What was hogan secret

Thanks for this carefully written insight. Coincidentally or not, this is exactly what I have been working on for the past 6 months and my ball striking has improved and my scores are inching lower. When I stated in golf 50 years ago I struggled until I read the first Hogan book. I was hooked on Hogan and fought a slice forever.

I even practiced the Hogan grip for hours in my spare time. I took lessons, lots of lessons, and read every other theory and tried them out always coming back to Hogan. Finally after retirement and all of my flexibility and strength gone with my youth I looked at the Hogan swing sequence then Nicklaus then Trevino then all of my past heroes swings and picked up a pen flashlight put my Hogan grip on it with the light on mimicking the butt of the grip and traced my swing slowly on the rug.

I transitioned to a strong grip, a 10 finger grip , a weak grip and found that if I traced the in to out swing I would come to impact in a square position. At age 78 I think I got it. So you only play 9 holes?

Do you walk and push a trolley or carry a bag… or do you ride a cart? Maybe he wanted to covey to us in silence that there was not such things as secrets in golf swing or golf period. Your email address will not be published. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Over the course of my golf life — for whatever reason — that strange affliction seems to crop up now and again. Same for the traditional putting yips. Those are nasty problems to deal with, but I have figured out a sound and effective way to beat them back into remission. It is my belief that this inability to execute the simplest of strokes — whether it is with the putter or the wedge — comes from prior bad experiences. One chunk or skulled shot or badly missed footer sticks in your mind and makes you more uncomfortable and nervous when you face the next one.

You hit that next one just as bad and the nasty affliction has taken hold of your mind in such a way that your body cannot perform the simple action it knows how to do. Review your fundamentals. If one or more of those gets out of whack, then your body is not in sync with the shot your eyes see. That causes unnoticed tension, and your hands try to take over to make the clubhead go where the eyes are looking, instead of where the body is pointing.

Double down on your fundamentals! Check your grip pressure…again! Tension causes us to tighten up all over, but particularly in our grip, and even more specifically, to your master-hand pressure your right for right-handed players, of course. When results go a bit south on you, your tendency is to get more master-handed in an attempt to guide the clubhead to the ball. Check your tempo. Anxiety begets tension which begets increased speed and wrecks your tempo and timing.

The great thing about practicing your short game technique is that you do not need to go to the range. You can do it in your basement, garage or back yard. Without any balls at all to get in the way, visit these first three points and re-learn or re-confirm your skill set. Focus on fundamentals, check your grip pressure, and tempo and make lots of practice swings.

Then hit some balls with this refreshed set of fundamentals. The last thing I highly recommend is that you begin and end each pre-round warm-up with these short chips and pitches. Hit enough of them to feel really good about your technique and attitude as you take it to the course. Michael Croley is a writer and a teacher. Without too much trouble, you can find his collection of yarns, Any Other Place: Stories or his magazine-published essays.

What he teaches, is writing. When you interview a writer, you resist being the child of impulse, who tosses out the simplest, mundane inquiries. Instead, you do your level best to come up with questions that compel the subject to sit back and ponder their intricacy, if only for a while. He grew up in the southeastern portion of the commonwealth with an older brother, now deceased, who he adored.

In a piece that he wrote for Golf Magazine, Mr. In truth, it was older brother Tim who always would be his favorite baller. While doing a bit of research on Corbin, I came across two items of interest. The first is the geographic location of the burg on interstate 75, smack dab between Lexington and Knoxville. The second was a bit funnier. Listed among the most famous people to emerge from the home rule-class city was one Jerry Bird.

Also a basketball player, but not nearly as famous as Larry. Golf prose is the better when great writers choose to write about golf. Not great golf writer, mind you, but great writers. Wodehouse, Bernard Darwin, and their ilk. Fortunately for golf and for us, Michael Croley writes about golf. His connection with our game, of course, is connected to his brother and their bond. MC: A little of both, right? RM: Was golf a part of your life while growing up in Corbin, Kentucky?

If so, elaborate. MC: Not at all. I found the game in my early twenties when my older brother took it up. It was a way for us to spend time together. RM: In one of your articles on golf, you reveal the pride you felt in watching your brother hit golf shots high in the air, straight at the target. How did the sharing of golf enhance your relationship with your brother?

MC: It was just a way for us to continue playing and competing with each other as we did when we were boys. As we got older and had families, the golf trip was a way for us to turn out some noise and we built our year around it.

