Blame the Modern Golf Swing for this, to be sure.
An absolutely depressing piece of golf journalism greeted me this morning, and I don’t know where the game is going – one day, they’ll be loading balls into mortar tubes and not having to hit them at all, it seems.
The Golf Digest article at hand, “For Most, The 4 Iron Is Dead,” by E. Michael Johnson, should have the legends rolling in their grave.
If you don’t know who Lee Trevino was, then I blame the Modern Golf Swing world for forsaking all of the Classic Golf Swing greats who came before it, because that would be a real shame.
Trevino is another golfing legend from Texas, and he was so good in his prime that Ben Hogan didn’t trust anyone else to hit his prototype clubs when he was running the Ben Hogan golf club company.
I had a video out a few years back that focused on the Kinetic Chain, which is the connection of body parts one uses to produce leverage in the golf swing.
The reason that Modern Golf Swing models are all faulty and mechanically unsound because they break the chain when they involve restricting the hip turn and twisting the lower body against the restricted lower body to achieve the shoulder turn.
It’s amazing what you find online just looking at random clips, but I have just found an old Ben Hogan television demonstration of a swing drill and suddenly, everything makes sense.
The thing I don’t get is that before he even performs his drill in the way he does, his actual golf swing is widely available to watch, so I don’t understand how everyone in the world of golf today fails to see what he was doing in his actual swings and how they so badly interpret it.
I have recounted to you all the lesson I learned over a decade ago, which is to never listen to or take another’s word for something if what they are saying can be independently checked.
For years, I believed (because it was all you heard about him) that Ben Hogan was a restricted-hip swinger and I’ve laid out for you all the theory I have that he was unwittingly the father of the Modern Golf Swing when people with eyes couldn’t see what he was doing.
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.
I’ve already briefly mentioned this fellow when talking about how so-called Ben Hogan “experts” are either completely misinterpreting what Hogan did or flat-out saying outlandish things that Hogan would have swatted away like a pesky fly.
I don’t even look for this stuff, it just comes across my feed because I am always searching golfers like Hogan, Nicklaus and other greats of the Classic Golf Swing era.
A new arrival to WAX Nation posted a comment last night inquiring about the origins of the Modern Golf Swing, and a couple of other related questions.
Welcome, Scott from Arizona, and I wanted to dedicate a full posting to answer these questions instead of just responding to the comment, as I know many people don’t dive into comments when reading online posts.
The three questions were:
I haven’t looked at Jim McLean’s description of Ben Hogan’s swing since I dissected it back in 2014, but today I ran across a shorter clip taken from the original and thought, “OK, my mental health is not too bad today, let’s have a quick peak…”
Bad idea, that. It’s as bad as I remember it, perhaps even worse, after my having exhaustively gone through the Ben Hogan – How He Absolutely Didn’t Swing video from the 1960s.
I’m beginning to wonder if Ben Hogan deliberately left out the back pivot in this video clip where he describes the action of the down swing involved the hips and legs.
He doesn’t have to, of course, because if you just LOOK at what he’s doing on the back pivot, it’s obvious that he’s using the hips and legs to create the position at the top.
WAX Golf 