As a very keen young player I read all Cotton's books. I was given his wonderful book called 'My Golfing Album' for my birthday in 1962. I still read it it regularly, full of golfing wisdom, great anecdotes, wonderful photos and nostalgia.
First professional golfer I ever saw was when I was a teenager back in the 80's, what an exibition of golf he put on that sunny afternoon in Killarney, I'd traveled 300 miles to caddy for a pro then stayed out to watch Henry show off his skills,never forget that day.cheers for sharing.
Good to see your videos still pop up in my feed. So much of swing strategy and technique back then seems to have been based around weakness of hickory shafts which were very strong lengthwise but allowed force acting on the toe of club to twist face open and closed and would splinter and snap if bent too much. That was certainly the case with the ones belonging to my grandfather born in 1900 whose hickories I played with and broke in the 1950s. The strategy of always keeping club head pulling on hands or hands pulling on club head is still the same but the ‘magic move’ reversing the club bends and loads the shaft and a much greater degree of side bending of the spine in the downswing is needed to keep the hands accelerating faster than the club head mass - what keeps the bend in the shaft -until deep into the downswing where it can do useful work accelerating the club head just before impact with the ball. Around the time you posted this I had been experimenting with the swing styles of Ben Hogan, Moe Norman and trick shot artist Count Yogi (Harry Frankenberg) who all had the uncanny ability to to hit balls consistently straight and long. Watching videos frame by frame I realized they were holding shaft bend via lagging club head bend deep into their downswings then snapping hands down at the ball with the same action as surf casting with two arms or cracking a whip with just the trail arm to the point hands maxed out in ulnar deviation and locked up-also locking face of club at target and momentarily slowing down the club head which causes the ball to release off the face with a higher rate of restitution and ball speed than a club sweeping through the ball while still accelerating. Some other maxing out wrist action is needed when both hands are maxed out in ulnar deviation (waggled down to the point of locking) to prevent the hands from turning over and snapping the face shut while releasing the ball - Hogan’s nemesis the ‘snap hook’. This is where the swing of the three differed. At impact Hogan’s hands were in ulnar deviation + maxed out dorsiflexion of lead wrist (not supination as he said in Five Lessons). Supination results from radial/ulnar rotation of forearms. Hogan’s action was just the wrist with the dorsiflexion of the lead and causing extension to remain in the trail hand. If the timing is off and swing force is allowed to pull the extension out of the trail hand the hands roll and the face snapped closed. Been there done that many times on the learning curve (which is always hook shaped) 😂 Count Yogi did the opposite of Hogan, maxing out extension of his lead wrist at impact 🫸 like a doorstop, with hands pulled down into the same ‘crack the whip’ maxed out ulnar deviation. He didn’t suffer the snap-hook problem of Hogan because of the way the maxed-out extension in the lead and arrested the club with face square to the target. His trail arm and wrist was pulled straight at impact-the next best thing for consistency other than maxing out in either flexion or extension. In becomes physically impossible to get the face open enough at impact to create slice spin on the ball but the odd position of the hands (compared to conventional wisdom of per Harry Vardon) requires putting ball far back in the stance and works best from a closed stance. I learned to hit dead straight shots with stance closed 45° with my back to target using Count Yogi’s wrist action to stop the club and face square. His trick act was based on hitting shots with an assortment of of odd clubs and he also hit balls dead straight with a club head attached to a leather whip. After reading about him in George Peper’s book The Secret of Golf I realized I had seen Count Yogi doing his act on TV as a kid, being fascinated by trick with the whip and having my engineer father explain how he was doing it. What made Moe Norman’s swing similar was his unconventional grip and single plane swing at the way he aligned to the ball with both arms straight and both wrists in maxed out ulnar deviation. At the top of his swing the wrists changed to maxed out radial deviation as in a Harry Vardon style swing but on the way down “snapped” back down to the stretched straight address position that locks up the wrists and creates the consistent face control he possesses. What Norman and Yogi had in common ways a very steep swing path in their finish. I discovered that is a result of the hands rolling so the toe points forward at the target just after the ball releases. Normally the rolling of the hands occurs much later in the finish when the club force is finally allowed to pull the trail arm and wrist straight. That is the reason Hogan had a more normal club path in his finish. Unlike Yogi and Norman Hogan maintained some bend in the trail arm and extension in trail wrist through impact. Again that’s why he suffered from snap hooks when is