If the forearms are strong enough, at some point I suppose the hands could feel passive as Knudson described, but Knudson’s swing was radically different from when he was on tour winning in the 60’s and shooting a Video in the Bahamas 20 years later.
If you work the club from right pocket to left pocket post impact, you simply can’t do it with passive hands. There are plenty of photos of Hogan’s forearms post impact where the veins are popping out of his arms. That’s not the vapor trail of relaxed passive arms and hands moving through impact.
Passive at transition… yes… but not through impact. “I wish I had three right hands” is probably an understatement.
I agree, Furgol used a Hogan style release through impact. Hands cut left and he didn’t roll the clubface over. That keeps the shaft pinned on plane through pressure and opposing forces, and as Trevino would say, “keeps the clubface looking at the target just a bit longer”
I didn’t mean to suggest the hands are passive, just that they are not contributing to the release. Actually, they are fighting the release, which is created by the straightening of the right arm in response to the ground reaction force. None of these great players was a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon. They all played golf in the simplest possible way and shamelessly copied one another. A few years ago I caught a televised video of Tommy Bolt giving a playing lesson at age 85. He still had a near perfect swing and used the ground in the same way. Julius Boros had the same action with a slower tempo. I think golfers have been misled by instruction industry mumbo jumbo. You can take a book written under the name of any great player and find stuff in it that is absolutely untrue, much of it ridiculous. What great players do routinely while the rest of us struggle to do it only part of the time is find the center of the face of the club. In 1992 I ran across Ted Kroll running a knock off club shop in Boca Raton. I asked him for forged irons. After asking why I wanted them he agreed to sell me his own Wilson Staffs. They had Dynamic S300 shafts and were one inch extra long, absurdly heavy. I paid him $300 cash and he delivered them from the trunk of his car with fresh range paint on the center of every face. He was then 78 years old! I hate to say it but the secret of golf is hand eye coordination. Just as you can study Ted Williams’ book until you go blind and never get your bat on a slider, you can study Hogan for a lifetime and struggle every day to break eighty. Finally you get to age 68 and find yourself happy to break 90 and finish all eighteen holes.
After reading your comments Jake let me offer this. In the larger sense it is true that hand-eye coordination is going to play a signigicant role for sure. However, even a two year old displays enough of that coordination to propel a ball forward…it is usually not pretty but the ball did go forward. Golf is defined in my book like this: acquiring real estate in precise increments in a predictable fashion.
The reality is that regardess of what one does there will always be a collision, well almost always …but this game is about the quality of the collision.
I’ve seen 2 year olds have a collision, I’ve seen 80 year olds have a collision…collision is easy, it’s automatatic really. It’s how the collision occurs that separates the best from the rest.
I agree, you can’t think your way through the golf swing. It’s an athletic move that must be trained properly. Some people get it, others don’t. I think most people can learn to strike the ball very well given proper guidance and a healthy dose of dedication to do the required work.
Sounds like TGM stuff to me…very contrary to what we learn here.
While true…you just contradicted yourself. If the greats copied one another, they’d have to watch and I doubt anybody was giving out too many tips on the older tours.
The first part is not necessary, but could certainly help a golfer. However, I certainly don’t think that building a repeating and powerful swing has much to do with hand eye coordination.
That last part is too cynical for words. And I won’t even touch on my inability to find anything in your statement that could have some sexual innuendo applied! Reading your post makes me feel like Forest Whitaker after discovering his love interest is a transvestite in The Crying Game. I want to curl up in my shower and cry.
Maybe not any rocket scientists or brain surgeons that I know of but Middlecoff gave up a dental practice to play the tour, Gil Morgan is an opthamologist & best guess from just about everyone was Hogan had an IQ in the 180 range. Oh yeah, Bobby Jones had a BS in mechanical engineering from GA Tech, a BA in English Lit from Harvard and a law degree from Emory all earned in the heart of his golf career. That’s just what comes to mind off the top of my head, I could pull a thousand more examples just off of Google gut spending that much time responding to that statement of ignorance gives it more time & energy than it deserves.
If golf was as complicated as you guys are trying to make it nobody could play. Golf may be difficult but that does not make it complicated. Moreover, the fact that you can shoot 64 or 65 (if indeed you all can) does not mean you know any more than other people who have spent a lifetime playing golf and thinking about it. Insulting perfect strangers who attempt to add something useful to your conversation is juvenile.
One last thing: if today’s ball does not compress (and it does not) wtf is the point of spending your life trying to compress it? Maybe Bubba Watson has the best swing of all for today’s equipment? Thanks, Lag, for the information about swinging. I don’t think you are right about the involvement of centrifugal force, but the idea of returning the shaft squarely to the ball seems a good one. IMHO You will be ahead of the game if you stop trying to involve science and view golf as an art. A golfer does A,B,C or D, and x,y or z happens. The science claims are all bogus. By the way, I did win my college golf championship in 1964 and shoot 66 in the process.
Jake: I don’t know how many of the threads you have read, but I would encourage you to read them and ask questions.
You have stumbled upon the most informative site that’s free of charge if you know where to look.
It will be a lengthy read, but go ahead and read some of the major forums.
This stuff…although not new by any means…is simply nowhere to be found in today’s world with the depth and intensity given here. It takes a while to put some of the pieces together, but you will get there of that I am confident especially given your collegiate background.
I’m sorry, jake66, but I fail to see where anyone in this forum is trying to make golf more complicated. In fact, 99% of the people probably would agree with your assessment that golf be more art than science. The few “arguments” that occur are mostly with regard to equipment or rules - however, this is the most sane place on the 'net for discussion and those who want to learn/opine.
