Rising from the Ashes

[Bagger Lance]

Anyone ever seen this character before?

[Yoda]

That would be TGM-Man! Where did you get this Hinge Action Figure?

[YodasLuke]

To keep the left forearm flying wedge from being destroyed, he must have started with a 10-2-D grip, as his left wrist is most certainly bent.
First time I've ever been an art critic.

[Bagger Lance]

That would be TGM-Man! Where did you get this Hinge Action Figure?

Sally Kelley sent it to me in 2001.

[6bmike]

Golf Tips Mag. Forgot the author perhaps. It was a decent intro.

[tongzilla]

I wonder who drew the Action Figure.

[armourall]

I think this is the article from that issue, if anyone's interested...

Book's techniques
alive and well
BY ANDY BRUMER

I first heard of the late Homer Kelley's book, The Golfing Machine, more than 10 years ago when I was working on a feature story about Bobby Clampett. People today know Clampett as a CBS Sports golf analyst, but when he came out on the PGA Tour in 1980 after a very successful amateur career, he was the Tiger Woods of his time and, perhaps, the first player to be touted as "the next Jack Nicklaus."

After a couple of promising years as a pro, Clampett fell into a slump, so deeply, in fact, that it spawned a veritable genre of golf articles. "What happened to Bobby Clampett?" became something of a rhetorical question because golf writers, broadcasters and pundits had gotten wind of how Clampett had learned to play the game as a young boy under the tutelage of teaching pro Ben Doyle, The Golfing Machine's first "authorized instructor."

They all but unanimously decided that the book's "overly mechanical and analytical approach to the game" was at the root of young Clampett's decline. My assignment was to find the truth about Clampett's story from Clampett. Before I met with him, I wanted to familiarize myself with The Golfing Machine.

As fate would have it, I found myself in Northern California a week or so before the Clampett interview. So I arranged to take a golf lesson with Doyle at Quail Lodge in Carmel Valley, adjacent to Pebble Beach.

Doyle's voice lilted with a poet's passion when he discussed the book, and my eyes lit up when he divulged to me that Homer Kelley had identified and christened "lag" as "the secret of golf." Simply put, lag refers to the condition of the golf club as it constantly trails behind a golfer's hands, arms and body in a chain reaction that accumulates power through the entire swing. Some of the book's detractors said Clampett's swing had too much lag, so I asked Doyle if he agreed.

"Can you have too much love?" Doyle snapped back. "Can a boat be too buoyant?" In other words, "lag" is a quality, not a quantity.

As I read more deeply into the book, I found myself fascinated by the text. I loved Kelley's playful use of language, beginning with the acronym he makes out of the word golf - "Geometrically Oriented Linear Force," G.O.L.F., by which he simply means the application of a circular swing to deliver force into the ball directed down a straight intended line of flight.

I was even charmed by the book's daisy-yellow cover, with its green ink drawings of circles dissected by precise lines and vectors reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing, "The Vitruvian Man." In fact, that 15th-century masterpiece depicts a man in the center of a circle, measuring its diameter by stretching his arms to the circle's edges, and it bears an eerie resemblance to a golfer swinging a club in a perfect 360-degree arc.

I liked the captivating, albeit a bit eccentric, fashion in which Kelley opens the book by saying, "It may be that an octopus - or a 'thing' from outer space - would need a different procedure, but for people-shaped golfers there is actually only 'one swing.' "

Actually Kelley's idea about one swing is somewhat misleading, because he hardly prescribes a single swing model that everyone should strive to imitate and develop. His genius lies in the way he envisions, understands, analyzes and catalogs the almost limitless ways it is possible to swing a golf club.

Kelley breaks the swing into 24 component parts, such as grip, hip action, shoulder turn, pivot and various plane angle variations, to name a few. He then declares that each component has one to three possible variations. When you multiply the components together with their variations, you wind up with something like 3 billion ways to actually swing a golf club.

This is where Sally Kelley, Homer's widow, comes in, and a more devoted, intelligent and friendly woman I've yet to meet. Here is this diminutive person in her 90s who has single-handedly kept the institution of The Golfing Machine alive. With incredible loyalty to her husband, she saw to it that the book was reprinted when necessary. After 28 years of research, Kelley first published it in 1969, then revised it in five subsequent volumes before his untimely death in 1983. (Kelley suffered a heart attack while delivering a lecture on The Golfing Machine to an audience of teaching pros.)

With uncompromising resolve, Sally Kelley has held firm to the principle that The Golfing Machine would never be rewritten in any way, shape or form. I've come to see that she is right, because the book isn't so difficult to grasp when tackled in the order and manner Homer Kelley outlines in the preface. This order involves jumping in nonlinear fashion from chapters 1 to 12 to 14 to 8 to 9 to 7 to 10 to 1, and so on, and it takes a little getting used to.

But just as Kelley describes golf as "a game for thinkers," he encourages that readers not "turn away because the truth looks too complex. Stay with it a while and you'll soon find it all very helpful and comfortable. After all, complexity is far more acceptable and workable than mystery is."

As for Clampett, I came to realize that if The Golfing Machine was responsible for his stellar amateur career and good play on the PGA Tour, then it seemed illogical that it also was responsible for his decline at the end. Clampett contends, "Saying that The Golfing Machine was the cause of my slump in the mid-'80s would be like saying the alphabet was the cause of a writer not getting any work. Different chapters in The Golfing Machine certainly explained my slump from a technical point of view, but the book wasn't the cause of it. Physically I wasn't able to turn my swing around and change it the way I wanted to."

In any case, The Golfing Machine circa 2003 is alive and well. Brad Faxon publicly has credited his work with Golfing Machine instructor Ron Gring (who also has worked with Jay Haas) for helping to improve his ball striking. Steve Elkington not only works with Doyle, but has become an authorized Golfing Machine instructor.

[Bagger Lance]

The illustration is credited to Nick Taggart.

Bagger

[6bmike]

I will look at home for it- I have it in color. I'll scan and post it if anyone likes. mike

[birdie_man]

"Can you have too much love?" Doyle snapped back. "Can a boat be too buoyant?"

lol I absolutely love that line...

...makes me giggle a bit every time I hear it...