Book excerpt: ‘Golf’s Holy War’

As golf became a more quantifiable game, a strange word emerged into the lexicon: own. Tiger Woods famously said that only two players in the history of the game owned their swings — Ben Hogan and Moe Norman. But how can a person own a motion?

The connotation is of an ingrained and unbreakable confidence in mechanics. It is the reaching of the point where no outside influence — say, a coach — is needed.

RELATED:Q&A with author

And yet in this age of science and technology, which took a huge jump forward after Woods won his first major championship as a professional at the 1997 Masters, the golf swing evolved from being thought of as a malleable part of each person’s nature, to being envisioned as an entirely blank canvas. Golfers became programmable machines, and their hardware and their outside programmer — the coach — were considered the largest determinants of their success.

Amazing how just one word entering the lexicon can speak volumes. Even more amazing how that mind-set began—with one of the best baseball players ever.

From 1929 to 1934, Babe Ruth had a backup on the Yankees named Sam Byrd. Often referred to as “Ruth’s legs,” Byrd would come in for the prodigious slugger late in games as a defensive replacement or a pinch runner.

Byrd carved out a nice little career, starting when he hit .312 in 203 plate appearances in his rookie season. Yet the native Georgian always loved golf, and soon after Bobby Jones won the Grand Slam in 1930, the Yankees came to Atlanta and Jones asked Yankees manager Joe McCarthy if Byrd could sneak out for a round. According to a story the Birmingham News later published in 1937, Byrd used borrowed clubs on a course he had never seen and shot 1-under par, tying Jones. When asked what he thought of Byrd’s game, Jones said, “He’s the best man off a tee I ever saw.” When asked if Byrd really was “one of the best,” Jones clarified, “No, not one of the best; the very best man with a driver I ever saw.”

Byrd traced his proficiency back to Ruth, who taught him how to hit a baseball when he was first called up in 1929. Ruth explained a drill he used where he kept a handkerchief under the lead arm — in Byrd’s right-handed stance, that meant his left arm. The goal of the drill was to keep the swing of the bat level, avoiding an uppercut or a downward chop, which would both result in poor contact. Ruth added that all good hitters “brace” on their back leg, coil around it, then fire through with big muscles — meaning the core muscles between the hips and shoulders — transferring their weight to the front leg. It’s exactly what a grainy video of Ruth hitting a home run looks like. By keeping the lead arm in close to the body, the whole thing stays “connected.” The drill is still used across sports today, with PGA Tour players often using headcovers instead of handkerchiefs.

Byrd used Ruth’s methodology with some success in baseball, and when Byrd thought about the golf swing, all he did was change it to an inclined plane. The image was that of a flat table for the baseball swing, then tipping it over to about a forty-five-degree diagonal for golf. To Byrd, that made the baseball swing and the golf swing identical, just on different planes. One day while Byrd was playing golf with famed newspaper columnist Grantland Rice, the idea for a collaboration on a book about the differences in the two swings was born.

“Well, Granny,” Byrd said, “it’s going to be a darn short book.”

Byrd eventually quit baseball in 1936 after a bout with malaria and took on a job with Ed Dudley, who worked as the head pro at three-year-old Augusta National Golf Club during the winters and at Philadelphia Country Club in the summers. Despite battling the putting yips, Byrd had a solid playing career, winning six times on the PGA Tour and making the final of the 1945 PGA Championship (then a match-play event), losing to Byron Nelson in the midst of Nelson’s eleven-tournament winning streak.

By 1960, Byrd was giving lessons at a driving range and par-3 course he owned in Birmingham, Alabama. That year, he hired a gangly seventeen-year-old named Jimmy Ballard, who began making a name for himself as a teacher using Babe Ruth’s idea of “connection.” By 1970, Ballard took on a student named Mac McLendon, who had been an All-America golfer at LSU, almost won in his rookie year on Tour, but then hit a major rough patch.

“You can get a lot of lessons on a practice tee on Tour,” McLendon said decades later. “I just got myself all fouled up.”

After years of work, McLendon teamed with childhood friend Hubert Green to win the 1974 PGA Tour event at Walt Disney World. He picked up his first solo victory in 1976, and two more in 1978. He was the proud reclamation project of Jimmy Ballard, and people starting flocking. Suddenly, teachers seemed necessary.

Jack Grout worked as an assistant at Glen Garden Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, starting in 1930, when Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson were both teenagers in the caddie yard. In 1950, he moved on to Scioto Country Club in Columbus, Ohio, where he met a 10-year-old Jack Nicklaus and the two would start a teacher-student relationship that lasted a lifetime.

Throughout most of Nicklaus’ historic career, which included a record 18 major championships, their schedule consisted of meeting in the cold, early spring and hitting out of what they called “an open-ended Quonset hut.” There was no overacting method, just the fundamentals. The rest was left for Nicklaus to figure out on his own.

“Jack Grout never set foot on the practice tee,” Nicklaus said, “never one time when I played golf.”

It wasn’t very different from Nicklaus’s contemporaries, either. From Arnold Palmer and Lee Trevino, to Seve Ballesteros and Tom Watson, these were all headstrong men, hardly relying on anyone but themselves to prepare for competition. Which is not to say that perfection wasn’t dangled in front of their face, with a historical template there to be emulated.

“I grew up in the era of Hogan,” Nicklaus wrote. “Everything I saw of him and read of him and heard of him indicated that he had achieved utter mechanical perfection in the striking of a golf ball. Perfect repetition. Flawless automation. This was my dream. All I needed to achieve it was sufficient time to work at my game.

“I was kidding myself. When I turned professional, suddenly I had all the time and opportunity I needed. And I discovered, fast, that my dream was just that: a dream. No matter how much work I did, one week I would have it and the next I couldn’t hit my hat.”

Acceptance of that inconsistency is a big part of what made Nicklaus so great. But the inability to accept it, or the driving desire to eliminate something that was inherent in the game, was what drove so many people so deep into instruction.

By way of McLendon’s success, Ballard was the teacher whom everyone wanted to work with. His method had an interesting origin in Babe Ruth, and anytime pro golfers could consider what they did more athletic and more in line with other sports, the more they liked it. In 1988, Ballard achieved what he liked to call the “Teachers’ Grand Slam.” At the time, he was teaching Sandy Lyle, who won the Masters; Curtis Strange, who won the first of his back-to-back U.S. Opens; Ballesteros, who won the British Open; and a Swedish kid named Christian Harden, who won the British Amateur — not quite the professional sweep, as the PGA Championship was won by Jeff Sluman, but surely an impressive bit of résumé building for Ballard.

He was named “Teacher of the Decade” by Golf Magazine, a newly coined title that would have been almost unfathomable in any decade prior. The celebration of the coach signaled a drastic shift in the nature of the teacher-student relationship.

McLendon eventually retired from pro golf to become a stockbroker — something he always dreamed of doing. Ballard continued to think he never got enough credit for the breakthrough work he did. But by the time Tiger Woods came along, whoever was teaching Woods at the moment was a big part of the story. Each time Woods switched teachers, it signaled a new avenue of purchase to own a motion.

It would only get more definitive as science progressed, and to think, Babe Ruth started the whole thing.