balance / timing was off on uneven lies but Norman and Yogi didn’t. For the past dozen years I’ve been using my own version of that technique with a standard Vardon grip but applied a bit unconventionally. I hold the arms at side with 90° bent elbows and palms up then rotate forearms so hands are like this 🙏🏼 and put club WITH FACE CLOSED 45° into them in a conventional interlaced grip (I have hands like Nicklaus with long palms - short ‘cadet’ fingers). This puts both forearms in the middle of their range of ulnar-radial rotation. As the club is lowered and the arms straight the forearms rotate inwards ( ) creating stabilizing counter torque by stretching the muscles, most notably the brachioradialis over the lead elbow that bulges as weight of club pulls arm straight. The rotation of the forearm rotates both hands toward ground increasing pressure between pad of trail hand over lead thumb. I force both hands into maxed-out ‘waggle down’ unlar deviation and push slack out of lead arm with slightly bent trial arm - a mash-up of Hogan and Norman’s target alignment of face at start of address. How I differ at impact / address is having my trail arm / wrist pulled completely straight and bearing the force of the club BEFORE IMPACT which requires a lot of side bending which I can do because I have a very long torso and arms and correspondingly short legs - 35” dress shirt sleeves / 31” inseam. At impact my lead arm is already starting to bend because the trail shoulder / arm is bearing the swing force which is what happens in the Norman and Yogi swings. The feeling when swinging is one of dropping the hand down well behind the back foot until the shaft is horizontal and wrists are in maxed out radial deviation then using a ‘whip cracking’ acting with very active and forceful ‘waggle’ action like Hogan did at that point in his swing quite stealthily. Hogan in Five Lessons never says to ‘waggle the club head down in the ball like swinging a hammer at a 45° angled nail or chopping a horizontal log with a axe in a 45° V” but that’s exactly how it feels and why it causes the club head to accelerate much more the convention sweeping through ball with lead arm dragging club swing does. I’m now 72 and compressing the ball much better with that “waggle down like you’re chopping wood” swing style. It’s not the compression but rather the way as the ball wants to release off the face the grip orientation creates a ‘doorstop’ action which abruptly slows the club head down and causes the ball to literally explode off the face in full swing shots were the ball is fully compressed. The cause and effect is the same as what happens to an unbelted occupant of a car if hitting a Greyhound bus head on, something Hogan experienced in 1948. What increases ball speed and accuracy is the RATE at which the golf ball decompresses which is greater when the club head stops suddenly vs. riding on one that is still accelerating. The ability to hit straight shots comes from the fact that abruptly slowing the club head with a ‘doorstop’ action of the hands will cause the ball to release off the face allowing the golfer to precisely control when it releases to match the point where the locking of the wrists cause the face to point at the target. That is was the underlying strategy of stopping and squaring the face to trigger the release of the ball Count Yogi and Norman based their swings around, Yogi with intellectual understanding of the cause and effect based on the physics, Norman just figuring it out with his savant-like intuition. Hogan I suspect saw and copied the techniques of Yogi and Norman without fully understanding the physics, which is why he held off the release and would snap hook. What is interesting to me is that nearly all the long drive competitors and an increasing number of tour pros are using the “snap it down like chopping wood’ strategy, most notably Dechambeau who sets-up with straight arms and hands in maxed out ulnar deviation like Norman did with similar grip and swing plane.
I like this new series. I am a huge Cotton fan, i think he understood hand action and could explain it better than anyone. his "study the game of golf" book is fantastic. Roll on the granddaddy of them all, Percy Boomer.
The golf swing boils down to hinging/cocking uncocking the wrist/flicking the right and left wrists through the ball at impact, at least 75% with the right wrist, and the rest is mental game.
Splendidly done Dariusz... another beautiful production. I'm a big fan of Cotton as well, he pursued technical perfection with an intensity equaled perhaps only by Hogan.
I love the quietness of his feet. His right foot just rolls inward with his right knee, neither on the toes or heels, but the whole foot.. The new swing of today? The players are up on their toes, the right foot is way more active and the left foot is sometimes off the ground. In one of Mr. Hogan's writings he talks of practicing flat footed. Mr. Hogan had the greatest footwork ever. This is great stuff, Merry Christmas and thankyou.
@@h1e2x3 Dariusz J. , I just went to your BGST website, first my heartfelt condolences to you on the passing of your beloved wife. Could I email you? Your comment above has opened the door to a lot of things for me, I have not read Cotton's book as you can tell, but would like to know which one of the 10 I should read, I and many other questions, thank you.
