On Knudson, Hogan and Golf Secrets

10 min readFeb 23, 2020

Note: In speculative exploration — last update 08/16/22. I’m progressing down a very strange but intriguing, beautiful, and fruitful path of exploration. The article is completely devoid of data at the moment as I work things out but there are many interesting Hogan and Knudson images.

**This essay’s golf algorithm is encoded in my** **Golf Swing Simulator**. (only for non-mobile browsers).

“One of the great fascinations of golf is the instinctive feeling a player gets soon after he has taken the game up that there is an explanation for everything that takes place, that the seeming mystery of how to hit the ball well and hit it well regularly is not mysterious at all, that it is possible to arrive at answers that will be as clear-cut and irrefutable as the solution the master detective unfolds in the last chapter of a mystery novel.”

— Ben Hogan

Golf and Secrets

What should the nature of a golf swing secret be? For me, it would be a truth that enables a golfer to consistently perform a pure swing. It would exemplify the power of knowledge over raw physical talent and endless grooving. It would be conveyable in words and it would apply to any body type. The secret would also need to be counter-intuitive and probably quite complex. If not, it would be commonly deduced or at least accidentally stumbled upon. The very existence of such a secret in this universe would be mysteriously wonderful. Most golfers don’t believe in the existence of this kind of secret. They feel that each golf swing must be individualized and painfully assembled. Note that I am not saying that there is only one way to swing a golf club. I am claiming that there exists this particularly beautiful and natural way to swing a golf club that can be achieved by earnest seekers.

Ben Hogan’s swing is perfection in motion. On several occasions, he revealed that he had discovered a secret which allowed him to strike a golf ball with effortless control and power. I believe he was a genius and he did find the secret to golf. There has been intense debate surrounding this secret and numerous theories have been proposed. But as is often the case in this world, the golden nuggets of truth are obscured by noise.

I searched in vain for Hogan’s secret for many years. Those who have suffered through my ever changing theories, and the results on the golf course, have felt either amusement or pity at my delusional endeavor. At this point, I can argue that my search has been aided by my extreme lack of talent, coordination, and my full blown case of the “yips”. Because of my profound lack of ability, only a very true technique has any chance of working for me (is that enough qualifiers?).

The greatest Hogan secret seeker ever was undoubtedly George Knudson. He very much succeeded in deconstructing Hogan as evidenced by his beautiful swing and his great success on tour. Knudson spent a lot of time studying Hogan’s swing and was said to have a swing more Hogan than Hogan himself. He documented his quest and method in The Natural Golf Swing. Knudson also believed in the idea of an “impersonal swing”:

The golf swing that I advocate is an impersonal swing. We are all trying to accomplish the same objectives: create direction, distance, and trajectory. If the laws of motion are operative, and they must be, then it follows that we should be able to find a way to accomplish these objectives that is independent of the idiosyncrasies of each and every golfer.

Sadly, Knudson discovered he had lung cancer while he was writing The Natural Golf Swing and he passed on shortly after the book was published. The resulting book is clearly a work of love and art (there’s even a little flip book of his swing in the bottom corner of the pages). On every page you can feel his authentic and earnest desire to share his deep appreciation for truth, understanding, and balance in golf. Lorne Michaels conveys a sentiment from Knudson:

And he spoke about how he was feeling now, even more aware than he had felt when well — and he was plenty aware then. He recalled being on a golf course and being so tuned in to his surroundings that he could see a drop of water glistening on a branch of a nearby willow tree. He was weak, and spoke softly. But there was no mistaking the conviction in his voice. “I want people to come alive,” he said to me late that winter night. “I want them to use all their senses. That’s what I’m all about.”

I read this book very early on in my search but I didn’t think too much of it, for my mind was preconditioned to believe the secret to golf must look a certain way. It took a second look with a different mindset more than a decade later for me to finally realize that George Knudson gave us a wonderful birds eye view of the secret to golf. While Knudson revealed overarching principles, Ben Hogan revealed details in Five Lessons. (Note however that many of these details are clues rather than direct revelations since they are downstream effects). These books are a beautiful complement to each other and form the framing of a profound and intricate puzzle.