I hope you didn’t feel insulted by my post as that wasn’t my intention. I was simply pointing out that some points in your argument were either flawed, that I didn’t agree with, or were downright depressing. I did enjoy your recollection about Ed Furgol though.
Okay…see you make a statement like this which has no basis in fact and add an invective to boot. jake66, it’s okay to make your views known, but don’t expect people not to challenge you if they feel differently or if you are patently wrong. After all, we aren’t hitting 1.680 inch diameter cue balls out there!
And we are trying to be golf artists here at ABS…just hitters, not swingers. Hopefully you’ll dig more and see the measured discussions in the forum.
Okay. Look. This is indeed a terrific site. I have read a great deal of the posts. I enjoy reading them. I am not going away mad, or even going away. But this idea that “I can shoot low scores and therefore I know and you don’t” is simply wrong. You guys who can shoot low scores have no idea how important raw ability is, and how problematic your explanations of how you do it are. How else can you explain the success of a Bubba Watson (who doesn’t care to hear about anything you know or anyone else knows either) or this seventeen year old Italian kid who must have learned his golf from some Italian nobody has ever heard of, or a KJ Choi who learned his golf from a translation of Nicklaus’s book (which doesn’t even make sense in English) into Korean? I admit to a weakness for hyberbole, but to have every sentence shredded and made the basis for ad hominem attacks makes enthusiastic participation next to impossible.
I am, however, serious about Bubba Watson. I think you should at least consider the idea that Bubba might have the best swing for today’s equipment, because he just accelerates the club in an arc from the end of his swing to the ball. For a good laugh I recommend the Peter Kostis analysis of Bubba which you can find easily on utube.
That’s exactly the point around here, that the equipment is such a joke that it creates players like Bubba who aren’t really skilled at all. They rely on quick twitch reflexes and making 20 footers from the wrong side of the hole on greens that roll at precisely 10.655 every single week. It’s not skill or even athletic as much as it is a science fair inside a bubble of non-reality. Who cares what the ideal is for hitting today’s gear is? It’s all garbage and obselete every 6 mo.
Plus the fact he knows that if it ever really sunk in how totally and utterly dependent he was on timing and flat out luck he was he’d never be able to play again. That’s why he never works with anyone or even thinks about fundamentals, he’s smart enough to no he’s up on the high wire without a net and is just trying to stay there as long as possible. He also goes to sleep every night with the thought in the back of his head that he could wake up & it’ll all be gone forever, I guarantee it because I’ve been there too. No thanks life is way too short for that junk.
Well, you are right about the clubs being junk. But the same claims were made in the Thirties and Forties about steel shafts. The purists of that day were incensed that steel turned golf over to ferociously strong men who could apply leverage and take all the “art” out of the swing. I don’t agree that Bubba is lacking in skill. He seems to have mastered delivering the club to the ball in a pure arc and curving it in ways nobody else can. When they stopped making featherie balls there wasn’t much point in developing a swing to hit them. Once you have acquired all the existing ballata balls will you be giving other players a chance to hit them?
There’s about 2 gross of ‘new’ Maxfli HT synthetic covers on eBay, 3 dozen for $50.00, 4 for 99.00 BIN. That’s still was less than half the price of ProV1s. There’s a bunch of wound balls floating around, I’ve bought like 3 gross in the last yr & a half, when I see a good deal I buy them & try not give them happy faces or tear the cover more than I can help…
When the game transformed from hickory to steel nobody doubled the size of the clubhead and tripled the size of the hitting area. When the ball went from featheries to gutta percha it was to make them LESS EXPENSIVE. When they went to wound balls it was to make them more consistent and better performing in regards to distance and shotmaking. I’ll jump on board with a solid ball that goes 500 yards no problem as long as it spins and isn’t preprogrammed with a figure S flight because the people at Titleist decided I suck.
As long as golf has been made SOOO much better and more enjoyable by technology let’s stop kidding ourselves and make everything in every sport better too. I want Kevlar core baseball bats integrated with covers made out of the stuff they put on the skin of the Stealth Bomber, the baseball is gonna be mercury core with a 12 layer polymer mantle and 1/4" titanium alloy cover. Basketball hoops,lets go 5’ wide, 16’ high & every NBA player spends 2 hrs a day on a 17th century rack inside a combination hyperbolic chamber/sensory deprivation tank. Footballs are gonna extendable fins & homing devices to receivers gloves but defenders will have jamming signals, let’s go full Batman putty battle armor too. Tennis balls & hockey pucks are now virtual. Soccer stays the same… And I want every athlete on a strict regiment starting at age 8 of HGH, synthetic T, the Cream & Clear and that green stuff from The Incredible Hulk.
C’mon folks, bigger faster, stronger!!! If it’s not brand new it’s obsolete!! Who’s with me, let’s go!!
Did anybody see the article in the latest Golf Digest about the round a bunch of folks played with 15 inch holes? It was really amusing that they concluded this was a great way to accelerate pace of play…what the deuce?
I’m with you Alec, I don’t really care how far the ball goes, as long is it is “massagable” in the way wound Balata was. As far as Bubba shaping shots, there is nothing artistic in my opinion about what he does…nothing subtle and skillful about moving a golf ball 95 yards right to left (or left to right) like he does. Having said that, on a personal level I really like him.
ANdy
P.S. Note to self…golf ball with microprocesser inside that can be pre-rogrammed for specific flight characteristics…sue me for royalties on this one Alec…I am going straight to TaylorMade. We’ll name the "s curve preset after you…
Give it the same thing that they put in the tip of the nuclear warhead on a Trident Missile. I like it… we laugh but somebody’s in a patent office as we speak…
…but this game is about the quality of the collision.
