For 13 years my day job was designing fishing rods…I saw some crazy ridicoulous stuff all in the name of attracting fish to bite a lure. One of he best one was a guy who used the technology in greeting cards that plays a song when you open it up. He developed a fishing lure that when twitched a certain way would emit “fish type noises” via the same type of embedded circut in the lure.
Effective? probably.
Unethical, un-skillful, and un-interesting? In my opinion, absolutely
Andy
Omg that’s AWESOME… if there’s anything with more gimmicks & general meaningless crap than golf it’s gotta be fishing… my maternal grandfather made his own flyrods & tied all his flies, passed 15 yrs ago but I’ve still got them & pull them out every summer, it’s big time rainbow & German brown country up here, it’s pretty telling that everything is buy this, buy that, no one ever talks about teaching anyone how to make anything that will last 3 lifetimes…
And speaking of technology where the hell are the flying cars, Mr Fusion and my clones for chores & backup parts anyway I was promised things!!
My dad would take me fishing up the east side of the Sierra’s… Owens River, and the best bait was always just the grasshoppers or whatever bugs we could find in the grass around the river banks. Put it on the hook and reel in the Brown Trout. Worked every time.
I’m not sure who on this site is claiming they can go low. I agree that scoring low has something to do with raw ability. The most talented athletes would be stand outs in other sports too, but seem to be made for the sport they excel in.
Along with natural talent I’d throw in a mind set that thrives on scoring and can control emotions. Add a dash of someone who is supremely confident (at least for the moment) and understands their swing enough to not get in their own way. Put that together with god knows how many other facets make up somebody who can golf their ball and you may have a first rate player. I say only “may have” because there is always luck.
I think most of the people here are really golf enthusiasts. They love the game, the history, and all that is golf…wishing to improve their consistency and not search so hard only to come up empty because of all the b.s. that surrounds the game we enjoy.
Cheers,
Captain Chaos
I believe attacking ad hominems out of season is against the law in Wisconsin, so clearly that wasn’t my intent as a law abiding individual. 
Captain Chaos
I think raw talent or athleticism is highly overrated in golf. I have known plenty of golfers who have won big tournaments who are anything but athletic specimens.
Talent? Golf is something you have to learn. Of course some people are naturally going to feel certain movements easier than others… but it can all be learned.
Dedication and putting the time and hard work in… now that is something that will get you somewhere along with proper instruction.
The athletic argument is a weak one, as there have been so many successful athletes from other sports who simply don’t get golf. No amount of raw talent is going to give you the swing of Ben Hogan.
There is so much more to golf also than just swinging the club. Intuition is huge. Being able to feel your surroundings and translate that into a shot selection YOU are capable of is huge. Corey Pavin would not have made it in most other sports.
Maybe a shortstop? Hard to say.
The modern game is trying feverishly to make golf an athletic sport by creating courses that are coming up on 8000 yards and removing the need for precision tee shots. Ultimately that will fail over time.
The muscles used in a golf swing are odd compared to other sports. I do see the swing as a very athletic move, but not in any traditional sense of what most would call a good athlete. You learn this stuff… it’s not God given. I have never seen any kid who was handed a set of clubs go out and break 80 on there first try. Not likely 90 either.
However, you could give a kid from Nigeria a football hand off, who grew up playing soccer and could run, jump and twist
and he may very well run right through a line of defenders dogging all of them unscathed right into the end zone. Track and field stars have been known to move right into wide receiver positions in football. If I remember correctly there was a wide receiver who played down in Dallas in the 70’s who had won an Olympic medal in sprinting. Hayes?
As far as the golf swing… well, you better be able to (or used to in your prime) hit it pretty darn good if you are going to proclaim to have an understanding of the swing. You simply cannot and will not understand the inner pressures and how things need to be sequenced and feel within the body if you can’t flush it yourself.
You see guys like Hogan and Moe showing all kinds of odd positions and feelings to try to contort your body into. The arm chair analysts love to say “oh that’s a feel vs real” but let me tell you… when I listen to those guys … they are correct.
They are talking about an intention that is VERY REAL. You better drop the club into the slot… and if you listen close, both Hogan and Moe tell you exactly how to do it… but you have to understand a whole ocean of other things or you are going to only get 1/4 of the picture. In golf 1/4 of the picture works about as well as 3/4’s of your cars engine components removed from your car. You are not going anywhere.
I have been accused of being too detailed in my teaching by more than a few… but I have no interest in sweeping anything under the table or canvasing the swing with such absurdities as “Just keep it simple”. It took me a long time to get my golf swing to be as simple as it is now. YES it is simple now… I look at the target, pick a club, and hit it without much thought.
