David Leadbetter - The Fundamentals of Hogan

Herbert Warren Wind, Ben Hogan, and Anthony Ravielli.

It was a great stroke of luck to find Ravielli’s photographs. Any Hogan artifact is a priceless commodity, as there is not an abundance of pictures or film of him compared to the wealth of material available on today’s top players. I am thrilled to have had the opportunity to study Ravielli’s photographs and to spend so much time with Hogan’s book again. This book, The Fundamentals of Hogan , is the result of that process.

The original film Ravielli used to capture Hogan’s swing.

Hogan was constantly thinking about his technique.

If you were to ask today’s tour players to vote on the best ball-striker of all time, the vast majority would pick Ben Hogan. They would place him at the top of the list even though many of them never saw him hit a shot. But so mighty is the reputation of the man that his name remains synonymous with pure ball-striking. The English writer and course architect Donald Steel observed that Hogan “was an extreme perfectionist and a ruthless competitor. His control was absolute, his dedication immense. He was the finest stroke player the game has known, a legend in his lifetime.” Indeed, he is a legend beyond his lifetime; since Hogan died in 1997, his legend has only grown. Today, when a golfer controls the flight of the ball and moves it around the course at will, we say “You’re hitting it like Hogan.” There is no higher compliment. Ben Hogan remains the standard of excellence.

Hogan’s reputation as the game’s preeminent ball-striker could well last as long as the game is played. At the same time he could be called the father of modern golf instruction—in which the basic idea is that the player is to use the big muscles of the body, rather than the hands, as the controlling influences in the swing. Nobody has influenced modern-day teaching more than Hogan. His years of observation, his unceasing trial-and-error experimentation that he put to the test in championships, his love for hitting practice balls, and his unwavering desire for perfection, led him to become the most precise golfer in the annals of the game. Hogan was the consummate practicer and tinkerer, and enjoyed working on his technique at every opportunity. He would use any location in his pursuit of swing perfection: driving ranges and fields en route to a tournament, hotel rooms, locker rooms—any place where he could swing a club.

The locker room practice session!

Hogan is truly a legend—one of the game’s most esteemed players. Yet many observers did not consider Hogan to be a natural player in the same vein, for instance, as his archrival Sam Snead. He worked extremely hard to achieve his results precisely because he wasn’t a natural player, making several dramatic changes to his swing over the years. Hogan’s own efforts and results proved to him that it was indeed possible to improve by working on fundamentals. In Hogan’s case, his hard work culminated in his finding, by 1946, his so-called “secret,” a formula to eliminate the persistent hooking problem that early on threatened to ruin his development as a tournament player. This gave him complete mastery over the golf ball and allowed him to play the commanding golf for which he became famous. It was during the next seven years that he won his nine major championships.

Hogan’s ability to change his swing was impressive. Every golfer who has tried to modify his swing knows how formidable a task it can be; one’s instincts and habits always seem ready to show up again under pressure no matter how hard one works. Every golfer is different and every swing has its own look, which is why one can readily identify a player from a distance as he swings.

Hogan, too, had his personal look, and during his ruthless self-examination he learned that he was prone to a loss of control for specific reasons. His great flexibility caused him to swing the club back a long way and gave the impression that he had a fairly wristy swing, which, when combined with his fiery leg action, led to his early tendency to lose control of the clubface through impact and to hook the ball. But finally one could candidly state that for a period of time Hogan mastered the game and overcame his few bad tendencies—by finding and incorporating the small number of fundamentals which allowed him to develop a repeating, effective swing. This mastery enabled him to manage his game so that he could plot his way around a course like a chess player; no fairway was too narrow and no pin was inaccessible. His course management and attention to detail were second to none, and his scores showed it. One might point to his play while winning the Masters, United States Open, and British Open in 1953 as proof of the soundness of his swing theories; he dismantled an extremely difficult Carnoustie in Scotland that year while winning the British Open with descending scores of 73-71-70-68. Hogan learned a little more every day about how to play the course. He had the tools—the refined, simplified technique—to dissect the challenging links. The Daily Telegraph newspaper asked after his victory: “And who shall say he’s not the best of all time?”

When Hogan spoke, everyone listened.

As serious a student of the game as Hogan was, he did not have the luxury of using highspeed sophisticated video cameras or computers to analyze other swings or his own. He remarked in his later years that had he had such equipment he would have understood the swing ten years sooner. He also did not shave a full-time coach as most players do today, although Hogan did on occasion confer with the renowned professional Henry Picard. But his uncanny sensory system, his powers of observation, and his tremendous kinesthetic awareness of how his body and the golf club functioned during the motion of a swing provided the underpinnings of his education. His greatest success occurred when he developed total belief in his technique so that he could play without worrying about bad shots. His relentless pursuit and eventual achievement of building a correct, powerful, and repeating swing that he could depend on under pressure led him to write Five Lessons. Hogan’s book was published four years after he won those three majors in 1953. It is, as I have noted, a deeply personal book. It is a book about Hogan’s search for a better swing for himself, and in it—having written Power Golf and in a variety of other publications—he offers his conclusions about what all golfers can learn from his own quest. His teachings have so much to offer golfers, but it has always been important that readers interpret his ideas correctly and clarify them properly. I hope to help with this.

Working with Herbert Warren Wind on Five Lessons.

Hogan was a superior athlete, gifted with remarkable flexibility and range of motion, as well as an imaginative mind. According to many people, his intellect bordered on genius. Gardner Dickinson, a professional golfer who won three tournaments on the U.S. tour from 1968-1970 and played on two Ryder Cup teams, worked as an assistant to Hogan when he was briefly the head professional at the Tamarisk Country Club in Palm Springs, California during the early 1950s. Dickinson held a degree in clinical psychology and was qualified to administer psychological tests. He could not prevail upon Hogan to take a standard intelligence test, but did slip in some questions during their conversations. He estimated that Hogan’s I.Q. was in the high genius category.