@@jteddy11 Thank you very much, I do appreciate your words a lot. There are quite a few Cotton's books worth reading, but IMO the best from technical point of view is titled "This Game of Golf".
Thank you, I am very honured, however, there are many pro experts of the game with much better historical knowledge as well. I might appear as such though because golf is in my heart all the time although I am not playing it any more....maybe someday
Would you say his wrist action included flexion of right wrist through impact? Homer Kelley said you are dead in the water if you do this, there’s so much confusion in golf, it’s like trying to find buried treasure in a wide open plain
@@cdunne1620 Well, Henry Cotton was a master of the game and very intelligent theorist. Homer Kelley was also an intelligent theorist, but definitely not a master of the game. I prefer to trust the first. BTW, one of the releases Cotton depicted is the push release which is similar to what Kelley endorsed. However, this is not the only one possible for sure.
Alex Morrison was maybe the most famous early teacher who constantly advanced the idea of ankles rolling inward, instead of inactive feet or a body working so hard that the feet were up on the toes (as you say). That made its way to Jack Grout, which made its way to Nicklaus. I hear he didn't do badly.
I am now smacking my ball as if it is a heavy tire and I am prepared to break my wrist over it. Thank God it’s not and thank you Sir Henry Cotton wherever you are. Cheers
I love the quietness of his feet. His right foot just rolls inward with his right knee, neither on the toes or heels, but the whole foot.. The new swing of today? The players are up on their toes, the right foot is way more active and the left foot is sometimes off the ground. In one of Mr. Hogan's writings he talks of practicing flat footed. Mr. Hogan had the greatest footwork ever. This is great stuff, Merry Christmas and thank you.
![SahBabii - Viking [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/D37cL92JX0I/mqdefault.jpg)
As a very keen young player I read all Cotton's books. I was given his wonderful book called 'My Golfing Album' for my birthday in 1962. I still read it it regularly, full of golfing wisdom, great anecdotes, wonderful photos and nostalgia.
First professional golfer I ever saw was when I was a teenager back in the 80's, what an exibition of golf he put on that sunny afternoon in Killarney, I'd traveled 300 miles to caddy for a pro then stayed out to watch Henry show off his skills,never forget that day.cheers for sharing.
Good to see your videos still pop up in my feed.
So much of swing strategy and technique back then seems to have been based around weakness of hickory shafts which were very strong lengthwise but allowed force acting on the toe of club to twist face open and closed and would splinter and snap if bent too much. That was certainly the case with the ones belonging to my grandfather born in 1900 whose hickories I played with and broke in the 1950s.
The strategy of always keeping club head pulling on hands or hands pulling on club head is still the same but the ‘magic move’ reversing the club bends and loads the shaft and a much greater degree of side bending of the spine in the downswing is needed to keep the hands accelerating faster than the club head mass - what keeps the bend in the shaft -until deep into the downswing where it can do useful work accelerating the club head just before impact with the ball.
Around the time you posted this I had been experimenting with the swing styles of Ben Hogan, Moe Norman and trick shot artist Count Yogi (Harry Frankenberg) who all had the uncanny ability to to hit balls consistently straight and long. Watching videos frame by frame I realized they were holding shaft bend via lagging club head bend deep into their downswings then snapping hands down at the ball with the same action as surf casting with two arms or cracking a whip with just the trail arm to the point hands maxed out in ulnar deviation and locked up-also locking face of club at target and momentarily slowing down the club head which causes the ball to release off the face with a higher rate of restitution and ball speed than a club sweeping through the ball while still accelerating.
Some other maxing out wrist action is needed when both hands are maxed out in ulnar deviation (waggled down to the point of locking) to prevent the hands from turning over and snapping the face shut while releasing the ball - Hogan’s nemesis the ‘snap hook’. This is where the swing of the three differed.
