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’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.
I guess you shouldn’t call it a “stick,” even though that’s exactly what it is – you must call it the “Pivot Pro,” but bless me if I couldn’t just get a 7 iron shaft (or any shaft or wooden or metal rod from a hardware store) and stick it into the ground.
It’s all about the grift with these guys, but that’s not even the problem (although it’s laughable in my eyes to be hawking a stick as anything “pro”), here are two of them in Continue reading
If you’ve gone through my breakdown of the Ben Hogan Swing video that was so shockingly incorrect in its analysis that I had to go through it point by point, then you know that I believe that this very video is responsible for all of the flawed Hogan swing instruction.
I decided to go through the clips online that I could find, and I’ll show the most egregious two YouTubers with a pretty large following.
Also, guess what the first video was?
Thanks to the Chief for sending me the news that a young golfer named Mason Howell has qualified for the U.S. Open at the tender age of 17.
That’s heady stuff, but it’s unfortunately the good news.
The bad news is that Chief included a video montage of the young man’s golf swing, and I don’t know what else to call it except a five-alarm fire with regards to injury risk.
I posted about Nataliya Guseva a month ago, with the admonition that “perfect” swings don’t ruin one’s body.
The clip was only 2-3 weeks old, but just a month after my initial post, I saw a clip of her swing posted just a day ago, which makes it little more than around 6 or 7 weeks apart – and it’s not looking good.
WAX Golf 