “Round Mound of Rebound” and NBA Hall of Famer accomplished in the third rendition of The Match was nothing short of remarkable.

Everyone knows Barkley’s story: Great basketball player, horrible golfer. Somewhere along the line, the super funny and talented NBA on TNT analyst developed a double dribble in the middle of his golf swing. Just as his hands, arms and clubhead approach the ball on the downswing, he suddenly slams on the brakes, double-clutching and pausing his swing before restarting it again.

“It’s virtually the yips is what it is,” said accomplished instructor Scott Sackett, ranked as one of America’s “Top 100 Teachers” by Golf Magazine for more than a dozen years.

That’s a nice way of putting it. Tiger Woods and others have described Barkley’s unorthodox move as a “hiccup.” Others have described it as a “train wreck” or like “swatting a fly.”  Barkley’s swing has been trolled unmercifully on the internet and on-air by his colleagues and friends. It’s a tortured-looking swing that is, without a doubt, the most ridiculed swing in all of golf.

That is up until the day after Thanksgiving. From his very first tee shot on, Barkley’s swing was free of any hitch or pause on the downswing. It wasn’t a thing of beauty, but it was one constant, fluid motion. Barkley impressively split the first two fairways at Stone Canyon Golf Club with long irons and kept it in play again on the fourth, giving partner and cheerleader Phil Mickelson a chance to be aggressive on his approach shots in the modified alternate-shot format. Barkley still struggled with his driver, hitting a few in the southern Arizona desert, but his iron play was competent as was his wedge game and lag putting. He consistently lagged putts of 35 feet or more to within 5 feet for easy pars and birdies for Mickelson.

By the sixth hole, Mickelson and Barkley held a surprising 3-up advantage over NFL legend Peyton Manning and three-time NBA champion Steph Curry, and with Barkley’s swing and game in control and now inside the ropes, the match was as good as over. Mickelson and Barkley held 4-up leads on three separate occasions and cruised to a 4-and-3 victory.

In the days leading up to the event, which was held the day after Thanksgiving, Mickelson said that he and Barkley “would shock the world.” And they did. Well, Barkley did anyhow. Lest we forget Mickelson is a five-time major champion.

“The world has been SHOCKED!” tweeted Mickelson following their impressive triumph. “My man Sir Charles surprised everyone with his great play and dominating performance. So happy for you and thankful to be your partner.”

What made Barkley’s performance so extraordinary was that just a few months earlier, he finished second-to-last in the American Century Celebrity Golf Championship in Lake Tahoe, with a minus-68 points in the modified Stableford scoring format. Curry finished fourth with plus-56 points.

The 57-year-old Barkley has been regular in the celebrity event, frequently subjecting himself to further ridicule and humiliation on national television. Yet, credit Barkley for his courage and perseverance, as it seems as if he might have finally exorcised his swing demons at The Match 3.

Prior to the match, Barkley told Golf World magazine that he had been practicing hard for months and it was just a question of whether or not his swing could hold up under the pressure of a nationally-televised event again. “Nobody has worked harder than me to play better at golf,” he said. “I have hit balls five hours a day for the last six months. I just really wanted to get better at golf.”

Barkley didn’t start playing golf until he became a member of the Phoenix Suns in 1992. So many of his fellow teammates played and were good at it, that he felt the need to excel at it. As a result, Barkley sought out several teachers in the area to help him with his swing and his game. Some theorize that all of that instruction and all that advice that would subsequently follow is what led to his downswing yips.

“I’ve done worked with every teacher in the land,” Barkley told Golf World.

One of those teachers was Sackett, who currently teaches out of McCormick Ranch Golf Club in Scottsdale, Ariz. Sackett was teaching just down the road at Legend Trail Golf Club when he met Barkley in the mid-1990s, and by that time Barkley had already developed his unusual downswing habit, says Sackett. In the “four or five” times Sackett worked with Barkley, it was his goal to try and get Sir Charles to break that habit.

“To change something in the golf swing, you have to understand you need to bring in a new motor pattern,” said Sackett, who also worked with Barkley’s teammate, Danny Ainge, and later Suns’ players Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway and Jason Kidd. “You have to change the motor pattern. It’s hard to change a motor pattern. For example: If you put your shampoo down in a new corner in a shower, how many days would you reach for the wrong corner? You wouldn’t get it in just one day. It’d take seven, eight, nine days, and that’s grabbing your shampoo! The motor patterns that we do every day are learned and very ingrained. It’s in your DNA. That’s where we go back and say we’ve got to change that pattern.”

To do that, Sackett would sit down right next to the hitting mat, and have Barkley make several backswings and downswings. On occasion, Sackett would place a ball on the tee while Barkley was at the top of his swing. Other times he wouldn’t put the ball down at all. The idea behind the drill was to get Barkley to forget about the ball, since he didn’t know if it would be there or not, and swing through the shot to a balanced, complete finish—all in one motion.

“If I just happened to put the ball down it would just get in the way of a beautiful practice swing,” recalls Sackett. “When we did that exercise, he would hit it well. We had his swing kinda humming.”

It took 25 years to get that swing humming again, and now that it is, it really is a beautiful sight to behold, and a tremendous credit to Barkley’s perseverance.

“It really is a miracle,” said Sackett.

RAISING ARIZONA

Sackett has a new academy building opening in several weeks at McCormick Ranch. The state-of-the-art facility will include two hitting bays, one outfitted by TrackMan and featuring its revolutionary TrackMan 4 Dual Radar Launch Monitor Technology, and the other by Gears Golf’s 3D motional capture swing analysis system. The academy will also have central air conditioning and heat, creating the ideal year-round learning conditions. The Scott Sackett Academy also has access to two outdoor putting greens, three practice bunkers and an 80-yard par 3 hole. For more information about the academy and The Scott Sackett Signature 3-Day Schools, please visit www.scottsackett.com.