Why Has Hogan Forum Gone Dead?

Used to be such a great place to discuss the great man's swing and all related stuff. His clothes, his shoes, his clubs, his swing speed, his personality. Everything!

Why has this died? People aren't interested in him or the swing anymore?

Being that it's Christmas how about we start a couple dozen threads about whatever is tickling our pickle with regards to Hogan and his game?

Could be Love for Hogan really is dying!

Don't know but I've tried to sell a couple of Hogan Iron sets and never even got an offer. Hogan was an animal, tactician and all around great player. No one will ever know "his" secret because it was unique to him. His swing will never be replicated because it was a result of his physical being and feel. There was only 1 Hogan swing and it occurred at the end of Ben Hogan's hands.

Merry Christmas!

Reasons are pretty obvious Tembolo.
- We are not allowed to fight anymore.
- We are not allowed to go off-topic into the darkside.
- Not enough Tylerdurdens are having epiphanies.
- Most people give up trying to be Hogan because its so frustrating.
- BHSP's progress is so slow I want to spank him.

My own opinion is that interest has been lost because too many so-called instructors are always referencing Hogan saying he did this and did that and the student becomes lost in the mis-information and thinks its too hard.
Also, new shiny toys with seductive promises are always far more attractive than building your billy cart in a reliable old-fashioned way. I actually think he told us everything and showed us quite clearly how to do it, but we insist on misinterpreting it.

Learning is a funny process. The main impediment to real learning and understanding true knowledge are the individual and collective unconscious pre-conceptions (habits of mind). So any attempt to understand something new is always filtered through and coloured by the existing beliefs which we are hardly aware of.

Most of us struggling golfers, I think, have the desire to discover or be told the THING that will solve all our problems and make us good. That's why the Arm Swing Illusion thread became so popular and things like straight right arm take-away beome flavour of the month, the poor student starts blending all this conflicting information into a swing resembling a squashed pavlova.
Another reason is that no instructor I have ever read or seen in person understands, let alone can teach, Hogan's swing.
The young pro at my club told me he tried a one-plane swing method and got all the right positions but couldn't hit the ball successfully so he gave it away and went back to a more "traditional" swinging arms swing, so that's the only thing he knows and that's the only thing he will teach.
So very few people are trying to learn the Hogan swing.
The Taylor Made company understood the average golfer's psychology very early and made themselves very successful. New is always better, scientific advances can compensate for my imperfections, stuff like that.

So, its up to you and me and Tylerdurden and BHSP to find the damn thing quick and then make a new thread titled "From a hacking 12 handicap to +2 in 6 months - I discovered how to do Hogan's swing".
Remember that song "I've been everywhere man, I've been everywhere..", that's me and my golf swing search.
But I always return to Gloria Gaynor singing "Get right back to where you started from" as the truth of the golf swing.

Anyhow here are a few thoughts about Hogan's teaching from practice last night.
- The utter complete importance of the right elbow not moving at all as the backswing starts and feels like it stays there for the whole backswing and forward swing to impact.
When i had my BSE (Best Swing Ever) at the Greenway driving range in Pattaya,Thailand, 2 years ago for about 1 hour, it had a lot to do with this, I said to a friend there and then "that's my golf swing for the rest of my life", but i failed to understand what I was doing and promptly lost it never to find it again.

It is actually a hard thing to do because of the impulse that says Hit Ball Far Move Arms Far. We all know the importance of the right elbow being down on the right hip at impact, so why the hell do we take it away from there when its so damn difficult to get it back there. Getting it back there is the one thing everyone struggles to do, clever people like Byron Nelson,Furyk, Trevino, Garcia, McIlroy etc. found their own way of doing it, grunts like Hogan and Snead decided it was best just to leave it there all the time and not make a problem when you don't need one.

Hogan theory question for youse all.
In the Power Golf photos he shows the right arm set under the left with elbow bend so a shaft can be inserted above the right elbow and through under the left arm, then in 5 lessons and all the swings we see the right arm is set almost above the left arm at address.
Why did he change this idea?

