The Potential for Power

My dismal distance at the range, related in the previous post, turned out to be a catalyst of progress and change. When I resumed my practice in my backyard, I was re-reading Tom Bertrand’s The Secret of Hogan’s Swing more carefully and paying more attention to where or how in my swing I could develop the clubhead speed that I wanted.

The day after the blustery, frigid practice when I just made slow motion swings, I went out again, not intending to hit practice balls, but content just to make full swings and see if I could speed up the clubhead. The answer I found came pretty quickly and was one that I had discovered months earlier and then set aside to practice other swing thoughts.

My problem turned out to be a familiar one—relying on muscles and conscious control of the swing. Lately, in my shortened swing drills, I had been concentrating so much on the role of each hand and the timing of the release that I had completely obscured the necessity of “letting the club do the work.” I was consciously doing the work, consciously moving the club along its path, consciously turning my left elbow, consciously throwing the clubhead with my right hand at impact. No wonder I can’t hit the ball 200 yards. Instead of distance, I had deliberate control. As I practiced swings, I could feel the weight of the club and every position of my arms and hands during the swing.

That weight and muscular awareness reminded me to keep the grip in my fingers and to keep my fingers and hands and arms relaxed in that active way that Tom Bertrand talks about. That did it. Once I let go of everything I had been so careful to control before, I was able to really start swinging the club with some speed and some acceleration. I could hear the club ripping through the air, a sound I had become unaccustomed to listen for. I began to pay attention to the transition once again, to have a sense of lag, and to feel the gathering momentum of the clubhead on its downward arc toward the ball.

With a loose, relaxed swing, my left elbow and right hand automatically did what I had been teaching them to do for weeks. Near the ball, nearly at the bottom of the swing arc, the club snapped through, my forearms were crossed, right over left, and the club was finishing its semicircular path up over my left shoulder while my hips completed their turn and my right shoulder finished over my left toe, just as Tom describes the finish of the follow-through.

From the feel of it, I knew that this is what a good golf swing is supposed to feel like. Naturally, as excited as I was by my re-discovery, I couldn’t wait to hit some plastic balls to see what would happen. Even before I teed them up, I knew. The worst hits you could imagine. Off the toe of the club, wicked slices, shanks, and topped grounders. I knew this would happen because it always does, without fail, whenever I make the slightest change With a change as wide-open as this—giving complete freedom to the swing—I couldn’t reasonably expect to hit the ball. Not at first, anyway.

I went back to some more slow swings and some swings at a faster tempo. When I started hitting again, at least the balls started going out in the general direction of my target line. And before too long, they were actually looking pretty good. And a couple felt like bombs, straight and way out there, I’d guess another ten or twenty yards longer than I was hitting at the range a couple of days before. You can see the results in the video below. The swing now felt as though it had the potential for power.

Reality Bites!

My previous post described the virtues of slow, patient practice and the rewards of working at a gradual, methodical pace toward building parts of the swing over time. It certainly makes sense on paper. Hitting my Callaway soft-flight practice balls across my backyard, I felt I was rounding into good shape for April 1, the beginning of the new season. Then I went to a range and hit real golf balls. That’s when I came back down to earth. Reality bites!

You’ll remember that for a couple of weeks, I had been practicing drills, shortened swing drills to learn the feeling of “slinging the ball,” like Hogan. Drills like that are the only practical ones I can hit in my yard, which is about 65-70 yards long corner to corner. A full swing with a driver would probably, if it was a good swing, send my Callaway balls out onto the main road.

At the range, my only goal was to hit the driver with a full swing and see how my short-swing practice was contributing to a better swing. I could see definite improvement. I was able to hit the ball more consistently and felt that my mechanics were more reliable and comfortable. On the other hand, I still had a problem with distance. Even when everything clicked and the ball went arcing across the range toward the yard markers, I could never hit 200 yards. Then I tried a seven-iron to see if I could hit it any farther than I did the last time at the range a few weeks before. Myabe it was because I hadn’t been swinging an iron at all lately, but I couldn’t hit it more than about 135 or 140 yards. The results with both clubs told me I needed to go back home and start thinking more about clubhead speed during my practice sessions.

Reality may be hard to face at times—most of the time—but my next practice session at home, the day after the frustrating visit to the range, put me back into a positive mood. Before I went out to practice, on a blustery, 24-degree day (wind chill made it feel like the teens), I re-read some of the last sections of Tom Bertrand’s The Secret of Hogan’s Swing. I’m constantly surprised, when I revisit my golf books, at how frequently certain details jump out at me, phrases that I have either forgotten or missed on earlier readings. This time, the detail that caught my attention came from the “Impact Zone Checklist” (p. 156) where the first item, in bold and bulleted, instructs “Left knee remains flexed.” How did I miss that before? As Tom explains, this tendency can lead to, among other problems, topping the ball, which, you may remember from earlier posts, I do with gruesome regularity, those hot infield grounders I hit in the backyard.

Despite the bitter weather, I went out to my practice area and set up the hitting mat and tee, but with no plans to hit balls. Even if I’d wanted to, the wind was too stiff to allow teeing up. Instead, I wanted just to go through the motions, the slow motions that Tom advocates, and full-swing motions rather than abbreviated swings. Somewhere in the full swing, good players generate clubhead speed, and I wanted to start finding out how to do that myself. Twenty minutes out in that gale was about all I could take, but at least I did get some swinging in. And those slow motion swings must have helped because the next day, I started to understand why I had such slow clubhead speed.

Slow Slinging: Slow, Patient Practice

In my last post, I said that the swing felt good enough to take out on the course, that is, when spring arrives. Practice the next day, however, brought me back to the reality of a long swing development process. Hitting for distance, a major concern in the last few posts, had dropped in my priority list, replaced by my effort to work on a clean, repeatable swing. By clean, I mean that I wanted to get over scuffing the practice mat. This is a nagging problem, and I am reminded of some sage advice I’ve come across, “You want to hit the ball, not the tee.”

Even with the latest improvements, my first few swings flew right into the side of the house or bounced across the yard with topspin, like hot infield grounders. This is how golf tests your resolve. The thought occurred to me that I was bringing the club up too severely and imparting this tennis-like topspin. I could see that clearly when I videotaped myself. The obvious answer was to practice level-left. This is what Tom Bertrand advocates. And, theoretically, I could understand the efficacy of this approach.

With a slowed-down swing, I tried just to hit the ball solidly with a relatively flat swing plane, using a very shortened swing—not even the nine o’clock drill. All I wanted to do was to control the clubhead and the path of the swing so that I wasn’t hitting below the tee. I wanted to see low shots driven out there straight ahead of me. After hitting a few practice shots, I thought it would probably be a good idea to go inside and take another look at Tom Bertrand’s chapter on “The Legendary Golf System,” just to make sure that I knew what I was doing.

