The Natural Golf Swing (4 page)

I didn’t find out right away. At first I looked for the common factors between Hogan, Sam Snead, Jimmy Demaret, Jackie Burke, Lionel and Jay Hebert, Dick Mayer, and Tommy Bolt. There was a great bunch on tour then. I used to spend all day watching golf swings: the guys I’ve mentioned, and Ted Kroll, Julius Boros, Lloyd Mangrum, Cary Middlecoff, Ken Venturi, Billy Maxwell, Gene Littler, Art Wall, and Don January. These fellows were my teachers. The practice field was my classroom.

What a place to be, with a wonderful crowd like that. I spent more hours sitting on the range watching the fellows than I did caddying. I looked and I looked at all these personal swings and finally I noticed one important element: every player who struck the ball well maintained the same firmness in his left wrist at the completion of the swing as he had in the starting position. His form at the finish was the same as at the start. When I discovered this, I discovered a gem. Wall did it about as well as anybody – as strange as his swing was with that ten-finger, baseball grip. Same thing with Boros. He’s as good as I’ve ever seen in terms of natural form. The wrist didn’t break down. There was none of what Bolt liked to call “flippy-wristed kids’ stuff.” And January: he was so supple and took the club back so far. But he was always in balance. He was just that flexible.

The Classroom: observing
(left to right)
Ken Venturi, Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, and Julius Boros.

These fellows interested me. There had to be a reason the best golfers in the world had some elements in common. I was especially interested in that one common factor that stood out: the way the guys maintained the same hand-wrist formation at the end of the swing as at the beginning. But I couldn’t figure out how they did it. Naive as I was, I tried to imitate them. But I couldn’t even come close to it. I tried to force my left wrist to stay firm through the completion of the swing. But, since my swing at the time was all upper-body – all hands and arms – that was the only way I thought I could accomplish the move.

I had no idea that the only way to maintain a firm left wrist was to use my legs, to transfer weight going back and through. My legs, however, moved very little then. I didn’t pay much attention to footwork. The reason? I was stuck on one of golf’s number one misconceptions: keep the head still. I tried to keep my head still and I couldn’t move. The only way I could get the club back was with my hands and arms.

The hands and wrists are in the same formation at the start and finish.

It didn’t take long to realize that it was far better to let my legs lead the downswing. Then there isn’t any restriction. The wrist won’t collapse. It’s pulled along by the leg drive. Otherwise
you’re just flapping your arms and the wrist collapses. Poor shots result; you can’t get power or direction unless the left wrist is firm throughout. Neither can you maintain the hands and wrist in the same formation as at the start. That’s why you want to start the downswing with the legs.

The hands just flip over when there’s a resistance. You’ve got to get the legs moving. This also keeps the hands quiet, or “passive,” as I prefer to say. Passive hands simply mean that we do nothing consciously with the hands during the swing. I didn’t begin to appreciate what this meant for consistency until I started using my legs. My hands now began to just go along for the ride, to hang on to the club.

Think about it. When you walk, you’re transferring weight all the time, back and forth, to and fro. The same thing happens in the golf swing; we move away from the ball on our backswing and our weight transfers to our right side. We move through the
ball to our target and our weight transfers to our left side. If we swing with our hands and arms alone, we’re swinging with less than a full deck. And we’re setting up restrictions and inhibitions. But we want to develop a natural, uninhibited swing motion. We want total freedom of movement. How can we have that when our legs are rooted to the ground like tree stumps? Move the legs and the rest of the body moves. Footwork is so important.

Top
, start, equal weight distribution;
centre
, loading, 75%-25%
bottom
, unloading, 0-100%.

After I began to understand weight transfer and the importance of the legs in the swing, I ran into Harvey Penick. Penick is one of the great teachers of all time. All the golfers I admire have talked with him over the years and listened carefully to what he has to say: the list includes Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, Mickey Wright, Louise Suggs, and Patty Berg. Now Penick told me: “Son, if you’re going to play this game for a living, you’d better learn how to use your legs.”

