New Blades vs Vintage Blades

Like I said… Greg Norman was an incredible ball striker… particularly with his driver…
I don’t know what was going on in his head, but his record speaks for itself. I will do nothing but defend the man, because I have played against him, and I have direct a personal knowledge of how good he was. He won 88 tournaments world wide.

When he was on, he played some of the greatest golf ever…

How about the Players Championship in 94 -24 (63-67-67-67=264)

He was that good…

It’s not because he just skanked it around… that’s being silly…

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Norman

Greg Norman was a great champion of golf… one of the greats…

It’s sad but it’s true… and you don’t have to look further back than the 08 Open to see that…

That was a great striker laying the sod over it in the pond dead left on 16 at Augusta in 96? OK… That’s a great post impact move? OK… I guess I logged onto the wrong site. Compare that to where Duval was all week, his hands I saw going somewhere l call left. Norman was athletic, period just like Tiger except not nearly as good in any way shape or form. Go play with Eldrick a while like you did the Guppy and tell me he’s a stiff. Whatever… This is insane.

Norman’s outstanding record speaks for itself.

Statistically Greg Norman’s driving stats are far superior to Tigers.

Not much to argue.

Nobody is saying he was a bad golfer at all, but we’re talking about ball striking, there’s a big difference and you know that. When talking about how good Peter Senior was you talk about him beating Faldo and Norman, so you know the difference. The discussion is not about his remarkable record which also included a ridiculous amount of time at world no. 1, it’s about his ball striking. Phil Mickelson has won a ton of tournaments including 1 more major than Norman but nobody is calling him a great ball striker…

So that giant flip is what you want your students to do, right?

Norman’s driving stats during his prime years. Most of these years are with persimmon. These are season long stats.
If you played in the persimmon age, then you would understand how great these stats are.

Driving Distance 278.2 –
Driving Accuracy Percentage 64.4%

Driving Distance 279.4 –
Driving Accuracy Percentage 69.9%

Driving Distance 273.2 –
Driving Accuracy Percentage 70.9%

Driving Distance 277.6 –
Driving Accuracy Percentage 68.1%

Driving Distance 282.3 –
Driving Accuracy Percentage 63.0%

Driving Distance 274.4 –
Driving Accuracy Percentage 73.9%

Driving Distance 277.1 –
Driving Accuracy Percentage 73.3%

Driving Distance 273.4 –
Driving Accuracy Percentage 73.4%

Driving Distance 270.4 –
Driving Accuracy Percentage 73.4%

Driving Distance 268.8 –
Driving Accuracy Percentage 73.6%

So that giant flip is what you want all your students to do, right?

And I’ve gotta apologize for being born in 73 too?

I would love my students to swing like Greg Norman. He has one of the greatest golf swings I have ever seen… but you have to know what to look for…

A lot of people didn’t like Gary Player’s swing, or Peter Senior’s. You wouldn’t believe the things they would say about Senior down on Australian TV. I was however, quite convinced I was seeing one of the great swings of the modern era.

I like Tiger’s iron swing… not his driver swing. It’s not good… and the stats show it clearly…

Tiger is also a great athlete like Greg Norman.

I have yet to see a great player who didn’t have a great golf swing… but you have to know what you are looking for…

Check please. Have fun with that. And I’m just that stupid. Joke…

I think Tiger’s swing is awful, irons and driver(though particularly the driver), but he still manages to hit more good shots than Norman…
I’ve got no doubt that if someone swung the club exactly like Norman they’d be great, but he’s not a model by any means. He was essentially an arm swinger and hands player which is why he fell apart when it mattered- similar to DL3 and Couples for the most part. Norman tried to get it deeper into the body as time went on but it didn’t matter, and wasn’t even an improvement. He’d already learned the game through the channels of his hands and ultimately went back to them regardless of how flat, deep or body controlled he looked. I’m not saying he wasn’t a great golfer, because he was, but I wouldn’t call him a great striker… it’s almost hard to believe we’re having this conversation…

You’re always welcome to post your opinions here.

We’ll probably find out this season for sure but I’d have to put money on Schumacher for that.

Its a very generalised question though.

Am I missing the joke here? We all accept he wasn’t a great putter, yet he often hit mid 60’s, and rarely wasn’t in the hunt in any tournament I ever watched in my youth. So what part of his game made him so good if his putting and ball striking wasn’t great?

The Norman I remember watching would hit 4 shots to 15 feet or less in a row, miss 3 of the putts and be 1 under for the 4 holes. I remember watching him on some of these majors thinking, “cmon, please just make a couple of putts.” When he made his putts, his scores were usually very low and he could easily blow the field away.

I don’t know about comparisons with Tiger, but there were a lot of tournaments I watched where Norman couldn’t be matched to the green.