Reviewing that chapter gave me the mental images I needed to continue practicing and also impressed on me two other points. The first is that the wrist of the left hand has to be bowed out toward the target. I didn’t think I was emphasizing that enough in my practice. The second is that you need to delay that left elbow turn as long as possible and then turn it very quickly in order to “sling the ball.”

Outside again on the practice mat, balls were glancing off the house and hopping across the ground as they always do when I make swing modifications. Gradually, however, with a slowed-down swing, I started to get control and hit balls solidly out toward my target, the big Norway maple that you can see in the videos. My method is to do some slow-motion practice swings, as Tom Bertrand suggests, and then to do some slow hitting so that I can see what the ball actually does. This kind of practice reminds me of the way I used to practice the piano when I played classical music, following Daniel Barenboim’s advice to practice super-slowly as the best way to teach the muscles what to do. Tom argues for this approach, too.

To learn precise swing motions by going through them slowly until they become natural and comfortable. Most important, you condition your mind and muscles to execute these moves without consciously thinking. Learning your swing at a slower pace enables you to watch it take shape and feel the flow of energy as you move through each position. This will prove far easier and more effective than trying to adjust movements during your normal golf swing when you’re moving fast and a dozen thoughts are jumping through your mind.

Or take Harvey Penick’s word for it. In his classic Little Red Book, he said, “A slow motion swing develops the golf muscles, implants the correct club positions in your golfing brain—and doesn’t smash the chandelier.”

For optimum results, these motions should be practiced every day. Studies have shown that any habit—in this case, the correct movements that create a solid, repeatable golf swing—can be learned in less than thirty days if practiced regularly. In sixty days, with regular practice and play, they are close to becoming second nature.

I don’t know what studies Tom is referring to, but my first pro, Mark, told me something similar. He said that whenever you make a change in your swing, it takes nine hours to learn it. So if you practice something for twenty minutes a day, that works out to less than a month, just as Tom says. The video below shows my latest practice: a shortened, slower swing while I work out a level-left follow-through.

Slinging Swing Modifications

My new “slinging” swing was hardly twenty-four hours old when I went out to start slinging again to make it repeatable. From the first plastic ball I teed up, the only consistency was that every swing was terrible, an ugly mixture of slices and topped balls. After a dozen or so of these swings, I stopped to take stock. The most obvious cause of the problems was my hands. Even yesterday, I suspected that, although I was seeing an improvement, I had adopted a swing that is too “handsy,” to use Tom Bertrand’s term. Taking a good look at my grip, I carefully pressed the pad “at the inside heel of the palm” against the handle and wrapped my fingers, just as Hogan teaches in Ben Hogan's Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf. I also made sure to overlap the right-hand pinkie on top, rather that beside, the left index finger and keep both hands tightly together.

With these corrections, I started some slow-motion swings, watching what my wrists did, and what I saw also needed some correction. Instead of maintaining wristcock, I was dropping my wrists and virtually dragging the club to the ball. That probably accounted for all my mishits, the skulled balls and sharp slices. Keeping the angle between my wrists and the club, I started to feel what Tom Bertrand means when he describes Hogan’s Secret, the turning of the left elbow “level left” toward the left hip. There is no hand action at all, just a very controlled clubhead arc out to the ball and then around the left leg, exactly what you want.

This new movement made sense to me. I could still get the slinging swing and, in addition, a much more accurate clubhead path to the ball; Already, I had the sense that the mass of the clubhead was hitting the ball squarely. The greater swing path accuracy would take care of the skulling balls and scuffing the mat that were plaguing me. With these new swing ideas in mind, I started hitting practice balls again, very deliberately and with moderate clubhead speed.

I could see the improvement right away. After a couple dozen swings and the growing sense of hitting the ball really solidly, it was time to try out my modified slinging swing on the Callaway practice balls. By the way, these have worked out extremely well. The true flight path they give is very helpful in diagnosing a swing, and they are safe to use in your yard. I’ve hit both cars several times, as well as screens, windows, and siding on the house (numerous times—it’s a big target), with absolutely no damage. They’re that soft.

This Callaway session was very gratifying. The swing modifications seemed solid. I hit the ball consistently well, skulling only a couple and no disastrous slices. My wrists firmly cocked, the club handle in the firm Hogan grip, I was able to hit toward my target again and again (see video below). Many times, I hit straight out, but I learned what to do in order to draw the ball. The practice went so well that, near the end, I decided to try a controlled fade. Addressing the ball as I remembered how to make this shot—stance slightly open, but still aiming at the target—I hit a shot, a beauty, high and fading just right. I couldn’t have asked for more. Just to make sure, I tried three more. All were acceptable. Then, to seal the deal, I tried three draws. All fine—right at the target, pulling right to left. I couldn’t have been more gratified. I felt as though I could go out on the course right then and there.

Slinging the Ball

Dreaming that I finally had the answer that would give me a good swing and all the distance I wanted, I woke up the next morning to misgivings. This swing really wasn’t what I saw the pros doing in the Swing Vision videos on YouTube, and it wasn’t what my books described. Confirming my suspicions, the YouTube video comparing the swings of Ernie Els and Michelle Wie provided me with the hint I needed. Watching them in slow motion, I noticed how quickly their right hands came through the hitting zone. At impact, the right palm is square to the ball, but immediately after that, you can see how quickly the hands are pronating. So my idea of a long arc where the hands supinate and pronate was erroneous. No surprise there.

Then I wanted to see what the pros do with their arms. The day before, I thought I had discovered that reaching out toward the ball, like Moe Norman, worked best. It felt good and reliable, but I remembered my first pro, Mark, telling me how close to the thighs players like Furyk swing the arms, and I also had a mental picture of pros, in a down-the-line shot, swinging the hands through a spot vertically underneath the chin. And that’s what Adam Scott does in the video I watched next. His swing reminded of a passage I had read months earlier in Swing Like a Pro, which I found and read again.

As important as the act of producing power is the ability to direct it properly. By driving the lower body toward the target, you move the hips out of the way so that the arms can swing on an inside path toward ball contact. Our research has shown that the clearance between the arms and the body is so small that, if the lower body is not moved out of the way, the path the arms and club are supposed to follow becomes blocked. (p. 153)

When I went out to practice, I had two swing thoughts (usually, that’s one too many and leads to ugly results)—quick supination and pronation of the hands and keeping the hands under my chin. I thought of Tom Bertrand’s “secret” again, and how it related to the quick hands I saw in Ernie Els and Michelle Wie and realized that far from being a slow, methodical, and long turn toward the left hip, the movement was actually the quickest part of the swing, almost instantaneous. Suddenly, I realized that this was where clubhead speed must be generated. Whatever the speed before, it is no more than highway speed compared to the mach-1 acceleration that happens at impact. This is the speed that Hogan talks about in Ben Hogan's Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf.

