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?"