Have you given thought for a minute that the Hogan threads , thoughts and quiries have been beat to death over the past few years ?? it's a swing next to impossible for most to re-create ,there are a
lot of more serious Hogan swing posters think they have the ulitimate answer when it comes to his swing and get truly pissed and offended if told otherwise ...... and there were some here who no longer post here because they were bashed for their opinions and just got sick of it and probably wont come back........and is his swing truly the best ever and the ultimate in swing thought theories ... some might differ in their opinions .... and maybe just maybe not everything lasts forever

Maybe people are starting to wake up and smell the coffee. To think that Hogan had some sort of mystical "secret" in his swing that made him better than anyone else is absurd enough, but to think that this secret can be passed on and can transform a hacker into an elite ball striker is illogical. Hogan hit more balls than any golfer in history. No secret to his success, just plain old hard work and dedication and perseverance til he found a way to control his ball. There are countless different ways to effectively swing a golf club, how come other great ball strikers like Trevino and Snead didn't have a "secret". Hogan just happened to be the best ball striker in history, so therefore he must have had some secret move that nobody else did right, how else could he possibly have been better? Surely not from natural ability and working harder than everybody else.
I wonder if boxing coaches pontificate over Alis secret move, or if hockey players pore over videos of Gretsky to fiind his secret? Getting the picture of how idiculous this whole concept is.

One would think that with the large amount of videos of his swing, in real time and even slowed down by Ben himself, coupled with his books and his own explanation of the swing, the swing will be thoroughly understood by now.

Yet the key insight remains elusive.

But the result (by Ben) is clear.

His genius and his legacy cannot be overstated. I am in awe.

[quote name='lee36328' timestamp='1387944528' post='8345925']
One would think that with the large amount of videos of his swing, in real time and even slowed down by Ben himself, coupled with his books and his own explanation of the swing, the swing will be thoroughly understood by now.

Yet the key insight remains elusive.

But the result (by Ben) is clear.

His genius and his legacy cannot be overstated. I am in awe.
[/quote]
Thre is an old video where he comes right out and says what he thinks is the most important part of the swing, "the movement of the lower body fom the top of the swing". Straight from the horses mouth, I don't think he could have mad it any plainer than that. I thjnk he was just messing wih us when he said he had a secret.

I believe my avatar is that very swing where he demonstrates that lower body move!

Hogan seeking is far from dead. I probably think about it more now than I did when I used to post here. But as mentioned above, a lot of the stuff has already been discussed. So for guys who have been around here for a while, they aren't going to hear anything new (or it's very rare). It's kind of natural. Look at guys who used to be super active and knowledgable. Both teachers and students in no particular order. Hoganfan, lake, sf, iteach, lefthook, 8i, DanaD (not that they all agreed but reading their debates is pretty damn informative). And you have a much longer list of guys that were somewhere between super confused (me lol) and somewhat confused but still knew enough to be dangerous (most likely to themselves and others).

Over time, the guys that get it become less active IMO because it's like a phd trying to teach a toddler basic science or whatever. Most these guys probably want to be helpful but after a while it's not that interesting. And the teachers have better things to do (students and earn a living).

I know I'm less active because I feel like most of it's been covered. Im comfortable with my understanding of hogan at this point (iteach really helped me the most here and sf was also very helpful along with some of the stuff I've read here). Not saying I have it figured out and not saying I get it 100%. But I also know I've made huge progress and at this point I feel like most of the work for me isn't on the boards but on the range. I needed to be here before and talk to teachers because I didn't have a clue what I was trying to do on the range. Now I know a lot of what I need to do and through what I've learned I'm confident I know the right guy that I need to reach out to if I start getting mixed up again (iteach).

And debates like hogan not rotating is forearms (which I was silly enough to be on the other side of initially) are just boring at this point.

In terms of it not being beneficial to add hogan to the swing, I personally think that's partly true and partly false.