IN THE CHAIN ACTION OF THE SWING, THE SHOULDERS AND UPPER PART OF THE BODY CONDUCT THIS MULTIPLYING POWER INTO THE ARMS…THE ARMS MULTIPLY IT AGAIN AND PASS IT ON TO THE HANDS…THE HANDS MULTIPLY IT IN TURN…AND, AS A RESULT, THE CLUBHEAD IS SIMPLY TEARING THOUGH THE AIR AT AN INCREDIBLE SPEED AS IT DRIVES THROUGH THE BALL. ALL THIS HAPPENS SO QUICKLY, OF COURSE, THAT YOU CAN’T SEE IT TO APPRECIATE IT. BUTTHIS IS WHAT HAPPENS. (p. 92)

Until now, I never understood how this multiplying effect happens. I certainly never had the remotest feeling that my clubhead was “tearing through the air.” As I continued to practice this new discovery, using a shortened swing drill (see video), I saw that it also cured the problem I had of grounding the clubhead in front of the ball.



The reason for that, I now guessed, was that I was trying to make a long arc as I turned my elbow “level left,” instead of this quick, lightning-flash turn I was developing now. Two other aspects of the swing became clear, too. One was the aim of delaying the release until the last possible instant. All this time, I thought the release began way back in front of the right hip and followed a long arc around the body. Now, I had the sense that I could let the release happen much later, at a point where my hands felt very close to the ball, much later that I had ever thought possible. Months before, I had tried a release like this but couldn’t make it work then, probably because of other problems earlier in my swing, such as casting or coming over the top or swinging outside to in. At this “Eureka!” moment, I realized what “slinging the ball” meant. Tom Bertrand refers to this in The Secret of Hogan's Swing when he describes “Capturing the Ball.”

When Hogan began to understand the workings of a repeatable golf swing, he realized that all his energy should not be directed toward a violent encounter with the ball. Instead, he envisioned his clubface capturing the ball and slinging it to the target. Thus the downswing energy is released toward the target and not at the ball. I believe this is what created a unique sound to Hogan’s golf shots as he connected with the ball.

“Slinging the ball” is exactly what I felt I was doing now. Finally seeing what had been so hard to imagine for all these months, I laughed to myself. I knew I was on solid ground now. Starting to make my new “slinging” swing repeatable and consistent is the subject of the next post.

Practicing Long Distance

I’ve made progress in developing my swing, and I’m continuing to make progress. Every day when I go out to practice, I gain new insights. My muscles and reflexes find new paths. Each day, I have a definite practice plan, something specific I want to implement or review. Since I’m a beginner just learning the swing, I never go out to my practice mat just to swing the club. Even if the question of the hour relates to distance.

As I have admitted in my previous posts, I haven’t been able to hit the ball far enough. When my friends ask how my swing is coming along, I say, “Great! I’m crushing my driver out there about 180!” Because this is so anemic, when I go out each day, I may have a specific thought to work on—such as extending my arms in the follow-through or staying behind the ball during the downswing—but at some point during the practice session, I’m going to focus on clubhead speed, which I know is the key to power and distance. Having watched, with envy, the LPGA players blast the ball distances far beyond what I can even dream of (at this point), I know that the answer has nothing to do with physical strength and everything to do with technique and timing.

The other day, in trying to solve the problem of an erratic swing that often grounded the club on the mat behind the ball or that skulled the ball, producing a hyperactive, topspin crazy shot that hopped across my frozen backyard, I thought I found an answer. It grew out of my attempt to lengthen my swing and keep my left arm straight. In trying to find a swing path that would take the clubhead directly to the back of the ball without hitting the mat, I started swinging as if I were doing a modified hammer-throw, you know, that Olympic event where the athlete swings a ball fastened at the end of a short length of chain around and around him as he spins before he reaches a maximum speed and lets the chain go. If his timing is good, the ball will go flying out across the field with the greatest distance possible. To me, it seemed perfect physics: centrifugal force, mass times speed, and acceleration all combining to move a dead weight an incredible number of yards.

As I was finishing this practice session, with good results, I might add, I remembered videos I had seen of Moe Norman, the great Canadian pro, who famously swung on a single plane and reputedly always hit the ball straight. Not bad company, I thought. I went to sleep that night thinking that I had made another step higher up the ladder toward the ideal swing. After a good night’s sleep, morning clarified that thought. Waking up to reality in the next post.

Distance Still Far Off

In January, 2009, I was in pretty good shape, with clear progress to show for all my practice during the winter. The path of my swing was good, and I felt I was incorporating that right arm motion that Hogan talks about.

In its general character, the correct motion of the right arm and hand in the impact area resembles the motion an infielder makes when he throws half sidearm, half underhand to first after fielding a ground ball. As the right arm swings forward, the right elbow is very close to the right hip and “leads” the arm—it is the part of the arm nearest the target.

My right elbow was next to my right hip, my right wrist was cocked back with plenty of power to release, and I could feel that there was more power ready to unload from my right biceps. With everything in place like this, why couldn’t I hit the ball farther when I went to the range, I wondered. I must be missing something.

Getting the club handle in my fingers was one thing I knew I had been neglecting. The worn spot on my golf glove proved that. So I needed more whip from swinging with my fingers. Then there was the more frustrating problem of being unable to hit the ball cleanly. Many times, the clubhead would hit the mat behind the ball, or if I made an adjustment for that, I’d skull the ball, sending it across my yard bouncing with crazy topspin.

These inaccuracies made me go back to one of the first drills I learned, the nine o’clock drill. Actually, I modified that drill so that it was more of a seven o’clock drill, with my hands going back only to the spot where I wanted to start turning the left elbow during the downswing. After days of practice like this, I started to get the feeling of the clubhead swinging more freely as I took it back to that spot and then came forward again. Almost effortless, that feeling must mean that I’m on the right track.

Still, I was hitting the top of the ball far too often. The cause of that, I thought, must be that I was moving my hips laterally on the downswing and getting out in front of the ball. The cure for that, I knew, was to stay back. That reminded me of something I had read or seen on YouTube about getting added “leverage” by staying behind the ball. To help me to this, I started trying to focus on a dimple somewhere at the back of the ball during the swing. That helped. And always, I tried to relax and swing as easily as I could. Not exactly like Julius Boros, but not Frankenstein, either.

All this practice and all the mishits took a toll on my plastic practice balls. I prefer the solid white practice balls from Wilson because I can see how a shot takes the spin that a swing imparts, but the balls tend to crack along the seam at their circumference. Looking online, I came across the Callaway Golf HX Practice Soft-Flite Ball - 30 Pack. Made out of soft rubber, with dimples so that their flight is realistic, they travel about a third the distance of a regular golf ball. In my yard, I can hit them (if I don’t hit the house first) about sixty-five or seventy yards on the fly with a driver doing that seven o’clock drill. Any farther than that, and they’ll end up out on the highway. Ideally, I’d like a ball with a shorter flight, but aside from that, they’re perfect for my situation.

With these balls flying about sixty-five yards, the equivalent of 195 yards with a regular golf ball, I still haven’t solved my problem with distance. Continuing my search for an answer will be the subject of the next post.

