Flag Hunters Golf Podcast
Hello and welcome to Flaghunters ! It is a privilege to bring to you this powerful insight into playing better Golf. In all my years of being in the game of Golf from competing at a high amateur level, to caddying, teaching, and being a overall Golf geek, I have an insatiable, curiosity driven desire to get down to the bottom of what it takes to truly get better playing the game of Golf that we all unconditionally love. This has been one of the greatest journeys of my life and I am deeply grateful for all that Golf has given me. Thank you for joining me in this incredible journey. This is my ever evolving love letter to Golf. Jesse Perryman P.S. Please Rate, Review and Subscribe !
Flag Hunters Golf Podcast
What If Everything You Know About Hogan Is Wrong?
John Erickson, father of Advanced Ball Striking, reveals how he cracked the Hogan code by examining the science behind Ben Hogan's legendary ball striking technique.
• Heavy club heads (around 16 ounces compared to modern 10-11 ounce drivers) helped Hogan generate power through body rotation rather than arm speed
• Flat lie angles (6-8 degrees flatter than standard) provided greater accuracy by reducing the possibility of left misses
• "Tripping the shaft" at transition creates the distinctive flattening move that allowed Hogan to approach the ball from inside
• Weight remains on the right foot longer than commonly taught, with a powerful push-off similar to a baseball pitcher
• Hogan stayed "closed" much longer in the downswing, maintaining shoulder and hip alignment until deeper in the downswing
• The distinction between a "hitter's release" (maintaining shaft flex through impact) versus a "swinger's release" (timing the straightening of the shaft)
• Cupped wrist at the top opens the clubface, allowing aggressive rotation through impact without fear of hooking
• Proper sequencing involves lateral movement first, then rotation, contrary to modern teaching about early hip rotation
For more information or to learn the Hogan modules, visit advancedballstriking.com or join the forum at forum.advancedballstriking.com.
Hello, this is Jesse Perriman from the Flag Hunters Golf Podcast, welcoming you to another edition of Mr John Erickson, father of advanced ball striking, partnered with Bradley Hughes and teaching many people how to play this game extraordinarily well. How to play this game extraordinarily well. But before Justin Tang and I get into the main body of the pod, I've got an announcement I really want to share my friend, greg Olson, greg Olson Greg Olson, stoneware. First of all, greg Olson is a very good senior player, excellent senior player, great golf swing. What he does professionally is he is a potter and he made me and my wife a couple of coffee mugs that were just out of this world. So I want to really shout out Greg for this incredible gift and share with the listener. If anybody needs to get any customized stoneware done, his name is Greg Olson. His number is area code 530-623-4718. His email is gsolsongolson74 at gmailcom. Gsolson74 at gmailcom. So, greg, thank you for the incredible gift and give Greg a shout. If you need any special stoneware, pottery, killer stuff, he's got it. He does it with his bare hands and that's the best. So, without further ado, quickly running through this intro John Erickson is the most influential person I've ever met in the game of golf, at least from my perspective.
Speaker 1:His ideology, methodology and thoughts have shaped me into the player I am today and also has exponentiated the curiosity that I have to ask all great instructors that come on. Both Justin and I are deeply influenced by John and I'm not going to say this lightly, but I am going to say it and that is John has cracked the Hogan code. He has figured out how Ben Hogan swung the golf club, the dynamics behind it, the pressures behind it, the ideology behind it, everything behind it. John, being one of the smartest people I've ever met and one of the most deepest, most conscious human beings I've ever met, has figured it out and his words will ring out in this episode. This episode is for those who are Hogan aficionados. You know we're not here to demonize or glorify any other way other than this was the way Hogan swung the golf club and since I have been doing the Hogan modules, which will be explained in the main body of the pod, my game has improved exponentially. My ball striking has gotten better and my level of thinking out there has gotten better. To quote John, john Erickson once said he thinks the best mental game is great technique, and I believe that he is 100% right, although great mental games definitely need to be trained, but your whole physiology will relax on the golf course if you know that your technique is sound. I've experienced that as well as many others. So, without further ado, we welcome John Erickson, father of Advanced Ball Striking, advancedballstrikingcom, and, again, my podcast partner is Justin Tang out of the Tanamera Golf Club, and this is a special one, folks. This week and the following week we're also going to have John with a fellow student of the Hogan Modules under the ABS Advanced Brawl Striking Umbrella. So cheers everyone, have a great week. Listen to this more than once. It's a fruitful conversation. Cheers everyone.
Speaker 1:This is Jesse Perryman from the Black Hunters Golf Podcast, welcoming you to a very special edition, one that we've been thinking about discussing for an awfully long time. Again, I want to welcome my partner, my friend, my confidant commiserator, even though he's all the way in Singapore. His name is Justin Tang, if you're a first-time listener. He is one of the lead instructors at the Tanimera Golf Club and that's in Singapore. And we have my friend, very special, special to me in my life. His name is John Erickson.
Speaker 1:For you advanced ball striking students out there and Bradley Hughes students. You know John well. His contribution to the game has been significant for me. He's been my deepest, greatest influence in this game, along with Brad Hughes and Billy McKinney and several others. Without these gentlemen, we wouldn't be here, we wouldn't be having this podcast and bringing you the special information.
Speaker 1:So we're going to get into John's findings. If you haven't already known, or if you don't follow Advanced Ball Striking or John's YouTube channel, he has cracked the code with Hogan, and I don't say this lightly, I say this with full honesty and 100% confidence and belief. I too have always been a Hogan fan, as well as probably you, the listener. I too have always been a Hogan fan, as well as probably you, the listener, looking at him as the Zeus, this deity of swinging a golf club and hitting a golf ball. And, aside from being human, he got pretty close to deifying his status, at least for a short time. But, gents, pardon the long interview or at least the long intro. I'm so happy to be having this conversation so welcome once again.
Speaker 2:All right, it's good to be back.
Speaker 3:Welcome on, john. It's been a while yeah it's been a while.
Speaker 2:So just to whet the listener's appetite what are the benefits of the Hogan module to the practitioner? What are the benefits? Well, what are the benefits? I wouldn't even know where to start with that. Certainly anyone that's seeking to really master the art of striking a golf ball. I would say it makes sense to start looking at other people that have done this, like Ben Hogan, mo Norman, you know, george Knutson, would you know? Those are Lee Trevino guys that would quickly come to my mind as masterful ball strikers and I think if you ask those guys they would all point to Hogan. So I would say that the advantage would be to study the greatest ball striker of all time and try and assimilate some of those concepts into your own golf swing. That should help your ball striking a lot.
Speaker 3:So how long did it take you to discover Hogan's secret?
Speaker 2:You mean Hogan's 38 secrets? Because do you want to hear them?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's the whole idea of this special edition.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So the idea of Hogan's secret is completely absurd, that there would just be one secret, because if you do one thing in the golf swing, there's going to be something else that's going to counter that. So if someone said the secret is to swing flat, you know, and quick on your swing flat, for instance, well, if you swing flat, you're going to have to change something else. In other words, you're going to have to come through flat and you're going to have to finish flat on the other side, right. So you can't possibly just be one thing. One thing, you know, if, if it's the cupped left wrist that opens the club face, so you're gonna have to do something to square up the club face, I mean, it's at least two things. Right, there's gonna be at least two things. Um, what is hogan's secret? It's just so. It's a silly thing. It's not not a there's no secret, it's. It's many, many things. It's a package deal. You can't just do one thing. It certainly is not.
Speaker 2:His two books that he wrote is you know they're? They're interesting books. There's some gold nuggets in there, for sure. But look at all the people, the thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people that have read those books and nobody's coming out the other side swinging like Ben Hogan. So you've got to look at his golf swing and say you know what's going on here.
Speaker 2:And my thought was to try and reverse engineer it and start by looking at what is the club shaft doing, what is the club head doing and what is the club face doing? Okay, if you start there, then you could say, okay, well, what would the body have to do, what would the arms have to do? What would the hands have to do? How would the club have to be designed to facilitate those things? The club have to be designed to facilitate those things. So that's kind of where it started for me, once I decided to really try and take a deep dive into it and it's been about 10 years, I'd say that I've been, you know, really focusing on this.
Speaker 2:His swing is quite mysterious. You know, really focusing on this, his swing is quite mysterious. You know, to a novice golfer or even a novice teaching professional. People don't really understand what's going on. I have to admit, I didn't understand either. Until probably maybe three or four years ago I started to feel like I understood enough about it to where I was confident that I could teach it. But I think to teach it you have to be able to demonstrate the core principles of what's going on.
Speaker 2:So I would say the first thing if you look at the shaft, what is the shaft doing? Well, hogan takes the inside route going back. He doesn't take it outside like Lee Trevino, he doesn't take it upright like Jack Nicklaus. The shaft comes inside pretty quick. And Mo Norman did that and George Knutsen did that. They both took the inside route. The hands set the shaft fairly early, not right off the ball. There's a little lagging away from it, kind of like what was taught in the golfing machine a little bit right off the initial takeaway. But then the wrists cocked the club shaft up pretty quick. It's coming to the inside. He gets to the top. His left arm never gets above his shoulder line, ever. I mean, show me one picture where Hogan's got his left arm up above his shoulder line.
Speaker 3:I've never seen it, perhaps pre-accident, I would imagine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, maybe I don't know. Even then I've never seen it up above his shoulder line, but it's pretty flat going back. So what most people do when they take the club back to the inside is they cross it over at the top. You take it on the inside, it crosses over. Or you take it on the inside and it crosses over, or you take it on the inside and you come over the top. You know there's kind of a opposite reaction, but Hogan's shaft didn't do that and so Hogan took it back to the inside and when he got to the top his shaft flattened further. As he went through transition and initiated his down sort, the shaft flattened. Now that's a mysterious move for people because if most people take it inside, the shaft doesn't flatten. It doesn't do that. So you know what is happening there. That's a big mystery.
Speaker 2:Then on the downswing, that shaft is coming down and it's very much coming from the inside. It's not coming over the top and his hands come very close to his right thigh as he's coming into impact. You see, his hands are very close to his right thigh. Now if he's coming over the top, his hands would not be near his right thigh. If they're coming over the top. They're going to be away from that. It's coming down steep. So again, I'm just talking about the shaft. I'm not talking about the club head. I'm not talking about the club face, I'm just talking about the shaft. I'm not talking about the club head. I'm not talking about the club face. I'm just looking at the shaft. Now, as he comes down into impact, his shaft comes into the ball very flat. Okay, now we're almost talking equipment, because hogan had very flat line goals.
Speaker 3:How flat For the benefit of our listeners.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know exactly, but I'm guessing they are close to between six and eight degrees flat of what was the old standard.
Speaker 3:And was that by design, or was that what's available back then?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, it's a little of both, I would say. I've got some old Persimmon drivers from the 1940s, like some Wilson drivers from the 1940s, that stock Okay, these haven't been altered, these are just stock. They're sitting at 48 degree lie angles okay. So hogan would have had access to clubs that were much flatter than anybody's swinging today. Like I don't even know what the modern drivers are today. I think they're very upright, probably over 60 degrees, maybe even more. So the shaft is coming in flat and Hogan's shaft actually comes in a little flatter than it was at address. So that's not a big deal. You could have your hands up a little bit at address to maybe get a little bit more extension, but his hands actually come in lower Now. Now there's no handle. Raising going on. His hands aren't coming in higher than they were at address. And I'm not even concerned about address. I'm really only concerned about what's happening from the parallel before an impact to the parallel after impact.
Speaker 2:In advanced ball striking we would call that P3, parallel 3 to parallel 4. First parallel would be shaft on the backswing, number 2. Parallel, we'll just say that top of the swing 3. The parallel before impact, parallel 4 after impact. So if I use those terms. During this, that's what I'm talking about P3 to P4. During this, that's what I'm talking about P3 to P4.
Speaker 2:After impact, from a down the line view, hogan's shaft goes hard left, goes right, he just disappears quickly around his body and from a caddy view you'd see a big extension of the shaft. You don't see the shaft flipping up. The wrist is breaking down. You see that shaft very in line with his left arm. You know, if you're looking at it from the front view, from a caddy view, that shaft is very extended, going all the way up to where it would be skyward before it's finished a lot like Mo Norman would finish, and then he does a little swivel at the end. So a lot of people will look at that and they'll say, okay, I want to have that look, but they don't have the dynamic that supports it. So you can throw the right arm at it going through the strike, straighten your right arm out to try and close the club face and get that big extended look with a swingers release. But that's not what hogan did. His hands are going left quickly, club shaft is low, flat and the club face is staying square to his shoulder rotation, or, you know, as lee trevino would say, looking at the target, it's looking at the target a lot longer than anybody else. For the hands to cut low, left and around and that shaft to have full extension up into the finish, the only way to do that is through post impact, pivot thrust, we'll just call it torso and shoulder rotation dynamics. That left shoulder is moving fast, okay, really fast.
Speaker 2:So you know, I can swing a golf club and people will say, oh, it looks really a lot like hogan, you know, coming down and you're lagging the club a whole bunch and moving laterally and doing all this and yeah, it all looks pretty good. But you know my train's gonna wreck a little bit when I get into p4 to the finish. That's's where Hogan's going to just do circles around me. So I'm not even really in the conversation there. I mean, you know I'm a pretty good ball striker, but you know there's a difference and I understand, when I see that, what that difference is.