At impact Hogan’s hands were in ulnar deviation + maxed out dorsiflexion of lead wrist (not supination as he said in Five Lessons). Supination results from radial/ulnar rotation of forearms. Hogan’s action was just the wrist with the dorsiflexion of the lead and causing extension to remain in the trail hand. If the timing is off and swing force is allowed to pull the extension out of the trail hand the hands roll and the face snapped closed. Been there done that many times on the learning curve (which is always hook shaped) 😂
Count Yogi did the opposite of Hogan, maxing out extension of his lead wrist at impact 🫸 like a doorstop, with hands pulled down into the same ‘crack the whip’ maxed out ulnar deviation. He didn’t suffer the snap-hook problem of Hogan because of the way the maxed-out extension in the lead and arrested the club with face square to the target. His trail arm and wrist was pulled straight at impact-the next best thing for consistency other than maxing out in either flexion or extension. In becomes physically impossible to get the face open enough at impact to create slice spin on the ball but the odd position of the hands (compared to conventional wisdom of per Harry Vardon) requires putting ball far back in the stance and works best from a closed stance. I learned to hit dead straight shots with stance closed 45° with my back to target using Count Yogi’s wrist action to stop the club and face square. His trick act was based on hitting shots with an assortment of of odd clubs and he also hit balls dead straight with a club head attached to a leather whip. After reading about him in George Peper’s book The Secret of Golf I realized I had seen Count Yogi doing his act on TV as a kid, being fascinated by trick with the whip and having my engineer father explain how he was doing it.
What made Moe Norman’s swing similar was his unconventional grip and single plane swing at the way he aligned to the ball with both arms straight and both wrists in maxed out ulnar deviation. At the top of his swing the wrists changed to maxed out radial deviation as in a Harry Vardon style swing but on the way down “snapped” back down to the stretched straight address position that locks up the wrists and creates the consistent face control he possesses.
What Norman and Yogi had in common ways a very steep swing path in their finish. I discovered that is a result of the hands rolling so the toe points forward at the target just after the ball releases. Normally the rolling of the hands occurs much later in the finish when the club force is finally allowed to pull the trail arm and wrist straight. That is the reason Hogan had a more normal club path in his finish. Unlike Yogi and Norman Hogan maintained some bend in the trail arm and extension in trail wrist through impact. Again that’s why he suffered from snap hooks when is balance / timing was off on uneven lies but Norman and Yogi didn’t.
For the past dozen years I’ve been using my own version of that technique with a standard Vardon grip but applied a bit unconventionally.
I hold the arms at side with 90° bent elbows and palms up then rotate forearms so hands are like this 🙏🏼 and put club WITH FACE CLOSED 45° into them in a conventional interlaced grip (I have hands like Nicklaus with long palms - short ‘cadet’ fingers). This puts both forearms in the middle of their range of ulnar-radial rotation. As the club is lowered and the arms straight the forearms rotate inwards ( ) creating stabilizing counter torque by stretching the muscles, most notably the brachioradialis over the lead elbow that bulges as weight of club pulls arm straight. The rotation of the forearm rotates both hands toward ground increasing pressure between pad of trail hand over lead thumb. I force both hands into maxed-out ‘waggle down’ unlar deviation and push slack out of lead arm with slightly bent trial arm - a mash-up of Hogan and Norman’s target alignment of face at start of address.
How I differ at impact / address is having my trail arm / wrist pulled completely straight and bearing the force of the club BEFORE IMPACT which requires a lot of side bending which I can do because I have a very long torso and arms and correspondingly short legs - 35” dress shirt sleeves / 31” inseam. At impact my lead arm is already starting to bend because the trail shoulder / arm is bearing the swing force which is what happens in the Norman and Yogi swings. The feeling when swinging is one of dropping the hand down well behind the back foot until the shaft is horizontal and wrists are in maxed out radial deviation then using a ‘whip cracking’ acting with very active and forceful ‘waggle’ action like Hogan did at that point in his swing quite stealthily.
Hogan in Five Lessons never says to ‘waggle the club head down in the ball like swinging a hammer at a 45° angled nail or chopping a horizontal log with a axe in a 45° V” but that’s exactly how it feels and why it causes the club head to accelerate much more the convention sweeping through ball with lead arm dragging club swing does.
I’m now 72 and compressing the ball much better with that “waggle down like you’re chopping wood” swing style. It’s not the compression but rather the way as the ball wants to release off the face the grip orientation creates a ‘doorstop’ action which abruptly slows the club head down and causes the ball to literally explode off the face in full swing shots were the ball is fully compressed.
The cause and effect is the same as what happens to an unbelted occupant of a car if hitting a Greyhound bus head on, something Hogan experienced in 1948. What increases ball speed and accuracy is the RATE at which the golf ball decompresses which is greater when the club head stops suddenly vs. riding on one that is still accelerating. The ability to hit straight shots comes from the fact that abruptly slowing the club head with a ‘doorstop’ action of the hands will cause the ball to release off the face allowing the golfer to precisely control when it releases to match the point where the locking of the wrists cause the face to point at the target.