Swing Shortcomings

As you’ve probably noticed, at this point in the evolution of my swing, my primary influence lately has been Tom Bertrand and his synthesis of

Hogan’s book Five Lessons. For the past four to six weeks, I’ve been working with Tom—his YouTube videos and his book—figuratively speaking, my latest swing coach, and we’ve been working on the left elbow turn.

In his video, Tom tells you that you have to practice this movement rigorously and in slow motion, at least at first. I followed his advice and saw immediate results. My practice balls seemed to explode off the clubhead, their trajectories starting out dead straight and then curving, incredibly, right to left. All of a sudden, I was able to hit a draw. With all my research on the development of a golf swing behind me, I knew that I was on the verge of graduating from a Stage One golfer (one who slices) to a Stage Two golfer (who can draw the ball). I was so excited! I’m still excited about this progress! Finally, I thought, I’m learning a golf swing!

However, I quickly realized that I couldn’t do this regularly. And as all “Wannabes” do, I probably liked to remember my good shots and forget about the bad ones. When I hit a wicked slice or topped the ball (which happened way too often), I would make an adjustment—anything to get that sweet right to left trajectory back again. These adjustments included

• turning my shoulders farther on the backswing
• leaving the clubhead farther behind me as I started the downswing
• keeping my left arm across my chest as I started to the downswing
• staying behind the ball at impact
• extending both arms into that desired “V” after impact
• feeling my weight on the downswing transfer to the outside left heel
• finishing the swing with a follow-through in the classic position, around my neck somewhere

As you can tell, this was too much to accomplish. Day-to-day, I would focus on one or two of these objectives, depending on how the practice balls flew. Then I spent two hours at the driving range. That was a turning point.

I started out hitting a seven-iron to a green about 150 yards out. I thought I was hitting the ball pretty well. Generally, I could hit ball first and watch the flight track right and come back left to hit somewhere on the green. Naturally, I hit many balls badly, too. I still felt that, for me, I was hitting the ball well, and accurately, too.

When it came to the driver, I saw the same kind of results. I could hit the ball out there where I wanted it to go. Sometimes straight ahead, sometimes slicing right, sometimes straight ahead and drawing left. I never knew what was going to happen. The track of the ball didn’t really matter to me, however. What mattered most was the distance. After all my practice, I still couldn’t hit the ball more than about 195 yards on the fly (and I was concerned only with the fly). To me, this meant that I might as well not play golf. I knew of holes on public courses that I’ve played near me where you had to carry the ball at least 210 yards. If I couldn’t do at least that, then I might as well take up chess. Recently, I saw Camilo Villegas hit an eight iron about 180 yards. That means that he can hit a

• seven iron 190
• six iron 200
• five iron 210
• four iron 220

Basically, he’s hitting clubs two and a-half times what I hit. This told me that I had a distance problem. And it determined what I would practice. Going for greater distance is the subject of the next post.

The "Missing Link"

As I mentioned in my last post, I came across Tom Bertrand’s YouTube video “The ‘Missing Link’ to Ben Hogan’s Secret” while browsing golf videos. He has another one, “The SECRET to Ben Hogan’s ‘laying off the club’.” Experimenting with this tip made me feel uncomfortable, and I haven’t adopted it yet (you’ll see my comments to Tom on his video), but the “Missing Link” is very powerful. See it for yourself. Then go to his book—it’s interesting to read this side-by-side with Hogan’s book. When I started re-reading The Secret of Hogan's Swing, I happened to notice what Tom says about both arms.

In his chapter, “The Technology of Hogan’s Secret,” Tom describes the role of the arms this way.

The arms have the critical task of bringing the hands into the impact zone precisely every time. They must work together, and the only way they can work together is to actively set them up with the elbows turned inward toward each other.

Hogan dictates this more emphatically

The upper part of the arms should be pressed very tightly against the sides of the chest. In my own case, I consciously work to build up so strong an adhesion between the upper arms and the chest that a person would have to exert a really terrific amount of force to wedge them apart.

When I tried to swing with my arms tightly connected, I did feel that it could lead to more power, but so far I haven’t isolated this arm connection enough. I’ve been more concerned with the elbow turn. That seemed like such a crucial factor that I directed most of my attention to it.

For this, we have to depend on The Secret of Hogan's Swing, since, as Tom explains, “Hogan never mentioned it in his books.” Hogan did reveal this “secret” to John Schlee, who, in turn, taught it to Tom. I could have saved myself a lot of time if I had come across Tom’s explanation earlier. Without it, I took Hogan’s talk about supination and pronation and thought that the hands do this. The result was that I had a “handsy” (to use Tom’s term) swing in the impact zone. Sometimes I hit the ball the way I wanted to, and sometimes I didn’t. I never knew what was going to happen, but I attributed this to lack of practice. I assumed the action of the hands was extremely difficult to learn and that years of practice would be required. That prospect was discouraging, yet I still drew hope from the occasional good swings I could make.

That’s why I instinctively knew that Tom had to be correct when I saw him demonstrate the left elbow turn in his YouTube video about the “Missing Link.” In the video, Tom concentrates on the hitting area “where the left elbow comes into play” and goes into greater detail here than he does in his book. You can read two sections in the book “The Left Elbow” (p. 121) and “The Missing Link to Hogan’s Secret” (pp. 148-151). However, to understand this fully, I recommend studying the video. As an aside, Tom believes in plenty of slow motion swing practice and plenty of practice in general, conclusions I come to share in my own swing development.

I also took encouragement from Tom’s introduction to the last section of his book, “The Legendary Golf System,” where he presents

a complete and final summation of all the key elements of Hogan’s golf swing, arranged in a simple format that the average golfer can understand, use, and enjoy.

This training program takes a bit of practice to work effectively, but it’s not so daunting when you realize that in a matter of weeks, you can learn and apply to your game the secrets that took Hogan at least forty years of steady digging to discover. As I [Bertrand] began to comprehend and apply the depth of Hogan’s hard-won wisdom to my own game, I felt as it someone had handed me a big bag of gold nuggets and said, “Here’s all you need to buy your ticket to golfer’s heaven.

I’m not so sure you can learn the secrets in “a matter of weeks,” but I am quite sure that Tom is correct in the rest of what he says. Without Hogan’s book and without Tom’s system, learning a good golf swing could easily take any of us at least forty years. Finally, I’ve found a complete teaching system that I understand and that can probably be achieved in a reasonable amount of time. How I practiced from this point on will be the subject of my next post.

Narrowing It Down

Taking regular lessons with my swing coach, JJ, starting in July, 2008, I spent the rest of the summer just practicing. I decided that there was no point in going out on the course to play with my flawed swing. The boundary of my golf world became my backyard. Like Voltaire’s picaresque traveler, Candide, I had learned to tend my own garden and felt no compulsion to go any further.