Speaker 2:So so that's the shaft. So if you look at the shaft then you would say, okay, comes to the inside, goes to the top, flattens out, hits the 430 line, stays low through the strike, flat line angles, cuts low, left and around post impact. And then one other thing from a down the line view, you'll never see Hogan's shaft go flatter than the plane. It'll never flip left and be flat, it'll actually steepen so as his hands move around. That shaft is low and left but is because his hands are accelerating, the left shoulder is accelerating, staying ahead of the arm, staying ahead of his hands, and he's pressuring that shaft. That actually steepens the shaft, even though the club is going around to the left. It actually steepens it because of acceleration of the left shoulder and the torso, hips and all that. So so that's, that's the shaft. So you know, I'm looking at that and I'm saying, okay, this is different. The backswing looks different than most players Not all players, but most guys don't take it way inside like that and at the top of his backswing it's very flat relative to other people. I mean, it's very flat compared to Jack Nicholas or Johnny Miller or other great players. It's very flat. And then that shaft flattens out more and it comes down and his hands are very close to his right thigh. His hands are low, going through the strike. So, given that, okay, that's the first thing I would, I would say to look at, then you know you can talk about the club head and what that's doing. Well, the club head was very heavy.
Speaker 2:Okay now, I knew mo norman well, I knew him personally and Mo is considered one of the great ball strikers of all time and I agree with that, and he held Hogan in great reverence. Mo swung a 16-ounce Persimmon driver, a one-pound club. Okay, a one-pound Persimmon driver. He told me that Hogan's driver was 16 ounces. He told me that Knudsen's driver was 16 ounces. He told me that newton's driver was 16 ounces. Now, these are heavy clubs. Okay now, I'm aware that in hogan's book in 1948 power golf, I think he said his driver was 14 ounces or 14 and a half. Now, that may have been true at the time, but you know, people change their clubs over time, so I don't know the exact dead weight of his club in 1950 or 53 or 55 or 64 or when we did the shells match or whatever. But I don't think mo was lying to me and mo would have known mo was such a golf fanatic, he would know exactly how many grooves are in each club of Hogan's or whatever. I mean, you know, his golf knowledge was just off the charts and Mo didn't have any trouble swinging a 16-ounce driver.
Speaker 2:So just to give you an idea, most people are concerned about grams. You know like, oh, my shaft is you. You know 72 grams or 68 grams or 120 grams or whatever. We're talking about the, you know, modern driver at around 10, 11 ounces and you're talking 16 ounces. You're talking about a, the dead weight of a club over a third of a pound heavier than what people are swinging now. I mean, just think about that, a third of a pound heavier than what people are swinging now. I mean, just think about that, a third of a pound. I mean we're not talking three ounces, we're talking a third of a pound, right? So this is a different approach to hitting a golf ball with heavier gear, heavier clubs.
Speaker 2:I have a lot gear, heavier clubs. I have a lot of the older clubs. I've got a rack just hundreds of sets on there. I've got stuff from the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. Mostly the stock clubs were heavier in the 1950s they were typically about a half ounce to an ounce heavier than the 1960s. Now that could be due to the shafts, the head designs, whatever. And then the 1960s clubs are typically a little heavier than the 1970s and then the 70s a little heavier than the 1980s, so things have got lighter over time.
Speaker 2:However, you've got three of the greatest ball strikers players say hogan byron, nelson, sam sneed right coming out of that era of heavier clubs. Now in the 30s clubs were lighter. They were actually lighter than they were in the 50s, and in the 40s they were a bit lighter too than the 50s. The 50s is when stock clubs were the heaviest. The 40s are heavier than the 60s, but the 30s a lot of the stuff is pretty light. They were experimenting with light clubs back in the 30s. A lot of the stuff is pretty light. They were experimenting with light clubs back in the 30s. So if you think about that of the 1950s clubs, I mean who came out of that era? You know you've got a lot of great players. I just mentioned a few. And then who were the junior golfers growing up in the 1950s? You had Nicholas Palmer, gary Player you know I could go on and on Mo, of course, and George Mutes, and they were junior players, so they were probably learning on gear that was a lot heavier, certainly way heavier than what's going on now.
Speaker 2:Now if you swing something that's heavier and you're hitting hundreds of golf balls a day, thousands of golf balls a week. You're going to get stronger, swinging a heavier club, it's, it's. You could go out on a construction site and look at a guy that's been swinging a you know a big hammer in his in his arm, and you'll see a big popeye forum on there from years and years of you know swinging a hammer, right, as compared to some guys you know swinging a drywall hammer or something you know a little small light hammer. I mean it changes your body, right. So these are just some things to think about and to ponder. Mo was very, very strong swinging a 16-ounce Persimmon driver.
Speaker 2:So in this conversation and the Hogan modules, I'm just talking about Hogan, right, we're not talking about. This isn't a conversation about the modern gear. It's not a conversation about Rory McIlroy or what's going on today or whatever. We're just talking about Hogan, greatest ball striker. What did he do? I think you've got to look at his equipment, how it was set up and how would that golf swing evolve out of the kind of equipment he was using? You know there's there's just so much here to to to talk about. I mean this conversation could go so many directions into Hogan's gear versus custom club fitting. You know, did Hogan? Was his gear just set up because of his body, like he was maybe five, seven, five, eight, not real tall swung flat clubs, you know that sort of thing. Ball swung flat clubs, you know that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:I did a myth buster video a couple months ago where I stood on a platform and made myself I think I was six foot eight and I hit a one iron that was set up at 52 degrees, so about six degrees flat, and I can absolutely just flush it All right. So I just lower my center of gravity down, bend the knees more, drop everything down and no trouble at all. I'm getting a six degree flat one iron and absolutely just piping it off my deck in the back. George Archer, who won the masters and, I think, 69 tall guy, I think he was six, six, six, five or six, six bend his knees a lot, lowered the center of gravity down. So this isn't anything new.
Speaker 2:And then another direction would be to talk about, you know, flat line angles. Well, there's a huge advantage to having flat line goals for accuracy. And I'll just explain it quickly. Quickly, if you, if the shaft were perfectly upright and the club head were 90 degrees to the shaft, then if you rotated the shaft 10 degrees to the right, the ball is going to come off 10 degrees to the right. Okay, there's a an exact correlation between how many degrees the shaft rotates left or right. The ball would be doing the exact same thing, coming off at 90 degrees to the face. Now, if you were to take a perfectly flat club that were just laying on the ground like it's on flat on the ground, and you had, say, zero loft on it to take out anything like that, if you rotated the shaft 10 degrees open, you're going to hit the ball 10 degrees higher, but not left or right, okay. So I know this is a concept that some people get and others don't, but it's a.
Speaker 3:It's a good concept to try and wrap your your head around basically like playing off uneven lies where the balls above your feet or the ball below your feet well, not exactly, because if the ball is above your feet and you have loft on the club, yeah, face, and it's going to send the ball to the left.
Speaker 2:I'm talking about just the advantage of flat line goals. If you bend your irons flat, then the the rotation of the club shaft. All right, let me just back up here for a second. The, the rotation of the club shaft is why people struggle hitting the ball straight. They have trouble reining that in. They they rotate the club shaft open or closed, and slice and hook the balls because the you know, how else could you do it right? I mean, if you're slicing it, obviously the shaft is rotated to the right. If you're right hand a golfer, right clockwise, okay. Now if you, if you flatten out your shaft, then rotation of the shaft has more to do with trajectory than direction. This is a really important concept and try and wrap your head around it if you can. But if you're really flat and you open the club face, it's going to tend to hit the ball higher. But if you're really upright and you open the club face, it's going to tend to send the ball out to the right. Does that make sense?
Speaker 3:What about face plane tilt if you flatten the shaft out? Because when you flatten the shaft out, where the loft is pointing tends to point to the right.
Speaker 2:Are you saying there's offset on the club?
Speaker 3:No, not offset. So if there's loft on the face and you flatten it out so with 56 degrees, for example, you flatten the face out the loft starts to point to the right. Okay, so if you put, if you put so in club fitting we often do this.
Speaker 3:so, for example, you can see here, if there's loft on the face and you put a pointer there, yeah and when you flatten it out, it starts to point to the right, just like why shots start going out to the right when the ball's below your feet and when the ball's below your feet, and when the ball's above your feet, let's say you're using a sandwich. Now the loft of the sandwich starts pointing to the left.
Speaker 2:I agree with you. I'm talking about hitting off a level high.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but when you start flattening no, hit the ball below your feet.
Speaker 2:Yes, that would be correct.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so when you flatten your clubs out by six, seven degrees, it's almost as if you're playing with the ball below your feet For some players who are used to the standard line angles, so that actually forces them to rotate even harder to get that face pointing straight to the target, and that's one of the benefits that you allude to.
Speaker 2:Well, I guess I'm not fully understanding what you're saying, I guess. But yes, if the ball were below your feet, then that would send the ball out to the right. I get that. And if the ball's above your feet it would send the ball out to the right. I get that. And if the ball's above your feet it would send the ball to the left because there's loft on the club. But if you're on a level eye, it shouldn't have anything to do with direction, as I see it. But I'm sorry, we may be not quite communicating.
Speaker 1:I'll interpret I think what Justin is saying and correct me if I'm wrong. Justin, and this is good, this is a good thing. This phenomenon happens when some of my buddies or people they pick up my clubs Because I'm 6'2" and I've got pretty flat lie angles and I think what Justin was saying was you know, most people are so used to seeing like today's clubs. I hate to say it, but they're really upright. Yeah, like standard is like. To me, standard looks like it's it's three up.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's like three up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you know, once your eye gets used to flatter lie angles, it starts to make sense. It takes a little time to get there, but justin, what you said was spot on, because every one of my friends that's picked up by golf clubs. They might hit the first one or two out to the right, but then the next thing they get used to they're striping it and they're like wow, you know, you're, what's.
Speaker 1:What's your five iron? Well, my five iron is three degrees flat. Well, what it's doing it's forcing me to rotate through the strike and I feel more in the ground. It's 100 percent. Those are the responses every single time.
Speaker 2:OK, I see what you're saying. Ok, Justin, I see what you're saying. Okay, Justin, I see what you're saying.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The player is coming through on the same swing plane as they were before.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it's like they have to come through on a flatter swing plane. Correct.
Speaker 2:Right, if you come through on a flatter swing plane, then it's not going to affect the direction in that way. But if you come through on the same swing plane you've been swinging on, then yes, Hanging out to the right. Okay, yeah, all right. Okay, we got that cleared up, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, I can tell you another benefit. I experienced it yesterday because I over-accelerated a couple times. For those who don't know what over-acceleration is, it's basically getting quick from the top. Your upper body might open up a little bit sooner than expected or whatever, due to anxiety, nerves or just whatever, and with flatter lie angles. That definitely brings in the vector of possibility significantly. So instead of snap-hooking a wedge long and left over a grain into some shit, it might just be in the left side of the grain or left of your target just a little bit, though with fly angles. So it really mitigates the the mess left. For those of us who yes, what it?
Speaker 2:what it does is it moves your left vector of possibilities out to the right yeah okay.
Speaker 2:So if you were to take an upright club, most people could come over the top and hit the ball 30 degrees to the left. I mean, if you're going in an extreme over the top move like, how far left can I hit it? If I just come as hard over the top as possible and just try and pull the ball as far left as possible, most people could pull it 30 degrees. I could probably pull it 45 degrees to the left okay. But if I went down on my knees okay. If I got on my knees and I start trying to come over the top of it, I can't. I can't send the ball 30 degrees to the left. There's no way.
Speaker 2:It's impossible people started off that that degrees to the left. There's no way. It's impossible. I won't be able to start it off that far to the left. So that would be an exercise. I mean for somebody that's still puzzled by this. Get on your knees, take a drive or something that doesn't have a lot of loft on it, tee it up and try and pull a shot hard left. You can't do it.
Speaker 2:So that left vector of possibilities starts to move more towards the target yeah and taking out the left side of the course is gen, you know, generally a good thing, and especially long and left. And I talk about this a lot in the advanced ball striking course.
Speaker 2:You know the you know, break it down into four zones. If you look at a green, you know the red zone long and left. You, for right-handed golfers, you're going to have a left to right downhill putt. If you're on the greens those are typically harder to make than if you're in the green zone short right, where you're putting uphill right to left. You're going to make more putts putting uphill right to left than you are downhill left to right and you're going to recover from short right of the green.
Speaker 2:I mean, given that it's not water there or some you know death pit bunker or something but just on a typical hole it's easier to get up and down from short right of the green than it is long and left over the green. So this is an argument again for Hogan flat line goals and the miss to be short and right rather than long and left. So if you set up your gear this way, set up your clubs, your line goals, your shafts, your gear this way, set up your clubs, your line goals, your shafts. You know stiffer shafts tend to go from hooking the ball. Um, stiff shafts, flat line goals, heavier clubs, uh, ball placement issues, all this stuff. Uh, when you do miss it a little bit, let that miss be short right and not long left, so that would be something that Hogan would have been very well aware of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, that makes perfect sense because he struggled with such a severe hook early in his career. So he figured that out. And then, well, I want this to be a part of the conversation, I'll put it out there right now. Uh, the difference, you know I? That whole life magazine interview in 53, and then the books. He, he, he gave out so much ambiguous information and, quite frankly, john, upon your analysis and what we're talking about now, he didn't give away jack smack Like. In fact, he threw people off the scent of what he was truly doing. At least now that I know what I know and my interpretation of it. And then, another thing too, is the difference between where he was at in 53 versus where he was earlier in his career, as as in regards to his release, cause he had a completely different release.