I’d like to contribute some details that I am exploring about this particular type of swing which Knudson calls the natural swing. The information here is a work in progress but at the very least contains some surprising and novel areas of exploration. I believe I understand why very few people have been able to emulate Hogan — because he allowed himself to experiment and focus on things nobody in their right mind would even begin to consider. Note that I’m a terrible golfer and don’t enjoy playing golf all that much — I’m mainly interested in understanding and solving this puzzle. Being a geek, my way is mostly via algorithms (a computer scientist by trade) and I enjoy trying to distill and curate. As with programming, the bugs are always in hidden assumptions. If you are athletic with good hand-eye coordination, the approach here will probably not resonate with you. I hope though that this information can be of help to the uncoordinated hacker seeker.

I’ve encoded my golfing algorithm in a Golf Swing Simulator. Simulator is used very loosely here because there is no physics involved — it’s more of an interactive visual exposition of the concepts detailed here. Note that the simulator works only on non-mobile browsers (Brave, Chrome, Edge).

The Secret

The secret to golf in one word is — balance.

Here is Knudson on his overarching concept of balance (mental, emotional and physical):

The most efficient way of doing this is to create a swing motion in which balance is the bedrock fundamental. We do nothing in the natural swing that is at the expense of balance, since disturbing balance will lead to a loss of control and power. Everything I will say in this book is based on balance. I won’t ask you to do a thing that disturbs balance. The balanced swing is the most satisfying swing. It’s also the most logical and simplest swing that will get the job done.

His concept of physical balance is as follows:

Static Balance: In the starting position, the body, grip and club must feel precisely balanced side to side and front to back.
Dynamic Balance: The main directive in the swing is to smoothly shift your weight to the right and then back to the left in order to link a balanced starting position to a balanced finishing position. The body, arms and grip should feel comfortable and responsive, and the swing should feel like one continuous motion.

If you are like me, you will read this and then a dismissive thought like the following might arise — “Of course balance is important but that’s kind of vague. I’ll keep that in mind, but now let me go back to the real details that I need to concentrate on. This will in any case eventually lead to a balanced swing.” This is a fair criticism in one respect so in this article I will be fleshing out key surprising and complex details below. A determined focus on balance and shifting weight leads to some incredibly interesting places.

I would however like to address the belief that if you were to groove the right movements in the swing itself, the eventual result will be a swing that is in balance via the creation of muscle memory. This is backwards. Our modern scientific reductionist view promotes deconstructing the swing in space and time. We are tempted to identify, isolate and learn movements or positions of different body parts at some moment during the swing. For example, in an effort to emulate Hogan, you might try to work on turning the hips to start the downswing. The plan would be to hit thousands of balls in order to ingrain this conscious move and make your body perform it automatically. The issue for the natural swing, is that every isolated adjustment can have no feel or bearing when separated from the whole. A movement ingrained without guidance from overall balance, will only serve as a disruption to this flow. Such a disruption will not magically become non-disruptive solely by repetition.

Another conception of the swing that must fall away is one of geometrical purity. This is quite seductive for left brained types. You might start conjuring up models like a pure double pendulum swinging around a fixed axis on a plane with the clubface preset at the angle you want to hit the ball at. What you should understand is that this swing doesn’t prioritize simplicity of the geometrical motion of the club (which doesn’t work by the way) but rather the simplicity of preserving balance. As you swing the club, you should allow your body and the club to move in whatever motion that allows you to maintain dynamic balance. You will find that the path the club takes is more complex than a simple back and forth on plane motion.

Balance is not only the primary goal on every setup and swing but also the means by which to achieve that goal — it is a compass that routes you away from many paths that lead to dead ends and despair. Balance turns minute millimeter differences into miles and is the best path towards consistency. If you don’t realize how sensitive your grip is to tiny adjustments, you are not in the right ballpark. An adjustment which does not quickly allow you to hone in on a balanced comfortable feel should be adjusted or discarded. Brute repetition (without adjustment) will not turn unbalanced into balanced and will not let you know that you are a millimeter off in your setup. There are a multitude of ways to be unbalanced and unnatural but probably not very many ways (perhaps only one or two) of being completely balanced and natural.

This particular swing has one huge downswide. It requires detailed perfection in the setup and certain control motions in order to meet the requirements of balance while also having the clubhead pass intuitively through the ball. The payoff for this attention to detail is that the most of the body during the swing itself requires very little conscious thought as the body is surrendered to flow in sync with physics. This promotes consistency. A balanced swing allows rather than ingrains. There exist much simpler, balanced, athletic swings that have a much simpler setup. However, these swings require more talent and athleticism to perform. And there are an infinite number of poorly configured, unbalanced swings that are easy to setup but produce poor results. Due to the plethora of possible configurations, golf instruction is littered with seemingly contradictory information.

TODO: Complete Section