On a small patio, I set up my practice tee, with a hitting mat, a couple of deck chairs, and two galvanized garbage cans. I set one deck chair inside another so that I could feel the top edge against my hip as I practiced my turn. I stacked the garbage cans one on top of the other about two strides out in front of the hitting mat. Then I practiced hitting practice balls just past the garbage cans on the right side. I wanted something wide and high enough so that I’d know when I hit to the right, the correct path I was after. If I missed and went left of my target, the ball would hit the cooler.

In this way, I spent the next few months, right up to the end of the golf season, hitting plastic balls in the backyard. Most of the time, I hit the white plastic balls with large holes in them. They don’t fly too far, and when one hit the garbage cans with a hollow, metallic tenor echo (reminiscent of the show "Stomp!"), it just bounced to the ground. If I felt I had made some progress, it was time to switch to the solid white dimpled plastic balls that I could hit about thirty yards or so and watch the flight of the ball.

Gradually, as I improved the path of my swing, I started hitting fewer and less severe slices. And when I was swinging well, I began to hit balls straight or with a gratifying right to left draw. This was such a novelty and such an encouraging development that even when I hit wicked duck hooks, I was delighted.

This was a period of patient, slow, and methodical practice. For quite some time, I’ve known that I can work on only about one thing at a time. More than that overloads my synapses. Even so, as I practiced, the slightest change in my swing usually produced terrible results. One minute, I would be hitting the ball fine. Then, if I make a slight modification, the ball would fly off right in a wicked slice or trip bouncing off the tee like a hot grounder during infield practice.

The hip turn, the weight shift, the swing path, staying behind the ball, rotating around the spine without too much head movement, keeping the left arm straight, relaxing the arms and wrists and hands, keeping the club in the fingers—all these basics I practiced basically one at a time. With the camcorder almost every day, I checked my progress and decided what needed more attention. This constant, daily practice taught me to use my time more wisely, too. Where I had been in the habit of videotaping myself for use after a practice session, and then working on a perceived weakness the next day, now I saw the wisdom of looking at the video during a practice session, while it was still fresh in my mind.

Speaking of wise practice, keeping a journal is a habit I’ve tried to maintain since the beginning, back in the spring of 2007. Looking back at my first entries, I can see that I took notes on research I was doing at the time, either by reading golf books or by watching YouTube videos. I see references to Shawn Clement (the great YouTube pro I mentioned in an early post), Hogan, Rory Sabbatini, Luke Donald, Kevin Na, K.J. Choi, Hale Irwin, Ernie Els, Sean O’Hair, Lee Scarbrow, David Toms, Aaron Baddeley, David Leadbetter, the golfcoastgolfschool.com posts on YouTube, Jim Flick’s book On Golf: Lessons from America's Master Teacher (listing his top ten drills), notes on the strength and flexibility drills on Roger Fredericks DVDs, and more among pages and pages of notes. I was very methodical back then and logged anything I though valuable in my journal. Maybe that was because I had read somewhere that Hogan a journal with him whenever he went out practicing. Though I still believe in the efficacy of this kind of note-taking, I do it only sporadically, the last three entries coming in September and November ’08 and then not again until a week ago.

I think that the reason for this is that, by now, I’ve narrowed down my biggest problems to a couple that aren’t hard to remember or keep track of, and these are mainly what Tom Bertrand illustrates in his YouTube video about the “Missing Link”, as well as in his book, The Secret of Hogan's Swing—turning the left elbow in towards the left hip during the downswing and at impact, keeping the arms close together as long as possible, and moving the left arm “directly across the chest and the right shoulder during the takeaway.”

At this point, I want to introduce you to Tom Bertrand’s wonderful video on YouTube, “The ‘Missing Link’ to Ben Hogan’s Secret.” I came across it, with impeccable timing, while browsing through other YouTube golf videos. After all my practice, I was receptive, and I didn’t miss Tom’s message. I had been trying to square up the clubface consciously, using my hands, and the second I heard Tom describe the role of the left elbow, I knew he was correct. This epiphany drove me back to his book, The Secret of Hogan's Swing. I was certain that there were other details I had missed or forgotten on my previous reading and study. For instance, I had forgotten the importance Hogan places on keeping the elbows close together on the backswing. Tom’s summary drove me back to the source. Hogan’s book, which I’ve had open ever since, next to Tom’s book and Swing Like a Pro) These three constitute my indispensable study guides.

In the next post, I’ll review what I’m trying to learn from them.

A Scent of the Secret

Serious golfers all know what "Inside Out" means. We all want the clubhead to swing from inside the target line out to the ball, or square to that line, and then back inside on the follow-through. That much is clear. I've known that every since I started trying to learn a good swing, and that was over a year ago. In my last post, I recalled how my swing coach pointed out that my swing path was outside-to-in, which explained why most of my shots started out left of my intended target line before fading or slicing to the right. JJ gave me a drill to use (trying to hit just right of a target placed in front of me), and I went home to practice for as long as it would take to get this path problem fixed.

As I've said before in my posts, this is yet another example of my tendency to think I'm doing one thing when, really, I'm not. Part of the reason for this tendency, I think, is some kind of wishful thinking. I so eager to do the correct thing that I convince myself I've already learned it. Another explanation is simply that, as complex as the golf swing is, there is a limit to what I can absorb at any one time. A swing idea might go into my brain when I read some instruction in a book, but the thought tends to stay there for quite a while before it starts to show up in my swing. Perhaps each swing improvement needs some gestation period.

Eventually, good things will happen. “All in good time,” as Cervantes reminds us. Valuable lessons rarely come easily. Even if they did, it would be highly unlikely that a golf insight would be one of them. No, golf reveals its secrets grudgingly. Golf’s stubbornness requires patience and practice. Fortunately, I enjoy practicing and am content to keep on practicing as long as it takes for the next feature of the swing to kick in. Each time I sense an improvement, it feels like a revelation, a golf gift that we sometimes call an “epiphany.” I haven’t been counting, but by now, after more than a year of learning, I wonder how many epiphanies I’ve had. It’s certainly dozens at least.

At about this time, I came across another book that eventually made a huge difference in my understanding of the golf swing.

The Secret of Hogan’s Swing is a great book for anyone who is trying to learn golf. Not only is the author, Tom Bertrand, a great teacher in his own right, but he also operates with the unequaled advantage of having studied with one of the few people who actually learned from Ben Hogan himself. And that person was John Schlee. Bertrand and Schlee hooked up for a number of years, and Bertrand took note of everything that Hogan had taught Schlee.

The book falls into two main parts. First, Bertrand talks about his relationship with Schlee. For me, that was interesting because I remembered Schlee as a Tour player I used to watch on TV. After Bertrand goes through the etiology of what Hogan taught Schlee, he gets to the heart of the matter in two chapters that distill the essence of Hogan’s book. Condensed and targeted as Bertrand’s summary is, full of photographs and explanations, I was able to absorb only so much on this, my first exposure. I had to return to this book several other times, as I will relate in another post. This time through, I was able to concentrate on a couple of details.