Speaker 1:Completely different, completely different, but but no one really talks about this.
Speaker 2:Well, a lot of people don't understand that release. Even a lot of instructors don't really understand it because they don't do it. I think for you to be able to teach something, I think you need to be able to demonstrate it and be able to understand it. You need to be able to demonstrate it and be able to understand it. And one of the problems with golf instruction nowadays is and I really this has been one of the problems of golf instruction for decades, I will say the distinction between hitters and swingers is just not common knowledge in the golf teaching community.
Speaker 1:Give us a basic. Give us a basic explanation between the two.
Speaker 2:Very simple as a hitter you're holding shaft flex into the strike, okay, and a swinger, you're not Okay. So a swinger is going to flex the shaft at transition. You're going to see a bow in the shaft. As it comes down, that bow is going to straighten out and you're going to, for a good swinger, you're going to try and time the straightening of that shaft. And this was, you know, kind of big in the golfing machine stuff. The swinging longitudinal acceleration Justin would know what I'm talking about the horizontal release release kind of water coming out of a bottle sort of thing if you have, you know, water in a coke bottle, like ben. You know, justin and I both had worked with ben doyle and, uh, greg mccatton and these are great swinging instructors and there have been a lot of great players that have been swingers. So I'm not knocking that, I'm just saying there's a difference in the technique here. One is you're flexing the shaft and then, as the shaft is releasing, as it's coming down, it's losing its flex and you're timing the straightening of that shaft at the low point, you know, right around impact, okay. The other would be to try and load the shaft and then maintain the flex in that shaft all the way to the strike and beyond. Okay, and the advantage of that is that number one and this is overlooked but when you're a hitter and you're holding shaft flex into the strike, it puts more pressure into your hands. It's the same thing as if you took a club and you put it up against a door jam and then pressed the head into the door jam and you flex the shaft back. It's like, oh, you're going to feel a lot more pressure in your hands than if you don't do that. Okay, so as a swinger, you don't get to feel any of that pressure at impact. As a hitter, you feel a ton of that pressure at impact. So what does that translate into? The hitter is able to feel where the leading edge of the golf club is during the strike. Okay, you have awareness of where the leading edge is because you're accelerating the club, holding shaft flex and you can feel where the leading edge of the club face is. Where the leading edge of the club face is If you're swinging, you're timing it so that club is coming down, the shaft is starting to straighten out, you lose that sensation in your hands and it becomes more of a timing issue and kind of a hope, hope I'm swinging smooth today. Smooth today, um, for a swinger, for a swingers release to work, the uh accelerate, acceleration must be steady and even okay on the way down and then that shaft releases, the right arm straightens, the club face, rolls over. You're going to have a lot of club face rotation going on through the strike. It's coming in open, hitting the ball ball and the club face quickly rolls over, which moves that left vector of possibilities way left. Okay, the possibility is wide open over there Doesn't mean you're going to hit it there. It just means that that possibility on a bad day, when you over-accelerate and flex the shaft too much and then that club head gets ahead of the shaft, you know that ball can go left.
Speaker 2:So Hogan would have had more of a swingers release early on. You watch the really old films of him. The right arm was straightening more. He flipped the club up. You know he didn't. The left shoulder was not staying ahead of his left arm and his hands in the early days and he fought the hook. It's very clear. I mean, if I try and swing like that I can hook it off the planet too. So by accelerating the club, stiffening the shaft, flattening the lie angles. Heavy heads are easier to keep pressure on the shaft all these things. Hands work low, left and around. Face is looking at the target. Hands are cutting left. You feel like you're never releasing, you feel like you never roll the face over, you just feel like that club face is looking at the target forever.
Speaker 2:So Hogan moved into that kind of a thing at some point. I don't know exactly what year, but somebody told him something or he figured out something. It was, uh, you know one of his. You know bill melhorn might have told him something, or you know there were other. There were people that supposedly got in his ear about some things. Uh, henry picard possibly, you know. Um, somebody told him something or he just figured this out, but he'd made a major change to his golf swing at that point and became a better player right at that point. So that's kind of one of the secrets. I suppose I've kind of written down 38 secrets, if you want to call them secrets.
Speaker 3:So hang on, before we get into that 38,. You talked about the shaft, you talked about the club head. What about the body?
Speaker 2:Okay, so we're talking, if you're looking at the club shaft and the club face. Now I didn't really talk about the club face but I'll make this kind of quick. So the club face is open at the top. It's not shut like you see guys doing now. Face is open. If you, if you get to the top of your swing and you cut the left wrist, it's going to open the face. Yeah, as you would come down, you would, you would typically see still some cup in his left wrist halfway into the downswing. That face is wide open and when the face is wide open you've got the green light to turn level and hard and accelerate. And if you're using this kind of release that we're talking about, where the hands are going low, left and around and they're not rolling over, then you can just go at it as hard as you want. You don't have to fear hitting it left. Okay, so the face is open, gives more range of motion for forearm rotation, level shoulder rotation, all of these things that would facilitate that.
Speaker 2:Hogan comes into impact, hits the ball, his club face, you know it closes a little bit after impact, but not much. It's pretty much staying at kind of right angles to his shoulders and it's looking at the target a lot longer than guys that are using a swingers release, for instance throwing. Because if you straighten the right arm through the strike it's going to close the club face. Typically that's what's going to happen. Because if you straighten the right arm through the strike it's going to close the club face. Typically that's what's going to happen. So Hogan's right elbow was kind of locked up from P3 to P4, parallel before impact, to parallel after impact. When Hogan's at P4, parallel after impact, you'll see a lot of flexation in his right elbow. Most people would have that right elbow straightened by that point and the club face would be rolled over so the golfing machine caught running out of the right arm yeah, right.
Speaker 2:So so now that we kind of have gone over what the shaft is doing, what the club face is doing, then you say, okay, what does the body have to do now to facilitate these things? To facilitate the club shaft working in the manner that I'm talking about and the club face working in the manner that I'm talking about, now you can start saying, okay, well, what do we have to do Now? The other, of course I have to include this that from a caddy view, one of the things that Hogan's club shaft is doing is that he's holding shaft flex through the strike. So we don't have a lot of clear footage of Hogan. You know, with high speed cameras and stuff, and there's been a lot of people that say, oh, it's impossible that you can't hold shaft flex to the strike. Well, it is possible and anyone, anyone can go to my YouTube channel. I've demonstrated that it's possible because I've done. I can do it. I mean, if I can do it, Hogan would easily do it, no problem.
Speaker 2:So, from a caddy view, what's the shaft doing? So, from a caddy view, what's the shaft doing? The shaft is loading up slowly at transition, not quick, coming down, and that shaft flex is building. Coming into the stripe the shaft is flexed back, hits the ball, it's flexed back, of course, from impact. When the ball hits the club it's going to tend to push the shaft back. Even somebody with a bad golf swing that has lost shaft flex on the downswing, they'll see after impact that the club shaft will be bent, uh, flexed back due to the, the forces of impact, the collision, right. But hogan would have his flexed back before impact hits the ball and then after.
Speaker 2:Now, you know, again, this gets confusing and I know the science guys are all saying, oh, you know you can't do this. Well, look at the pictures and all this. Okay, but justin, you would understand this chapter two of the golfing machine. Homer kelly talked about that. The load in the shaft can be kind of hidden visually because of the pull of the centrifugal force. Pulling the head, pulling on the shaft tends to conceal the visual shaft flex. In other words, it's pulling on it like a rope, right. So you pull on a rope, it straightens the rope, but that doesn't mean that that stored energy in the shaft isn't still there. Okay, right, I don't know. Maybe you could explain that to the listeners here, justin, because I think you know, I know you're very knowledgeable on the golfing machine, but that Chapter 2 stuff where I mean homer homer was talking about the I believe it was a longitudinal acceleration.
Speaker 3:Stretching the shaft can conceal the uh yeah, because, because it's a three three, the shaft is basically 360, right, it's very difficult to see just from a two-dimensional angle, if you will.
Speaker 2:So until someone is able to create, a 3D camera that tracks the movement of the shaft at every point. It's going to be visually difficult to see, as you point out. Yeah, and there's also issues with camera lenses, and we know this too in the power golf.
Speaker 3:You see the, the shaft, you know flexing the wrong direction.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and it wasn't doing that. I mean, people look at that and they think, oh, I mean it's really been a cancerous thing for people to see that, because you would not want to do that on the downswing if if you had had a high speed camera taking those swings, you would not see that. So it's, it's really problematic. There's a distortion that happens across a lens I think they call it the rolling shutter effect yeah, because the shutter basically rolls shut from the top down yeah versus right now.
Speaker 3:What we have is a global shutter, where the shutter closes immediately, all at the same time. So in the old days it would capture the grid and then the top part of the shaft, on and on. By the time the shutter closes, when, when it's at the head, the head would have kicked forward. So it looks like Hogan was throwing the club head forward. So that created this concept of oh, let's throw the club head forward.
Speaker 2:Yeah, really bad. So I you know, when I started to try and get into this whole thing of Hogan, the first thing that I did is just decide not to look at his books or anything. I really am going to look at the shaft, the club face, and then look at his body and see what's happening to facilitate these things and see what's happening to facilitate these things.
Speaker 3:I like that approach because when he was writing, it wasn't even him writing those books. When those books were written, he was still competing. And if you were a commercial competitor, why would you want to give away your secrets? No, you wouldn't it. This doesn't make sense at all it makes no sense.
Speaker 2:It's a. It's a very good grip stance and posture book for beginner golfers and maybe maybe people down into you know single digits or something you know, but at some point, yeah, there's just so much left on the table that, um, you know there's a, like I say there's a few gold bars in there. I like some of the stuff. I there's a couple diagrams that I that I think are good, but for the most part a lot of uh kind of reminds me of the wizard of oz, when dorothy comes to the y in the road and the scarecrow is like pointing this way and that way, you know, to the left or to the right. Is it this way? Is it this way if you, if you look at the diagram where he has the tilted plane right, he's got, you know, take it back on this plane and then the tilted plane out to the right oh yeah but if you look at that, okay, I would agree with that on the downswing.
Speaker 2:But that tilted plane is going to put you over the top, at the top right. You're going to get, you're going to take it back and then you're going to fly your right elbow out to get on that inside plane and then you're going to come down on that plane. But Hogan didn't do that. He did the opposite of that His shaft flattened, right. But he doesn't tell you how to do that in the book and nobody really tells you how to do that. So so yeah, that's. I just kind of had to like throw all that stuff out. I mean, I've read those books a bunch of times, but it's a lot of. It just doesn't have enough detail, right. There's just the one thing I did like about Homer Kelly is that? What was it saying, Was it? The complexity is far more simple and workable than mystery.
Speaker 3:More acceptable.
Speaker 2:More, yeah, right yeah. Mystery More acceptable. More, yeah, right, yeah. So you know, trying to be too vague isn't really going to help, right yeah.
Speaker 3:But I think Hogan was vague on purpose.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But having said that, even if he was accurate, he was describing how he felt, and I think how he felt was quite different from what he actually did, and I think that's really the misconception that dooms a lot of golfers what feels like over the top for me might feel something else and might look something completely different for the golfer.
Speaker 2:You're exactly right and you can't trust that stuff. So you know, when someone says they feel this, I mean you know hogan's demonstrations of him opening the hips right from the top. You know you see we're just opening well, he didn't do that at all. So I'm not really sure what he was feeling there. I don't know. I don't really care to be honest with you, because what I know is that his hips didn't open from the top. They moved laterally and they stayed closed as long as possible, as did his torso, and shoulders were very, very closed late into the downswing down to about P3. Now he's got all this range of motion to turn his torso, shoulders, hips, through the strike. Everything's moving through the strike. It's not opening up from the top. You start working on that.
Speaker 2:I mean I just don't see how you're going to get anywhere close to Hogan or even be in the conversation. You know if you're opening up from the top and you see a lot of people doing that now. Even guys on tour are trying to open up real early and stuff. But again, you know staying unfocused on Hogan here. You know what did he do and how did that affect the golf shaft. So you know. I mean I've said a lot so far and I feel like I haven't covered anything actually. Yeah, so I mean back to Hogan a little bit covered anything actually, yeah.
Speaker 3:So I mean back to back to Hogan a little bit. He could have felt that his hips were way open, but what he did was completely different and I like what you've done with this module so much. You used objective evidence. You kind of experimented with yourself and then you went okay, this is cause and effect, you do x, you get y, the look, and then you talk about the 38 secrets. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the key secrets that the golfing uh public, the golf scientists, have largely missed out.
Speaker 2:Well, I don't put a lot of belief in golf scientists. To be honest, I've never known any golf scientist that could go out and shoot 65 at Royal Melbourne or something that could go out and shoot 65 on a you know, at Royal Melbourne or something. Never seen a physicist go out and shoot 66 at the Olympic Club or something.
Speaker 3:Actually, you know, let's back that up Brendol Shambly. In today's interview on the Smiley show he said this he's puzzled as to why great players would even listen to teachers like myself, and I agree with that 100%. Teachers like myself learn from the good players. Good players are geniuses. They just do things that largely cannot be explained.
Speaker 2:Or they can be explained. I mean mean, I think that was one of my big departures from the golfing machine. You know, growing up, you know I mean I've done plenty of podcasts where I've talked about my youth and college golf. You know, being under the tutelage of ben doyle and greg mccatton and they're and they're great teachers and they're swinging, swinging teachers and that got me so far.
