The
Fundamentals of Hogan
by David Leadbetter
In the late 1950s, the great Ben Hogan consolidated his considerable
knowledge of the golf swing into a small volume called Five Lessons: The
Modern Fundamentals of Golf. Nearly half a century later, it remains the
cornerstone of every intrepid hacker's instructional library, and one of
the bestselling sports books of all time. But there was always something
missing from its pages: photos. As marvelous as artist Anthony Ravielli's
accompanying drawings of Hogan were, they weren't the same as seeing the
Wee Icemon himself in action.
Surprise! Ravielli modeled those drawings on several rolls of film he
took of Hogan, and those photos, recently discovered, are the heart of
The Fundamentals of Hogan. For golfers, they are like finding a piece of
the true cross; there has never been a more perfect swing than Bantam Ben's.
If some of the pictures in Fundamentals are just explanatory poses--Hogan
gripping the club, Hogan standing at address--and the majority of the swing
sequences are actually not true sequences at all but, given the technology
of the time, individually posed photos at appropriate intervals of the
swing, no matter. They convey what they need to, providing a closer glimpse
of the master's mastery.
Swing guru David Leadbetter tees up the accompanying text, analyzing
Hogan's swing, parsing Hogan's swing theories, and adapting what Hogan
knew to fit the rest of us. Leadbetter knows most of us can't possibly
re-create the effortless power of Hogan's fluidity, but that doesn't mean
we
can't incorporate bits of Hogan's technique into our own herky-jerky hacks.
Like Hogan, Leadbetter is obsessed with golf's mechanics, and while Hogan
managed to breeze through Five Lessons with the help of the splendid writer
Herbert Warren Wind, Leadbetter often gets mired in the kinds of technicalities
that lead to the "paralysis by analysis" that plagues over-thinkers when
they step up to the ball. Still, the team of Hogan and Leadbetter makes
a twosome you can't help but learn from if you're willing to pay attention.
--Jeff Silverman - Amazon.com
Hardcover from Doubleday
Book Published: 07 November, 2000
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Ben
Hogan's Five Lessons : The Modern Fundamentals of Golf
by Ben Hogan
Paperback - 127 pages Reprint edition (March 1989)
Simon & Schuster (Paper); ISBN: 0671612972
Ben
Hogan's Power Golf
by Ben Hogan
Paperback Reissue edition (December 1994)
Pocket Books; ISBN: 0671729055
The Tiger Woods Way : An Analysis of Tiger Woods' Power-Swing Technique
John Andrisani; Paperback
Listed under Tiger Woods
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