One was that Bertrand took me back to Hogan’s emphasis on keeping the arms together as a unit. The second is the role of the left elbow in the downswing. I’ll go into more detail in a subsequent post, but for the moment, as the left elbow turns toward the left hip, that movement squares up the clubface at impact, obviating the need for a conscious, “handsy” attempt to get square. Be sure to view Bertrand’s video on YouTube where he discusses this move in detail. I found the video extremely helpful and important. According to Bertrand, the role of the left elbow is “the ‘missing link’ in the ongoing analysis of Hogan’s secret.” Without Bertrand—both his book and his video—I doubt that I ever would have understood this crucial feature of the downswing.

One of the great advantages of Bertrand’s book is that it drives you back to Ben Hogan's Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf. Bertrand got me to start studying Hogan all over again, revisiting Hogan with a fresh eye for what he was trying to impart.

Now that I was improving the path of my swing and had a scent—a whiff— of Hogan’s Secret, I felt I was finally making real progress. Suddenly, it started to appear that I might actually have a swing good enough to take out on the course in the coming spring. Of course, there was plenty to do in the meantime. That will be the subject for the next post.

Pilgrim's Progress

In my first lesson with JJ, part of a five-lesson package, I explained that I needed these lessons because learning a swing was so difficult. When we started lesson one, he might as well have said to me, “Why don’t you tell me about yourself?” I couldn’t restrain myself. I started telling JJ about the books I had read and what I had tried to accomplish in practice. He listened to it all. Then I asked my key question (key, because I didn’t think there was an answer). “How can you tell what’s going on with my swing when it all happens too fast for the eye to see it?”

He was ready. As I learned later, JJ attended the San Diego Golf Academy and learned how to become a teaching pro. Obviously, I had turned over the discussion to him. He took over and calmly gave me his response. “The path of the ball never lies.” Then he explained what he meant. He planted a golf shaft out in front of my mat as a target and told me to hit the ball right at it. With each shot that I made, he let me see where it went. Either at the shaft, or just left of it, or to the right of it. That direction indicated the path of the swing. Then if the ball tailed off left (which it usually did), that indicated that the clubface was open at impact.

This was a huge leap forward for me. All of a sudden, JJ gave me a way to assess the results of my own swings. From then on, whenever I practiced, I could analyze my swing based on where the ball went. This was a tremendous insight, one that I couldn’t have found in my reading, my videotaping myself, or watching “Swing Vision” on YouTube.

That first lesson started me on correcting the path of my swing. Obviously, it was “over-the-top” and “outside in.” Breathless, practically, I went back to my backyard and started hitting plastic balls, trying to get the inside-out swing. This is a perfect example of something I’ve said before. After a certain period of practice, you think you’re doing one thing, but, really, you’re not. Here, I could see that I was coming at the ball from the outside, not from the inside, as I thought I was. All I wanted to do in my backyard was to see the ball fly from the tee out to the right. I didn’t care what happened next. As long as the ball went right, I knew that my swing path was inside-to-out. And that’s what I wanted. In my next post, I'll describe how I attempted to draw the ball.

Gratification, at Last

Practice, drudgery, false starts, endless research online and reading library books—finally my first golf season was over. As I recounted in my first post, I practiced right through the winter, going out almost every day in my Sorrel boots, hitting plastic practice balls in my backyard.

When spring, 2008, arrived, I started going back to the range and occasionally going out for nine holes with my friend, Clint. To me, the results were extremely disappointing. I still couldn’t hit a driver very far, and I felt short with all the other clubs, too. I had no distance, and I didn’t have any accuracy, either. For nine holes, I would usually shoot around 50 at best. The thought of taking up a board game, like Parcheesi, occurred to me often. Masochistically, a dark part of my brain kept whispering, “No, golf defeats you. Let’s keep trying.” My golf adventure had become the myth of Sisyphus, the figure in Greek mythology condemned to roll a huge rock up a steep hill, only to see it roll down again, over and over again, for all eternity. Pointless. Meaningless. The crux of the Existentialist dilemma.

But we golfers, we who want to join the initiated, we are heroes of a sort. We do not give in easily. We accept failure. We persevere. And that is just what I did.

After a few desultory rounds with Clint, I decided that I wasn’t going to go out and play on a golf course again until I had a reliable swing. This was in July, 2008. I have spent the rest of that summer and fall and, now, the winter practicing. I have not set foot on a fairway. And I will not until I have a swing that pleases me. This decision has turned out to be pivotal, and I should have made it much earlier, except that there is no timeline or guidebook for learning golf. Each player has to figure it out for himself. “Dig it out of the dirt,” in Hogan’s famous aphorism. Finally, things started to improve. I could see it and feel it.

Although I had devoted myself to practice, I knew I needed help. The books, the videos, YouTube—that wasn’t enough. I also needed a swing coach. Fortunately, and conveniently, I found my swing coach less than a mile from my house. Over the hill, a nice little driving range is tucked into the otherwise commercial occupants of the main road where heavy traffic thrums by my house. And—just my luck—a new pro (soon-to-be manager) had just taken up residence. Jeremiah (JJ to those who know him well) became my swing coach. In actual practice, he was more my golf psychiatrist, for reasons that I will describe in my next post.

More YouTube and a Couple of Books

YouTube videos, especially the “Swing Vision” ones, are extremely helpful, and I continue to go back to them. Very early in my attempt to develop a good golf swing, I made video a central part of my plan. Pictures don’t lie. But golfers do. To themselves. I can’t tell you how many times I set out to learn a facet of the swing—from something I had read or a video I had watched— and practiced and practiced faithfully until I was sure that I had learned it, only to discover, much later in most cases, that I was completely mistaken. I thought I had been doing what I set out to learn, but in fact, I had been doing something else. As I said to a pro, who came along later in my development, “You think you’re doing it, but you’re not.”

After all this time spent practicing and learning, I’m still in awe of the elusive nature of the golf swing. You think you’re learning it, but you’re not. Or you’re learning only a tiny part of its intricacies. I remember my first pro, Mark, who told me about the swing, “You have to feel it.” At the time, I didn’t say anything to him, but I thought to myself, then and for a long time afterward, “What a ridiculous thing to say!” Surely, I thought, it has to be more concrete than that. “Why is it so hard to describe what happens during the swing?” I wondered. More than a year later, I understood what Mark meant. But long before that, I realized that I was going to have to teach myself a swing.

After my package of lessons with Mark, I went into a period where I just practiced and played. Then I went to see another pro, one who actually had played on the Tour when Hogan was playing. The trouble with this pro was that he was beyond retirement. He had lost all patience and wasn’t a good teacher to begin with. However, that really didn’t matter to me. I was such a beginner that I could pick up something useful from just about anyone.

During this time, I bought two books. The more influential one was Swing like a Pro by Dr. Ralph Mann and Fred Griffin. I liked it especially because of the mechanical and scientific nature of the model. I was hooked when I read,

Golf is a very difficult game.

And yet, when [you watch] a great pro swing[,] the motion seems so smooth, so fluid, so natural. It looks simple. But as the millions of amateur golfers who strive to develop a proficient swing can attest, it is more difficult that it looks.

