MyGolfSpy ran a question this week that every slicer has asked at least once: can a midsize grip cause a slice? Britt Olizarowicz, a scratch golfer and former teaching professional, went looking for the answer the honest way. She plays undersized grips, put a standard grip on her 7-iron to test the theory, and still could not close the face. So which was it — the grip, or her hands, or something else entirely?
The mechanics are real enough to explain the suspicion. A thicker grip sits deeper in the palms and quiets hand action through the swing. Less hand action can mean less clubface rotation, which can leave the face open a fraction longer at impact. A slice, after all, is nothing more than a face open to the path when the ball leaves. String those two facts together and the grip looks guilty.
Then the piece does the thing most instruction skips. It checks.
Olizarowicz walks through Golf Pride's own fitting method, which starts with two measurements — wrist crease to middle fingertip on the lead hand, plus glove size as a cross-check — and then watches where the fingers actually land. On the right size, the fingertips barely touch the heel pad of the upper hand. Too small, and they wrap underneath it. Too big, and they never reach it at all. That last case is the one that matters for a slice. If your fingers cannot reach the heel pad, you do not have full control of the club through impact, and the face has an easier time staying open.
The distinction she lands on is the whole point: it has less to do with "thick grips restrict hands" as a blanket rule and everything to do with whether this specific grip fits this specific hand. Reach the heel pad fine and still slice, and the grip is not your problem. That is a path or face-angle issue, and no regrip will fix it.
The comment section, as it often does at MyGolfSpy, argued the case better than any single writer could. One reader went up to oversized grips on his driver, sliced everything for a few weeks, then watched his consistency climb once his hands settled. Another went from a +4 build to a JumboMax medium and now hits more fairways. A third moved to midsize and gained face control. Same category of change, and it helped every one of them — for different reasons, at different sizes, with different hands. Read the thread as a data set and the lesson writes itself. The fix is individual. What worked for the golfer above you in the thread tells you almost nothing about what will work for you.
This is where most amateurs lose weeks. A slice shows up, a theory arrives — the grip, the shaft, the stance, a swing thought borrowed from a range neighbor — and the fix gets chosen before the cause is known. Sometimes the guess lands. More often it moves the miss somewhere new, and the golfer is back to guessing with one more variable in play. The grip question is a small, clean example of a much larger habit: treating a symptom without ever reading the mechanism underneath it.
The honest version is slower and duller and works. Isolate the cause before you buy the cure. Is the face open at impact, or is the path across the ball? Do the numbers move when the grip changes, or do they sit exactly where they were? A face that is square to the path does not slice, whatever is wrapped around the shaft. Answer that first and the equipment question mostly answers itself — either the change earns its place or it does not, and you can see which in the data instead of in your feelings about the last range session.
None of this argues against a fitting. Olizarowicz's closing advice is to start with a grip check and have someone watch for the heel-pad gap, because grip size can tip an existing tendency one way or the other. The argument is only about order. Diagnose, then adjust. Grip size is a real lever; it is rarely the root, and treating it as the root is how a slice survives three regrips.