100’s of thousands of balls, drills and hours of hard work… touring the world, playing pro tournaments, 1000’s or rounds and years of study and experimenting. Sure I can help people out now… and students that work through what I teach are going to know exactly what they are doing and also what everyone else is doing.
One thing I agree with Homer Kelley is his statement in TGM
“Complexity is far more simple and workable than Mystery”
I disagree with how TGM goes about things in a general sense. But I would rather know too much than not enough.
Sometimes it helps to have the knowledge and conviction so you KNOW you DON’T need to change what you are doing.
Golf becomes simple when you don’t know how to do it any other way but the right way with your chosen methodology.
These are very passionate and seductive arguments but they are just arguments. Let’s take Hogan, who is the poster child for hard work. I recall that when he was in the Navy they gave him a hand eye coordination test used to select the prime candidates for performing some combat function (the details escape me). He scored highest among those taking the test! Nobody can argue reasonably against the need for hard work. The difficulty still remains: what should a person work at? A golfer’s downswing takes what, 0.2 seconds? Performing more than one voluntary act during that interval is impossible. If a player is determined to pivot through the ball, he cannot do anything with his hands except hang on, and he cannot do anything with his arms without slowing down his pivot. Of course, players can argue about what a pivot is. Some feel it from the left hip or the torso, others from the right foot and right leg.
Every high performance golfer is entitled to the utmost respect in discussions of swing technique. Still, it is not necessarily certain that you are doing the things you feel you are doing. Science can’t tell us much about how to play golf. It can help to disprove claims about how golf should be played, as its true function is falsification of hypotheses.
I don’t think to him it was hard work, others may have thought so. In his own words, he loved to practice…a dedication to excellence.
Ye reap what ye sow. Careful what ye sow!
Rat philosophy 101 
Ok, only heard that argument 1000x, next one is usually he only got that deep in the slot because his left thumb was double jointed. Exact same argument 20 years later & it started 20 yrs before I started, nice to know some things never change I guess.
Do or do not, there is no try…
-The other green Muppet
As far as I’m concerned anytime you look for a reason why you can’t do something you’ll always find it. And another and another and another. The hard part is deciding you can, and of course most people aren’t able to. But if you can decide it & believe it everything after is academic… Preachy & totally arrogant statement but true nonetheless.
Absolutely. I’m sure we can all think of people we’ve come across who had the deck stacked against them (Hogan) and had no reason to believe they had the special natural-born intangibles to make it, yet through sheer determination reached the highest levels of success in their field of interest. At the same time, so many “talented” people listen to those who offer the good-intentioned advice that “it’s a longshot” or something similar and end up taking the safe route.
Jake66:
As I’ve mentioned on this site before, go read both “Talent is Overrated” and “The Talent Code”, and then we can discuss the whole talent thing. Or for that matter, try to find a super-successful person in just about any endeavor and ask them how they got there. You will likely find (as I have) that many had an inclination early on that they were below average in terms of “talent”, yet due to the slightly vindicative nature of successfull people as a whole, they set out to prove they could overcome obstacles through hard work. Every single person I have ever met that is highly successful at a world-class level in whatever meets most of these criteria.
I have yet to meet one who said, “I was born better than everyone else, so it was easy for me.”
Anyone who has achieved anything worthwhile has sacrificed and worked extremely hard to get there.
Well, it is very easy apparently to be completely misunderstood. I am wholly in agreement with all you are trying to accomplish here. Were I young and strong I would definitely work the modules. I spend at least half of every day working at my own golf swing and thinking about the vast swing literature of the past hundred odd years, most of which is here in my library although I can quote nearly all of it without looking up the references. There is no reason for any of you to take seriously anything I might have to say about golf. But, then again, some of it might be true. I think it was Henry Cotton who said somewhere, ‘a golfer must be prepared to try absolutely anything’.
I don’t disagree with what you are writing here, but I urge you to consider the role that random chance plays in any particular individual’s success. I don’t necessarily think this applies to Hogan or golf, in particular, but rather to other types of “highly successful” people who have relatively unique skill sets but whose sheer good fortune–i.e. random chance–put them in a position “to succeed.” This theory was excellently espoused and explained by Nasim Taleb in his outstanding book, “The Black Swan.” There are many superbly talented authors, writers, and executives that have toiled in obscurity and poverty due mostly, in part, to the lack of the random act of discovery. Taleb, a former “quant” trader, mathematician, and philosopher excellently explains why in this book, which is an outstanding ‘read.’
