Thanks to WAX Golf denizen MC for forwarding the following golf article.
One of the things that has bothered me in the years I’ve been blogging on the golf swing has been the overwhelming silence from the Classic Golf Swing era greats (those still with us) on the Modern Golf Swing.
Sure, Jack Nicklaus trashed the idea of the X-Factor swing in his book “Golf My Way” back in 1974, but that’s 50 years ago.
I looked at a swing clip of mine from ’07, that you’ve all seen before, and that something caught my eye, leading me to conclude…
… that in my first year of actual swing research (I started the mission in ’05 but didn’t have a chance to really hit balls regularly on the range until ’07 due to work and family constraints), I had what the Modern Golf Swing is killing itself to replicate.
As I’ve said, I never really looked very hard at Tiger Woods’ golf swing other than to look for things to tell others not to do, but the more I look at the younger Tiger Woods, the more tragic his story becomes.
It’s because he was likely taught a Ben Hogan swing model, but a Modern Golf Swing version of it, which made it not Ben Hogan’s swing because of the one thing that made Hogan the great swinger that he was.
Yes, the entire Modern Golf Swing world would follow him, it unfortunately seems.
I didn’t even go looking for this – I was watching all of this ridiculous modern swing instruction that tells everyone that it’s not proper mechanics to shift one’s hips on the down swing, and it eventually fell from the sky as these things do.
Update: Originally published June 3rd, 2019 – I had put this post into archive but figured it is relevant to the earlier post today about equipment.
So, yes, I have blade irons myself and have no problem hitting them. /update
I received a pleasant surprise gift from The Welshman a couple of weeks back on my last session at the range, when we got together to hit some balls together after the long winter.
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.
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?
This is incredible – I would never in my wildest dreams have traced the Tiger Woods Tai Chi squat exercise back to Ben Hogan, but here we are.
I remember Tiger Woods once saying that Moe Norman and Ben Hogan were the only two golfers who owned their swings, which leaves out others like Bobby Jones and of course Jack Nicklaus, among others.
Leaving that aside, Tiger also claimed that Hogan couldn’t have played on today’s Tour because he’d be too short-hitting, which is rich, because guess who Tiger Woods has been trying to emulate since at least his Sean Foley days?
WAX Golf 