Speaker 2:But I, you, when I got out on tour, there were guys with terrible-looking golf swings I mean the worst grips you could ever imagine guys taking it all over the place, big loops and horrible-looking golf swings and they'd go out and shoot 64 on some windy golf course. It's tough and this is back in the persimmon and blade and balada golf ball era when scores like that really meant something. You know, now people are just, you know, flipping wedges and the whole, but I'm talking about guys having to hit three or four long irons around off the fairway, shooting 64s in the wind and stuff. And my point is that when I saw those guys, I'm like, like you know they're not wrong, because on Sunday when they get their check whether they're winning the tournament or finishing in the top 10, you know I'm finishing 35th and they're finishing third or winning or whatever. That's real money in the bank, you know. So what they're doing isn't wrong.
Speaker 2:So I started to try and understand what those guys are doing. Like well, how is this guy able to do this? I mean, I had this guy go out and hit 17 greens today in the wind with this horrible looking golf swing, and uh, so that was a big turning point for me to try and not be so dismissive Like, oh, you know, that guy, that guy, he just, he just has talent or he's got educated hands, as ben doyle would say.
Speaker 1:Well, he's got educated hands.
Speaker 2:You know he makes it like he's. You know ben used to say that about lanny watkins oh, lanny's just got educated hands. You know it's like never liked his golf swing but he's got educated hands. Well, I think lanny watkins got a great golf swing. Actually I mean not knowing what I know now it's he's got an incredible golf swing, you know, in his prime.
Speaker 2:So you know, it's not all about how much lag you have coming down, what those angles are, it's about the pressure, the lag pressure in that, in the shaft, in the hands, and lanny watkins had a ton of that. So so to hogan. You know really, yeah, it's not what people say. You know, just look at it, see what's going on. What would the body have to do, you know to, to facilitate these things? And that's where my journey really started. And uh, you know it started from P3 to P4, going through the strike. It wasn't that hard for me to figure that out, that the club face is open, that the line angles are flat, heavy clubs. I mean, I stuck some heavy, heavy clubs in my hands with flat line angles, stiff shafts and no offset, just like hogan's clubs. Start there, get it on the 430 line and move around to p4 with the hands cutting left club face, looking at the target. You're holding a wrist cock between the club shaft and your left forearm and you're not handle raising like everybody else is doing. And that wasn't hard. I got that pretty quickly and that really did wonders for my ball striking. I mean, it really took me from being a streaky ball striker to someone that was really consistent.
Speaker 2:But then there were other problems. You know, it's like I get to the top and my shaft never flattened at all. I'd get to the top, I'm on plane, I come down on plane but the shaft doesn't flatten Right. So that was. I had to figure that out. That was a big piece of the puzzle, huge piece of the puzzle there. The next thing was, from a caddy view, my club shaft would flip up a little bit after P4, and I had to figure out well, why is that happening? I'll give you an example. Like Mo Norman, he's got that great extension from impact all the way to the finish. Finish to the sky basically means he's preserving that impact alignment right to his finish. Okay, all the way.
Speaker 2:But then you got a guy like Todd Graves that's teaching Mo Norman and I think Todd's good teacher. It's far a lot of that stuff. But you know his, his shaft, when he swings his shaft flips up and doesn't do what Mo Norman's does. Well, why is that? I mean, I'm not saying that any fault of Todd's, but his left shoulder doesn't move fast enough. It's just that simple. If you don't have the strength and the speed to do it, then the shaft is going to flip, the club head's going to get ahead of your hands and get ahead of your left shoulder, and that's what happens. You have to have a certain amount of strength and speed and dynamics to facilitate that.
Speaker 2:So, to Todd's credit, I would say he's teaching the right things in all these other areas and I assume that he's promoting the torso rotation to be fast and aggressive, like most post impact. I assume that, and he needs to work on that and I need to work on that and you do and everybody else right, we all need to work on that. The faster and harder we can accelerate our torso post impact, then we're going to keep our left shoulder ahead of our left arm, ahead of our hand, ahead of the grip, ahead of the club head, and the range of motion and the speed to facilitate what Mo did and what Hogan did. I'm going to put that as one of the great secrets. One of the 38 will rank that one up really high. We'll put that one up way up there, right up near the top. Nobody talks about that, but that's one of the, the mandatory things that you need to be striving for every day, because the search for truth is constant and clear, and that is constant and clear. It certainly is to me you.
Speaker 3:one thing you didn't mention about Hogan, besides his superlative ball striking, is that he was a long hitter in his time.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, very, very long hitter.
Speaker 3:And so what were the elements of his swing that allowed him to hit the ball pound for pound, longer than anyone else on tour?
Speaker 2:Strength speed, acceleration and heavy clubs.
Speaker 3:That goes counter to what a lot of people understand about club weight. They think that if the weight of the club is heavier they would swing the club slower.
Speaker 2:Yes, and most people would at first. But after they swing a 16-ounce driver for six months, guess what? They're swinging it faster than they were before. Right, because you get stronger. It's like going to the gym you work out. You get's like going to the gym. You work out, you get stronger. Go to the gym, gee, I can't curl 50 pounds with a dumbbell when I get there. But after a year, gee, I'm curling 100 pounds or whatever. I mean you got to work out. These are.
Speaker 2:Hogan was very strong, very athletic, and this is an athletic move, make no mistake about it. It's not for the faint of heart. You know we teach this through the module course and there's a lot of drills and exercises that we do to strengthen, to increase our speed, to work on the proper muscle movements and biomechanical moves to get to where we can improve, because a lot of this is is strength and speed. Now there there are certain things that are just technique, like you know. Uh, what he did at transition, what I call tripping the shaft, I mean that's, that's not really a strength thing, that's a technique thing.
Speaker 2:For instance, right, the back swing a little bit of strength, I would say, because as you speed up the back swing. You know you need to be a little bit stronger to control the club with a quick back swing. If you're, if you're weak and you try and swing the club back too fast, you know you can get out of control. So there's some strength there and we have drills for that, back swing drills. We do them with one arm and there's a certain way that we do this to get the club shaft to come to the inside, get the forearms to rotate open and this sort of thing.
Speaker 3:I think generally also used to say this that if you were to use a light hammer you could just use your wrist to move the hammer. But then you put a sledgehammer in someone's hands, suddenly the body would have to participate to move that heavier implement. Absolutely, yeah, you know. You always talk about just give someone a heavier club to get all the body rotation that they previously were trying to get with a lighter club.
Speaker 2:Well, think of it this way. If people are still not understanding this, let's just say that the club had let's take a driver, that's 10 ounces the dead weight. Okay, and I'm more of a dead weight guy than a swing weight guy. I don't care about swing weights because I'm not trying to time the shaft straightening into impact. It's more like a baseball bat. They don't. If you talk to baseball players, they're not talking about swing weights, they're talking about dead weight.
Speaker 2:You know how many ounces is the bat, you know how many ounces was Babe Ruth's bat, because it's one solid piece of wood. It's like if I hit you in the shoulder with a two by four or something, you're going to feel the whole log coming at you, right, that's when you're holding shaft flex. So that's an important thing that people need to understand. But let me get back to this. So if you have a golf club, dead weight of, let's just say, rounded off, 10 ounces a very lightweight, modern club with a lightweight graphite shaft and a titanium head, it's 10 ounces and it's going to hit a golf ball at 100 miles an hour. Okay, so the physicists, the scientists, are going to figure out that that ball is going to go. You know X number of yards or whatever, based upon 100 miles an hour and a dead weight of 10 ounces. Now, if you can swing a 16 ounce club at 100 miles an hour, which ball is going to go farther, have you? Of course it is. Of course it's going at 100 miles an hour.
Speaker 3:Which ball is going to go farther Heavy.
Speaker 2:Of course it is. Of course it's going to go farther. So actually if you swing heavier clubs you don't have to have as high a swing speed to hit the ball the same distance. And now I'm speculating here when I say that I think one of the problems with the younger players getting injured earlier in their careers, blowing out their hips and knees and this sort of thing, is because they're having to just rotate so fast, going through to accommodate for a lightweight, a long and lightweight driver, very, very tough to get the body to move that fast. Their intention to move the body fast is a good intention, but it's very tough on the body when you're trying to just lightning, lock up the left leg and spin the hip out and all this and people are getting injured doing this.
Speaker 2:And you don't really hear about golf injuries that much from from the golf swing itself. You know, back in the 1950s and 60s and this sort of thing, guys had some back trouble that were doing the big reverse c thing. You know. You know lee trevino was very, very steep with the shoulders going through. Tom watson, jack nicholas, these are all people that had back trouble. But I don't think Gary Player had back trouble as much because he was quite a bit more level going through it. So I mean I'm speculating on this. I don't know the facts on this, but from my experience the guys that had more level rotations going through the strike were not hobbling around with back trouble and the guys with steep shoulders and reverses were having a lot more back trouble. Now, that's been my observation through you know I'm of my 50 years of playing this game next secret, please okay, well, next secret, please.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, how about I just rattle off the 38 secrets and then you can?
Speaker 3:no, no no, no, we want, we want the. So there's always a ranking. What are the key ones? Or maybe, maybe we do this, jesse. Jesse, why don't you talk a little bit about how the modules have helped you? And then John can, I guess, chime in with the key secrets?
Speaker 1:Okay, so that's great, that's a great segue. Justin, you know this is such an enriching conversation my head is just spinning. And now that I know what I know about, about Hogan and I'll get to to what my experience has been thus far being a practitioner and a student of this I can certainly understand George Newton's golf swing a lot better now. Better now. I can understand Nick Price and Nick Faldo's golf swing now a lot better through this. The Hogan lens, which is very interesting because I always looked up to all of those people. So I guarantee you one of the secrets or the tenets that John discovered is something that I'm discovering, probably more so now, and that is the free ride down. So understanding how Hogan shifted his weight and what that meant. You know, john, you mentioned Hogan stayed closed for longer than anybody. And then when I look at George Knudsen's swing, I go, ah, now I know what they were doing, I can finally see it and how that's being sort of myelinated into my golf DNA now and what the manifestations are is the concept of the transition.
Speaker 1:My previous concept was very erroneous. My concept of transition now is so much more dynamic and understanding because I'm looking at it through the lens of what Hogan did and because I have this resonance of understanding, it's easier for me to do the movements, with each movement, each repetition, with intention and the free ride down. Basically, I could never understood why Hogan had this look of swinging downhill Like in his transition. To me, it always looked like he swung downhill. John, you have the same thing, so does Bradley, it's like. To me it always looked like he swung downhill. John, you have the same thing, so does Bradley, it's like. To me it looks like they're swinging downhill. But now that I know that the weight Hogan's weight was on his right side a lot longer than people thought he did and that facilitated him staying closed for longer than anybody in the history of the game you know, today Scottie Scheffler stays closed longer than anybody out there. It's not a coincidence that he's the best ball striker.
Speaker 3:Just on that point, Jesse, you talked about Hogan staying on his right leg. A lot of people teach that Hogan shifted his weight to the left very early on in the backswing.
Speaker 1:Or that his weight, or you know. There's arguments that his weight never really even shifted.
Speaker 3:Yeah, this is a big divide.
Speaker 1:It's a huge. But I can tell you that as a student of this, as a practitioner of doing these drills now regularly, it's hard for me to put into words. But the best way I can say it is this Because I've worked on this with this dynamic weight shift, with the weight shifting, and then we'll get into tripping the shaft in a little bit. But I want the listener to really try to use his or her imagination here. So when I work on the modules this particular module, it's called the free ride down what basically without giving too much of it away is I'm trying to keep my upper body and my lower body closed for as long as possible while the weight is moving to the left. But the weight is staying on my right side. So to me it's like it's no different than if you're going to load up a throw from center field to home plate. You don't see those guys out there in Major League Baseball opening their shoulders too quickly, do you Like? They are fully wound up and they're staying. And here's another thing they're all staying on their right leg a hell of a lot longer than they are on their left leg. It's the same as a quarterback throwing the ball down the field, especially when he lets one rip, his shoulders are closed. They talk about it in throwing mechanics. How in on the NFL. In the NFL these QB gurus are talking about with power and velocity it comes from the ground, while keeping their shoulders as closed as long as possible.
Speaker 1:So this was a big, big, big epiphany for me, a big paradigm shift, and it's like okay, well, well, you know, working on this. How is this manifesting on the golf course? Well, first of all, there's more mass behind the hit, so I'm hitting it further. And when it first started to get myelinated, like all of a sudden, I would hit a shot right out of flag and I'd airmail a green and I'd go. What in the hell did I just do? But it felt great because I was holding shaft flex. So if you're listening to this for the first time, the picture will start to come more and more in the focus, because we're throwing a lot of information out there. But now and John, you and I have talked about this several times that has to explain why Hogan had the extra spike in his shoe and, quite frankly, he probably was the initiator of it, because when he did it, a lot of those guys started doing it with that extra spike in the right shoe In the right shoe, not the left shoe, In the right shoe.
Speaker 2:It's in the right shoe, not the left shoe. There's a big-time reason.
Speaker 1:That's what we're talking about. It's almost like that extra spike was his pitcher's mound Right Because he's pushing off that son of a gun hard. That's a great analogy, yeah, yeah, so that's sort of what the sensation. So, justin, to answer your question, that's a sensation that I have felt lately quite a bit is like I feel like I'm pushing off the pitcher's mound in transition. But what's interesting is the club is dynamically flattening because of I'm I'm not, I'm not opening up so fast so I'm not over accelerating, so like I'm literally putting my body in a biomechanical position to never open my shoulders up faster than my lower body. That's what I'm striving toward, that's what you know. Working on this.
