Hey Everybody,

My name is Reed Howard. I have been working with Todd for over a year and now feel close enough to my result to talk about the swing and the process I’ve gone through without leading people down an incorrect path. I am a professional golfer, and ever since I became a real student of the game, I became obsessed with obtaining a single plane swing.

While all of you know that the foundation of the single plane fundamentals is based on Moe Norman’s swing, Moe Norman is not the only golfer in history to be able to have the same angle of attack at impact as you have at address. The others are Ben Hogan, Lee Trevino, Joe Durant, young Gary Player and while it’s done uniquely even, Sergio Garcia.  It is a rare quality that very few have, but all of the players including Moe Norman that have a single plane swing have one significant similarity; they are masters of ball striking, and they dominate ball-striking statistics.

Through studying swings, I saw this rare similarity between all of these great ball strikers and decided that if I were going to make it as a professional golfer at the highest level, I would need to acquire this advantage. So I did what many great golfers have done in the past; I experimented without a clue of what I was doing. I was first trying to emulate the great Ben Hogan. I worked very hard and was able to get aspects similar but that critical position, through impact, wasn’t even close. I tried to emulate aspects of Lee Trevino. Failed. And of course, as a final try, I attempted to follow Moe Norman. While I was able to get the club to return to the original plane, I was severely deleting the organization and couldn’t hit it accurately. I gave up on the idea I had spent four years working on and returned working with a great coach on the conventional golf swing.

While I did play better, I wasn’t about to make the PGA tour, and I still knew that the single plane swing had led to the most dominant ball strikers in the world. One day I saw a video of Todd Graves’s golf swing and his swing had all the key aspects that I had been trying to acquire for four years.

In my history, every person who had these issues had them naturally without learning to change their impact positions. Eventually, I called Todd and “interrogated” him on his swing and the different results he had gotten. Finally, I was on a plane to OKC. I learned within 1 hour why my attempts in the past had failed and what I needed to do to achieve a functional single plane swing. While I felt right about what I needed to do, executing change is a challenging and sometimes creative task. Todd had changed himself into a single plane swing golfer. While we are a similar build and size, my swing was different from his swing which means that even though we understood the destination, the journey to a functional single plane swing was different for me than it was for him. Certain things I may have picked up quickly and others felt more foreign than swinging a baseball bat.

It has been a 1 1/2 years, and I have finally gotten to a functional single plane swing. My tournaments of late have been good. I have made about half of my cuts. My ball striking goes in streaks of being very dominant, and then something gets off, and I’ll struggle. Over the last few months, I have learned how to hold the more dominant stretches for more prolonged and believe that I have or will very shortly achieve a place where I hardly ever hit a bad shot. It will be either decent or high depending on my judgment of distance, wind, and strike of the ball.

If I do get there, which I believe I am almost there, it will be difficult for anyone to beat me over 18 holes let alone 72. I just wanted to write this to explain my story and introduce myself to everybody. Todd has given me permission to tell my story and provide updates as I go through tournaments and to work my way to the PGA tour. I hope this little entry wasn’t too dull for anybody. I am playing a small 1-day event in Chino, CA on Thursday which I will be prepped for and have a few three day tournaments coming up over the coming weeks. I will be making periodic updates with the things I am working on, with hopefully some good results.

All the best,

Reed