It works for Elk, and now it's on video

Steve Elkington is more than a championship player. He’s a questing soul, a seeker of truth and beauty in the art, science and sorcery of golf.

Last spring (The Blogolfosphere, May 10, 2011), Craig Foster got an email from Elkington, a 10-time winner on the PGA tour, including the 1995 PGA Championship. Elkington had been testing out Foster's Dynalign© system, and he wanted Foster in Houston, like right now, for a first-hand tutorial with the inventor.

Which brings us ‘round to the epidemic, maybe even pandemic, which nonetheless lies outside the jurisdiction of the Centers for Disease Control. So, too, are the USGA and the Royal and Ancient silent on the subject. Which does not mean it hasn’t caught the attention of people in high places.

It started among old people, old golfers, to be precise, but it didn’t stop there. Keegan Bradley, the twenty-something PGA Championship winner in 2011, caught the disease, and he’s living with it today.



Elkington (left) and Foster teamed to make the DynAlign video.

What “it” is is the belly putter, and it’s all the more lamentable, according to guys like Craig Foster, because it’s 100 percent preventable.

Foster, an Olympia, Wash., golf inventor and golf club technician, believes his DynAlign golf alignment system will do everything a belly putter can do, all with a traditional putter, i.e., it will firm up your stroke and take all the slack and floppy variables out of your flatstick game.

Foster, despite no help from golf’s officialdom or epidemiologists, is far from alone in decrying belly putters, which allow a golfer to jam the shaft of a long putter into his gut where it is held firm, negating the natural looseness of free-hanging arms with a normal putter in hand.

Debating the fairness of the belly putter is a losing battle, right now, and Foster would rather talk about his DynAlign system, which uses the natural physics of the arms’ skeletal structure to remove the hands and wrists from the putt.

Elkington is a true believer in DynAlign, and for good reason: it works for him. Elkington, 49, is no fogey about anything new if it enhances the golf experience, and he went on Twitter last week to shout the good news. The stats are solid as bone: In 2011 PGA Tour play, Elkington was 368-for-368 on putts of four feet and in.

Last spring, when Elkington beckoned Foster to the Champions Club in Houston, he had his fulltime video guy running a camera from the time Foster climbed into his car at the airport.

The result is “The Stroke of the Future,” a video course in DynAlign mechanics. It’s available only from Elkington’s Web site, Secret in the Dirt (http://secretinthedirt.com), which the golf literati is learning is the place to come to steep in the craft and theory of golf.

The download from Secret in the Dirt costs $35, and to sweeten the deal a 45-page .pdf file of Foster’s original DynAlign instruction manual is included, along with a transcript of the video.

“The first person I know of who downloaded it is a guy from Madrid who joined my Dirt group a few days ago,” Foster said. “He improved his putting just by watching the promo videos, and he was very enthusiastic about DynAlign.”

Foster has stayed patient with the marketing process for DynAlign, because he, like Elkington, knows it works, and no burying a shaft in your belly necessary.

“It feels like I have just reached the top of a mountain after a long climb,” said Foster. “That's a pretty good payoff in itself.”