That is was the underlying strategy of stopping and squaring the face to trigger the release of the ball Count Yogi and Norman based their swings around, Yogi with intellectual understanding of the cause and effect based on the physics, Norman just figuring it out with his savant-like intuition. Hogan I suspect saw and copied the techniques of Yogi and Norman without fully understanding the physics, which is why he held off the release and would snap hook.
What is interesting to me is that nearly all the long drive competitors and an increasing number of tour pros are using the “snap it down like chopping wood’ strategy, most notably Dechambeau who sets-up with straight arms and hands in maxed out ulnar deviation like Norman did with similar grip and swing plane.
I like this new series. I am a huge Cotton fan, i think he understood hand action and could explain it better than anyone. his "study the game of golf" book is fantastic. Roll on the granddaddy of them all, Percy Boomer.
The golf swing boils down to hinging/cocking uncocking the wrist/flicking the right and left wrists through the ball at impact, at least 75% with the right wrist, and the rest is mental game.
Almost...
"Maximum sag of the left wrist" is just a very natural combo of dorsal flexion and radial deviation.
Splendidly done Dariusz... another beautiful production. I'm a big fan of Cotton as well, he pursued technical perfection with an intensity equaled perhaps only by Hogan.
Ring the bell is what Sergio Garcia’s father taught him.
I love the quietness of his feet. His right foot just rolls inward with his right knee, neither on the toes or heels, but the whole foot.. The new swing of today? The players are up on their toes, the right foot is way more active and the left foot is sometimes off the ground.
In one of Mr. Hogan's writings he talks of practicing flat footed. Mr. Hogan had the greatest footwork ever. This is great stuff, Merry Christmas and thankyou.
Love it.
Thank you for nice words and a fine comment. Merry Christmas to you and your close ones :)
Thank you as always, curious about the photo of the incorrect wrist action @2:34, could you h1e2x3 describe what he did wrong?
Yes, it's just a full crossover/rollover release that Cotton hated as it is the most timing-prone release type.
@@h1e2x3 Dariusz J. , I just went to your BGST website, first my heartfelt condolences to you on the passing of your beloved wife. Could I email you? Your comment above has opened the door to a lot of things for me, I have not read Cotton's book as you can tell, but would like to know which one of the 10 I should read, I and many other questions, thank you.
@@jteddy11 Thank you very much, I do appreciate your words a lot.
There are quite a few Cotton's books worth reading, but IMO the best from technical point of view is titled "This Game of Golf".
Dariusz J. Your knowledge of the swing and the history of the game is unsurpassed. Thank you for keeping the history alive. It is fascinating.
Thank you, I am very honured, however, there are many pro experts of the game with much better historical knowledge as well. I might appear as such though because golf is in my heart all the time although I am not playing it any more....maybe someday
So true. Merry Christmas to you and your close ones :)
My pleasure, mate. It's great I could contribute to evoke some great memories.
Definitely. His descriptions on wrists and release types are the best until today. Merry Christmas to you and your close ones :)
Would you say his wrist action included flexion of right wrist through impact?
Homer Kelley said you are dead in the water if you do this, there’s so much confusion in golf, it’s like trying to find buried treasure in a wide open plain
@@cdunne1620 Well, Henry Cotton was a master of the game and very intelligent theorist. Homer Kelley was also an intelligent theorist, but definitely not a master of the game. I prefer to trust the first. BTW, one of the releases Cotton depicted is the push release which is similar to what Kelley endorsed. However, this is not the only one possible for sure.
Alex Morrison was maybe the most famous early teacher who constantly advanced the idea of ankles rolling inward, instead of inactive feet or a body working so hard that the feet were up on the toes (as you say). That made its way to Jack Grout, which made its way to Nicklaus. I hear he didn't do badly.
I am now smacking my ball as if it is a heavy tire and I am prepared to break my wrist over it. Thank God it’s not and thank you Sir Henry Cotton wherever you are. Cheers
⭐⭐⭐
I love the quietness of his feet. His right foot just rolls inward with his right knee, neither on the toes or heels, but the whole foot.. The new swing of today? The players are up on their toes, the right foot is way more active and the left foot is sometimes off the ground.
In one of Mr. Hogan's writings he talks of practicing flat footed. Mr. Hogan had the greatest footwork ever. This is great stuff, Merry Christmas and thank you.