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.
All of this Ben Hogan talk has reminded me of something amusing that happened to me a few years back.
The funny thing is – I have never pretended or tried to swing like Ben Hogan except for in the video “The Ben Hogan Project” in 2014 in which I did wear a driving cap like Hogan for the mood.
In that video, if I recall, I didn’t even really try to swing exactly like Hogan, I just pointed out his pivot action, later known as the “Perfect Pivot” in my subsequent videos, and to debunk all of the nonsense about his swing that so irritated me after I’d taken a hard look at his mechanics.
The reason so many people struggle to maximize their power with the golf swing is likely because they’re not set up in the proper manner in which to do so.
It is also a reason you’ll find all sorts of professional players who contort themselves coming into impact – they manage to get the power they want to generate, but at a cost to consistency and/or physical health.
I’ve just uploaded some irons swings from the same date as the down the line swings I shot back in August of 2022.
Now, I had said that I loved the setup viewed down the line and the face-on, not so much – however, upon review, it’s not so much the setup that I didn’t love, rather the pivot action.
There’s nothing wrong with helping people improve their golf swings.
It is a tad disingenuous however in my opinion to present old and established mechanics principles as new and a result of “the advent of new technologies in the sport,” which is an exact sentence from the article I just read.
Or worse – it means that these basic principles aren’t being taught to beginning golfers.
It never ceases to amaze me how the modern media do backflips over anything a modern player does, as if today’s best player is the greatest ever.
Here’s yet another point, where Tiger Woods apparently is a god because when he was at his best, he didn’t take divots with his irons.
I have three separate iron/wedge shots below, the first being a PW, the second a 7 Iron and the third a 5 Iron.
See if you can spot the difference in how I set up for the shots, and how it changes the result in the ball striking aspect!
This article from GolfDigestOnline is all over the place – I don’t know what stands out more to me having read it – that a professional tour would call a 286 yard hole a “par 4,” that people would freak out that, you know, a pro golfer would hit the green with an iron, or that they call it a “specially-made iron” but don’t give any loft information for the iron.
I came across a Tweet this morning showing Bryson DeChambeau’s stock distances with his club lofts.
This has nothing to do with him specifically however as I’m just remarking on the club specs.
To put it mildly, I’ve always been aware of the clubmaker scam where they kept lowering the lofts to make the same number iron hit the ball greater distances, but I was absolutely blown away by how far they’ve gone.
WAX Golf 