Lorne Rubenstein | |
Hubert Green and his Hall-of-Fame swing
April 24th, 2007
 Photo: © Scott Halleran/Getty Images |
Hubert Green was famous for not only winning the U.S. Open and the PGA Championship but also his quirky swing. |
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It's impossible not to be taken with Hubert Green's fluttering yet effective
swing. The newest World Golf Hall of Fame member's move-well, bunch of
moves-reminds us that there's more than one way to find the proper position
at impact. Green has so many ways and shots that he takes us back to a time
when golf was more feel and flair than mechanics and method.
There's nothing wrong with looking for ideal mechanics, of course. Much of
the pleasure of the game lies in the quest for a more reliable swing. But
some players have to go with the swing they have. Lee Trevino said you have
to dance with the girl you brung, or something like that. Trevino should
know; he described his swing as "junkyard dog," because of all its loops.
But it worked and still works, because Trevino got the club on the ball as
required at impact. That's what Green, who along with Curtis Strange will be
inducted in November into the World Golf Hall of Fame, has done so well.
It's fun to watch Green and other players who have idiosyncratic swings get
into motion and back to the ball. It's the swing as improvisational jazz,
not to put too fine a point on it or get too analytical.
Green won 19 PGA Tour events, including the 1977 U.S. Open and the 1985 PGA
Championship. All he was trying to do, he's said, is "to move an object from
one place to the next." He picked up the club abruptly, took it back, well,
not very far, and then rocked and rolled the clubface with his hands through
impact, depending on what he wanted to do with the ball. Beautiful.
Photo: © Andrew Redington/Getty Images | | Jim Furyk is another great player with a "different swing". |
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Green's in excellent company. Jim Furyk's won 10 tour events and the 2003
U.S. Open, with a swing that twists and turns but finds its way back to
square more often than most players. Furyk doesn't appreciate it when
somebody calls his swing "homemade." But it is his own, in that he owns it.
Furyk long ago tried to produce a more conventional swing, but gave up on
that. He hated the way he felt. It wasn't him.
Then there's Moe Norman, speaking of somebody who owns his swing. None other
than Tiger Woods has said that only two golfers truly owned their swings.
They would be one Ben Hogan and the late and great and unusual Norman. The
Canadian died in September 2004, a few days before the Canadian Open would
begin at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario.
Moe used to amble out onto the range on Tuesday during the Canadian Open, in
his street shoes and without a club. Officials weren't too crazy about his
doing so, but players such as Nick Price, Vijay Singh and many others
encouraged him to come out. Eventually he'd grab somebody's club, hit a few
shots, and then everybody on the range would stop their work and come over
to watch. Moe would stripe one shot after another, standing there over the
ball with ramrod-stiff legs. He addressed the ball with the clubhead a foot
behind it.
Photo: © Natural Golf | | Canadian Moe Normancould be one of the most natural swingers in Golf. |
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Sometimes he would put a silver dollar 37 inches behind the ball
to show that his clubhead grazed the coin going back. Meanwhile, he set up
so far from the ball it appeared he couldn't reach it, and he'd take the
club straight back and straight through. Trevino loved Moe's move because he
kept the clubface square through impact and past the ball for so long. Well,
so did Trevino. Moe's clubhead actually grazed the ground 22 inches ahead of
the ball.
"Long and low, long and low," Moe would say. "Stretch it." Or, referring to
how straight he hit the ball, he might say, "If they had a tournament in the
dark, I'd be the only one who could play. I'd know where to walk." Straight
down the middle, to appropriate a line from Frank Sinatra's famous song.
Sinatra's song My Way was Moe's favorite. Moe did it his way, a la Green,
Trevino and many other golfers.
Here are a few others who come to mind: Doug Sanders, stiff-legged at
address as Moe, his swing so short, as it was said, that he could swing in a
telephone booth; Arnold Palmer, who hung on so hard with his right side
through impact, and whose swing was a controlled contortion; Ray Floyd, up,
up, and away going back, and then swan-diving down to the ball; hey, he won
only the 1969 and 1982 PGA Championships, the 1976 Masters and the 1986 U.S.
Open with his action. Along these meandering lines we can include Nancy
Lopez, whose swing was so slow and convoluted you'd think she'd never find
her way back to impact with any speed or control. Yet she's one of the best
players ever to tee it up on the LPGA Tour, a Hall of Famer of Hall of
Famers.
You want more? Check out the chapter about unorthodox styles that the
marvelous English writer Louis Stanley included in his book Legends of Golf.
He mentions the delightful and accomplished Irish professional Harry
Bradshaw, who gripped the club with a few fingers from his right hand on top
of his left. Years ago I played nine holes with Bradshaw at the Portmarnock
Golf Club near Dublin, and I asked him about his grip.
"I put the club in me hands one day that way and it felt just right,"
Bradshaw said. Historians among you might recall that Bradshaw lost a
playoff to Bobby Locke for the 1949 British Open at the Royal St. George's
Golf Club in Sandwich, England. Bradshaw had double-bogied the fifth hole in
the second round after hitting his drive into a broken beer bottle. He
elected to play the ball by smashing the bottle, and said it took him six
holes to settle down. Bradshaw was an individual, that's for sure.
Then there was Jimmy Bruen, another Irishman and lifelong amateur prior to
World War II, who, Stanley writes, "could have won both [the] Amateur and Open
Championships, but the ambition had to be there." Bruen, a Walker Cupper,
finished seventh in the 1939 Open at the Old Course in St. Andrews.
"The remarkable feature was how he managed to hit the ball at all," Stanley
wrote of Bruen. "The famous loop at the top of the backswing with right arm
well away from the body and hands high was something that had to be seen to
be believed. How the kind was ironed out in the downswing was a matter of
speculation and high-speed photography. It contradicted unorthodox teaching,
yet consistently produced brilliant results. James Bruen was a law unto
himself.
Touche, and the same thing goes for the man known as "X," Miller Barber, he
of the wildly flying right elbow. So what? The elbow came down at he
approached the ball, which, quite often enough, went flying toward the
target. Golf Digest's erudite Nick Seitz put it like this in the magazine's
September 2000 issue: "Taking the club back to the outside and sticking it
straight up in the air, he resembles a man trying to open an umbrella in a
hurricane." Seitz reminded readers, however, that Sam Snead said Barber was
the best through the ball he'd ever seen.
Through the ball. That's where it's at, right? And we haven't even mentioned
Chi-Chi Rodriguez, or Jim Thorpe. But Sir Walter Grindley Simpson must be
mentioned. He wrote the following in his classic 1887 work The Art of Golf.
"There is no more fruitful source of bad golf than to suppose that there is
some best style for each individual which must be searched out by him if he
is to get the best results our of himself," Simpson wrote. "In a broad and
general way, each player ought to have, and has, a style which is the
reflection of himself-his build, his mind, the age at which he began, and
his previous habits."
Or, as that famous swing coach William Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, and as
Polonius said in the play to his son Laertes, "This above all. To thine own
self be true."
How true it is. Cha-ching, shall we say. Or, better, Chi-Chi.
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