SEVAMâS HOGANALYSIS: BEN HOGANS SECRETS TO A BETTER GOLF SWING by Max Phillips
SEVAMâS HOGANALYSIS: BEN HOGANS SECRETS TO A BETTER GOLF SWING
Why was Ben Hogan so amazing at hittinggolf balls? In this article, Mike Maves, (aka SEVAM in the golf forums) the author of âThe Secret is in the Dirtâ deconstructs Ben Hoganâs golf swing and demonstrates how to use Ben Hoganâs lifetime golf skills to take strokes off our own game.
Ben Hogan is famously quoted as saying things like âItâs in the dirt, go dig it out yourself.â or âThe secret is in the dirtâ. Itâs been paraphrased a million different ways too. Most of us just leave it at that and assume that he was just saying âGo out and practice your ass off and you just might get it.â
SEVAM doesnât go along with this overly simplistic explanation. Many since Hogan have worked just as hard and have had access to better resources than Hogan had at his disposal and yet no one has achieved that level of perfection in driving with the possible exception of Moe Norman. SEVAM concluded that there must have been something more to it.
Hogan was a genius and it would seem that the answers that Hogan gave to a series of IQ test questions that Gardner Dickinson administered to Hogan over time would most certainly confirm this. Many of the phrases he often used were purposefully loaded with cryptic and/or dual meanings. If you think about it, that wayHogan could tell you the secret without really telling you by sort of handing it over in disguiseâ.a good way for an otherwise frank and honest person to manage a secret. It takes some diligent studying to grasp those secrets
To find our answer we have to look at what he said about the golf swing and what he did in his golf swing, by studying photos and video, and also dig into the thoughts of his contemporaries on 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 swing. By âflatâ, we mean the position of the arms relative to the angle the shoulders are turning on. In his prime the club went right across his chest on the swing and rarely got above the plane of his shoulders.
Part of this was just dictated by the depth of the arm swing. Hoganâs 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 swing plane and basically never got much above the right ear on the 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 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 Hoganâs 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 Hoganâs 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 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 one took a photograph 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 Hoganâs setup was complete the swing would automate and time itself. This is the key thought that has driven my analysis. What basicthings 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 towards the targetthrough 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 swing and rotated it like a baseball bat. (Nick Seitz interview 1985)
The secret revealed in Life Magazine was Hoganâs method to hit a fade and eliminate a hook. Cup the wrist on the swing. (Life Magazine August 8, 1955)
Hogan used left arm pronation on the 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 which points to how important Hogan secretly placed on his right foot traction during the swing!
So in a nutshell these are some key things we can take from Ben Hoganâs 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 his web name, SEVAM.
When it takes strokes off your game, consider getting SEVAMâs book, âThe Secretâs in the Dirtâ. 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.
Mike Maves offers you the secrets of a better golf swing which were handed down from Ben Hogan and Moe Norman in an entertaining and mind opening book called “The Secret’s in the Dirt”
Article Source: http://www.earticlesonline.com/Article/SEVAM—S-HOGANALYSIS–BEN-HOGANS-SECRETS-TO-A-BETTER-GOLF-SWING/579103
Ben Hogan Golf Swing
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