It's true in the respect that a very small percentage of teachers actually get hogan IMO. So students might go to the wrong teachers and mess themselves up. More likely, they will watch hogans swing and have no idea what they are looking at. But they will try to incorporate some "hogan" into their swing and in all honesty they will be working in something that hogan didn't even do. I did this for like 2 years and hit it miles right and snappers as a result. I tried to hold everything off and pull the handle cause I thought that's what his release was. And to a novice that's what it looks like. So yes if that's how you're trying to chase hogan, good luck, you'll need it ( and for slicefixer guys, this is not a dig at you all. I still consider myself a slice guy in many ways and I don't believe Geoff believes in pulling the handle and holding anything off. But I don't think some of the golfwrx crowd that follows his stuff has mis interpreted his message. I'm sure Geoff gets it and he did help me but if you fall into the boat that is just reading his old posts and doesn't understand stuff very well like I didn't, then it helps to get some context from the man himself).

So chasing hogan can mess you up the wrong way but the right way it can be super beneficial IMO. I personally think it's helped me tremendously at this point and I expect it to pay dividends over the next few decades. But that's how I always looked at it. I was willing to can quite a few seasons. Most aren't. But please don't insist it can't be done. It can, if your saying it can't it just means you can't. And you can't because you chose not to or physically it doesn't work for your build. I know I will continue to pursue hogan (not copy him exactly but steal plenty from him and be a beast and hit the ball amazingly well). Maybe I'm foolish for that believe but in some ways it could be like guy pierce at the end of momento.

Peace out and merry Christmas.

Nice to have you back Tyler!

Because dissent is an integral part of progress.

I've been around for several years and a lot has changed. The Hogan subforum didn't exist and arguments about Mr. Hogan would seem to overtake general discussions. The subforum worked for a while but arguments still got too heated. A lot of people have been banned or left. However, out of some of the worst arguing came some of the best ideas about Mr. Hogan. I think we need an area set aside where its understood to be a "gloves off" arena. You enter that area at your own risk of getting offended and the like.

Agree with that Bogey.

[quote name='Pinsplitter59' timestamp='1387927263' post='8345277']
Reasons are pretty obvious Tembolo.
- We are not allowed to fight anymore.
- We are not allowed to go off-topic into the darkside.
- Not enough Tylerdurdens are having epiphanies.
- Most people give up trying to be Hogan because its so frustrating.
- BHSP's progress is so slow I want to spank him.

[/quote]

Lol. Don't spank me just yet! I'm still at it. Swing has progressed nicely! Its looking more and more like i want it to. I can strike the ball consistently and confidently with these persimmons and razor blades. I just haven't been in any forums for the past few months. Really focused on swing training. Will get some vids up soon.

[quote name='Ben Hogan Swing Project' timestamp='1388066058' post='8349479']
[quote name='Pinsplitter59' timestamp='1387927263' post='8345277']
Reasons are pretty obvious Tembolo.
- We are not allowed to fight anymore.
- We are not allowed to go off-topic into the darkside.
- Not enough Tylerdurdens are having epiphanies.
- Most people give up trying to be Hogan because its so frustrating.
- BHSP's progress is so slow I want to spank him.

[/quote]

Lol. Don't spank me just yet! I'm still at it. Swing has progressed nicely! Its looking more and more like i want it to. I can strike the ball consistently and confidently with these persimmons and razor blades. I just haven't been in any forums for the past few months. Really focused on swing training. Will get some vids up soon.
[/quote]

Just get your wife's permission first before you get spanked please.

[quote name='Pinsplitter59' timestamp='1387927263' post='8345277']
Reasons are pretty obvious Tembolo.
- We are not allowed to fight anymore.
- We are not allowed to go off-topic into the darkside.
- Not enough Tylerdurdens are having epiphanies.
- Most people give up trying to be Hogan because its so frustrating.
- BHSP's progress is so slow I want to spank him.

My own opinion is that interest has been lost because too many so-called instructors are always referencing Hogan saying he did this and did that and the student becomes lost in the mis-information and thinks its too hard.
Also, new shiny toys with seductive promises are always far more attractive than building your billy cart in a reliable old-fashioned way. I actually think he told us everything and showed us quite clearly how to do it, but we insist on misinterpreting it.

Learning is a funny process. The main impediment to real learning and understanding true knowledge are the individual and collective unconscious pre-conceptions (habits of mind). So any attempt to understand something new is always filtered through and coloured by the existing beliefs which we are hardly aware of.