RM: Is there a golf club in your bag that you rarely use? If so, which one, what do you fear, and why is it still there? MC: I rarely keep the 4-iron in the bag. RM: As a sometimes-writer on golf, do these story proposals find you, or do you begin with a notion, then seek an outlet or venue? I try to think of which venues will best support the story. RM: What type of golf characters would populate your theoretical volume of stories on the game?

MC: The same ones that populate the fiction I write now, I suppose. Folks struggling to figure out who they are. RM: There are at least two general sorts of golf writers: those whose dedication has been to tell the story of golf over the years, and others who are creative writers first, but cannot resist the siren call of golf. Do you have any to recommend, from either camp?

I came to golf writing because I wanted, in part, to tell some stories about architecture and learn more about how golf courses are designed and built. RM: In one of your articles, you mention the sect of golfers that studies the architecture of great courses.

Talk a bit about this, about your entry into the coven, and the impact it had on how you played and enjoyed golf. MC: That was due in part to my brother. He was really enamored with the work of Tom Doak as as I started playing golf I started paying more attention to how courses are built.

For bonus points, where would you play? The first would be my late brother who passed away in May of Sometimes a hook gets so exaggerated that you don't know where to aim. In Hogan was in the throes of just such a dilemma. As he intimates, many fine golfers had been there before him—in fact, all but a very few of the top tournament golfers since Harry Vardon, the last of the natural fade exponents.

Gene Sarazen, for example, had to fight a hook throughout his career. Sarazen's solution was 1 to make certain his hands remained glued to the club at the top of the backswing and 2 to allow for the possibility of a hook by aiming, when in doubt, down the right-hand side of the fairway.

At the stages in his career when he had to battle a hook, Bob Jones, in the view of his contemporaries, pronated his right wrist at address in order to open the club-head a shade. The mystery of the multiple "collapses" of Macdonald Smith, the greatest golfer who never won a major championship, was partially cleared up for many observers when they studied slow-motion pictures of Mac's beautiful swing and detected that, under the strain of the big events, he had a tendency to come into the ball with a slightly closed club face.

On pages 20 and 21, the three adjustments Hogan arrived at for exiling his hook and still extracting maximum manageable power from his swing are described in graphic detail.

As Hogan himself warns, they will not prove a panacea for the average golfer. Moreover, although his left-thumb adjustment should help accomplished golfers who are afflicted with a hook, it would seem that mastering Hogan's other measures would be at least as difficult as mastering a positively correct method of swinging.

In short, Hogan's Secret is probably best viewed not as a prescription for other golfers' ills but as an example of one man's resourcefulness in solving his own particular problem and, with his amazing concentration and will power, turning himself from a great golfer into a great champion. This is the hook-proof position Hogan has mastered.

The salient feature is the superbly strong left hand—a wall solid enough to restrain the natural tendency of the smashing right hand to overpower the left and shut the face of the club.

For the measures that the hook-plagued Hogan took to insure that he arrive at this position, study pages 20 and One night in as he was lying awake in bed and wondering what he could do to harness his hook, Ben Hogan decided to experiment with some personal variations on the old, discredited technique called pronation.

Hogan was a practice-aholic. He was so in the zone on the driving range that he would go all the way to the right side to hit balls. Habits like this only add to the intrigue that is Mr. Remember, hard work never fails in the game of golf or life.

Well, we have more answers to help you make your own decisions about what made him such a successful golfer. He also has another book, Power Golf, which has golf tips to help golfers lower their scores. The author was mentored by Tommy Bolt who was a protege of Hogan and shared what he learned in his own golf journey. He breaks the magic trick into two aspects, plus the book has tons of images and illustrations for the average golfer to implement into their game.

Practice, practice, and practice some more to take your game to the top and reach your potential. Hogan — no offense, I am not going to either. To think how well he struck the golf ball at the top of his game, with the clubs he was using back then is nothing short of amazing. In fact, he once suggested that to eliminate putting all together from the game of golf! How funny is that? After watching some old films and researching it, it looks like he used a MacGregor Spur Puter.

Reports have said that he had damage to an eye following the accident and impacted his putting. Do you think there was a specific thing he did? A combination of the theories above? He did two things all great players do well — never settled and worked hard. An easy comparison is Tiger Woods. Despite his historic run in the early s, he changed his plane and found a new teacher in Hank Haney.

Plus, his work ethic is unparalleled as well. Both players were range rats and constantly were looking to groove their game on the range so they could trust it in the course. Remember, no golfers are born great well maybe Tiger Woods but for most of us, getting better is all about fundamentals. Was it something he learned from his time at Shady Oaks? Your email address will not be published.