Speaker 1:We say the free ride down, but the free ride down in the Hogan modules has a few different meanings, but the primary meaning is the dynamic weight shift and then how it correlates to your arms and your shoulders and your hips staying closed to the strike while you're dynamically shifting your weight. So there's a lot going on here. There's a lot going on, but when I look at Hogan and the way he did it, to me it was like that's the natural state of it. You know, that's the way I mean with him and Knutson particularly like whoa. Okay, so you know what's happening with me and how this is manifesting thus far at this early stage in my journey, is the quality of my golf shots have improved a lot, but, more importantly, the quality of my misses have improved a lot.
Speaker 1:So very rarely am I going to hit a space ball. These days it might be just slightly right or slightly left. I'm giving my body a chance to dynamically shift weight and slot the club at the same time. And you know I'm not quite there yet and it's a lifetime, a work of a lifetime really. But I can now feel different things. You know, just my right foot pushing off was new and different. That's been new and different. You know, I never really did that. I don't think or quite understood that, but the visual for me is I am pushing off a pitcher's mound.
Speaker 2:So, uh, yeah, that's exactly, exactly right that's the feeling you want to have and you know. So what's happening with the golf instruction and these people like justin, like you said, these people that are saying hogan never transferred his weight to the right foot, I mean it's complete rubbish, complete nonsense. Um, think of it this way if, if I were to take a fast backswing, okay, and I were to lift my left foot and one inch off the ground, okay, and then I push off my right foot and as I'm moving laterally and falling towards the ball, I still have my left foot off the ground by an inch and I get down to where the club's halfway down and my body's way over to the left, okay, but I've got my left foot an inch off the ground. You know what that means. It means 100% of my weight is on my right foot. I can't possibly have any weight on my left foot. If my left foot is even a quarter of an inch off the ground, okay, because people are looking at still photographs.
Speaker 2:If you were to capture me on that still photograph, you'd go oh, look at John, all his weight is on his left side. You can see that his body mass. I saw some instructor that put a line down through Hogan's body, saying 75% of the mass of his body is left of this line. So therefore he must have, all you know, 75 of his weight is on his left foot. I mean, that's like me. If I were, I could put my right foot on a wall like I could jump. I could run towards a wall, jump on the wall and push off that wall with my right foot and just as I'm ready to get airborne again, like if I was on a skateboard or something like this, someone would say 90% of John's weight is left of the wall. You must be.
Speaker 2:You know they're not considering the motion and that you're pinning yourself onto that right foot and pushing off the right foot and moving everything laterally and the weight is not on the left foot until you get down near impact and bam, all that weight lands on that left foot. But it's not there at the top of the backswing, it's not even there in the transition or halfway into the downswing. You get down near impact, the left leg catches the weight, and then the torso, hips. Everything just flies open as quickly as possible to leverage off the ground, the pressures from the ground, wrenching the feet into the ground, the corkscrewing the foot action into the ground so that you can turn, try and swing a golf club with tennis shoes on an ice rink. I mean, you're not going to do well. Even a hacker is not going to do well. A hacker might even do better than a good player. At that point, a good player is going to shift their weight to the right and their foot's just going to slide out because there's no traction right. So this is one of the really big problems in the golf instruction people teaching Hogan that don't know what they're talking about. Ok, they just don't.
Speaker 2:And this is one of the reasons why I took the deep dive myself.
Speaker 2:I sacrificed my own swing and body to get inside this and try and understand what needs to happen dynamically, so that I could then say, ok, how do I get the shaft here, how do I get the club head here, and what kind of biomechanical motions of the body have to happen to facilitate these things? Tripping the shaft, working down to the 430 line, moving the hips laterally, all of this stuff saving the rotation, like what Jesse was just talking about, keeping the hips and the shoulders closed in the dancing what do you have to do to do that For that particular move you're going to have to push off the right foot laterally. You better have some spine tilt that opens up the 430 line for you to get on that. The people that are setting up to the ball really erect, working their shoulders in a more upright motion. They've got no access to the 430 line at all. And there was a term that was happening in the maybe it was in the late nineties or the early two thousands this term getting stuck Okay.
Speaker 2:Well if I'm stuck, of course you're stuck because you have no access to the 430 line. You're stuck If your weight is on your left foot at the top of your backswing. You don't have access to the 430 line. So, yes, you're stuck. There's nothing you can do.
Speaker 2:That word, that terminology, didn't exist. Okay, didn't exist back in the 60s or 70s. Nobody would even consider swinging a golf club like that. But again, because of some of the advancements in technology with equipment hybrid clubs, upright clubs people were like oh well, I can swing like this. It's basically an old style wedge swing where you would just have your weight on your left foot and you just take it back a little three quarter backswing and kind of hit down on it, hit a little shot in there. That was easy for people to learn and it's like like, oh, I just want to, I want to swing like that with a driver or a long iron. Okay, well, here's a hybrid, you know, and you can just slap at it with your hands and and get into that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:I know I'm kind of getting off track here, but but this is one of the things that happen in the teaching and that people now that are trying to teach Hogan? Well, I want to see. I don't expect anybody to necessarily hit the ball like Ben Hogan or even swing like Hogan, but you should at least be able to take the club to the inside, have the shaft flattened transition, get the shaft on the 430 line, lock up the right elbow through the strike and have some decent kind of shaft extension with a level rotation through the strike. If you can do those things, then you're in the conversation. We can start talking about Hogan. If you're not doing those things, just go do something else. You know, don't teach Hogan, teach. You know, teach Rory or Tiger or whatever. Teach some other thing, but stay out of the Hogan conversation.
Speaker 2:Unless you can do that inside. Trip the shaft on the 430 line, lock up the right elbow through the strike and have a level shoulder rotation and good extension of the shaft, without the shaft flipping over to the left or the club face rolling over. Get up into a finish where your upper left arm is parallel to the ground and you've got, you've preserved your impact alignment. Okay, do that. Then we're just talking like, okay, I'm not strong enough, I'm not fast enough, blah, blah, blah. I can work, I can train, I can improve. But if you're not doing those things, you're out of the conversation. As far as I'm concerned, don't even, don't get anywhere near me.
Speaker 3:So who do you think in the modern game is the closest to swinging it like ben hogan?
Speaker 2:nobody, nobody, nobody's doing it, not even close. I haven't seen. I've had over the years. I've had so many people say, oh, check out this guy, check out this guy, and I will say, yes, there are certain things. Okay, okay, that looks, that looks like ben Hogan in this spot or this area, the only thing that people really see with the naked eyes. They see the address right, they see the top, cause the club's moving. You know if you're taking a quick back so you can't really necessarily tell how quickly someone's loading the shaft up a little you can see it a little bit, but for the most part they see the address, they see the top and they see the finish.
Speaker 2:Put on a Hogan cap and hike your trousers up over your hips. Have some shiny shoes and a nice golf shirt, especially that Hogan cap set up there with a super weak grip that looks like right out of five lessons. Which Hogan's grip was not like that. When he played, his right hand wasn't way out on the top like he portrays Another myth buster. But hat, clothes, shoes, high belt, get the setup. The knees and the elbows together, have a bunch of lag at the top of your golf swing. Come down and then into that finish where you have that classic. You see those three things and people say, oh, it looks just like Ben Hogan. I specifically do not wear a Hogan cap during any of these Hogan modules because I refuse to be pretentious about this. I'm not trying to pretend anything. We're just talking fundamentals. We're talking positions. We're talking club shaft, club face holding shaft, flex, heavy clubs, accelerate. All that stuff has nothing to do with a white, you know? Uh, what do they call those hogan caps? There's a name for them again they can't bury.
Speaker 3:It's a.
Speaker 2:It's a beret like, almost like a little beret well, not quite a beret. There's, I forget there's.
Speaker 1:There's a is it a cangle? Is that what it is?
Speaker 3:well yeah theol is the brand a brand?
Speaker 2:yeah, but there's a name. It's not a fedora, but you know there's some no fedora is what Homer Kelly used to wear yeah right, sam did. Sam Snead, he wore a fedora sometimes, didn't he?
Speaker 1:yeah, I think he rocked a fedora. Yeah, chi Chi too yeah, chi.
Speaker 2:Chi rocked one so we're not talking about fashion here or anything, anything like that. We're just talking about the shaft, the club head, the club face. That's what we're doing. But one distinct thing here and I'll just talk about a big difference really, but it's important to mention this is that most golfers, when they take the club back, they get to the top. The shaft at transition comes down fairly steep and then it slides down onto plane. So it's steep like nicholas over the top comes down steep and then it flattens out and slides down onto the plane and then they hold off the release a bit and move around.
Speaker 2:Hogan's shaft went flat and under the plane tripped. The shaft flattened even more so his shaft was coming up to the plane on the downswing. Everybody else's shaft is coming down onto the plane, kind of like the Olympic ski jumpers. You know they come down, you know coming down the ski slope, and Hogan's would be the opposite. If you think of a ski ramp as kind of that curve right, it's a curve right, it comes down and it curves. Hogan's would be the opposite. It would be he would be down below, coming up to that ski ramp and then coming down right.
Speaker 2:So it's a completely different approach. Completely different approach than what pretty much everybody else is doing, so that has to be identified. I did identify that early on and that puzzled me a lot until I finally figured out how to trip the shaft. And then, when I figured that out, I was like, oh it all, right, this is different, this is going to take some work. Yeah, okay, but identifying that, that put it's another way to get yourself on the 430 line. I think it's a better way. It's more sophisticated, I think, ultimately easier to repeat once you master it and should hold up better under pressure. Why was hogan a great ball striker? Why did he win all those tournaments? Because he had the best golf zone.
Speaker 3:Could you, for the benefit of our listeners, explain, provide some clarity on what you mean by tripping the shaft?
Speaker 2:Okay. So most people, when they take the club back and they start the downswing, they immediately put a lot of stress on the shaft. As soon as you change direction, it's putting stress on the shaft. As soon as you change direction, it's putting stress on the shaft. Now you've got to. If you're a hitter, you've got to maintain that stress on the shaft all the way down to the ball. So the best way for a hitter to do that is to shorten the backswing. You know, do a Doug Sanders thing, just take it back halfway and rip at it. Right, that's the best way, easiest way to hold shaft flex and nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 2:I've been a lot of guys with short backswings. In fact, when I was on tour there were probably more guys out just shooting 62s and fours and stuff with little short backswings that just ripped at it. Really ugly kind of looking golf swings to an untrained eye. Great, actually, it's a great methodology to do it. Okay, you've got that.
Speaker 2:However, hogan's method was the opposite of that. Okay, when Hogan got to the top, he was taking pressure off the shaft. Okay, so everybody else is like putting pressure on the shaft. Hogan's trying to take pressure off the shaft so that when he moves laterally, comes down the 430 line, he starts to build the acceleration and then it becomes easy to increase, put flexation and stress and pressure into the shaft through the strike, and so to do that you have to trip the shaft. Okay, and there's a technique to doing that, and it's not just tripping the shaft, it is has to be combined with the lateral movement of the hips. And we've got about four or five drills that we do in the course that show the students exactly how to do those.
Speaker 3:For our listeners.
Speaker 2:It's hard for me to explain it because you can't really explain it in words. That's why I mean specifically hard to explain it in words. That that's why I mean specifically hard to do it in words. If I say that we're trying to, you know, move the the grip end of the shaft skyward while we're moving laterally, you know you could say, okay, you could try that, but it takes a lot of drills, exercises, very specific fundamentals to get that to integrate into the golf swing. It's not an easy thing to do. It takes time, it takes practice and you need to be working on the right things to do that and you can really mess yourself up really badly if you don't have full information on this. So what we teach is the methodology to do this, the exercises to do this, to train yourself to do this and to do it properly so that you'll be successful. And then, once you've got that happening flattening the shaft you just you got the green light at that point.
Speaker 3:And what's the golden pathway of the magic trick?
Speaker 2:So the golden pathway, the magic trick drill, is from the ABS modules and it's basically at P3, the club face is open, facing skyward, and at P4, the club face is also skyward. So how can the ball go straight if the club face is wide open at the parallel before impact and it's wide open at the parallel after impact and you think the ball would just go way off to the right. But it doesn't. So that's why we call it a magic trick, because if you rotate properly, lock up the right elbow through the strike and what we call holding the X and holding wrist cock through the strike, then you can actually hit a straight shot by having the face from open to open that post-impact the clubface is looking at the target longer. That way you eliminate the clubface rotation, you move that left vector of possibilities from way to the left. You keep that very much, uh, close to the target. So that is the golden pathway and no one exemplified that better than ben hogan.
Speaker 3:so that is one of the hogan modules you know you talk about retaining right arm, flex through the shot right. A lot, of, a lot of modern day golf teachers are trying to teach that without really understanding why and how yeah, I don't, I don't.
Speaker 2:You know, you're a modern teacher, so you, you would know more than me. I don't study that because I don't believe it. That's the best way to do it. I, I look at Hogan, I look at Mo, I look at Knudsen, you know. I look at Peter Thompson, I look at, you know the, the great players of the past. I played at the end of the Persimmon and Blade era. So you know, my career was 1987 to 1993. I played seven years on tour and that was kind of right at the end of the Persimmon Not quite at the end, but pretty close. Tom Kite won the US Open in 1992 with a Persimmon driver.
Speaker 3:Davis Love. Yeah, Davis Love.
