The Natural Golf Swing Read Online Free PDF

knew that if I was ever going to play to my potential I would need better balance. But how could I achieve it? I came back on the winter tour in 1958 to play as an amateur, then played as a pro in 1959 and 1960. I was in school, observing every minute I could. The range was my classroom, Hogan my main teacher. I still hadn’t figured the guy out. He looked so different. His shots had more character and he knew where the hole was. But it took a while to grasp the key: he had better
balance
than any golfer.
    Hogan was so stable over the ball and throughout the swing. He looked so solid, and yet he also gave it everything he had.Hogan had a controlled and powerful golf swing and balance was the key. It looked to me that if you hit him anywhere, you’d be hitting something dead solid. He never looked wobbly. As for me, I wasn’t falling over, but I was continually rolling over onto the outside of my left foot and left heel. So was everybody else. Everybody except Hogan, that is. He was dead solid flat on his left foot at the finish of his swing.
    The thing that Hogan did differently to stay in balance was really quite elementary. He took a wider stance than the others. When he set up over the ball, he pointed his left foot out about a quarter-turn to the left and set it outside his left shoulder. This gave him a boxer’s stance; he was in a “go” position. He was ready to give it a whack with his whole body. By setting his left foot beyond his shoulder, he ensured that he wouldn’t roll over onto his foot and heel.

    Finish positions emphasizing foot locations.
    Having gained at least some appreciation of the fact that the elements of the golf swing came together in a unified manner, I tried to incorporate what I’d learned into my swing. As I said, Hogan was my model. Before long, people were saying I looked more like Hogan than Hogan himself. I took that as a great compliment, but I was still a long way off from being the “natural” people thought I was. And I wanted to be a “natural”; I wanted to feel good over the ball and during the swing. But I was contriving the whole thing. I still didn’t have a full understanding of what it meant to
let
myself swing. I was still trying to do things. I was still
making
the swing happen. I was using too much effort,
trying
too hard. I felt that I was over-exerting myself. Rather than simplifying the swing and eliminating moves, I was adding to it. And it was work. It took me a year and a half to achieve the balanced position at the finish that I so admired in Hogan.
A BREAKTHROUGH
    It wasn’t until the summer of 1960 that I had a breakthrough in my understanding. I had come to Toronto’s Oakdale Golf and Country Club in 1958 as an assistant to Bill Hamilton, who later went on to become the executive director of the Canadian Professional Golfers Association. Oakdale was a terrific place for me; the members knew I wanted to play the game professionally rather than work at a club. They let me hit balls and play as much as I wanted. It was during one of my practice sessions that it occurred to me that the golf swing had to be impersonal. If it followed the laws of physical motion, then we were all trying to do the same thing. The idea that golf was an individual game had led us to believe every swing was different and that we had to find our own ways, each and every one of us. That summerday at Oakdale I asked myself: “What would the swing look like if I cut my head off? What would it look like if I were a machine, if I were designing a machine to create a golf swing?”

    The head goes where the body carries it.
    First, I realized that the head had nothing to do with the swing. If we were searching for a natural swing, the head had to go where the body carried it. The idea of keeping the head still suddenly made no sense to me. How could I swing back from the ball and through it without my head moving along?
    Allowing the head to move helped me realize that the head had