The golf swing is not simple. It is enormously complex, perhaps the most challenging sport we humans do for recreation. Errors of a small fraction of an inch or a minute change of angle lead to large differences in the direction and trajectory of the shot, and where the ball comes to rest.

In what they call “The Biomechanics Approach,” Mann and Griffin filmed “over one hundred PGA, LPGA, and Senior PGA Tour players” and identified “the best characteristics of the entire group.” Then, “to demonstrate the model swing, [they used] the 3-D performer, which [they] have termed ‘the Pro.’ He has the best characteristics of all of the tour players.” Pictures of the Pro fill the book and illustrate every teaching point. Photographs add a “human element.” Griffin demonstrates each drill, while another instructor mimics common swing errors. Some of the diagrams of clubhead and hand paths were difficult to grasp, but in general, for visual learners, like me, this book is indispensable. Below, "The Pro."

When I ordered Swing like a Pro from Amazon, I got a second book as a bonus. Right up to the present, Tour Tempo has been of limited use because I'm just not ready for this yet. Once I get a good swing, then I can start thinking about tempo. Nonetheless, when I first looked into it, I couldn't resist conducting a little experiment. I wanted to see how my swing tempo compared with the tempos on the included CD, which includes a calibrated soundtrack. It didn’t take me long to videotape myself, capture the video in some computer software, see what the tempo of my swing was, and compare it to Hogan’s tempo. Virtually the same! Can you imagine how gratifying that was? Of course, you can! I remember telling my wife I had the same tempo as Hogan. Knowing he's dead, she was unimpressed.

What Tour Tempo has to teach me is way beyond what I can handle. It's like the "transition" at the top of the backswing. I just can't absorb that idea now. I'm still trying to figure out the fundamentals of just hitting the ball. In the next post, I begin to see the light.

Valuable Videos

Last post ended with my embarking on a period of self-imposed practice drudgery. Because I went through such drudgery doesn’t mean that I have to drag you through it, too. Let’s just say that gradually I learned that I couldn’t develop whip in my swing by trying to do it with my hands. It cannot be done. What generates whip was still a mystery to me, but at least I knew enough to start looking for other ways to do it.

I mentioned last time that I had been looking at a number of “Swing Vision” videos on YouTube. They were just part of my never-ending quest for any suggestions or examples that I could apply to my definition—and by now it was starting to take shape as a definition—of a good golf swing. My friend and often-partner, Clint, and I were often on YouTube and trading URLs. One of the first valuable sources I found were all the Shawn Clement(Clemshaw) videos. He’s really a great teacher, and I highly recommend him to you. Another is Bobby Eldridge (PurePoint Golf). And you’ll find many others. It’s a great resource. You can watch all the teaching videos you have time for and bookmark the ones that make sense to you.

Once you get going, you’re also going to want to check out all the “Swing Vision” videos so that you can see, in super slow motion, what the pros do. Most of these are hard to learn anything from, for various reasons. Sometimes, the camera is just too far away. Sometimes, the lighting is too dark. And sometimes the picture quality is not sharp enough. Still, you’ll find videos that will help you, ones featuring pros like Ernie Els, K.J. Choi, Hunter Mahan, Charles Howell, Trevor Immelman, Aaron Baddeley, Adam Scott, Anthony Kim, Luke Donald, David Toms, Sean O’Hair, and others. One of the problems with these videos is that you can’t always get both views that are helpful (straight on and from the rear).

It’s not perfect, but it is a great resource. Think of it this way. If you’re tempted to go out and take lessons from a pro who has the equipment to videotape you and show you your swing against some pro’s, using expensive software that he has loaded on his computer, you can save yourself a lot of money by doing all that yourself. Videotape yourself, make slow motion clips, and put those on your computer screen right next to a minimized browser screen with a “Swing Vision” video playing. Everything you’ll want to know will be right in front of your eyes.



And speaking of eyes, make sure you take time out for a little golf humor on YouTube. Go see Professional Golf Secret - Simple Tip to Improve Your Game. Proverbially speaking, your eyes will pop. And you’ll be LOL.

In the next post, I'll mention a few other resources that I have found helpful.

More Muscle, No Memory

In the previous post, I was reviewing some of my first year as I tried to build a good golf swing. Chief among many problems that I recognized, through videotaping myself and watching slow-motion clips of my swing on a computer, was my personal tendency to want to control everything using muscle control. Practically all the visual cues I saw told me that muscles made the swing.

I looked at the drawings of Hogan in Ben Hogan's Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf and saw his muscular arms and shoulders and legs. I looked at “Swing Vision” videos of Ernie Els on YouTube and saw the big shoulders and upper body strength of a great athlete. The same with Tiger Woods, the paragon of the muscular, athletic golfer who is in fantastic shape. Camilo Villegas is another one. Watching the pros and hearing about their yardage, I thought that physical strength was the only way they could hit like they do.

The trouble was that I wasn’t getting the results that I knew my expenditure of energy should give me. Even when I hit a driver a good distance (say, about 200 yards), I remember saying to my companions that “I’m working too hard.” A friend of mine, Clint, after watching me hit a short iron to a par three, told me, “You’ve got no whip.” I pretended that I hadn’t heard him. I was swinging as hard as I could. Wasn’t that enough whip? Apparently not. After months of hitting a driver as hard as I could and watching it go only about 180 was enough practical evidence. I knew that I was making this all much too difficult. That’s when I started trying to develop some “whip” in my swing.

I assumed that there must be some very subtle aspects of the swing—things the naked eye couldn’t detect, even in my slo-mo video clips— and that these subtleties must, therefore, take place in the area of the release, when the club is moving so fast, it’s just a blur. The solution must have something to do with an exquisite sense of timing, of letting the club go at the exact millisecond when the clubhead will behave as Hogan describes it.

THE CLUBHEAD IS SIMPLY TEARING THOUGH THE AIR AT AN INCREDIBLE SPEED AS IT DRIVES THROUGH THE BALL. ALL THIS HAPPENS SO QUICKLY, OF COURSE, THAT YOU CAN’T SEE IT TO APPRECIATE IT. BUT THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS.

I concluded that it must be the hands that provide the whip. After all, just before Hogan talks about all this clubhead speed, he mentions that the hands multiply all the power that is developing during the downswing. Then I’ve got to practice the release. By itself. In slow motion. That’s what I thought. I had to get control of the only part of the swing that is basically invisible. With this as my next goal, I began slow practice, trying to capture the ball with the clubhead, my left wrist curved and pointing to the target, the right wrist laid back the way a second basemen in baseball does when he flips to first. Just the way Hogan describes it.

Of course, what I failed to remember, or notice, were a few lines on the very next page of his book. These were also in all-caps, just like the lines about clubhead speed. In fact, the first time I read the book, I had used a green highlighter to underline part of this section and to write a large exclamation point in the margin to make sure I would always pay attention to this section.