Speaker 2:He was the last.
Speaker 3:I think he was the last guy to win on the last guy at Wiganfoot the PGA Championship, and then that same year Justin Leonard won with the Titleist Mepplewood yeah, that's a whole other conversation about.
Speaker 2:I just did a video on that, we don't need to get into that here. But that's a whole other conversation about, you know. I mean, I just did a video on that, we don't need to get into that here. But my point is that that era of clubs, clubs were heavier and they were a little harder to hit, which required the brain to engage on where the sweet spot is.
Speaker 2:So you know, if you look at Hogan's clubs that he designed as soon as he went into designing clubs, the most interesting blade that he made to me is the power thrust. That came out in, I think, 1960, 61, 62. I think it came out two years, maybe three years. The power thrust it had a shaved-off toe. The toe was not much weight out on the toe at all, so the center of gravity is very much more towards the center and into the heel. And then Spalding came out with a blade where they shaved off the toe. I think it was the bird on the ball, the mid to late 60s version of that. That's what George Knutson was using. He was using a club that was basically a spinoff of Hogan's power thrust. My point is very difficult club to hit for the average golfer.
Speaker 2:However, if you can learn to hit it, you're going to improve your hand-eye coordination, You're going to start to feel the sweet spot and then, once you can learn to hit that club, that club offers a much greater ability to draw and fade the ball with precision, to spin the ball the way you want it. It had a very thin flange on the bottom and it's a great. It's actually a great club, but it's designed for great players. You know, it's just like a car. I mean, yeah, you can get in an old 1970s Cadillac or whatever that's. You know, 30 feet long or whatever. You're just cruising down the road. It's really comfortable, right, it's like comfortable and cushy and you got a nice stereo and you roll down the windows and what was that? You know the guy did the song about that in the 70s or whatever. You know the famous song. But then you got a guy you know driving a formula one car. You know most people can't handle that, that. They wouldn't know what to do with it. But if you want to be fast and be able to rip around corners and this sort of thing, you need to drive a Formula One car and you need to learn how to drive it and then the car will be there for you with the techniques that you would apply in an advanced driving school.
Speaker 2:It's no different with golf equipment. You know there's clubs that are designed for great players and there's clubs that are designed for hackers. If I were to design a club for a hacker, I'd make it upright, I'd make it light and I'd put a bunch of offset on it because people come over the top. So the offset's going to move that left vector that we're talking about out to the right. It's going to delay the club face to getting to the ball just a little bit, so it's not going to be pulled as hard. You're going to make it upright because if you had, if you have, a bunch of loft on the club and somebody comes over the top, they're going to just hit you know a pole and they're going to have the the. The toes are going to be in the wrong position. So yes, for hackers, design clubs that way and that's pretty much what we see.
Speaker 2:You go into any big box golf store and you're going to see clubs that are made for hackers. You're not going to see anything designed for good strikers. I can't even hit a standard lie club with offset or whatever. It's just unplayable to me. I wouldn't even be able to hit it. It'd be a total disaster.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so so the equipment, my getting back to hogan, the equipment thing is very, very important. If you want to get to hogan, if you want to experience what it's like to hit the golf ball like he did, then the first place you would start is to get your equipment set up. That way you go with with heavy clubs, flat lie angles, no offset, super stiff shafts. Now if you want to fine-tune it and start you know, worrying about where he had his uh, he had a reminder, you know, put under the grip and all that stuff or whatever but but you start with that heavy, flat, stiff offset. Now you're in the conversation.
Speaker 2:Okay, now your golf swing has a chance to start evolving based upon the club. Your golf swing is going to adapt to the club that's in your hands. It has to right or you won't be able to. I mean, if somebody handed me a super upright club with a bunch of offset, with a whippy shaft, it's going to affect the way I swing a golf club. If I'd never played golf before and somebody hands me that, my golf swing is going to have to mold to accommodate that golf club If I had a.
Speaker 2:Hogan style club, then I'd have to mold to adapt to that. That's one of the reasons why, you know, we're now selling a 16 ounce persimmon drivers at advanced ball striking, because people that want to learn how to do this need a club that they can use. That's going to be appropriate for it and we got super stiff shafts in them and they're 48-degree line angles and they weigh. We have weight options, you know 14, 15, and 16 ounces. If somebody, you know, doesn't want to go the full 16-ounce thing, and that's understandable. I mean, even I'm playing at 15.5 and I I train with a 16 ounce and when I get on the course I use a 15, 15.5 and it's just, if it's just a preference thing, it just feels right, like for me, my strength, uh, I'm fine at 15 ounces, 15 and a half, that's fine.
Speaker 2:16, I can hit 16, fine, I train with it. But when I get go out and play, it's just just a little bit, a little bit less. You know, that's just, it's just a personal preference. Then yeah, so the equipment's important is you know, that's one of the secrets right there. You know, let's just break that down into four secrets heavy, stiff, no offset. Okay, there's four secrets right there.
Speaker 3:So do our listeners have to change their club setup in order to benefit from the Hogan modules.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, everybody has a different degree of commitment, right? I mean, I've got students that are hardcore. They want to go after Hogan. They're like Hogan was was the greatest striker. I want to do everything I can to be like that. I want the technique, I want the clubs. You know, I want and we accommodate those people.
Speaker 2:Then we have people that are like well, you know, I don't really, you know, I think I still want to swing my modern driver, this sort of thing, and they can, you know, take away a lot of this stuff and it'll be beneficial for them as well, but not as much, right? Because I personally believe it's a package deal. You know, if you really want to get into this and give yourself the best opportunity to learn Hogan's methodology, I think that Hogan's methodology can be teached and I'd say this again, I believe it can be teached. Before I wasn't so sure. Now I'm 100% certain. Yes, you can learn to do this.
Speaker 2:If you watch the Olympics and you see the figure skaters and they jump up in the air and they spin around four or five times. It's not just whatever they want to do, it's not like oh well, you know, I'm going to go out on the ice and I'm going to just do my own little spin or whatever. Well, you're going to get thrown out of the competition, right? I mean you have to learn to do. You know, the triple loop, pair, what do they call it? Pair, axles or whatever. You know? I mean there's specific things they have to learn how to do, and I would. I think the Hogan methodology is just like that. It's something you have to learn how to do. You have to learn how to trip the shaft. You have to take the backswing a certain way to be able to trip the shaft. I couldn't use my old backswing of junior golf in college because it didn't allow me to trip the shaft. Okay, I have to take the backswing a certain way to get in position so that I can trip the shaft. So the technique, technique, technique, technique, all these things right on down the line.
Speaker 2:People can learn this or they can choose to take part of it, or a little bit. You know, I had a student come here to the deck recently and he was just hell bent on swinging his upright modern frying pan or whatever. I showed him a lot of this stuff and you know he'll go home and try and figure it out. But I don't expect I'm going to get a phone call from him saying oh yeah, I've got it, you know, because he's not really committed. You know he's not committed to it. Other people are like heck, give me the. You know, I want a 16-ounce driver. I mean, I'm not trying to sell drivers on this podcast, I'm just making them available to the students. You know we, we have them available and there's a six week, you know, lead time on these things. It's not convenient. You know we're having them made exactly to my design and specifications and getting it set up be very, very similar to what hoban would have been using who makes these drivers that you're offering?
Speaker 2:we have an individual, a custom guy, that's, uh, just a master craftsman that makes them for us and he's, you know, making a prior. What is the word? Priority, propriety, propriety, version. You know, I've designed the club, set it up, sent him a prototype exactly how I want everything to look, from the insert to the little angle, the shafts in it and the whole thing, and, um, so we're having, we're having those made and, uh, and it's great to be able to offer that, because in the past it was like, okay, we well just go buy something from the 50s and throw a bunch of lead tape on the back of it and, you know, get it up to 16 ounces, and people can do that too, but it never has the right shafts in it. The the driver shafts are too loose. Hogan didn't use driver shafts.
Speaker 3:He put one iron shafts in his clubs we heard of this uh, former pga tour player, todd dempsey, who's also doing the same thing, selling persimmon woods and he, interestingly enough, in one of the interviews he said that he hits his persimmon woods as far as his modern day frying cans well, you know this, this is you know.
Speaker 2:Again, this goes off the conversation a bit, but there's a reason for that and I would say it depends, okay, because the technique to swing a modern driver is different than the technique to swing a 14 ounce, 15 or 16 ounce persimmon driver, like we talked about earlier. With the persimmon driver you have to use the big muscles in your body to handle the weight and to move the thing. With the lightweight clubs you really you have to disconnect the arms and the hands from the body rotation. They have to move separate and independent. It's the same thing as if I, you know, took a fly swatter in my hand. I could just, you know, move it back and forth really, really quick, like you know, with a fly swatter, and I wouldn't be using my shoulders or torso or anything. I could. Just that would be the way to get the speed. It's hard to get that kind of speed with the body rotation, but with a heavier club you need the body rotation to move it and you don don't have to swing as fast with the club head to hit the ball the same distance. So I'll just give you an example Only one time have I ever hit a modern frying pan driver and I was playing up at Pumpkin Ridge up in the Portland area and the guy I was playing with said oh John, you know, will you just try it just one time?
Speaker 2:So I teed it up and it was so light, okay, and my golf swing isn't based upon disconnecting my arms and my hands from my body. I'm a pivot-driven hitter. So I used my same swing with this lightweight club and my body. The RPMs of my body rotation is the same, okay, so I'm going at the same rotational speed, but now I don't have the mass in the head. So what happens? The ball didn't go as far. Okay, I hit the ball farther with the persimmon driver because I have more mass in the head, with the same body rotation.
Speaker 2:Now if I were to say, oh, okay, you mean I can just slap at it with my arms and hands and I don't really have to turn my body here, then yes, I could disconnect and swat at the thing like I, like it was a fly swatter, and probably knock it another 30 yards, 40, 50 yards, you know if I had the right technique for it. But would I have control over that thing? Absolutely no way, no way. I would have too much face rotation going through, I wouldn't be able to feel the leading edge of the of the club face, the club head, and I wouldn't be holding shaft.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, could I hit it farther? Sure, would I hit it straight? No, and we don't see anybody really lasering the ball straight. You know, we see people, even the top, top. Look at Roy McIlroy. He's the top player in the world. He's hitting the driver all over the place. I mean, it's a different game, courses are different, different conversation, but my point is that Hogan was a pivot-driven hitter with a heavy club. So, getting back to Hogan, if you want Hogan's methodology then you should start with that kind of gear and then work into that kind of swing.
Speaker 3:So talk about the next one explosion into the finish.
Speaker 2:So that would be advanced ball striking module three for the ABS students. But it's a little bit. We have to tweak it for the hogan modules a bit because of the weight distribution. Uh, at the address position would be different than what we would teach at advanced ball striking regular modules. The regular modules are more uh, it's a, it's a umbrella. It's going to cover all the kinds of backswings.
Speaker 2:You can take it outside, inside, upright flat, whatever you want to do, you don't hit the ball in the backswing. We know that. I've seen every kind of backswing work. I've seen upright swings work. You know when I say work, I mean reasonably well. I've seen guys win tournaments, win at the professional level with upright swings, with flat swings Club face open at the top, club face shut at the top. I've seen all of that stuff.
Speaker 2:We don't really worry about the backswing. In fact we don't even have a backswing module in the advanced ball striking modules. That's how much I care about the backswing. There's a couple things. If I see a student doing something really, really bad, like just no rotation of their shoulders at all, then we'll make that correction. But for the most part we don't really talk about it.
Speaker 2:But with the Hogan modules, because we're talking about Hogan, you have to have a very specific backswing. When you're talking about Ben Hogan, his backswing is engineered. The whole swing is just an engineering marvel actually it's incredible. But he figured out he's got to take it back a certain way, take it to the inside, rotate the forearms open, has the great shoulder rotation weights on his right foot and the club shaft is kind of like a Nautilus, like a seashell corkscrewing kind of move on the backswing. So you have to set yourself up to be able to trip the shaft.
Speaker 2:Okay, so that has to happen on the backswing. You can't just do whatever. Okay, it's not. It's not a whatever, it's a hogan specific. So it's a small umbrella that sits under the big umbrella. Basically, hogan modules are a small umbrella underneath the advanced ball, striking big umbrella. Basically, hogan modules are a small umbrella underneath the advanced ball, striking big umbrella. Everything would be compatible if you're working on abs modules. You're not. It's nothing there's going to be, you know, radically incompatible. It's just that someone that graduated from the abs modules would then move into refining. It's like, okay, we're going to refine things now.
Speaker 3:So do we need to be an ABS practitioner? Do we need to get the ABS modules to benefit from the Hogan modules?
Speaker 2:No, I designed the Hogan modules for people that just want to come in and do Hogan modules, so it's specifically set up that way. Of course it's advantageous to have taken the ABS module course first, and we have a lot of the Hogan module. Students at this point are guys that went through the ABS course and so there's going to be a lot of things that are familiar. But all of the modules are tweaked a little bit Hogan specific. For somebody coming in new. You don't have to take the ABS modules. Would it be beneficial to have done that? Yes, because there's a lot of crossover, there's a lot of cross-pollination between the two, but you could come in right into the Hogan modules without any exposure to ABS and learn the methodology.
Speaker 3:So what can students expect when they purchase the Hogan modules?
