Why are back pain and spinal injuries plaguing the game? The answer is complicated
This article originally appeared in the March issue of GOLF Magazine.
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In golf, success is promised no one. But for Philip Francis, it once seemed guaranteed.
Born in Las Vegas and raised in Scottsdale, Francis started swinging golf clubs as soon as he could toddle, and he captured his first tournament when he was four, trouncing opponents twice his age. Jim Flick, who taught Jack Nicklaus, was so impressed with Francis that he offered himself up as his instructor. Others who watched him play in his precocious prime still speak of Francis in awestruck terms.
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“He was unreal, totally insane,” says two-time Tour winner Jamie Lovemark, who came up through the junior ranks with Francis.
“A golf savant,” adds Mike Malaska, a GOLF Top 100 Teacher based in Scottsdale. “You can toss out other names like Mickelson or Seve. But from 100 yards in, Philip Francis was the best I’ve ever seen.”
In 2002, when he was 14, Francis won his fourth straight Junior World Golf Championship, breaking Tiger Woods’s record for most consecutive victories in the event. That was in the midst of a 65-week stretch when Francis was the top-ranked junior in the game, one notch ahead of his buddy, Rickie Fowler.
On a podcast last year, Rory McIlroy was asked about the most impressive players he faced in his youth. “Philip Francis,” McIlroy said. “I’m not sure what he’s doing now, but I just could not beat this kid.”
What Francis is doing now is living in Chicago, out of competitive golf and earning a living as an analyst for a high-tech consulting firm. At 29, easygoing and content, he isn’t one for coulda-woulda-shoulda’s. But when he looks back, he says he can see clearly why his game went wayward and his body turned against itself. He can even single out one of the swings that did it, an agonizing low-point in a downward spiral that began in 2007, when, as a freshman at UCLA, he decided he needed to get longer—never mind that he routinely beat the most prodigious bombers and that he flew it plenty far himself.
“I could get it out there 280 or 290, and I did pretty well with that,” Francis says. “But it did start to bother me that some guys were knocking it 30 yards past me.”
ANATOMY 101
Not only does the golf swing call for the spine to rotate, it forces it to do so at a tilt, over and over again, at excessive speed—not what the doctor ordered.
Around that time, Francis parted ways with Flick, who’d always preached the primacy of rhythm over power. A feel player at his best, Francis started crunching numbers and pumping iron. He strapped on a K-Vest and studied 3-D images of his action. He embraced buzzwords like “coil” and “separation,” and enlisted with an acolyte of David Leadbetter who encouraged him to strive for a greater differential between the turn of his shoulders and his hips.
Francis’s scores began to suffer. So did his lower back.
The pain and tightness persisted after college (he transferred after his sophomore year to Arizona State University), but Francis played through them. Then came qualifying school in 2012, at Dayton Valley Golf Club outside Reno—and a slash with a long iron that drove him to his knees. “It was like an electric bolt shooting up my spine and into my neck,” Francis says. “The pain was so intense it knocked me to the ground.”
An MRI confirmed it: tears in a disc between two vertebrae. After seven months of rehab, Francis went back at it. But a game that once came easy had long ceased being the same.
“Looking back today, it’s so obvious to me that with the way I was going about things, it was only a matter of time before I got hurt,” he says. “But when you’re in the middle of it, that’s not how you’re thinking. You’re always trying to get any edge you can.”
BACK IN THE DAY
For all his uncommon promise, Philip Francis is something of a familiar story. It’s a narrative that mixes gaudy golf achievements with the grim diagnostics of a medical report. Similar threads run through the résumés of many near the top of the World Golf Rankings. For almost every major title, there is mention of a surgery, a medical exemption, or time spent sidelined from injury or pain. Among the names worth noting are Jason Day and Danny Willett, both beset by back woes before and after their first majors, as well as U.S. Open champion Justin Rose, who captured gold in the 2016 Olympics then retreated to recover from back issues of his own. Meanwhile, McIlroy, who never could beat Francis, spent much of last year trying to beat back and rib pain.
Rory has recovered. So has Jamie Lovemark, though it wasn’t easy. Now 28, Lovemark traveled a long road back from from disc-replacement surgery seven years ago.
What to make of all of this is a subject of debate. There are those, Lovemark included, who are skeptical that golf is in the midst of an epidemic. “As hard as we swing these days, sure, it’s not good for your body, but I also feel like golfers have always had bad backs,” Lovemark says. “With all the media coverage, I feel like it’s more in your face these days, so maybe we’re just hearing about it more.”
He’s right to say that back pain is nothing new for golfers (count Lee Trevino, Lanny Watkins and Retief Goosen among the well-known graybeards who’ve undergone back surgery). It’s also true that long-term trends are difficult to trace; the PGA Tour does not keep detailed data on specific injuries behind medical exemptions or causes of withdrawals throughout the decades. Yet anecdotal evidence keeps piling up of players getting injured at a younger age.
“I never had back problems. Jack and Tom [Watson] never did,” says 1973 U.S. Open champion Tom Weiskopf. “We practiced just as hard and played just as much as these players today. We just got hurt a whole lot less.”
Why the apparent scourge is another question. Consensus concentrates around a confluence of factors, from the repetitive strains of youth-sports specialization to the wraparound demands of the Tour season. Adding to the mix are changes in technology, training and tournament setups that are meant to either furnish or favor power, which, in turn, encourages more violent swings. Eye-popping purses only reinforce the cycle of bigger, stronger players trying to hit it farther and cash in faster, regardless of the physical toll it takes. Longevity is a less urgent goal than length. It’s a perfect storm, and swirling at its center, many experts say, are fundamental shifts in the golf swing itself.
“Just in general, the swing has gotten shorter, faster and tighter,” says Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee, who fleshes out that thesis in his book The Anatomy of Greatness: Lessons from the Best Golf Swings in History. “When you do that, you’re basically turning the body into a time bomb, and sooner or later the spokes are going to start busting off the hub.”
Although Chamblee cites many names in support of his argument, Exhibits A and B for him are Tiger Woods and Michelle Wie, the two most soaring talents of their time. Woods has been under the knife more times than the guy in the Operation board game, while Wie’s litany of injuries might lead you to believe that she’s a running back.
That one is fond of twerking and the other has a penchant for jumping out of airplanes may provide a partial explanation. But it doesn’t change the fact that both superstars fell prey, to differing degrees, to what Chamblee describes as a detrimental drift in golf instruction. That vogue, which first gained traction in the “80s, called for players to maintain a flexed right knee during the backswing, the better to build