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.
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 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.
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’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.
As I prepare to conduct the shooting for the upcoming “New E = MCS Golf Swing” video, I have found a pretty good 8 iron swing in my archives that best illustrate the setup and pivot action (with a couple of changes, namely the right-hand grip and my foot alignment).
It will be an ongoing theme – Jack Nicklaus’ setup with Ben Hogan’s “Perfect Pivot” action, and once again, I am finding my best swings to compare with the finished model are my MCS Golf Swing setup and swings from all the way back in 2015.
I have many time thought of re-editing the old “E = MCS” swing video because nearly all of it is still relevant, but the reasons I haven’t, and why I removed it from sale on the site are because I have made new discoveries since shooting that video back in 2017.
There are so few changes however, that I won’t even try to think of a new name for the upcoming video – it will simply be “The New E =MCS Golf Swing Video.”
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.
WAX Golf 