This swing clip that I saw online and of which I’ve made a gif. is the sweetest swing I’ve ever seen from Ben Hogan, in terms of visual quality and that really brings forth the magic of his pivot action.

For those who think Hogan looked a little thick around the waist and upper legs, you are likely unaware of his physical struggles.

He was nearly killed in a crash with a bus traveling to a golf tournament in his peak at age 39, and his treating surgeon had to tie off the vena cava (the major vein carrying blood back to the heart) in his mangled left leg.

After his recovery, his legs would swell badly when he stood and walked, so when he was playing golf for the rest of his days, his legs were heavily wrapped with ACE bandages.

The reason he could even play golf following that crash, with his lower body issues, was because of his gorgeous pivot action.  It was fluid, effortless, and didn’t waste any energy whatsoever.

Even so, he could only play 5-6 Tour events per year due to the leg issues. In 1953, he won 5 of 6 events, three of them being the Masters, U.S. Open and the Open Championship (the PGA Championship at the time was played at the same time as the Open, so he missed out on winning four majors in one year).

It is still beyond me how anything Ben Hogan said about his swing could have led to the disastrous Modern Golf Swing, because anyone can see at a glance that Hogan had a free and full hip turn with a lifting leading heel on the back pivot:

Anyone who thinks that Ben Hogan couldn’t have played on today’s Tour doesn’t understand either how he swung nor the speed he was still able to generate.

I suspect, and this suspicion is well-founded if you go through my analysis of it, that a certain video of Hogan hitting balls in the 60’s became a defacto instructional manual on how to get Hogan’s swing way, way wrong.

If you were trying to swing using the narration from that video, you would struggle to swing at all, and would think that Hogan’s swing lacked power – but it was never his swing.

You’ll notice as well that, whilst Jack Nicklaus is known for his head shift before taking the club away, Hogan was doing it before him.

Nicklaus was the G.O.A.T. but Ben Hogan, when it came to the golf swing, was Shakespeare.