Speaker 2:They can expect to work really hard. They can expect to find out they have muscles in their body they didn't know existed. Yeah, it's a process. It's uh, this is for you know. It's really designed for people that actually want to take, take on a methodology that's going to get them very, very close to how ben hogan was was swinging the golf glove and um, the reason that I did it is because I just didn't see anything out there that was even close. I mean, there's been all kinds of books written and people talking about this. You can go on youtube and there's a thousand kinds of books written and people talking about this. You can go on YouTube and there's a thousand people with Hogan's secret the one, it's this, it's that it's his left wrist, it's this or that, you know nobody's.
Speaker 2:If I'd looked at the people that are claiming to teach Hogan I've looked at their golf swings and they have no idea what they're doing. So they wouldn't even I wouldn't even let them in the room to talk to me, and I'm not. I'm not saying this in an arrogant way, I'm just saying factually, I want to see them take it inside. I want to see them trip the shaft. I want the shaft on the 430 line. I want to see the whole shaft flex through the strike with with a frozen right elbow and I want to see some some club shaft extension into the finish. If you're not doing that, you're not teaching h, you shouldn't be teaching Hogan and you should be teaching something else.
Speaker 3:And don't talk to me, okay.
Speaker 2:So how long is it going to take for people to get it? I think it's just like to me. You know, golf is almost like a spiritual discipline and you know, jesse and I have talked about that. It's like a martial art. You know, golf is almost like a spiritual discipline and you know, jesse and I've talked about that, it's, it's like a martial art, you know, and, justin, you took some martial arts when you were younger, right? Yeah, now this can be combined with like a spiritual discipline, a life quest, a quest for perfection. It becomes a big part of your life.
Speaker 2:It's a great thing, um, to to feel what it's like to hit a golf ball, holding shaft, flex through the strike, tripping the shaft at the top, coming through. I mean it's just an incredible experience. And why would you do that? I mean you could ask somebody why, why do? Why do you surf? You know you get on that perfect wave and you know there's that perfect eight foot swell and you just drop in and you cut left and you know, and here comes the barrel and you tuck down, you go through the tube and you know you come out the other side unscathed and you ride into the beach and there's a beautiful girl waiting for you with their arms wide open. You give you a big hug. That was awesome. I mean, you know it's like.
Speaker 2:These are things that aren't about money, you know, it's not necessarily about winning a tournament or whatever. It's just having that experience. What's it like to flush a golf ball, holding shaft, flex, with a flat line angle, tripping the shaft, feeling the shaft load up on the way down. You know, wrenching your feet into the ground, doing the mod, two foot squeeze through the strike module, two through one, two, three, going through it. You know, the experience is fantastic, right? So I would expect that you're going to have a ton of light bulb moments that are just going to be clicking off every few weeks, every few months, every few years. Another light bulb moments that are just going to be clicking off. Every few weeks, every few months, every few years. Another light bulb goes off, a shining light, that real that you realize, wow, I am on the pathway.
Speaker 2:Excellent degree to greatness like most feeling of greatness and he and mo had this move. Mo had the tripping the shaft move. In fact, on our ABS Advanced Ball Striking website, neil, I think, put up a GIF like a two back and forth and it just shows Mo tripping the shaft and that feeling of greatness. I think that's what Mo's talking about, because this isn't a move that's easily accessible to people.
Speaker 3:You know you talk about tripping the shaft. I think you posted a video of someone drumming before.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I thought that was instructive. Yeah, that was a good one. Yeah, what a shame.
Speaker 2:But I'll tell you, yeah, that was a great thing. So it's the same thing. So it was Buddy Rich. People would argue, so it was buddy rich, the you know. People would argue he was the greatest drummer of all time. You know, there's there's other people in that conversation, uh, joe Moralo and other guys.
Speaker 2:I'm a drummer as well, but what buddy rich did is, if you take a snare drum and let's just say you put it perfectly level, okay, when he would, when he would hit the stick and the stick would rebound, okay, off the drum. He'd hit the drum and the stick would rebound and his hand would break the plane and go below the surface of the drum. Okay, now, who would do that? Who would do that to hit a drum? Think, just, you know, think about landing a pencil on a desk. Right, you hit the pencil on the desk, but the, but the eraser end when you do that, ends up below the desk and then to come back up, the eraser comes back up above the, the plane of the desk, or you could say, a drumstick comes up and then strikes the drum again, and then this pattern goes back and forth at the speed of light.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is, this is technique stuff. Okay, this isn't strength, this is technique. And this is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about with hogan tripping the shaft. It's actually the exact same technique, it's just applied to a golf club. So you've got, like a buddy rich kind of technique master and Hogan doing the same, the same thing. And I've heard that the great Ted Williams baseball player many consider the greatest hitter of all time he did the same thing with a baseball bat.
Speaker 1:Wow, this is a lot to unpack, big john. I mean, it's a lot. Um, you know, for me I just feel like I'm I'm still a toddler learning how to walk in this journey.
Speaker 2:But so far, so good and you want me to rattle off the 38 secrets and then you can pick one of them that you want to talk about. Take me about probably two minutes and I can rattle them all off just like a lightning round.
Speaker 1:All right, let's do a lightning round, okay.
Speaker 2:Flat lie angles, heavy heads, stiff shafts, no offset, wide stance, maximum weight transfer. Left arm on the shoulder line at the top a laggy takeaway getting the shaft perpendicular to the left arm by nine o'clock. Cupped wrist at the top. Torso vertical with level shoulder rotation. Torso torso more vertical, I should say I'll just say a little Torso. More vertical, I should say I'll just say a little more vertical than upright, not bent over a lot right Level shoulder rotation Straight. Left arm created by tripping the shaft. Tripping the shaft to transition Weight 98, 95% on the right foot through transition. Major push off the right foot through transition. Tripping the shaft and lateral push must happen simultaneously. Shoulders and hips remain closed as far into the downswing as possible. After tripping the shaft, the hands move down to the right hip pocket Strike from the 430 line with weight on the left foot. Club face as open as possible at P3 prior to the strike. Hands low through impact. Feeling a heel-heavy divot. P3 prior to the strike Hands low through impact. Feeling a heel heavy divot. Body rotation through the strike. Right elbow frozen through the strike. Forward shaft lean resisted through the strike. Okay, that's one that's a controversial thing, but absolutely I'm telling you 100% he's resisting forward. Shaft lean through the strike Level. Shoulder rotation through the strike. Cohesive body tension points in place throughout the swing, meaning squeezing the uh, the feet, the abdominal cavity, the upper arms packed on the body in a firm grip.
Speaker 2:Module three grind. Abs. Module three, as people would know, abs. Module three, foot grind from p3 to the finish. Holding shaft flex through the strike via acceleration. Hands cut left, post impact keeping the club face looking at the target Pressure taken off the shaft at transition Shaft falling behind the body while weight transfers laterally through transition, which I would refer to as the major part of the free ride down. The grip is firm but flexible. In the wrist the grip is firm but flexible. In the wrist the grip is fairly neutral. The finish with the weight on the left foot. Finish with shoulders rotated as open as possible. Finish with upper left arms parallel to the ground Shaft more skyward. Grip in the fingers is firm. Head moves down and laterally on downswing as knees flex and weight moves left, right foot perpendicular to the targeted address. Inside route takeaway shaft works at right angles to the spine on the downswing as early as possible. That's absolutely critical. And hips and shoulders move every frame through the strike. If you're, if you're taping it okay so there's 30.
Speaker 2:That's just so far I'm that. That's where we are. And on this day of july, what is today?
Speaker 3:15 15th of July.
Speaker 2:July 15th 2025. Maybe a year from now, I'll have another six secrets on here. We might be up to 46. We might get it up to 80 at some point.
Speaker 3:Have you ever thought of writing a book?
Speaker 2:The problem with writing a book is that there's no visuals. I mean, everything's stagnant as a picture. Video is such a better way to teach. I'm really into teaching through the module videos. Writing books it's. Who's ever written a great instruction book? That the best instruction book I'll say right now is Sam sweet.
Speaker 2:Sam sneeds swing keys. That's the best book, better than Hogan's book, better than Knudsen's book, better than Trevino's Swing Keys. That's the best book, better than Hogan's book, better than Knudsen's book, better than Trevino's book, better than Jack's book. That's the one to get and go buy stock in the company of the publisher right now. Sam Sneed's Swing Keys Now that's a good book. People say that Sam Sneed. Well, you know old Sam Snead, he just grips it and rips it and you know he didn't know what he was doing. He was just a good old country boy from Virginia that gripped the club and he knew exactly what he was doing. He knew and when you see that book you'll be like, oh, this guy was a major thinker. He knew exactly. The old farm boy thing was a big front.
Speaker 1:He knew exactly. That's funny, wasn't dumb, no, yeah, yeah. Well, I'll tell you I have. I have one last thing that I want you to enlighten everyone that, um, I don't even even know if it's even been misunderstood versus just weft. When, when you say hogan took pressure off the shaft in transition, what do you mean by that?
Speaker 2:well, I mean, he's doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing. So his intention is to take pressure off the shaft okay, and to to delay the loading of the pressure into the shaft as late as possible into the downswing as possible. Right, if you just take the club back. Let's just say a typical golf instruction you set up at address. The instructor says cock your wrists up 90 degrees and cock bend them back 90 degrees. So now the shaft's parallel to the ground and now just hold, hold that, just turn your shoulders back and then turn into the golf ball. What's that going to do? It's going to right, when you start turning the golf ball, you're going to start loading up that shaft really early and putting a lot of pressure on it. Hogan would do the.
Speaker 2:Hogan was trying to take that pressure and take pressure off the shaft, but maintaining a very fast golf swing, fast back and fast through. You could argue that, oh, what if he just took a slow backswing and paused at the top and then came down? Yeah, yeah, you could do that, but that's not what Hogan did. Hogan had a very fast backswing, very fast downswing, and his downswing and his intention and this is all stuff that I learned getting inside this kind of swing. It's like, you know, experiencing this from the inside out.
Speaker 2:Like what does this feel like? You know months and months and months of experimenting with things. I wouldn't even think about putting out a module until I'd been working on this thing for like six months, you know, and field testing it, hitting golf balls, going out and playing, really trying. Is this right? Yes, it's right, because I'm just hitting it at the pin every hole. It's like, okay, you know this. Yeah, I get this, this is right, this is working with this part, this is working with that part, and it's, it's been a joy. I mean it's, it's really been a wonderful thing. But but getting back to, you know, taking pressure off the shaft, that is what we learned through tripping the shaft. Tripping the shaft takes, pressure off the shaft takes pressure off the shaft.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Knudsen did it so well as well, as did Mo. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. You know the correlation of Mo when the few videos that Mo has done that have been pretty good, where he talks about it's impossible for him to spin out. He was relating, opening up too early with spinning out.
Speaker 1:It was impossible for him to spin out because he was lateraling too much right you know, everybody was in such a hurry to hit the golf ball and he wanted all of his pop at the bottom yeah, and mo hit into a bent left knee right.
Speaker 2:So you know. You see all these guys with the you know locking their left knee up through the strike. You know, tiger, you know, ended up having what knee surgery from doing that, didn't he?
Speaker 2:no, multiple multiple knee surgeries you know, um, injuring themselves doing that. Justin and I were taught that with, uh, the golfing machine. You know, like, lock up the left knee to speed up the hips. Golfing machine said plant the left foot. The left foot moves the left knee, the left knee moves the left hip, the left hip moves the torso on the shoulder, you know, the shoulder moves the arm.
Speaker 2:But I would say that that's just completely wrong. It's not, it's not correct. It's one way to do it. It's not correct. It's one way to do it. But if you say that that's the right way, then you say Knudsen is the wrong way because Knudsen swung into a bent left knee and Moe swung into a bent left knee and Hogan swung into a bent left knee to P4. You'll never see Hogan's leg locked up at P4. His knee straightened up into the finish. The biomechanics of this really is that the torso goes first. It pulls on the left hip, the left hip pulls on the left knee. The left knee gets straightened because the hip's moving, because the torso's moving above it. That's actually what Mo's doing and what Knutson's doing and what Hogan's doing. Hogan's torso rotation was so vicious, so violent, from before it was finished that it would straighten his left knee.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:His left knee would just give out and it would just straighten up because the upper torso was so aggressive, so violent With Knutson it's very violent, but not as violent as Hogan's and therefore his left knee doesn't lock up. The left knee is resisting that. Everyone else is trying to straighten their left knee and you've got these great strikers that are resisting that. So there was a real departure here between these great strikers and the modern teachers and the modern players. And you know again, that's a whole other podcast and you could say modern players against who's better, the modern players or the old timers or whatever. But that's an easy one to prove because you could just give the modern players the old equipment and see how they do, and I say they don't do very well. Now you can't take the old guys out and give them the modern. I say they don't do very well. Now you could give you can't take the old guys out and give them the modern equipment. We don't know. We don't know what they would do. I would say they wouldn't do very well. I don't think they would do well because the clubs are too light and and that golf swing is designed around heavier gear. I mean, I know this for myself, because I'm a old school swing and you give me lightweight gear and I can't hit it, be disaster. But if I learn to hit the lightweight gear, then my old school swing wouldn't work.
Speaker 2:See, this is the thing when I know this to be a fact too, because when I won the trga event in vegas I hadn't played a tournament I don't know 13 years or something. I go out and win it by seven shots. It was a persimmon and blades tournament and I go out and win it by seven shots. It was a Persimmon and Blades tournament. And I go out and win it because I'm a Persimmon and Blades player and everybody else that was a Persimmon and Blades player. That went to the modern gear they can't play anymore. So I mean, how could you explain that? How can somebody? How can a washed-up golf pro like myself who hasn't played a tournament in 13 years?
