There is something that Moe Norman used to do in his setup that fascinated many people – the way he’d get behind the ball, then set up seemingly half-way into his back swing.
“I have to be here,” he’d say, setting the club down about a foot or 30 cm behind the ball, “I want a low takeaway, so I might as well start from here, and I’ll have the perfect takeaway every time…”
I got a request from a Wax Nation reader to talk about Moe Norman’s so-called “Master Move,” which he explains, albeit in a tortured way, at the beginning of the video clip below.
He calls it his “vertical drop and horizontal tug,” and while the first part of that description is very, very correct, I would not suggest paying any attention to the second part about “horizontal tug.”
I love Moe Norman. There were two swingers I looked at primarily in the first years of my swing research, and they were Ben Hogan and Moe.
That’s because of more than one reason – the first, being my 2nd and last swing instructor was a Hogan/Moe fan, and had build his own swing model that he taught, based on Hogan and Moe.
Just as I pointed out that the Moe Norman swing that made Moe Norman famous as a quirky, straight-shooting Canadian in the 50’s and 60’s had a floating pivot swing with a lifting heel.
The Moe Norman you see when someone mentions his name – that swing was a later-years swing when Moe began to exaggerate things in his swing to get more and more attention.
Originally posted at DJ Watts Golf on April 11, 2013
If you ever heard Moe Norman talk about the golf swing, he was always about effortless power while everyone else performed “powerless effort.”
Even though he was a very short hitter, Moe could hit balls all day long because of how he swung. Part of the trick of course was his “gravity drop.”
