The Goofy Game of Golf Searching for the Answer

Because of weather, and visiting grandkids, but mostly the weather, I have not been able to play a new course for the last 2 weeks. Therefore, I thought this would be a good time to write about the search for the answer and some of the things I have looked at over the years. This blog I will cover the garbage. The things not to waste your time on in the golf instruction literature. The first thing to avoid is any of the so called golf methods. These include the square to square method, natural golf, stack and tilt, Jimmy Ballard method, swing the handle and automatic golf just to name a few. I compare method golf to weight loss diets. They help some people but they are not for everyone. The only thing you can say about both things is that who ever invents them, its puts a lot money in their wallet. Its not to say that there are not some good things in these methods but if you follow them to the letter you will always be a frustrated golfer. They always have some tour player that has used or is using the method with great success but more often that not, 5 years or so later, he or she is doing something else. Now lets get to worst instuction book that was ever written and that is The Modern Fundamentals of Golf by Ben Hogan,written in 1955. Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, and Annika Sorenstam, all wrote instruction books that described the way they played golf and were titled accordingly. The idea of these books is to show in detail how these great players go about hitting a golf ball and if the average golfer can apply some of this to their own game, so much the better. If the Ben Hogan book had been titled similiarly, like How I Play Golf by Ben Hogan, then I would have no beef with the book. Ben Hogan was a golfer who was plagued in the early part of his career by a terrible duck hook. So everything he describes in this book concerning golf technique is with the sole purpose of keeping a player from hitting the ball from right to left. The problem is that 90% of all people that have taken up the game are slicing the ball, hitting it from left to right. So if you pick up this book thinking that it is truly the modern fundenmentals of golf,  you won’t last very long playing the game. However if you are troubled by a duck hook then this is the book for you. The problem is the book doesn’t really say this and that is why I think it is the worst book for instuction ever written. Now that we have taken care of the garbage, on the next golf swing blog we will get to what you really have to do to hit the ball reasonalbly well. Hopefully the weather will improve and we can get to course n0. 61 in the next 7 to 10 days.