Ben Hogan Was Not the Best Ball Striker

I know that at first glance many will scream heresy and how can he say such a thing, but I have it on good authority that it is true and when I say good authority I’m talking about no lesser authority on the subject than Ben Hogan himself.

During my years on the Hogan Advisory Staff I had the opportunity to travel to Ft. Worth and meet Mr. Hogan and socialize with him and after a couple of glasses of wine he was absolutely charming. By this time his competitive career was over with, but his ball striking was still as awe-inspiring as ever.

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Here was a man who was a legend and when you are in the presence of greatness it can be difficult to come up with something to say that would open the door to an real conversation. At a complete loss of anything truly profound to say I simply told him that I thought he was the best ball striker that ever. He paused for a moment and said “No, Sam Snead was the best. He hit more dead solid golf shots than anybody”. Stunned, I asked him how he would explain his success then. He looked at me and smiled and said “I missed it better than they did”.

That statement completely changed the way I looked at ball striking. It’s not about your good shots; it’s about your bad shots. It’s all about learning to hit good misses. It’s not about how many good shots you hit during a round, but how bad were your bad shots. Hogan had refined missing the ball to an art form.

After that I started to track my bad shots and what I needed to do to eliminate the ones that were costly. One really bad shot can erase several really good ones.

I highly recommend this approach to everyone. If you are serious about improving your score don’t waste your time looking for perfection in ball striking. Start working on your worst shots and what’s causing them. You may find that the true cause of your worst shots is not your swing but your thought process.

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