[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/9858644[/vimeo]
for those of you who have not been inside our vault in the private side of the forum… I was reminded of this footage of George, and how so many of the games great players so admired George’s masterful control of the golf ball.
Have a look if you have not seen it… and if you have, have another look. I talk a lot about George here, and I learned a lot about him from my conversations with Moe Norman.
Lag–thanks for sharing that. I really didn’t know and appreciate Knudson until I came upon your site. He obviously admired Hogan. Did he go up against Hogan a lot on Tour; and did Hogan help him with his swing, or did Knudson study from afar? I find it curious that excellent ballstrikers are usually deficient in putting. They either didn’t practice it much (too busy banging balls), or couldn’t calm themselves on the green. We think, what if about Hogan and Knudson, if they could have putted. They had a humorous, almost cavalier attitude toward that part of the game…I cracked up when I heard that.
When I arrived on The Canadian Tour in 1987, I first met Moe Norman the very first day I was there. He was on the range at Thunderbird where we were having Q school. I can’t remember if George had just passed or was about to… but this was deeply affecting Moe. He kept talking George and all these things they had shared and it was clear how deeply inspired he was by Knudson. At the time I knew of George, but I didn’t learn until later how fantastic a striker he was. There were other veterans on tour that did of course, and you would keep hearing the stories about George at The Masters hitting 70 out of 72 greens when he finished second, and endless amazing stories about him hitting pins, and shooting course records and the deep respect he had from his peers. Needless to say I was very captivated by Moe watching him, but he would always keep referring to George about how only George, Trevino, and Hogan could strike it “in his league”. I tend to take stuff like that with a grain of salt, but that grain does get bigger as time goes by, and more and more testimonials would come from other contemporaries.
I don’t know the extent of the relationship between Knudson and Hogan, but they did talk and it was something. Hogan’s last decade of competition was at best sporadic, and he surely attracted a lot of attention when he did show up to an event. Knudson talked about some of this in his book, and Alvie Thompson who I worked with on putting talked about how he and George spied on Hogan through the trees practicing at Seminole during the winter. There is a lot to be learned simply by observation.