“There’s no doubt in my mind that Ben Hogan played a key role in transforming professional golf into something different than it had been, a much bigger game with all kinds of new commercial possibilities. Love him or hate him, most of us were frankly in awe of the man for what he‘d done—even before we realized the huge debt of gratitude we owed him.” Arnold Palmer
“If you ever heard Hogan hit a ball.” says Ben Crenshaw flatly, “it was like no other sound in golf.”
I. B. Nobody’s Philosophies
The great players
* Adhere to a few time-proven mechanical fundamentals and resist the passing gimmick
* Maximize their greatest natural physical assets in molding and maintaining a playing method
* Have the ability, while playing, to define objectives and then concentrate on achieving them to the exclusion of all else
* Have desire, intensity, focus
With regard to the golf swing (check out the swing photo sequences of the greats),
* They turn their shoulders 90 degrees on the backswing around a relatively motionless head
* They have a true pivot—their weight shifts inside the right leg
* The downswing is initiated by the lower body—having enough lateral motion to get the weight on the left side—and then drag the clubhead into impact
* Then facing target with their belly button at the finish and their weight off their right foot and on the tip of the big toe.
Some of the secrets of the game . . .
“You must learn to feel the sensations through your intellect and then forget them intellectually and leave them to your muscular memory or control system.” Percy Boomer.
“You must not think or reflect; you must feel what you have to do.” Percy Boomer.
“What we use imagination for is to translate theory into feeling.” Percy Boomer.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Albert Einstein.
Truisms of the game:
“The hands and arms are passive and the shoulders and hips are active.” Percy Boomer.
“What do the hands do? The answer is nothing active until after the arms have moved on the downswing to a position just above the level of the hips.” Ben Hogan.
“That complete relaxation and ease of motion is necessary to the accomplishment of a rhythmic stroke of any length, from the shortest putt to the full drive. One cannot start with the intention of making any stroke with the hands alone, or with the arms alone, or with anything else alone and hope to swing the club easily and with smooth rhythm. The effort to exclude any part or parts of the body from the action, to hold any part motionless, must set up a strain opposing the ease of movement that is so necessary.” Bobby Jones.
“The three basic feels of the golf swing—the pivot, the shoulders moving in response to the pivot, and the arms moving in response to the shoulders. These are the three basic movements of a connected and therefore controlled swing, and they must all be built into the framework of your feel of the swing.” Percy Boomer.
left brain right brain
Commands Pictures, feelings, abstracts
How a math teacher teaches How Picasso paints
In order to play respectable golf, one must learn the fundamentals via left brain and transform those thoughts—via right brain—into pictures, feelings, and on a much higher level, abstracts.
The Fundamentals
Within the book, Five Lessons by Ben Hogan, are eight fundamentals. These fundamentals framed in this outline are the cornerstone of From the Inside Out ideas/concept/teachings about the golf swing.
About the fundamentals:
1. No golfer can make headway in this game without understanding them.
2. The idea is to stick with and work at these fundamentals.
3. Any golfer who is committed to change can improve as long as he works on them.
The first four fundamentals constitute the Setup and fundamentals 4 through 8 constitute the Swing.
I. Set Up
* Grip, Arms—Setting up the triangle
* Lower Body: Stance, Posture, Ball Position
* Alignment
* Waggling
II. Swing
* Takeaway
* Staying on Plane throughout the Backswing
* Initiating the Downswing
* Hitting through in One Cohesive Movement
III. Impact
Once you understand impact you’re on your way to becoming a better golfer. After all, the ball’s spinning every time you strike it
I. Setup
The single most important maneuver in golf is your setup. It consists of the golfer aligning himself properly to the target, then positioning his/her body in such a way the he/she can move freely during the swing while in balance. Setting up properly will help accomplish the goal of creating power with the big muscles and then transferring it to the clubhead. The setup is where your adjustments are made. The best players have an unvarying setup routine that they execute before addressing the ball, and then run through a series of “setup feels” as they address the ball.
“It is essential to standardize the approach to every shot, beginning even before taking the address position.” Bobby Jones.
“The difference between the good and the ordinary golfer is that the good one feels his shots through his address.” Percy Boomer.
“The only way in which we can repeat correct shots time after time (and this is the greatest of golfing assets) is to be able to repeat the correct feel of how they are produced.” Percy Boomer.
“I feel that hitting specific shots—playing the ball to a certain place in a certain way—is 50 percent mental picture, 40 percent setup, and 10 percent swing. That is why setting up takes me so long, why I have to be so deliberate.” Jack Nicklaus.
“I never hit a shot, even in practice, without having a very sharp, in-focus picture of it in my head. It’s like a color movie. First I ‘see’ the ball where I want it to finish, nice and white and sitting up high on the bright green grass. Then the scene quickly changes and I see the ball going there; its path, its trajectory, and shape, even its behavior on landing. Then there’s a sort of fade out, and the next scene shows me making the kind of swing that will turn the previous images into reality. Only at the end of this short, private, Hollywood spectacular do I select a club and step up to the ball.” Jack Nicklaus.
Watching the Ball
“If you can’t see it, you can’t hit it. You have to keep your eye on the ball through the whole swing. If you do that everything pretty much falls into place naturally.” Jimmy Dameret