Penick’s advice confirmed what I’d noticed on the range. And so I began to work on getting my legs into my swing. It wasn’t easy; I had some bad habits to overcome.

I’d had a problem as a kid with balance. Because I used my hands as much as I did, I tended to drift. I was a bit of a flailer as I manipulated the clubhead so that I could get it on the ball. But I didn’t need to do that. Instead, I got my legs involved, and by doing so, I was able to eliminate some of the excess hand action. Now that my body was moving, my hands simply worked on their own. I didn’t have to do a thing with them, and what a relief that was. Like everybody else, I’d been seeing hand action while watching golfers. But I was seeing it wrong. It was poor observation on my part.

Hand action is a result of the swing put in its proper form: what I call a “by-the-way-happening,” an involuntary action. It’s the legs that carry the arms and hands. The arms and hands merely go along for a free ride. This insight introduced much
more consistency into my game. I learned that weight transfer is the means of moving the hands, arms, and clubhead.

Load, 75%-25%; start, 50%-50%; unload, 0-100%.

Still, my balance wasn’t what it could be. I knew that if I was ever going to play to my potential I would need better balance. But how could I achieve it? I came back on the winter tour in 1958 to play as an amateur, then played as a pro in 1959 and 1960. I was in school, observing every minute I could. The range was my classroom, Hogan my main teacher. I still hadn’t figured the guy out. He looked so different. His shots had more character and he knew where the hole was. But it took a while to grasp the key: he had better
balance
than any golfer.

Hogan was so stable over the ball and throughout the swing. He looked so solid, and yet he also gave it everything he had.
Hogan had a controlled and powerful golf swing and balance was the key. It looked to me that if you hit him anywhere, you’d be hitting something dead solid. He never looked wobbly. As for me, I wasn’t falling over, but I was continually rolling over onto the outside of my left foot and left heel. So was everybody else. Everybody except Hogan, that is. He was dead solid flat on his left foot at the finish of his swing.

The thing that Hogan did differently to stay in balance was really quite elementary. He took a wider stance than the others. When he set up over the ball, he pointed his left foot out about a quarter-turn to the left and set it outside his left shoulder. This gave him a boxer’s stance; he was in a “go” position. He was ready to give it a whack with his whole body. By setting his left foot beyond his shoulder, he ensured that he wouldn’t roll over onto his foot and heel.

Finish positions emphasizing foot locations.

Having gained at least some appreciation of the fact that the elements of the golf swing came together in a unified manner, I tried to incorporate what I’d learned into my swing. As I said, Hogan was my model. Before long, people were saying I looked more like Hogan than Hogan himself. I took that as a great compliment, but I was still a long way off from being the “natural” people thought I was. And I wanted to be a “natural”; I wanted to feel good over the ball and during the swing. But I was contriving the whole thing. I still didn’t have a full understanding of what it meant to
let
myself swing. I was still trying to do things. I was still
making
the swing happen. I was using too much effort,
trying
too hard. I felt that I was over-exerting myself. Rather than simplifying the swing and eliminating moves, I was adding to it. And it was work. It took me a year and a half to achieve the balanced position at the finish that I so admired in Hogan.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1960 that I had a breakthrough in my understanding. I had come to Toronto’s Oakdale Golf and Country Club in 1958 as an assistant to Bill Hamilton, who later went on to become the executive director of the Canadian Professional Golfers Association. Oakdale was a terrific place for me; the members knew I wanted to play the game professionally rather than work at a club. They let me hit balls and play as much as I wanted. It was during one of my practice sessions that it occurred to me that the golf swing had to be impersonal. If it followed the laws of physical motion, then we were all trying to do the same thing. The idea that golf was an individual game had led us to believe every swing was different and that we had to find our own ways, each and every one of us. That summer
day at Oakdale I asked myself: “What would the swing look like if I cut my head off? What would it look like if I were a machine, if I were designing a machine to create a golf swing?”