I am absolutely sick of YouTube and the golf “instruction” found therein, so let’s take a break this U.S. Open and look at something positive, golf-wise.

If you’ll come along, there is another reason for using Jack Nicklaus’ setup and Ben Hogan’s pivot action – it has to do with ball placement within the setup.

If you look at the ball placement methods of Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus, you will find that one is very straightforward and the other…. not.

First, because it is the way I would recommend setting up, is the way Jack Nicklaus did it, and I would wager that just about every pro anywhere follows this system, more or less:

Jack Nicklaus’ Ball Positions

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We all recognize this instantly, don’t we?  It’s so simple – you set up to make a swing and you know that your swing bottom, if you stand the same way every time, will be directly below the leading armpit.

Now, knowing where your swing bottom is going to be, it is very simple to set the ball up in a position relative to that swing bottom – starting with the Driver, the ball is at or slightly beyond the swing bottom, and you move the ball progressively towards the center of the stance with shorter clubs.

Notice how consistent Jack’s stance is with the different clubs, with the head just inside the trailing foot and the ball moving increasingly away from the leading armpit the short the club gets.

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If Jack had had Hogan’s pivot action, he’d likely have won everything much the way Byron Nelson did when he was the first person to really figure out how to swing with steel shafts instead of the previous hickory shafts of old.

Nelson also invented the “bulge and roll” of the persimmon driver, grinding away at clubs in his workshop and taking advantage of the curved driver face on either side of the sweet spot.

These were two reasons Nelson won 11 Tour events in a row back in 1945 and 18 in total for one season, retiring shortly thereafter, having purchased his ranch (he was only still playing in order to raise money to do so, as he hated the Tour lifestyle and the effect constant traveling had on his sensitive stomach).

Jack later found similar if not identical dominance due to his nearly optimal setup (and great putter, of course).

This setup method meant he only had to swing, keeping his head stable, and he was assured of making solid contact.

Of course, there were times when his setup and pivot were off, and you saw really bad things even as he continued to win:

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In the swing gif. above, his driver ball position is far too much to the target, which made him make a near reverse-pivot in order to be able to make contact with it on the down swing.

A ball more aligned with his leading armpit would have allowed him to pivot with a head position more to his right, as here in 1963:

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So, he didn’t always have it down, which is why he didn’t win everything in sight, but his issues were easily solved with yearly visit to his coach Jack Grout for a tune-up.

Now, let’s take a look at Ben Hogan’s ball placement method:

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Yes, that’s quite the formula there, and one that would have you pulling your hair out trying to perfect – there was a reason that Hogan, as good as he was, had to practice every single day, all day, and that’s because of what he was doing.

I can’t find the quote, but Hogan had said once, something along the lines of, “If I miss a day of practice, I notice the difference. Two days, my competitors will notice. Three, and the crowd will notice.”

As I say, it’s likely not an exact quote, but it definitely had him noticing his decline after missing only one day and something about two and three.

The point is, you don’t want to build a golf swing that requires this degree of practice and feel – I could go out today, if my shoulder would let me, and after three months’ off swinging, I could hit the ball just about as well as I could with practice, after shaking off the rust.

That’s because I follow Jack’s prescribed setup and I use Hogan’s pivot action.  The two together are unbeatable.