Ben Hogans Secrets To A Better Golf Swing
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 Hogan’s golf swing and helps us use Ben Hogan’s 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”. It’s 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.”
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?
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. Hogan’s 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 Hogan’s back shift was a little different and I will talk about it more later.
Hogan used eversion of the right foot meaning the heel releases targetwardthrough impact as opposed to just turning and lifting up. He also hogan outlet 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. The secret revealed in Life Magazine was Hogan’s method to hit a fade and eliminate a hook. Cup the wrist on the back swing.When strokes start falling from your score like leaves in the fall,, consider getting SEVAM’s book, “The Secret’s 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.
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