Most of us struggling golfers, I think, have the desire to discover or be told the THING that will solve all our problems and make us good. That's why the Arm Swing Illusion thread became so popular and things like straight right arm take-away beome flavour of the month, the poor student starts blending all this conflicting information into a swing resembling a squashed pavlova.
Another reason is that no instructor I have ever read or seen in person understands, let alone can teach, Hogan's swing.
The young pro at my club told me he tried a one-plane swing method and got all the right positions but couldn't hit the ball successfully so he gave it away and went back to a more "traditional" swinging arms swing, so that's the only thing he knows and that's the only thing he will teach.
So very few people are trying to learn the Hogan swing.
The Taylor Made company understood the average golfer's psychology very early and made themselves very successful. New is always better, scientific advances can compensate for my imperfections, stuff like that.

So, its up to you and me and Tylerdurden and BHSP to find the damn thing quick and then make a new thread titled "From a hacking 12 handicap to +2 in 6 months - I discovered how to do Hogan's swing".
Remember that song "I've been everywhere man, I've been everywhere..", that's me and my golf swing search.
But I always return to Gloria Gaynor singing "Get right back to where you started from" as the truth of the golf swing.

Anyhow here are a few thoughts about Hogan's teaching from practice last night.
- The utter complete importance of the right elbow not moving at all as the backswing starts and feels like it stays there for the whole backswing and forward swing to impact.
When i had my BSE (Best Swing Ever) at the Greenway driving range in Pattaya,Thailand, 2 years ago for about 1 hour, it had a lot to do with this, I said to a friend there and then "that's my golf swing for the rest of my life", but i failed to understand what I was doing and promptly lost it never to find it again.

It is actually a hard thing to do because of the impulse that says Hit Ball Far Move Arms Far. We all know the importance of the right elbow being down on the right hip at impact, so why the hell do we take it away from there when its so damn difficult to get it back there. Getting it back there is the one thing everyone struggles to do, clever people like Byron Nelson,Furyk, Trevino, Garcia, McIlroy etc. found their own way of doing it, grunts like Hogan and Snead decided it was best just to leave it there all the time and not make a problem when you don't need one.

Hogan theory question for youse all.
In the Power Golf photos he shows the right arm set under the left with elbow bend so a shaft can be inserted above the right elbow and through under the left arm, then in 5 lessons and all the swings we see the right arm is set almost above the left arm at address.
Why did he change this idea?
[/quote]


Great post sir! You have my permission to give BHSP a healthy spank.

Hey guys,

Hope everyone is doing well. Haven't been on the site in months but thought I'd pop in, say "hi" and see what's up. As far as this topic, I think Pinsplitter has covered it pretty well. As far as his Hogan question and the arm placement. Hogan changed it because what he showed in Power Golf I think would make a lot of folks hook machines. Perusing the threads, I see not much has changed here. Same old arguments, just new names!

I don't plan to spend much time here as my journey has deviated onto a new one. My interest in golf began to wane as I got into another pastime - rifle marksmanship. This was my first year in about 10, that I didn't have a golf range membership and I barely practiced after mid June. I still played once a week in my golf league and about 18 holes every other week and my scores didn't suffer too much to my surprise.

Anyway, I finally found something that I'm really good at, much better than golf, considering what a newb I am at it (didn't own any kind of firearm until 2 years ago). I now am doing volunteer instructor work for the RWVA, which runs weekend clinics known as Project Appleseed. If you own a rifle and you want to get really good with it, google it.

If things go well for me in the next 3 months I may make it down to the Masters this year on my way back from a rifleman's boot camp in NC. We'll see.

Enjoy the Hogan quest!

[quote name='playa' timestamp='1387943722' post='8345891']
Maybe people are starting to wake up and smell the coffee. To think that Hogan had some sort of mystical "secret" in his swing that made him better than anyone else is absurd enough, but to think that this secret can be passed on and can transform a hacker into an elite ball striker is illogical. Hogan hit more balls than any golfer in history. No secret to his success, just plain old hard work and dedication and perseverance til he found a way to control his ball. There are countless different ways to effectively swing a golf club, how come other great ball strikers like Trevino and Snead didn't have a "secret". Hogan just happened to be the best ball striker in history, so therefore he must have had some secret move that nobody else did right, how else could he possibly have been better? Surely not from natural ability and working harder than everybody else.
I wonder if boxing coaches pontificate over Alis secret move, or if hockey players pore over videos of Gretsky to fiind his secret? Getting the picture of how idiculous this whole concept is.
[/quote]

That is all well and good but the man said he had a secret - and this was after he had already put his money where his mouth was. The changes in his game were astounding and cannot be ignored.

