Even during rounds, he would walk down the fairway holding a club aloft so he could inspect his grip. Every shot started with the hands for him, and every kind of shot could be created through nuanced adjustments to the grip. He especially preached weaker hands for little chips and pitches. He felt that this gave him much more control.
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He also told me that he’d always believed that if the club traveled faster after impact than before impact, the ball would fly farther and straighter. “I know I saw that once in a physics book.” He said, “It said that if an object that hit another object was traveling faster after impact, the object being hit would travel farther and straighter.
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He thought that the key to great golf was work, a relentless pursuit of perfection, repeating the swing through hours and hours of practice. If someone who never went to the range approached him with a question about the golf swing, his typical response was something like “It doesn’t matter if you don’t practice.”
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Even though he regularly shared his expertise with me, I recognized a reluctance when it came to helping others. I think he was afraid of making people’s swings worse and he was only willing to help someone if he thought they would be willing to work at it. He knew that I wanted to learn and would put in the time.
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What he didn’t enjoy was meeting someone if he couldn’t devote himself fully to them. It was better, in his view, not to meet someone if it meant giving that person only half of his attention, or worse, no attention at all.
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Jackie Burke, another Texan and contemporary of Mr. Hogan’s who won the 1956 Masters and PGA Championship, once said, “Back when we played, everybody had the same sports psychologist. His name was Jack Daniel.”
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“Well, I was always afraid somebody would start a conversation about something that would interest me and it would distract me from what I was trying to do,” he said. “I was so broke I couldn’t afford to talk to other people, because I was afraid of losing my focus. So I stayed to myself on the golf course, and that again became one of the things that got blown out of proportion with time.”
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To my eternal shock, Mr. Hogan revealed to Doc that his father had committed suicide when he was very young. He went on to say that he’d read a lot of books on families of suicide, and that it wasn’t unusual for children of a suicidal parent to become loners.
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Mr. Hogan shared the familiar story about finding the key to his swing in weakening his left-hand grip. As with all swing improvements a chain reaction occurred. He went into great detail about how his new grip allowed him to get the butt of the club pointed at his belt buckle and his triceps close to his sides.
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It also got the clubface more open in his backswing and allowed him to hit it with his right hand and hit it hard without worrying
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“What do you say to people who claim that, especially in your book, you didn’t do what you said you did in your golf swing?” Doc asked. Mr. Hogan’s answer was great. He said, “I described what I felt. That’s all I could do. I don’t know if I was doing it or not, but I said what it felt like.
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“You can’t do a great many difficult things perfectly. You groove the fundamentals and then make the practice perfect.”
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“Well, my secret, if there is one, is that I didn’t start winning championships until I learned that it was okay to hit irons off the three or four tees that scared the heck out of me. For a long time I felt that in order to win big tournaments I had to attack the long, tough holes. So, I’d hit driver no matter how scary the hole was, and I’d end up making a double or triple and shoot myself out of the tournament. I came to grips with the fact that if I hit irons off those tees and just laid up to a particular spot, the worst score I was going to make on those holes was a bogey. Once I reconciled in my mind that it was okay to play those holes that way, and that bogey was not all that bad, I got comfortable and ended up making a lot more pars on those holes.
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“Always curve the ball away from trouble,” he said. “If all the trouble is on the right, move it right to left, and if the trouble is on the left, move it left to right.” He always wanted you to move the ball one direction or the other, even if it was only a few feet. That’s how exacting he was.
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“If you aim for the middle you only have half the fairway to work with. Start it down one side or the other and you have twice as much room.” Meaning, if you have a fairway that is thirty yards wide and start it down the middle, you are only working with fifteen yards on each side. If you start it down the right side and work the ball to the left, you are working with thirty yards of fairway.
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“I won’t hit it until I feel the wind on my cheek. That’s when I know what it’s doing.”
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He wanted me to keep my arms close together. To make that point, he would take off his belt and strap it around my elbows so that the width of my arms would never vary during the swing.
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If you look at pictures of him from down the line at address and impact, the angle of the shaft is almost identical.
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But as we practiced, I noticed that he actually did have a pre-shot routine.
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every shot, he held the club in his right hand and then switched it to his left hand while he looked at the target. Then he would check his grip and waggle the club behind the ball as he took his stance. He would step in with his right foot first, and then his left. One more waggle and one more look at the target, then with a slight kicking in of the right knee, he would move into his swing. He did it with every club and he did it every time. His routine had a cadence to it. He even shifted his feet in his stance the same number of times (four each) on every shot. He didn’t know he had a pre-shot routine, but he had one of the most consistent ones in the game.
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when Mr. Hogan played, the greatest compliment a player could receive was that he “worked the ball” well, which is harder to do with today’s equipment.
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Hogan drilled some holes in the head of a persimmon driver and filled them with lead. The club weighed probably five pounds, and swinging it more than once or twice would get your heart rate up. He used it as an exercise tool well into his seventies, and he believed, rightly so, that five or ten minutes a day with a weighted club would increase your strength and clubhead speed through impact.
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A lot of people assumed that he only faded the ball after he changed his grip and beat the hooks. But that was never the case. He always told me that you should hit the shot that each hole requires. He worked the ball left and right, flying it high and low, depending on what was needed.
It wasn’t enough to know where the pin was cut: He believed you also had to know the fall line of a green, so that you always knew where to leave the ball to give yourself the easiest possible putt. He said he never aimed directly at pins because he was afraid he’d hit them. “A good shot can turn into a bad shot real fast.”
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I spoke with Mr. Hogan, and as usual he offered succinct advice. “Survey the situation. Choose your shot and hit it!” he insisted. He always talked about not being afraid of the trouble. “You have to know where it is and then select your shot and trust it,” he told me repeatedly.
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“Map out the round in your mind ahead of time,” he said. “Once you know what shots you’re going to hit in a round and that you’ve hit those shots before in practice, you’ll calm down and be fine.”