Chuck Quinton is the founder of the Rotary Swing and the former Teaching Professional at Castle Pines Golf Club in Colorado. He also founded the Rotary Swing Golf Academy at the Ritz Carlton Golf Club in Orlando, Florida where he teaches golf during the winter months.
Chuck Quinton is the author of the popular “The Rotary Swing” golf instruction book that has sold thousands of copies worldwide as well as the instructional DVD series, “Swing Plane Made Simple” and “Short Game Made Simple”, and most recently the “Rotary Swing Tour Certification Manual”.
Chuck Quinton’s instructional website, https://rotaryswing.com/ is one of the largest golf instruction sites on the Internet today with thousands of visitors per day and is host to over 300 instructional videos that Chuck Quinton has created, as well as over 150 articles he has written. His videos on YouTube have been viewed millions of times and he has been featured as a guest on ESPN Sports Radio numerous times, as well as numerous local radio shows around the country.
Chuck Quinton has helped thousands of students of all abilities, including many players on the PGA Tour, Web.com Tour, European PGA Tour, LPGA Tour, Futures Tour, Hooters Tour, Gateway Tour and numerous other mini-tours. Chuck Quinton. Has spent thousands of hours of tireless research, continuing instruction and hard work to create Rotary Swing.
We are excited to have a few minutes with Chuck Quinton to learn about how he got started and what he is up to now.
How did you get started?
It’s been over thirty years that I’ve been playing golf. My first time ever playing golf was a little bit different than how most people got started. I went out on Christmas Day as a 14-year-old kid, and there were six inches of snow on the ground. We had to use orange balls. The ground was completely frozen. I never played on green grass the first three times I tried to play golf. The pins were literally frozen into the ground. I literally didn’t know for the first month that I played golf, that the pins came out of the hole. I just thought they were all stuck in there. I didn’t know any better. But immediately, I was totally hooked and became super obsessed. I just fell in love with the game immediately. Even though it was playing on white stuff instead of green stuff.
What could have possibly led you to play golf in the snow?
My childhood stuff was a little bit different. I didn’t grow up at the country club with the silver spoon kind of thing. It was pretty much the exact opposite of that. My mom had me when she was really, really young. I think my mom had me when she was 15. She had to drop out of high school to help raise me. My mom really, really struggled growing up and we didn’t have any money. I mean, at all. We grew up in government housing, we were on welfare, we had food stamps. My mom had a lot of guys in and out of her life as we were growing up. My dad left when I was two months old, so I didn’t really have a father figure growing up. But this guy who I was trying to kind of bond with and attach to was super passionate about golf.
He and his brother were super passionate about golf. That’s all they talked about all the time. I’d never played golf in my life. I’d never even thought about golf. I didn’t know anything about it. He finally asked me one day, he’s like, “Hey, would you like to go play golf?” It was Christmas Day. For me, I’m like, “Wow, I get a chance to get to know this guy and to go and do something different. I don’t know anything about golf, so why the heck not?” I was super excited to go out and play.
You talked about falling in love with the game immediately. What was it that hooked you?
I have always been the kid who took apart all his toys. I had to know how my toys worked. I took apart my Nintendo, I took apart my G.I. Joes. I literally I was like, “Man, how do these legs move like this?” I look, there’s little rubber bands in here. I didn’t ever put them back together, but I loved taking them apart because I just love understanding how stuff works. For me, because I’ve been like this my entire life, I drove my mom nuts. I took apart our TV, I took upon our VCR when I was a kid. I just was like, “Wow, you stick something in here and it starts playing stuff. How does that work?” The golf swing for me, as most golfers become obsessed with the swing, it was an instant lifetime pursuit for me. Because the golf swing has really been one of those things that in my opinion has never really been solved per se. It’s been taught so many different ways. Still to this day, it’s taught so many different ways. But you can go down so many different rabbit holes looking for answers.
I’m obsessive about that stuff. I have to know how everything works. That’s carried through, not from the time that I was just a kid taking apart my toys, but to this day now I just have bigger toys. I take apart my cars and my gearboxes and engines and I have to understand how stuff works. Golf gave me that opportunity to have a passion that I was super in love with. But also like, “Man, I want to understand how this stuff works. How do you hit a ball? How does Jack Nicklaus hit the ball that way?” That’s actually how I first got my real introduction to understanding a golf swing philosophy, if you will. My grandmother used to drop me off at the golf course. It was $4 and 35 cents and you could play all day, and shoes and shirts were optional. That was my first golf course. In the summer, she would drop me off there and I would play 45 holes a day all day. When I was waiting for her to pick me up, I’d sit in the clubhouse and read every single back issue of golf magazine, Golf Digest.
It was piles and piles of magazines in the clubhouse. I was just reading all this stuff. At first, I had no idea what I was reading or what it meant or how… But I was trying to get better at golf. I instantly knew I had to conquer this game, even though it’s a game you can’t conquer. A cousin of mine had these Golf My Way tapes by Jack Nicklaus, the VHS tapes. Since I had taken my VCR apart, I had to figure out how to put it back together and put this VCR tape in there. I wore that thing out. I watched that Jack Nicklaus Golf My Way tapes so many times that it literally stopped working. But I loved it because Jack Nicklaus and he had his teacher, Jack Grout, on there talking about how Jack swings.
Of course, at this time, Jack Nicklaus is one of the greatest golfers of all time, if not the greatest golfer of all time. If you’re going to learn from somebody, it makes sense to learn from this guy.
I really started down that rabbit hole. That was really the catalyst where having these VHS tapes and wearing them out and watching them over and over and over again, made it so that I then had to read every single golf book that I could ever get my hands on, every single golf magazine. I obviously had subscriptions to all the golf magazines, and I just couldn’t wait to get the next one each month. I’ve been pretty much obsessed with the mechanics of the swing from the very beginning.
What do you think it is that makes you successful?
Passion. I have an extreme passion for solving problems, getting down to the root of an issue and exploring outside the box ways to create solutions.
What are you most excited about right now?
The AXIOM. I created something that truly has the ability to revolutionize golf instruction, and when you combine it with my DEAD Drill program, it is a fool proof pathway that guarantees golfing success. Our aim is to bring this program to as many golfers as we can so that the frustration and aggravation that is usually associated with golf can fade into the past.
Many thanks to Chuck Quinton for sharing his story with our readers. See you on the links!