THE MAIN THING FOR THE NOVICE OR THE AVERAGE GOLFER IS TO KEEP ANY CONSCIOUS HAND ACTION OUT OF HIS SWING. THE CORRECT SWING IS FOUNDED ON CHAIN ACTION, AND IF YOU USE THE HANDS WHEN YOU SHOULDN’T, YOU PREVENT THIS CHAIN ACTION.

Despite the fact that I had already read this, despite all the capital letters, despite the green hightlighting, I wouldn’t notice or re-read this crucial section for months. I thought I was on the right track and didn’t need Hogan’s book any more. I had discovered a secret of golf, and I had done it without anyone’s help. I flattered myself with my new understanding of the subtlety of the golf swing.

The prospect of a long period of breaking down my swing and of the pure drudgery of practice that I expected would be agonizingly slow to show any results—all this worked together to convince me that I was on the verge of a major break-through, an insight that would put me among the sacred brotherhood of those few, touring professionals mostly, to whom golf had revealed its most abstruse secrets. In spirit, I was the modern equivalent of the medieval flagellant, seeking penitence through scourging and self-abnegation.

Let me suffer for a while. In my next post, I'll talk mostly about YouTube golf videos.

Muscle Memory

The previous post concluded promising to confront the question, "Can a control freak learn a good golf swing?" The "control freak" I had in mind is me, and at first, I wasn’t sure that I would ever be able to swing a golf club correctly. My pro, Mark, repeatedly showed me how fluid and graceful and almost effortless a good swing should be, but that concept was very difficult for me to understand and absorb.

My brain and body acted in concert, telling me that I had to use muscles to swing the club along the correct path and that only muscles could generate real clubhead speed at impact. Hitting a hundred or so balls at the range would leave me sweating and my arms feeling as tired as if I had just sparred three rounds with a young boxer. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t hit a driver more than about 180 yards, my yardage with other clubs correspondingly anemic. Whenever I heard other players start talking about their clubhead speed, I would estimate that “My clubhead speed would be legal in a school zone.”

Muscles aren’t good listeners, however. They want to continue to show you what you have taught them to do for you. They are extremely reluctant to forget what they’ve been taught, and when you try to teach them something that must appear to be the exact opposite of what they already spent so much time and effort mastering, in their inimitable, non-verbal way, they protest, “Are you kidding? You can’t be serious!” I distinctly remember wondering if I was, indeed, capable of relaxing my upper body. Reluctance to let go—that was a big problem for me. And I knew it. In search of a cure, I remembered an easy-swinging PGA great whom I had seen play. Julius Boros. And I found his book, Swing Easy, Hit Hard. I got it and read it. It didn't make a big impression. I thought the ideas were pretty boilerplate. The secret I was looking for wasn't there. Or, more accurately, I wasn't able to see it. Not yet, anyway.

For months, I continued to play early morning back nines and hit practice balls in my backyard and go to the range, and my swing did get better. Slowly. Very slowly. Methodically, I practiced my way through the rest of Ben Hogan's Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf. Early on, as soon as I started taking my lessons with Mark, I regularly videotaped myself, sometimes as often as every day. Usually, I would capture the video on a computer and use some editing software to make slow motion sequences so that I could see exactly what I was doing. It was hard to watch.

Lifting my left heel, turning my hips too much and straightening my right leg on the backswing, the reverse pivot, head moving, left arm bent—in short, all the mistakes that a beginner could possible make were all there in my swing. No surprises there. And I wasn’t discouraged by any of this. I would isolate one thing at a time and work on that until I started to see improvement. After months of this, I started to realize that the list of individual components of a good swing is quite extensive and that I might be practicing like this for years before I started to get the results I wanted.

After all, when Hogan, the player I wanted to emulate, turned pro in 1929, he hardly made any money. As he said to Ken Venturi in a 1983 interview on CBS,

I was always last if I got in the money at all. As I said, I was a terrible player.

It took Hogan another ten years to develop the game that made him famous, becoming the Tour’s leading money winner for the first time in 1940. And even then, he didn’t really discover the inspiration for his championship game for almost another decade. With three years off the Tour while he served in WWII, it wasn’t until 1948 that he won the U.S. Open.

Hogan’s example, of course, cast serious doubt on the likelihood that I would live long enough to see myself with a good golf swing, and I still hadn’t convinced myself that a “control freak” could break bad habits. In the next post, I'll describe how I continued to believe that a good swing is the result of a conscious application of muscles, but that subtle timing is required as well.

Get a Grip

In my first post, I described the likely audience for “Learning a Good Golf Swing” as players or beginners who are serious about developing a mechanically sound golf swing, using my own struggle as the case study and Ben Hogan's book Five Lessons for my guiding principles. Going back to my early practice is the subject of this second post.

My determination to learn a good golf swing goes back now almost two years, to the spring of 2007, when I began to play regular weekly early-morning back nines with three colleagues at work. Of course, my play was just awful. I was prepared for that and enjoyed myself with the beautiful surroundings and my congenial company. As I came to say (fairly often), for me, as a beginner, golf was “all about the aesthetics.” The arc of a ball in flight, the occasional pretty iron shots and skillful short game, breaking putts rolling across dew-covered greens raising “rooster tails," early mist rising from the fairways, the growing warmth of the rising sun, the singing birds and gliding waterfowl, the wet softness of the trimmed sod under our feet. Deflecting attention to aesthetics was my coping mechanism, a way to endure and get past the terrible shots I was hitting. To focus on just the shots would have been sheer insanity. Like Lear, I instinctively knew better.

O, that way madness lies; let me shun that...

Certainly, there were few shots of my own to take any pleasure from. Shooting in the 60s once or twice was all the encouragement I needed to get to a local driving range and signing up for a package of lessons with the pro.

By the time I took my first lesson, I was wearing both left and right gloves because I had developed blisters on both hands from gripping the club so tightly. That’s the first thing that Mark (my pro) noticed and corrected immediately. Like all the other parts of the swing, the grip was an aspect of the swing that I have re-examined, but at least I was off to a good start. Mark showed me the overlapping grip, the one that Hogan advocates in Five Lessons, where the little finger overlaps the left hand (since I am right-handed) in this way:

As for the little finger, it slides up and over the forefinger of the left hand and locks itself securely in the groove between the left forefinger and the big finger.

Then we moved on to some simple swing drills. I think this is where Mark started talking about the swing plane and first mentioned Five Lessons. Once he got started talking about Hogan, I later realized, he could practically quote whole sections of the book. After he explained to me for the first time Hogan’s two swing planes and the turning of the hips, I remember that, at the end of that lesson, Mark stopped and reflected on how commonplace these swing ideas have become in the modern game and that Hogan was the first to formalize them into a swing theory. “He was way ahead of his time,” Mark concluded.

Immediately, I went to Amazon and ordered Ben Hogan's Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf and have used it as my main guide for all my practice and learning. The next post will confront the question, "Can a control freak learn a good golf swing?"