If I misunderstood I apologize but when you wrote that the downswing is only 0.2 sec and not enough time to consciously make more than one movement I happened to find it amusing in that those were the exact words my first golf teacher said to me once. I decided right then & there I needed a new instructor and I found one. That statement happens to be correct but very misleading. If you do it well very little in golf is conscious, most is like driving or brushing your teeth, learned automatic motion. You do it every day & you know you’re doing it but without much conscious thought. The training is conscious and different than the execution you bust your ass to learn it then you hopefully let it go of most of it (and that isn’t a swingers protocol only, even a hitting protocol is 95% automatic).
CRR, that’s an 8000 yr old numero uno official philosophy question. If Plato couldn’t find a satisfactory answer I ain’t even gonna try. That is way way big time.
Put enough words in front of the masses on the 'net and you’ll be misunderstood in more ways than you could fairly calculate.
Precisely why I am here! As an engineer and a perfectionist, I’m learning to enjoy the game…not just the swing. jake66, you seem introspective enough that you’d probably lend a valuable voice while learning. I’m certain there are those here that are beyond “retirement age” and you shouldn’t discount the modules because of age. Besides, then you can stop re-reading those old golf tomes and enjoy the pleasures a vintage Hustler magazine!
Captain Chaos
I’m sure a smart man like Plato would have a few more interesting things to say on the topic had he the opportunity to catch up on 2,500 years worth of advancement in human understanding of the natural world. Descartes, who famously thought therefore he was, also thought that the pineal gland was the transmitter and receiver of the soul, which existed elsewhere in the ether. It turns out that the pineal gland is responsible for helping to regulate diurnal rhythms.
Taleb’s book is fascinating for many different reasons. He became interested in randomness in the early 2000s when he began to suspect that the mathematical models that he and other derivative traders were using to determine probabilities were fundamentally flawed in their understanding of the likelihood of rare events. He subsequently left Wall Street, completed a Ph.D in mathematics, I believe, and philosophy, and published his prophetic book right about that time that the markets crashed. Even more subsequently, along with Nouriel Roubini, he became very famous “predicting” the crash of the derivatives market. This is obviously very pertinent to the discussion at hand because…hang on a sec, it turns out it is completely off-topic! 
Back to Hogan!
PS. As someone who most would consider to have excellent hand-eye coordination and as a former division one collegiate athlete, I can say that I completely agree with your point of view. I have a decent swing compared to most of the other hackers, but it will take a few more modules for me to become a good ball striker. My biggest problem seems to be between the ears…
Absolutely agree with that statement. I think that the arts in general are probably the toughest field to “make it” in. What I originally said probably doesn’t apply very well to those fields (painting, writing, music, etc.) In sports though, at a professional level especially, the effects of random chance are greatly lessened. Financial success is similar. While someone born into a wealthy family who attends an Ivy League school is more likely to land a job as CEO of a Fortune 500 company than a high school dropout, the high school dropout can certainly create as much if not more first generation wealth. It’s more difficult, but it’s similar to the Hogan quote where he mentions feeling sorry for rich kids who won’t go through the hardships he did. Often in life, the people who are dealt the better hand (more stable family life, more financial security, etc.) don’t have the work ethic to be successful while those who start with less end up far more successful.
I don’t know what this has to do with Hogan at this point though, so I agree it’s time to get back on topic.
This is all still on topic, if Hogan were reading he’d agree. It’s about the journey not the destination, get off your butt & get to work and enjoy the work while you’re doing it. Success is incidental and often gets in the way.
when i was in college, i used to drive to the parking lot of the nearby supermarket and sit in my car for four or five hours at a sitting reading molecular biology. i did this four or five days a week for about a year. it was the best place i could think of to get some quiet and remove distractions. i’ve highlighted almost every page of that text book, over 2000 in total, and read most of the chapters three or four times each when i was learning it. such was my depth of understanding of that material that on many occasions since then, i’ve relied on that foundation to facilitate the understanding of new, different, and more complex information, generally more quickly than peers in similar situations.
i guess that was me digging up my secret in the dirt. incidentally, the book was lovingly repurposed this winter when i used it as a block to prop up the front wheel of my bicycle/bicycle trainer apparatus.
your last remark is so true. focus on the process and the results will follow. it’s how i’m trying to embrace and approach the modules…
Getting back to Hogan. It has always puzzled me a bit that Hogan became such a cult figure, but the swing of Byron Nelson, who may have had the best swing in the early steel shaft era, is pretty much ignored. One of my favorite videos is the 1962 match between Nelson, age 52, and Gene Littler, 25 or 26 and one year removed from winning the Open. Nelson hadn’t played competitively for sixteen years but I think he only hit one mediocre shot over the eighteen holes played at Pine Valley, and beat Littler by 5 or 6, maybe more. Has anyone ever tried to swing like Nelson?