Rinker’s Golf Tips Rob Akin Top 100 Teacher 12-28-2014 grew up with a golf course in his back yard in Shreveport, Louisiana. After hoping the fence and sneaking on the golf course many times, he finally started going to the pro shop to check in every day. “A lot of us played every day that didn’t pay.” Finally the management shut that all down, cut off their playing privileges, and the junior golf program was fading because a lot of kids simply couldn’t afford to pay. So Rob Akin, at the age of 15, started a junior program in the summers where 90 kids could hit range balls and have access to nine holes for $75. The next summer the 90 kids signed up again for a total of 125 juniors at his club, 125 at another club Lakeside, and another 90 at Huntington. Rob did that for five years and Perry Moss, a former PGA Tour player, came up through his program.
There was another junior that lived about 25 miles from Shreveport named David Toms who was winning everything. Rob met David playing in tournaments where David would play in the city championship in Shreveport. In 1989 Rob moved to Memphis and began instruction in the Mid South. In his mid twenties he started working with David who was now a PGA Tour player and struggling. Rob had watched David play a lot of golf when he was young where everybody thought David was the “Golden Boy, the kid that is going to make it.” Golf had beat David down and he wasn’t quite as confident as he used to be because when he was a kid, “nobody could beat him.” “The confidence I had in David was probably the greatest gift I gave David,” Rob said.
The style of swing and substance of the swing is what really matters. Ball curves about the club face, path, plane, swing radius, and lag. Changing your style doesn’t always lead you down the right path to change what the ball cares about. Most people have one stroke pattern that works for them. If you go into a bunker and manipulate keeping the club face open, and try to hit shots with the champagne glass on the club face past impact, how are you going to go to the first tee and swing differently where the club face is rotating to square the club face at impact and continuing to close after impact? Even top 20 players in the world think you cut across the ball on a bunker shot with the club face open. That’s not a reliable technique because it’s very hard to control distance even for them. If you make your normal stroke pattern that works for you in the bunker, where the arms and hands are rotating through impact, you don’t have to swing as hard to get the ball from A to B. Rob Akins can be reached at 901-359-4869 or www.akinsgolf.com