I think this place died out b/c of the zero tolerance rule. After that this place sucked. Also, many of the topics have been covered.

We should be able to show things more clearly now since we understand more about cause and effect.

So hogan did X because of where he was before...and it led him to then do Y as a result.

Hope we can have more topics like this soon.

[quote name='Pinsplitter59' timestamp='1387927263' post='8345277']

- BHSP's progress is so slow I want to spank him.

[/quote]

so is his swing, sorry you set that one up.

Ben Hogan Swing Project how IS the ball flight anyway?

The reasons are locked and pinned.

I think forcing people to have 75 posts isn't a bad thing. Also I doubt if they were civil and no name calling or wasteful/pointless posts like Cary Schoen's then they can be as argumentative as we wanted. Really don't know why we can't start up some of these threads again. Instead of calling the guy an MF just call him a silly goose instead or something. It's just theory after all....unless you have some physical proof that shows why something must be this way.

There are more 'serious' Hogan forums elsewhere. Also, people just came here to troll and dink around. That's what I gather, at least.

What are some of those more serious threads k001k47?

[quote name='playa' timestamp='1387943722' post='8345891']
Maybe people are starting to wake up and smell the coffee. To think that Hogan had some sort of mystical "secret" in his swing that made him better than anyone else is absurd enough, but to think that this secret can be passed on and can transform a hacker into an elite ball striker is illogical. Hogan hit more balls than any golfer in history. No secret to his success, just plain old hard work and dedication and perseverance til he found a way to control his ball. There are countless different ways to effectively swing a golf club, how come other great ball strikers like Trevino and Snead didn't have a "secret". Hogan just happened to be the best ball striker in history, so therefore he must have had some secret move that nobody else did right, how else could he possibly have been better? Surely not from natural ability and working harder than everybody else.
I wonder if boxing coaches pontificate over Alis secret move, or if hockey players pore over videos of Gretsky to fiind his secret? Getting the picture of how idiculous this whole concept is.
[/quote]

I agree with what you say to a large extent. Analysis of Hogan's swing is of course incredibly interesting. A pivot controlled swing that delivered such consistency, accuracy and power deserves all the praise and study that it gets. The issue of discovering the "secret" on the other hand is worthy of the disinterest that it is starting to garner, though the mystique is very alluring. IMO what amateurs such as myself should take from Hogan, and many others, is how to make our hands passive from the top of the backswing (and in my case even before), a functioning pivot, staying connected hip to hip, and a proper balanced setup and use of ground pressures.

For the sake of re-lighting the old fires, IMO it boils down to a simple recipe for Hogan and it alludes to what you were saying. Before his light bulb moment he use to hook the ball off the planet. Afterwords he didn't go left unless he wanted to. Below is a "pre-secret" swing and also a later one, and I believe this should be the only analysis that matters:

[sup][media=]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oURjm5XeNm0[/media][/sup]

[sup][media=]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPGScwRJyWU[/media][/sup]

The things in his young swing that to me are clearly different:

- The stance is wider
- The right foot is open at set-up
- The hands flip and turnover aggressively thru and post impact
- The pivot stalls (and right knee doesn't aggressively chase the left)
- The right hip doesn't drive through the impact zone and remain connected to the right arm

So for me Hogan clearly tightened his set-up and improved his ground pressures, tidied up and prioritised his pivot, strengthened his connection between hips and arms, and passified his right hand. I'll let others judge whether one "secret" can achieve all that, but if the secret can be labelled something he stopped doing...... its that he stopped getting so deep in in backswing and flipping the club through impact.

^
I don't know how... but would be interesting if someone could size and ghost image the early swings over the "post secret" swings.

Yall need to read the Life mag article for the first time go to the third page down where he talks about rolling his hands and how he could not wait to get to the course he did this in one night not out of the dirt
or google www.militarygolfcourseguide.com
and click on download free vintage golf publications