Speaker 3:go out and beat everybody by seven shots.
Speaker 2:It's impossible. I'm not sure you can use the term watch, that will not screw on you, but it's true. You know everybody just got worse. All those guys were good players before and now they can't play anymore because they've ruined their swings with lightweight clubs upright lightweight clubs and they're just slapping out with their arms and hands. They go back to the old stuff. You know it's like Major League Baseball.
Speaker 2:When you're in the show man, it's wood Hit that 90-mile-an-hour breaking balls coming down at you with a piece of lumber in your hand. You're in the show man. This is the big leagues. You don't see that. If I saw an aluminum baseball bat in somebody's hand, I'd know I'm at a college game or a corporate softball game or something. It's not the show, it's not the big leagues, but that's another. We'll have that conversation. Never. We won't do that podcast. I did a video about that recently. I mean a little tongue in cheek on it, but everyone knows where I'm at with this stuff. We won't get into that here. We're just talking about Hogan. Hogan was a persimmon player. I'm going to say that Hogan was a persimmon player.
Speaker 1:Well, I find it very interesting and I'm not disrespecting anybody out there, because I have some friends out there on the various tours in the world, some friends out there on the various tours in the world but just the level of mastery has changed in my opinion. I think I remember talking I know I've talked to Justin about this and I've talked to you about this, john, but just in closing when I was growing up and watching the people, the guys at the Crosby, they were master ball strikers, like a lot of them, just hit it incredibly well. And I'm not saying that the guys today don't hit it well, they do. It's just different. I mean, these guys were just technical masters, masters of trajectory, masters of spin, masters of working the ball. It was really cool, it was cool to see. It was cool. It was cool era to see and be a part of.
Speaker 1:And you know I'm one of these humans that has seen both eras. You know I grew up playing golf both eras. You know I grew up playing golf, playing persimmon and blades and, as we all did, all of us in our 50s or late 40s, and then seeing that change, you know, and introducing a different, just a different layer of playing. But you know, in the Hogan, in regards to Hogan, like especially the teachers that listen to this, because I know that there's a bunch, you know, please consider that the equipment was a major factor in how Hogan swung and you know, correlating that to my own game going heavier, flatter, particularly with my irons heavier and flatter I'm more rotational.
Speaker 1:Now it's like my irons have me in a captive environment. If you hit my irons it's harder to over-accelerate, it's harder to come out of it, so to speak, or get, you know, quote unquote stuck, because the irons are set up in a way that's forcing me into anatomically better spots in my golf swing, forcing me to be more rotational. It's forcing me to be more in the ground and use the ground appropriately. So you know, here's another thing that we talked about that I've spoken about, justin. You and I have spoken about how the importance of getting your golf club set up to how you want to play. But you know, hogan did that and was, quite frankly, maybe one of the first to exemplify that and talk about how important that was.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, the equipment, you know it's a different conversation. The modern game, you know, I, I understand, I respect the modern teachers because they're teaching modern players and most people are just weekend golfers and they just want to hit the ball better now, okay, like tomorrow they're going to play this weekend. Can you tell me something that'll just want to hit the ball better now, ok, like tomorrow they're going to play this weekend. Can you tell me something that will just help me hit the ball a little bit better today? And that's what most teachers are doing and that's what most people want, right? Very few people, you know, are going to come to me and say, john, I want to. You know, commit my life to learning Ben Hogan's golf swing. You know, commit my life to learning Ben Hogan's golf swing. You know, tell me what to eat in the morning and which shoe to tie first, or whatever. You know, I, I'm, I'm filling in a niche. That is necessary, but it's a very small niche, right? This is I'm just for fanatics. Okay, you want, you want to get to Hogan. You're a fanatic, you're obsessed, you've read his books. It's not working. You've been to, I don't. I can't tell you how many people have come onto the deck that have told me. I went to Butch Harmon, I went to Hank Haney, I went to David Ledbetter, I went to blah blah blah. And when you know they went to all these people and you know they, they just like I'm lost, I'm confused, I'm not sure they know what they're doing. And I'll take out a one iron, okay, and I'll put a ball on the deck and I'll say watch this. And I will just rip that thing and I'll say do you want a five-yard fade on it? Do you want a five-yard draw on it? What do you want on it? I'll put down three balls, I'll go five-yard, maintain my ball, striking for credibility. You know as long I'm 61 right now as of this video. You know the clock is ticking Now. Will I be able to do this in 20 years, when I'm 81? I don't know. Maybe not, you know. But at least I'll have some record of doing it.
Speaker 2:And it's important to be able to have some amount of athleticism to be able to get inside this kind of action, because you're going to be busy, you're going to have to work at this stuff. I mean realistically, you know, for the Hogan modules I'd say a half an hour a day of hardcore drills. I just released a video for the Hogan students showing me do this, what I consider the six most important of the Hogan module drills. It takes me about 30 minutes to get through it and I showed me doing all the reps and everything, not just like, ok, here's me doing one rep and then, you know, do 30 of these. That's like you see me doing 30 of them with one hand going bam, two, three, four, five, 28, 29,. You know, I mean it's a workout. I break a sweat and I quit my gym membership years ago. You know this is this is all I need. And I go to the park and I do some sprints and I, you know, I watch my diet to a certain extent. I do some things there. But now this is, this is for fanatics.
Speaker 2:My point is, if you want to learn to swing like Hogan that methodology then I'm probably a good person to come and see. Now, if you find somebody else that can teach you this stuff, that's great. Else that can teach you this stuff, that's great. But I would want to see them take it inside, trip the shaft to transition, get on the 430 line, work through the strike with a frozen right elbow and show some decent shaft extension through the strike. If you can do that, go see that guy. Okay, if he can do it better than me, go see him and I'll go see him, him and I'll go see him.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I'm just here for the people that want to learn that, or they take the advanced ball striking course, people that want to move from swinging protocol to hitting. I've done both. I've won tournaments as a swinger and I've won them as a hitter. And I'll tell you what it's a lot easier as a hitter, a lot better ball control, a lot more confidence. You know you can actually play more aggressively and, uh, without fear. And swinging was just full of fear and uncertainty and chance and guessing and and I won't have anything to do with it because I've done both, I know I've done, I've done both. So anyway, I don't, I don't know what else I can say. I think Justin's like shut this guy up you've done.
Speaker 2:You've done well winning two golf tournaments playing in very different ways yeah, I, you know I did fine, I mean, and I was okay. I was a good junior player. I was, you know, third ranked in the in southern california.
Speaker 3:Uh, dennis paulson and duffy waldorf they were dennis paulson I remember that name and duffy waldorf. Speaking of duffy waldorf, that's one swing that had the right foot on the ground for a long time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, duffy. And then college I was an All-American, I won the conference championship. I want to say I won it twice because I signed my card incorrectly and was disqualified my sophomore year, think about that. So, tee to green, yes, I want it, um, but uh, I signed the card, the pencil, you know, whatever. So that's a whole nother story, but it's one of those silly rules in golf. You know, can you imagine, like watching a basketball game, and then they get off the court and they ask Steph Curry well, how many three pointers did you make? And he said I think I made 10. And will you sign that? Okay, yeah, I made 10. He said oh, you made 11. You're disqualified, we're taking all the points off. I mean, it's just ridiculous. It's the most stupidest rule I've ever heard of. It's like in the Masters, like people don't know how many under par somebody is. You've got a million people watching it and rules, officials and a scorer, and the player has to sign his card after the round. Like can't do the math or something, or he's just so happy or nervous he's looking at the numbers, he puts down the wrong. I mean, think about that. It's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. But I'm going to say, okay, yeah, I won the conference championship. I went back the next year and won the tournament.
Speaker 2:After that happened to me my sophomore year, I came back my junior year. I was an All-American, got on the tour, got my butt kicked. I went down to Australia hitting balls between Greg Norman and Sandy Lyle in the Australian Open and I went okay, this isn't going to work. Gunshots going off on both sides, these guys are doing something different. Gunshots going off on both sides, these guys are doing something different. Went back to McCatton and I said I got to do something different. This little swinging move isn't going to work Out in the big leagues out here. And I didn't really have anyone to teach me, so I just taught myself, figured some things out, looked at those guys, looked at what they were doing, tried to emulate. People like Peter Senior and Greg Norman and people I was playing against at the time Turned it around. End. People like Peter Sr, greg Norman and people I was playing against at the time Turned it around, ended up winning on the Canadian Tour. Broke Mo Norman's tournament record. Shot 17 under par hit. I missed four greens in four days.
Speaker 3:Who came in second?
Speaker 2:Bradley Hughes Beat Bradley by a shot and Greg Norman. He went down in Vegas for revenge.
Speaker 3:Greg Norman was in that tournament as well, right.
Speaker 2:No, no, this was on the Canadian tour, yeah, but I played the Australian tour four years, played Canadian tour seven years, played a little bit around the US, but I was mostly focused on the foreign tours. I didn't really like the American courses that much.
Speaker 2:I had this talk with Jesse about it. We're kind of golf course snobs a little bit, but I didn't really like the TPC stadium golf thing. It wasn't really my kind of thing, really too much. Went to the finals of tour school, went to PJ tour school three times, made it to the finals and missed in Houston. Um, I don't even remember what year that was, I'm thinking that was eight, 80, 89, maybe. Um, yeah, I had a good, you know good career, good career, decent, you know. But I was never, you know, like a world beater. I was never, you know, I was just a journeyman guy.
Speaker 2:I was on the tour and, you know, picked up a win and I new york open. I lost in a sudden death playoff and the guy chipped in. I did a tom watson thing on me and chipped in out of the rough. I was in for par and he's over the mystic. Yeah, he's over there 10 yards right of the green in the deep rough and holes it out for birdie and wins the playoff. I feel like I won that tournament in my head. I won the tournament. I hit it down the middle, I knocked a one iron on the green and I two putted. He hooked it left in the trees, found a slot through the trees, missed the green right into the rough. You know I'm beating him in every possible way off the tee into the green. You know I'm in for par. He holds it out. I don't know to me. I won that tournament.
Speaker 2:A newspaper said something different but I disagree with the newspaper. I won that tournament. No, but yeah, you know, I was just. There were a lot of guys like me, a lot, of, a lot of guys did better than me, but I was, uh, just guys trying to make it. You know, just trying to pay my bills out there.
Speaker 2:If I could pick up 50 grand on one tour and buy a plane ticket to Australia and go down there and play for four months and make enough money to fly home and you know, pay my apartment and golf course junior membership and get on to the next tour and know, buy a used car and drive around, and you know it was a lot of fun. You know those. I should write a, I could write a book, I could write like a jack kerouac on the road of tour golf, because there's a whole life outside the golf, you know, there's just the whole thing of just the traveling and the people you meet and the experience you know. It could just be like that. That would be a book I should write. No, not so much about the golf swing. I'd rather do it on video.
Speaker 1:But yeah, that's a good idea. I think you should, john. That would be good.
Speaker 2:It would be really good I wouldn't talk about the golf swing much, it would be all the other things.
Speaker 1:That's all good. Well, listen, let's wrap it up so people can get a hold of you via the site right, Advancedballstrikingcom.
Speaker 2:Yep, youtube channel, john Erickson, advancedballstrikingcom. If you want to jump right onto the forum, you would go forumadvancedballstrikingcom. There's a little bit of stuff on Instagram. Justin posted some things on there, some of the ABS stuff.
Speaker 2:It's too much for me. I can't be on YouTube and the site. I have to pick and choose my battles there. I'm not really. It's too much for me. I can't be on YouTube and the site and I have to pick and choose my battles there. But I'm just. I'm not really even on Facebook, although I do have a Facebook page, but I'm pretty much YouTube, john Erickson and advanced ball strikingcom. If you go there, there's a link to the forum and that's where all the goods are. That's where all the conversation and stuff is. Yeah, that's where all the goods are. That's where all the conversation and stuff is. Yeah, that's about it. I mean, I didn't even drink any water during this. How is that possible? Passion, yeah, I can get it going, no doubt about it. But no, it was good. I enjoyed it. Appreciate you having me on, jesse. It's always a pleasure to speak with you, justin. You're a huge part of why ABS is even going on these days.
Speaker 1:Thanks to Justin.
Speaker 3:That was serendipity. I just wanted to catch up with you and then boom, we went down this rabbit hole.
Speaker 2:Well, you were scolding me, You're like you have to get. I remember you just saying you have to get the advanced, false striking site back up because it had gone dark because of changes to the website protocols. It was no longer readable on iPhones and modern browsers and it just went away slowly, one year at a time, until it wouldn't even exist and I just thought, well, go on with other things. You know, I got a fishing pole in the car and other stuff. I'll just go do that. It was like the golf thing's over and just just in there like, uh, you have to, you absolutely have to get that back. You have to, you have to somehow. Just, you know, and I talked to william, william hannish, and he was one of the students and he's like you know, he's a computer code guy and he's like let me take a look at this and see if I can figure something out. And three months later he's got the site back up and going and and then all that was, that was amazing and then neil jumped on board.
Speaker 2:Now we've got the four of us running this thing and it's like amazing, you know. So I've got to give it to these guys, because without them I wouldn't be here. Yeah yeah. That's right.
Speaker 1:Without any of us I wouldn't be here. So advancedballstrikingcom folks, John, always a pleasure. My man, Justin, Thank you Awesome folks, john, always a pleasure. My man, justin, thank you, awesome you.