That post is just ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.

probably the greatest player to ever pick up sticks and his swing - which is a constantly evolving thing btw and is much flatter now than when he first played on tour - is being bashed. :open_mouth:

btw, all those bashing Norman’s putting may be interested to know that Butch Harmon considers Greg to be one of the very best with the flat stick after Tiger. Greg’s problem was twofold. He tended to hit poor shots under pressure which were also very destructive and he copped a lot of bad luck on or around the 72nd hole of major championships.

Because its often used here, lets put it this way, Tiger and Norman could show up on any tee in the world with persimmons and a half set and beat absolutely anyone who has used these boards.

I think Lag’s modules are excellent and have seen with my own eyes the improvements that practice of them can bring about, but there is a fair amount of shit being talked up here too.

Norman hit his poor shots - his leaks to the right at 84 US Open, 86 Masters and even his junk at the 96 Masters last round—why?.. ALL because of trying to finesse shots… he tried to hit high cuts into Winged Foot and Augusta with too much club and he tanked it because he stopped his post impact body rotation. His hands didn’t have a clue what to do when they weren’t aggressively flashing through the ball following his body for the ride.
Same in 1996 Masters- he played safe- played within himself and lost his feel for playing his style of golf- he said that himself.

Whoever says Norman was a flipper is wrong…he had just about the most aggressive body pivot through impact ever… he was creating so much speed there were forces to go up against. The irresistible urge to throw the club right like most with that club speed do was never in his equation as he fought that in the perfect way—like I said the only time he screwed shots up was by being slack with his swing- trying to hit fancy cut up/hold off shots and that shot selection killed him. It WAS NOT the swing that lost him those events- it WAS the shot selection

The only person I have ever played with who could make the ball sing and do pretty much what he wanted with it and who made a ‘NOISE’ of compression on woods and irons is Norman. If Norman had a better thinking cap or went with instinct instead of too much analysis he would have won 10 Majors. It was his thought process not his swing. Tiger wins his events by mental prowess- just never choosing the wrong shot at the wrong time when compared to Norman.
Norman could charge out on Sunday’s and shoot 62 and catch guys and win- because he played his own natural aggressive brand of golf which didn’t affect his swing. When he got into tight situations with the lead he didn’t always pull them off because he lost his aggressive nature and steered and his swing suffered- NOT because he had a flaw in his swing but he allowed one of the main ingredients in his swing to cease to operate well… because of playing a different style of game when he had the lead or was trying to hold on

Here’s a sequence i took with a crappy instant camera way back in '82…Absolutely no flip whatsoever. Still shots don’t always tell the whole story…and like Lag said if you know what to look for Greg’s action is a thing of beauty
gn82.JPG

Greg Norman was an unbelievable putter. One of the best in golf history. I think Pelz ranked him in his top 10 and I think Geoff Mangum ranked him really high as well.

You really can’t go as low as Norman did and win as many tournaments he did without being at least a good putter. You have to be at least a pretty good ballstriker as well. Norman’s game was extremely similar to Nicklaus’. I’d probably rank them 1 and 2 as the greatest drivers in golf history. Both great putters. Both solid iron players. I’d probably take Norman with a wedge over Nicklaus, but Nicklaus easily has the advantage on the long irons.

Hinting that Greg Norman ‘wasn’t a winner’ is ridiculous and I personally don’t like the guy. But I’d take his 88 worldwide wins and 2 majors over my 0 wins and 0 majors. The problem with Norman and why he didn’t win more was simple. He had the game, he just started to choke quite a bit and he got very unlucky. He also had some poor choices in equipment, particularly the golf ball (Tour Edition) which spun way too much.

Getting back to ‘vintage vs. modern blades’, I do feel that there are some really good modern blades out there. Cobra, Bridgestone (really good, really underrated), Scratch Golf, Mizuno, Miura, Epon, Cleveland, etc. are all really really good. But, if you’re a part of the ABS modules you should get muscleback blades and not ‘player cavity backs’ or ‘game improvement’ irons. You should also get forged steel irons so you can adjust the lies flatter. With vintage irons the sweetspot is smaller, but really far from impossible to hit. I had some MacGregor 985’s and could find the sweetspot regularly, but preferred the feel of my Mizuno MP-62’s when I caught them flush. So I then went looking for some vintage Hogans, found some 1963 Hogan IPT and I actually like the feel of those more than the MP-62’s. And the sweetspot is not really that much smaller, it’s just in a different place. The lofts are what you have to look out for with vintage irons. The standard loft back then was around 30-31* with a 5-iron and 50-51* with a PW. That has a lot to do with the sweetspot being higher which causes the ball to launch lower. But, I’ve found the lofts need to be about 2* stronger to get the optimal trajectory.

3JACK

I’ve got about 10 different swing sequences of Greg’s at home and he’s not flipping in any of them. I used to get lessons when playing college golf from a teacher (TGM AI) who worked with me on getting rid of my flip. This was about '97 or so and the golfer’s swing we looked on how not to flip was Greg Norman.

If I had a scanner, I’d be able to scan them on here and show that there is zero flip going on there.

3JACK