Viral Iron Drill Shows Just How Good Tommy Fleetwood Is

It’s hardly a revelation that there are plenty of qualities needed to make it at the top of the game, from the incredible levels of dedication to the mental strength to compete consistently against the best.

But just how good do you need to be at playing? One clue can be found in a viral iron drill used by Tommy Fleetwood. The World No.25 is one of the best strikers of the ball in the game, but he doesn’t come by it by accident. The Englishman spends hours on the range honing his skills and is often seen using the ultimate tour player drill to warm-up and keep his swing in the groove.

It involves setting a golf ball box just to the right of his ball, with an alignment stick on the left and another in a device called a Swing Plane Perfector behind him, which prevents his arms and club becoming "stuck" behind him on his downswing.

Then comes the difficult bit. To succeed, Fleetwood needs to swing between the narrow gap created by the box and the first alignment stick to make impact with the ball, without hitting either object on each side. Needless to say, the technique needs incredible precision, although, Fleetwood makes it look easy.

Golf content creator and scratch golfer Brian DeLorge recreated the drill and proved it's anything but. DeLorge posted the video on Instagram and it was quickly picked up and reshared by Zire Golf, before going viral. To begin with, DeLorge uses just a box and alignment stick, and makes something Fleetwood seems capable of doing in his sleep look almost maddeningly out of reach.

Eventually, he makes perfect contact, which leads him to add a second alignment stick behind him, at the angle of his club shaft, to perform the job of the Swing Plane Perfector. That leads to a marked improvement, with the perfect impact coming after just three attempts. However, even then, he admits that he didn’t start with the second alignment stick as far back as Fleetwood’s. He then repositions it to that point and succeeds after a couple more attempts. 

In all, the player is shown needing 13 attempts to make the perfect contact just three times, which confirms what we all know deep down – playing the game to any kind of decent standard is no easy task, but attaining the calibre of one of the world’s best? That’s a completely different level.

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