Golf POC

Why was Ben Hogan so amazing at drivinggolf balls? In this article, Mike Maves, (aka SEVAM in the golf forums) the author of The Secret is in the Dirt analyzes Ben Hogans golf swing and helps us use Ben Hogans lifetime golf skills to take strokes off our golf game

Ben Hogan is famously quoted as saying things like I dug it out of the dirt. or The secret is in the dirt. Its been re-quoted many different ways as well. Most of us just leave it at that and figure that he was just saying Go out and practice your ass off and you just might get it.

SEVAM thinks that there is a lot more to this. Other people since Hogan have worked just as hard and have had access to better equipment and instruction than Hogan had at his disposal and yet no one has gotten to that level of perfection in ball-striking with the possible exception of Moe Norman. SEVAM concluded that there must have been something more to it.

Hogan was a natural genius and it showed in a lifetime of achievement. Many of the phrases he repeatedly used were purposefully loaded with cryptic and/or dual meanings. If you think about it, it was a way thatHogan could tell you the secret without really telling you by sort of handing it over in disguise.a good way for an otherwise frank and honest person to manage a secret. It takes some diligent studying to grasp those secrets

Part of this research involves looking at what he said about the golf swing and what he did in his golf swing, by studying photos and video, and also the thoughts of his contemporaries to discover what they may have thought or noticed about Hogan. What did Hogan have that we all want?

What We Know

First, notice that Hogan swung the club flat on the back swing. By flat, we mean the position of the arms relative to the angle the shoulders are turning on. In his prime the club went basically right across his chest on the back swing and rarely got above the plane of his shoulders.

Part of this was just dictated by the depth of the arm swing. Hogans arm swing had width but stayed a good distance from the body. The arms did not collapse in and lift. His hands went back on a wide arc but a very shallow back swing plane and basically never got much above the right ear on the back swing.

Hogan had no pause in transition. In fact Hogan looked like he began to bend the body and slide the hips back to the target long before he had completed his back swing. The body bend achieved the plane shift he talked about in 5 Lessons. Some have wrongly suggested that he had a reverse weight shift, but that is completely wrong. Hogan used a back shift to accomplish the look we see in the pictures. Bobby Jones and many others used a similar transition move, but Hogans back shift was a little different and I will talk about it more later.

Hogan had a weak left hand grip and importantly advocated use of a modified Vardon (overlap) style grip.

There was very little deviation between Hogans back swing plane and forward swing plane.

There were two planes, but they were very similarly inclined with the downswing plane pointing slightly to the right of the target line just as he outlined in 5 Lessons.

Hogan used heavy clubs with flat lies and swung very fast and very flat without a loop in transition and the reversal or transition of the swing initiated early (i.e. long before the hands and club had finished their trip on the back swing). His swing was characterized also by a vertical drop or body compression in transition (a trait also of Sam Snead and Moe Norman).

The club weight, flattish plane and cupped left wrist resulted in what looked like a freakishly impossible angle between the left arm and club shaft in transition. Part of the appearance of this angle was real (that is, it was a deep angle), but part of it was also illusion created by the low hands at the top position relative to the camera angle he was usually photographed from.

This deep angled appearance varied greatly when compared to most of his contemporaries who of course were filmed from the same position. If photographed from above, however, I believe that this angle would have looked far more natural.

By all accounts at address it appeared that the shot was basically done. It appeared as if once Hogans setup was complete the swing would automate and time itself. This is the key thought that has driven my analysis. What fundamentalthings did Hogan build into his address that could have automated his action and eliminated the need to time elements of the swing?

Hogan used eversion of the right foot meaning the heel releases targetwardthrough impact as opposed to just turning and lifting up. He also used inversion of the left foot as he moved into the left leg to the finish.

Hogan claimed that he rolled the club open on the back swing and rotated it like a baseball bat. (Nick Seitz interview 1985)

The secret revealed in Life Magazine was Hogans method to hit a fade and eliminate a hook. Cup the wrist on the back swing. (Life Magazine August 8, 1955)

Hogan used left arm pronation on the back swing to move the club to the top of the swing without a loop. He used a combination of supination and cupping of the left wrist through impact. (Five Lessons)

The right foot was square to the line at address and the left foot was flared and he insisted on these issues as fundamentals with the same force that he advocated the Vardon grip as the best at the time he wrote Five Lessons.

When speaking of Hogan we also have to investigate why he felt compelled to have extra spikes added to his custom Maxwell shoes and in particular under the ball of the right foot. We need to also understand the slip at the 18th at Olympic – The smoking gun that pointed to the importance of right foot traction in Hogans swing!

So in a nutshell these are some key things we can take from Ben Hogans lifetime of winning golf. Try it out. Download a couple of free chapters or the Secret in the Dirt primer for free and see what else we can discover from Ben Hogan, Moe Norman as told by Mike Maves, or SEVAM on the internet!

When strokes start falling from your score like leaves in the fall,, consider getting SEVAMs book, The Secrets in the Dirt. SEVAM combines video and text to show you how secrets from Ben Hogan, Moe Norman and others will take yet more strokes off your game.