Chamblee - The anatomy of greatness : lessons from the best golf swings in history

Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.

C LICK H ERE T O S IGN U P

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

To my parents, Harrel and Sandy, who have always been there and are always ready to help.

S ome of my lifes most cherished times were spent in the same room with Byron Nelson listening to him tell stories about his life and the game we both truly loved. One of these wonderful stories involved a reporter who came to him in the locker room one day and told him what Ben Hogan had said about Byrons practice habits: If Nelson practiced harder he would become a better player was the gist of his needle. Bryon needled back: Go tell Hogan that I have already learned how to swing the golf club!

Indeed, Byron didnt practice as much as Ben did. Nobody did, as Hogan was legendary for his extensive practice sessions in which he dug it [his secret] out of the dirt. The point of this is the difference in their two different psyches. Byron of knowing his golf swing and trusting that he knew it and of Hogans who was rarely satisfied with his swing and who was always searching for the secret, possibly reaching as closely to the Holy Grail of the perfect swing (for him) as anyone ever.

Both players were arguably among the greatest ever in our sport but each had markedly different golf swings. They approached practicing differently but shared a similar trust in the mechanics of their own swings. In fact Byron told me that for his entire career he made only one major change to his swing that really mattered. It was in the early 1930s when steel shafted clubs were introduced, greatly reducing the clubhead torque, or twisting, of the shaft/clubhead at impact compared to the hickory shafts in use up to that time.

Instead of having to more forcefully rotate, or release, the hands through impact to help square the clubface as you had to do with the flimsier hickory-shafted clubs, the stiffer steel-shafted clubs allowed him to keep the clubface square to the aiming line a lot longer in the impact zone. Byron accentuated this by driving both legs toward the target on the downswing more than any other top pro at that time. He called this his rocking chair motion, which resulted in a pronounced dip of his head on the downswing and through impact. Its a fact that high speed motion camera studies of his swing confirmed that Byron kept his clubface square to his aiming line longer than any of the top pros of his era, and this is why Bryon hit the ball so consistently straight.

As far as golf instruction goes, there have been countless swing comparisons of the Great Triumvirate of Hogan, Nelson, and Sam Snead as there have likewise been of Nicklaus, Woods, and McIlroy. Golf professionals, instructors, and analysts of all different persuasions dissect the golf swing, trying to define the specifics of why each swing works or doesnt work. This is where many times we tip-hungry golfers get confused, as the conversations become too minutely technical for the golfer to understand and/or perform in the one-plus second it takes to complete a golf swing.

What Brandel describes in this book is what he sees as certain historical, and proven, fundamentals of instruction that in this day and age have been overlooked as the key elements to build a consistent golf swing. Of course any instruction starts with what connects you with the club: ones grip. This is how I start any discussion of the golf swing: by making the observation whether or not the golfers grip is fundamentally soundmeaning, will the hands deliver a square clubface to impact repeatedly under pressure? Brandel describes the grip in terms that should be remembered by all golfers.

The fundamentals of the grip, setup, and swing can never be taken for granted. A case in point was Jack Nicklaus. At the end of his 1979 season, during a rare low point of poor play in his career, he called up his lifelong teacher Jack Grout and said, Lets start off from scratch, starting with the grip and setup, then with the movement of the golf club. Lets first make certain my foundation is solid. This is how the greatest player in the game approached his problematic game... and it worked. Jack won both the U.S. Open and the PGA Championship the following year.

In this book, Brandel, after sorting through todays golf instruction and its many conflicting methodologies, describes what has historically been proven to work in the teaching of golfs fundamentals, and from which we can build a consistent golf swing. May your journey to find your best golf swing stop here.

Tom Watson

I m often asked where I would send my children for a golf lesson if they were just beginning to play. Certainly there are many knowledgeable men and women golf professionals who can set a child on a path to a lifetime of enjoyment playing the game, but when its your own children and their educationbe it in golf or anything elsea parent wants only the best. For colleges, the choice is often Harvard. But where is the Harvard of golf?

While I can point to several teachers who have been very successful at the highest levels and more than a few players who seemed to know what their peers didnt, in their differences, both of ideas and technique, where is the glitter and where is the glue?

Written in 1857, the first book on golf instruction.

From the first instruction book, Henry Brougham Farnies The Golfers Manual (1857), to the last instruction book or article you read, millions of words have been parsed about the little more than a second it takes the average Tour pro to make a swing. And every year new technologies are advanced that allow for a deeper understanding of that fraction of a second when the clubhead meets the ball. Yet there have never been more theories, argument, and debate about the golf swing.

In Bobby Jones on Golf , Jones states that:

In examining and comparing the methods of various players it is always necessary to be aware of the difference between mannerisms and fundamentals.

Very often, it is the players mannerisms or idiosyncrasies that divert our attention from what one great player has in common with another, and to this point Jones continues:

When we set side by side the playing methods of the best golfers, we always find that the basic movements and their orderly sequence are the same within a very narrow range.

This principle is the central theme of this book: There is one best way to learn this game and to play it, and it can be found in the commonalities of the greatest players of all time. These commonalities are the Harvard of golf.

No great player ever swung more upright than Jack Nicklaus or flatter than Ben Hogan, and yet these two players have much in common. Besides their records, both are linked to the ideas of an instructor from the Los Angeles area in the first half of the twentieth century by the name of Alex Morrison.

Perhaps golfs greatest teacher, Alex Morrison.

Morrison was one of the first to use high-speed photographs to analyze golf swings, and according to Grantland Rice, he exerted more influence on the game and the method of playing it than any individual in the memory of man. Morrison was sought after by the Hollywood stars of that era and his prolific thoughts on the swing changed the games of hundreds of thousands of golfers and were advocated by none other than Bobby Jones. And Joness own swing, with only one exception (he didnt kick his right knee in at address), was a perfect distillation of Morrisons thoughts.