toe hits, divot to the right

Question
My inquiry concerns making bad contact with the ball by hitting irons and driver on the toe of the club. Divots will be pointing straight to the right, ball flight is either strong draw or hook or push with generally very short distance on all clubs. Sometimes even pull. If I hit the ground at all it's generally behind the ball. My worst scenario is when ball lies above feet!

Answer
Hi Bruno::

You need to change the path te club moves into the ball on.  You are obviously coming too far from the inside.  Your club is moving from the inside of the target line and swinging out to the outside of the target line.  Any time the club approaches the ball too much from the inside, the club is too shallow on it's approach to the ball.  This means the club will tend to hit the ground behind the ball (bottom out too soon), or if you miss the ground, you'll tend to hit most shots thin and to the right.  When you get sick of doing that, you'll begin to start using your hands in an effort to close the clubface, thus promoting a hook type spin.  So when the hands close the clubface too fast, you hit a hard hook, duck hook or worse.  Sound familiar?  So here is how you fix it.  If you were standing behind your golf ball looking directly at the target, picture a big clock out there as your target.  So the flag would be 12 o'clock, your ball would be 6 o'clock.  When you come too far from the inside, the club is swinging from 7 o'clock towards 2 o'clock.  That is what you do.  You need to get your club to approach the ball from a different path.  For a while, working through this, you need your club to be moving more from 5 o'clock towards 10 o'clock.  Sounds drastic, but you need to sense what it's like to swing the club on a different path.  You'll feel as though you are swinging way over the top and way to the left.  That is just a feeling though Bruno, because you swing it too much from inside to out.  Go practice and see how you do.  Stay with small irons for now, get a sense of how to do it, and try to quiet your hands so they are not turning over too much.  Watch the ball.  It will tell you everything you need to know.  Until you can get that ball to start left of your intended target, keep working on it.  

Eddie Kilthau
PGA Member