The Grip
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Ben Hogan wrote extensively about the grip. This video makes it simple and helps you understand its true purpose in the golf swing.
We're going to start with the lead hand on the grip because that's the simplest.
To get the lead hand right is really, really basic.
And all you really need to feel is that the thumb and forefinger, you're going to see there's going to be, these are going to be touching each other.
They need to be touching together.
I'm going to explain why in a moment.
And the pad on your lead hand needs to sit just on top, roughly about the center of the shaft.
So if I'm like holding it like this, as Hogan talked about in his book, I can hold the club with just that finger and the pad.
And this is about the amount of grip pressure you need to hold the club.
It doesn't need to be much.
Remember, we want our wrists to move fast in order to get this to happen quickly.
And the quicker this can happen, the quicker the hands can move, the quicker the body can move.
So if your hands are rigid and tight, it's not going to work.
If your hands are tight and you're trying to throw this club, you're never going to get that strike of the match feel that you want at impact.
So get this basic part and get this line pointed roughly towards the right side of your head, give or take a little bit, not really that important.
Here's a simpler way to think about it.
What you really need to do is take this lead arm to the top and get the lead wrist flat, with the club face close to square.
And if we do that, we're going to be fine with this lead hand.
Let me explain this a little bit further.
I'm going to the top.
Notice that my lead wrist is flat.
This would be cupped.
This would be really bowed.
Look at the club face.
If the club face and the back of my hand are in the ballpark, relatively flat left wrist and the club face relatively square, and you can bring your hand down to parallel to the ground.
So you can see the club face, the leading edge is roughly parallel to the ground with the back of my left hand, also parallel to the ground with my lead arm parallel to the ground, shaft parallel to the ground.
That's it.
If you can do that with your lead hand, then this is really, really simple.
The only thing that you really have to understand from there is what to do with this guy.
And this is the important one because this is all your sensitivity.
And And what's cool about understanding how to use this swing?
The way that the Greats did is that all of their sensitivity and their feel like Tiger talked about comes from their dominant hand.
Now, so many times we've thought about this thing is just a swing wrecker.
Ben Hogan said it was a swing wrecker.
Oh, but he could use it at impact.
It's kind of confusing.
If you hold the club correctly with this hand and you understand this basic throwing motion, then all of a sudden the swing is going to start to be really, really simple.
The entire golf swing starts to become really, really simple because it's not that complicated.
All I need to feel is that the bulk of my sensitivity is coming in these middle, two fingers and this knuckle right here, the first knuckle on my index finger.
And this is really important at the top of the swing.
So now I'm going to take my left hand grip.
I'm interlocking.
I've messed around with overlapping.
Interlocking helps me feel these middle two fingers a little bit more connected to the club.
And because I'm trying to get that sensitivity of this casting motion, this throwing motion from the top in those two fingers, it helps me.
If I get like this, it feels like it lifts my fingers away from the shaft.
But as soon as I get them that way, the club sits more in the cradle of those two fingers.
And then my index finger can then sit up against the side of the shaft.
Now, why this is important.
Hogan talked about like, hey, you like to be able to feel like it was opposite the target.
You could push against it.
But what I like to feel is more of the top.
So if I take my left hand off the club, and I go to the top of the swing, where I feel everything that's getting ready to fire is in these middle two fingers, and right there on that joint.
That's where all the pressure sits at the top of the swing.
This is my sensitivity.
This is my awareness of the golf swing, because what am I going to do from here?
All right, Marissa, I don't want you pushing against the shaft of the left thumb.
That'll make your left thumb really, really sore.
But if you start pushing with the trail hand to start throwing it, and if it's sitting right here on top of that first joint, then all of a sudden you start to have a good sense of awareness of what that club's doing.
What's the club face angle?
Well, now it's closed.
Now it's open.
See how it fell out of my hand, fell out of that cradle?
But I know if I have a proper grip.
So I'm going to interlock, get the club sitting in these middle two fingers, and sitting against that first joint right there.
And then I'm going to pinch my thumb and forefinger together lightly, because this is going to help me at the top of my swing, have that club sit there under control.
Now you can see some guys like John Daly sets it like this and has his thumb way away from the shaft.
You can do that.
This makes it so that the shaft wants to sit right there in that finger, and the thumb keeps it from doing something goofy like that falling into my palm.
So I'm letting it rest on that first two knuckle, balancing it out with those middle two fingers, just like that, and pinching the thumb and forefoot.
Now I have complete control over this golf club, and I'm holding it very, very lightly.
And as I put the left hand on there, because remember the left hand is doing a bunch of the heavy lifting, because we want the right hand not to be picking the club up in the backswing.
That's going to cause all sorts of issues.
We want to swing it back to the top with the left hand, and the right hand is there waiting to be deployed like that.
That's how you think about it in your swing.
Use the left arm to swing it up, and both hands are going to begin to widen right away in the downswing.
And that's where the speed comes from.
So if you start to get this feeling, and get the grip in your hand right, especially in this trail hand, so that you can feel the club sitting on that knuckle at the top, and holding it with those two middle fingers, you're off to the races.
You don't have to worry about anything else in the grip.
The grip, the whole point of it, is to set up the throwing motion for speed, and feeling like you have control.
So we're flattening this left wrist already at the top, because we know we need it to be slightly bowed at impact.
So if we are already there at the top, all I got to do is start to widen.
Oh, look at that, the club face is already square.
How am I going to hit a bad shot from here?
If my grip is proper, and I just begin to get the club out in front of me, dead square every single time.
The grip's job makes this throwing motion very, very simple and very easy to square the face.
So if you think of it the way I just described, you don't have to get all crazy with your grip and get every single little detail of it.
This is the big picture stuff.
This is what you need to feel.
It's all about being able to throw the club and square the face.
That's it.
We need speed, and we need accuracy.
And if we have those two things together with this proper grip, you're going to make this so much easier on yourself.
Basically, that's all you need for the entire golf swing.
If you understand how to widen the angle with the lead arm and the trail arm, and understand how to grip the club to make that happen, this is it.
That's a golf swing.
You're going to be able to start swinging fast with no strain on your body, no effort.
But now that we understand this basic part, we're finally ready to talk about the body.
I know it seems a little backwards than normal.
But trust me, if you start getting this basic motion, the body movement, the pressure shift, your weight transfer, how your hips turn, all of that stuff is going to start to happen naturally.
And that's what we're going to talk about in this next video.
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