SIMPSONVILLE, SOUTH CAROLINA | When Brendon Todd was lost in golf’s wilderness with every full swing feeling like a potential trap door into deeper darkness, a friend suggested he check out online video lessons posted by former touring pro Bradley Hughes.
With nothing but a terrifying big miss to the right to lose, Todd was intrigued by what Hughes – a native Australian now living outside Greenville, S.C. – was showing and telling prospective students through the magic of the internet.
Todd, a former PGA Tour winner whose career had cratered to the point he was considering a new path in the pizza business, had been through enough teachers and lessons to write his own book on how not to get better.
But something about what Hughes was saying – and the methods he employed – felt right to Todd. He bought Hughes’ online book, The Great Ballstrikers, and a career resurrection had begun.
“What he teaches is grounded in common sense and grounded in experience,” said Todd, who has won twice in the 2019-20 season and is ranked 43rd in the world after falling to 2,036th in the ranking two years ago.
Hughes, who played on the International team at the 1994 Presidents Cup, isn’t yet a teaching star like Butch Harmon, Sean Foley or Jim McLean. But with Todd’s success and the commitment of Harold Varner III and several other tour players finding their way to him, the profile of the 53-year-old is expanding.
He played professional golf long enough (Hughes still holds the all-time scoring record in the Australian Masters, 24-under-par 268 when he won in 1998) that spending 20-plus weeks a season on tournament practice tees isn’t appealing. But helping golfers get better – whether they’re touring pros or 20-handicappers at Holly Tree Country Club where Hughes is based – fuels him.

“It’s pretty cool to help someone get better because everyone wants to get better. Pros, amateurs everyone,” Hughes said recently, sitting in the Holly Tree grill room on a hot afternoon.
“Of all the lessons I’ve done, and it could be in the thousands by now, I’ve never had anyone leave the range worse – which a lot of times does happen because they change things so much and so differently. People get so stuck on ‘I’ve got to go here, and I’ve got to go here.’ They can’t do it. They get fried in their brain.
“I love the fact that everyone I’ve taught has left the range getting better. I had a 70-year-old guy go from a 16 (handicap) down to 7 within six months. He thought his golf was done and now he’s playing the best golf of his life.”
Fifteen years ago, having bounced around the world playing tournament golf, Hughes played a Nationwide Tour event in Greenville and liked the area. He moved there and began his teaching career giving lessons for $40 at an Edwin Watts store in a local shopping mall.
“An inauspicious start,” Hughes calls it.
Through his years, Hughes studied the game’s best players. He played alongside Greg Norman and he once spent an hour in a bunker with Gary Player, one of the best sand players in history. He looked at videos of the great players, studying their similarities and their differences.
Hughes also looked at how golf has been taught traditionally. It didn’t work for him, so he created his own teaching approach. It’s not built around swing positions. It’s built around feel.
“It’s hard to tell people what to do,” he said. “They have to feel it, so I designed a series of drills around that. … It’s not about positions. It’s about force, dynamics and feels. When you’re a player, you know it by feel, not by definition. I’ve worked hard to explain what I do.”
When Hughes works with players – whether it’s Ollie Schniederjans or someone trying to win a flight in their club championship – he takes the same approach. He has created five drills and has players work on those, one building on top of the other.
“You can have the best backswing in the world but if you don’t know where to go and what to do from there it’s not going to make any difference. The Hall of Fame is full of funny backswings which tells you there is something else more important than that.” – Bradley Hughes
The first drill is not about the swing but about impact, teaching players what it should feel like. Ideally, students will make hundreds of swings into a duffel bag designed to absorb impact, teaching their muscles what to do.
The second drill focuses on legwork and footwork (Hughes’ training aid called the Down Under Board has become increasingly popular on PGA Tour practice tees). The third drill centers on how the body takes over; the fourth is built around continuing to hit through impact; and the fifth drill focuses on the actual backswing and downswing.
Each of the drills is built around resistance, like a boxer hitting a heavy bag.
“We kind of go backward,” Hughes said. “I have a lot of people come and see me and say I’ve had lessons for 12 years and all I’ve ever worked on is my backswing and I never get any better. Right.
“You can have the best backswing in the world but if you don’t know where to go and what to do from there it’s not going to make any difference. The Hall of Fame is full of funny backswings, which tells you there is something else more important than that.”
When Todd reached out to Hughes two years ago, he did so because he liked the concept of using force pressures and dynamics in his swing. There were elements that reminded Todd of how he played when he was younger, before he got bound up in a confusing tangle of swing thoughts.
Todd had become almost paralyzed by the fear of hitting full shots wildly to the right. He can go back to the moment in the 2015 FedEx Cup playoffs when it began and the more he worked to overcome his problem, the worse it became.
Put simply, he was so afraid of having the clubface open at impact that he overcompensated by closing the clubface going back. After reading Hughes’ book, Todd called and they talked for three hours. Hughes made a point of not looking up Todd’s swing online before they worked together.
“I gave him permission to release the club again from something that felt really open,” Hughes said. “He immediately liked that. He said that’s how he felt he swung it the best. He was more an open/close, shut-the-door kind of player.”
Within six weeks of their going to work together, Todd saw the light again, including shooting 61 in Monday qualifying at the 2018 RSM Classic.
“I went home and worked on his drills and I came back remarkably better,” Todd said.

That’s part of what led Varner to Hughes. Their work began with a phone lesson early in the week of the Genesis Invitational in February, a tournament in which Varner contended before fading to T13 on Sunday. They have stayed in touch, concentrating on leg and footwork in the swing.
Hughes believes in delivering the club to the ball on a path that approximates 4:30 on a clock, coming from the inside to allow a full release at and through impact. Hitting the ball, Hughes teaches, isn’t all that determines how a shot flies.
“Once they understand you can actually control your shapes, your heights, your everything from what you do after impact, then golf becomes really easy because your mind is forward of your target rather than behind it,” Hughes said.
“The golf ball reacts to a force. It’s not just an entry force. The golf ball gets hit out of the middle of two forces. If you can get your entry and your exit to match, that ball really has no choice but to go straight.
“All those words like pronation (in feet). I don’t use any of those words. I just get people to feel it. They don’t need to know it. They just need to feel it.”
Two weeks ago, Hughes made the three-hour drive to Greensboro, North Carolina, to see Todd and Varner before the Wyndham Championship. He doesn’t work the range like some teachers who seek maximum visibility.
“He hasn’t had instant stardom on the tour but he’s not seeking it,” Todd said. “He believes if you work on the right things at home, you don’t need constant attention.
“I don’t think he wants to spend his life on the road. He enjoys helping people on all levels.”
Sitting in the grill room, Hughes ticks off success stories that validate his work.
“I had a student who went from shooting 130 to 88 in three to four weeks and he was only doing the first drill. Within a year the guy shot 74,” Hughes said. “I had a few in Australia go from 18 handicaps to 2s within a year.
“I did an interview with (swing instructor and radio/TV personality) Michael Breed and he sort of laughed because I said I find it really easy to teach pros and good players. He laughed and said he finds he butts heads more with pros because they have their ideals and they don’t want to budge from them much.
“What I try to teach them is feel. It’s something they’ve probably done at some point. It’s not a new idea. It’s pointing them back to something they felt. The better the player, the easier to teach them.”
Whatever the level, Hughes loves seeing the light go off within players.
“I love the pro stuff,” he said, “but I get more fun out of the average guy getting better.”