Let’s rinse the sour taste of the past few posts from our collective palates, shall we?

I’ve talked at length about how Jack Nicklaus’ swing model in 1963 was nearly optimal, but Ben Hogan has always been poetry in motion for me.

It is incredible to me that the videos on YouTube of the great Classic Golf Swing era don’t have so many more views, because these gents knew how to swing.

The reason I didn’t base my entire swing research on Hogan was because of all of the idiosyncrasies in his swing, that he built into it to avoid his dreaded hooking problem that had him crashing out of the Tour yearly in his early days playing.

He would run out of money to tour and have to return home to Texas, where he saved enough money once again as a club pro to go back out on the road.

Hogan’s Early Swing

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As seen above, he had a great, flowing swing motion but it was very loose, and he was haunted by a hook that would ruin his rounds.  Notice the slide release of his trailing foot even back then.

When he had finally figured out his swing, he was unstoppable, and without the crash with the bus that nearly killed him in his prime, he may have rewritten nearly all of the records.

When I worked on the driving range at a golf club that used to host a Canadian Tour event, I would spend hours in the teaching trailer watching a video tape that my boss and instructor had of Hogan – in the 90’s, you had to search high and low to get video of anyone!

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These angles above and below show the beauty of motion that was Ben Hogan, and you would do well to copy his pivot action – it was, after all, the pivot action I learned and copied (and named the “Perfect Pivot”) to build into my MCS Golf Swing:

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It is a glorious pivot move.  Witness:

• The free hip action and lifting front heel,
• The loading of the weight into the trailing hip and leg,
• The inward swing of the leading knee, what I call the “Swinging Gate,”
• The triggering of the down swing with the return of the weight to the leading foot,
• The planting of the leading foot as Hogan “stepped into” the down swing as you would a throw,
• The release of the trailing foot as the weight transfer to the leading foot and the hip turn through impact drag the trailing foot along,
• The balanced finish on the leading foot and leg

Compare all of that greatness to the ridiculous “hanging on for dear life” with the trailing foot that has the modern swingers performing the Flying Foot move rather than getting onto the leading foot and releasing the trailing one:

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If you have two legs, why on earth are you performing a swinging motion but only using one of them?

Because, nothing they do with that leading leg and foot is doing anything to add power or lift to the swing motion.  It’s so they don’t snap themselves in half hanging on with the trailing foot.

It’s as if, once the back pivot begins, they are acting as though there’s a landmine planted beneath their leading foot – don’t shift to it and don’t stand on it!

One day, the sporting world will look back on the period of golf between the mid-90s and whenever this idiocy ceases, and will wonder what on earth these instructors and golfers were smoking to think that this (the Modern Golf Swing & accompanying lack of knowledge of kinesiology) is a proper golf swing motion and not a huge mechanical flaw.

And I for one can’t wait for the day this nonsense goes away.