Gary Player said this golf swing ‘improvement’ gained him 30 yards

Gary Player truly was, in many ways, a golfer ahead of his time.

In an era when the mainstream opinion was that working out was bad for your golf swing, and that power was as much a curse as a gift, Gary Player went full-throttle. An undersized talent compared to many of his peers, he won the 1959 Open Championship, and after a top 10 finish at the following year’s Masters, came to another realisation.

As he told Golf Digest in 1961: “I told myself, ‘Gary, if you expect to win this, you’d better start hitting your drives 30 yards farther.’ I had just finished my fourth try at the Masters and the reason for my failure to win was obvious to me. I just couldn’t reach the par-5 holes in two shots. Instead of putting for eagles on these holes like Arnold Palmer was doing, I was forced to rely on a full approach and a good putt to even get a birdie.”

So,…