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I saw Moe Norman hit balls twice, both times speaking to groups of golfers about what he was doing and how he was doing it, and I thought it would be interesting, given the myth concocted around him and his alleged ball striking prowess, if I told the story of my encounter.
When I got out of college I quit golf for a time (I had lost my game miserably my senior year at LSU after being a First Team All-American my junior year), but ended up playing again as a amateur, qualifying for the 1981 US Open and turning pro that Fall. I moved to Florida and embarked on an attempt to play golf for a living, starting out on the Space Coast mini-tour run by JC Goosie. It was at a tournament at the Royal Oaks club in Titusville that I had my first glimpse of Moe Norman. He was on the range hitting balls, and was surrounded by players watching and listening to his sing-song voice describing each shot and relating tidbits about his prowess and the similarities between his methods and those of Ben Hogan and Lee Trevino.
“Me and Hogan, me and Hogan, down the line longer than anyone. 22 inches… 22 inches down the line. Nobody longer…except maybe Trevino. Me, Hogan and Trevino, nobody down the line like us. Look at my right ankle. See my sock? I put holes in it ‘cause I drag it on the ground. Straight as an arrow, straight as an arrow. No curve…see? No curve at all. Just straight at the target.
I looked at Moe’s hands. They were scaled with callous so thick they looked like fish. He had on red pants that were way too short and tight, and a red shirt to match, with white socks and red and white shoes. There was a large bulge in one of his pockets which a friend informed me was a wad of cash in the neighborhood of $10,000 which he carried because he didn’t believe in banks. Needless to say, this was a seriously strange dude.
I had heard most of the Moe stories simply because I was a pro golfer, and everybody talked about Ben Hogan and Moe Norman. How Moe was leading the Masters and walked off the course for some strange reason or another, or how someone told Moe the hole they were about to play was a “driver and a wedge”, so Moe proceeded to tee off with his wedge, then hit his driver off the deck to 10 feet and make birdie. It wasn’t hard to imagine him reciting “driver, wedge: wedge, driver…driver wedge: wedge, driver…me and Hogan, me and Hogan. Supposedly Moe never missed a shot. Some pretty serious players had commented on how impressed they were with Moe’s ability to hit the ball. So as I began to watch I waited to be enthralled.
Well, it didn’t happen. I was into golf ball compression and the stories I liked the most were about Hogan and the sound his ball made when he hit it. I had seen video of Hogan hitting balls and Hogan playing Snead in the Wonderful World of Golf, and I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted the ball to shoot off the club with a crack, and I wanted to mash it against the ground and compress it so that no wind would affect it. I wanted to hit bullets with my driver that curved any way I wanted. Moe Norman didn’t have that. He hit the ball nice and straight, but there was no outstanding quality in his strike. In fact, he seemed to “pick” the ball off the turf, barely disturbing the ground. The whole mechanism looked odd, as he set up way further from the ball than anyone I had ever seen, and with his hands arched up the shaft of the club lined directly up with his left arm. He placed the club well behind and to the inside of the ball at address, and when he finished his arms shot straight up in the air as though he were still guiding the club to the target.
I really didn’t care that his technique was idiosyncratic. There are plenty of funky looking golf swings amongst the greatest players. But I was hugely disappointed in the lack of a compressed strike of the ball. At that point in my mini-tour career I had been playing a bit with Jeff Sluman and Donnie Hammond, and I could only think that those guys could really hit the ball, especially Sluman, who absolutely flushed it with a beautiful, high, straight shot that fell a yard to the right. I recall thinking that I had never hit a shot in my entire life as good as Jeff hit a standard 3-iron.
Anyway, fast forward almost two decades and we arrive at my second meeting with Moe. This time I had been invited to the Pro-Member-Guest at the Adios Golf Club in Fort Lauderdale, Florida by a student of mine, and as a bonus we were going to be able to attend a clinic given by Moe before the start of the event. Alan, my student, had been inflicted with the disastrous conventional instruction to “swing down the line” and had been trying to keep his clubface square to the target to boot. We had worked hard on getting him to swing left around his body, and I spent ample time with the video showing him that the proper exit plane for the club was not straight at the target. Now enter Moe, and as he starts hitting he segues directly into the “down the line” rant, repeating it over and over. “Me and Hogan, down the line: me and Hogan, down the line 22 inches”.
Alan gave me a puzzled look and said “Hey, Wayne. He’s talking about swinging down the line. You’ve been telling me to swing to the left. What’s the deal?” My response was as such: “All right, I’ll tell you what. I’ll make two bets with you right now. The first is that Moe (who was slated to play in the event) will not turn in a score. The second is that I will film Moe’s swing and show you that his club will not swing down the line at all. In fact, it will head more left than almost any swing I have ever shown you” Alan looked at me with great skepticism and said “you’re telling me that Moe Norman, supposedly one of the greatest ball-strikers in the history of golf, doesn’t know what he is doing? Or even worse, that he thinks he is doing exactly the opposite of what he is really doing?” I had no choice but to agree. “That’s exactly what I am saying”. Alan was almost perturbed at this point. “That’s crazy. You’re on. $50 on each bet. By the way, why the “no card” bet?” “He’s a legend”, I explained, and legends don’t shoot 80. This is a tough course and he’s getting older. There’s no way he posts a number.” I took the video of Moe hitting (it still didn’t impress me, although he still hit it straight just about every time) and told Alan we would watch it on a TV after the round.
When we finished and walked upstairs to where the score board was the first thing we saw was the NC beside Moe’s name. 50 for me. After food and drinks we found a TV and I hooked up the video camera. Here it was, a perfect down-the-line shot of Moe with the camera tight in on the bottom of the swing. I cued it up and let it go back in slow motion, and as it got to impact I stopped the tape. “Are you ready for this?” I asked Alan. “Yeah, come on, get to it”, he said excitedly, “I want to win my money back”. Of course, I knew he would do no such thing, because it is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE to swing a club straight down the target line with any speed, especially as far as Moe stood from the ball. I clicked the camera one, twice, and as the swing moved past impact the club turned sharply inward on the arc of the shaft plane, finally exiting past his body somewhere between hip high and shoulder high. At the end of the swing, however, Moe brought his arms upward with a flourish, as if to imply that he had actually not swung around his body at all.
Alan was flabbergasted. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. Moe Norman has no idea what he is actually doing with the club. “How can that be?” “Look”, I said, “the lesson to be learned is ‘beware what the good player says he does, because quite often it won’t actually be the case’. It may feel like one thing, and it may produce great results, but it won’t necessarily be what is actually happening. For that you need a video camera. It is never a bad thing to see what is really going on, especially when you are trying to make a change. You have to see what the ideas are producing. You can’t depend on a couple of good shots to tell you that a thought is doing what you want it to do. Great players know what they feel, and when you ask them they’ll tell you. Take that for what it’s worth and be careful with how you apply it. Now, you owe me $100.”