Natural Golf has its critics, but some players love it
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Bill Meyer's golf game needed an overhaul about as much as Bill Gates needed food stamps. Still, he was curious.
Meyer was an accomplished golfer, a former college golf coach and a national lecturer on the mental aspects of golf. He had won the Pacific Northwest Golf Association senior championship in 1999.
Golf wasn't difficult for Meyer, but he realized it was Mount Everest for a lot of other folks. He wanted to know if there could be a simpler way to teach and play it.
Natural Golf caught his attention, and he sent away for a kit of two videos, a book and audiotape about the simplified system. He had two target audiences in mind for his hands-on experiment: 75 high-school golf coaches he was scheduled to address and his three daughters' fiancés, all of whom were athletic but nongolfers.
Most high-school golf coaches are no better than intermediate players. The bottom half of many rosters, particularly on girls teams, is filled with struggling players.
And his three future sons-in-law?
"This is going to be a long journey if they want to get there the traditional way," Meyer said. "If there is a simple, more natural way to play that they can learn quicker and enjoy, then we'll test it."
That's exactly what Meyer did. He went about changing traditional golf to Natural Golf. He played alone at first so he could focus hard on the adjustment.
"I had to really concentrate as we do when we move from one comfort zone to another one," he said.
"It was so simple," Meyer said. "It just felt natural. The thing I lost was distance, but the accuracy was just amazing."
Meyer put Natural Golf to the test last June when he used it to try to defend his PNGA Senior Men's Amateur title. He finished a strong third.
He remains a Natural Golf convert.
Another well-known local convert is Jack Challender, president of the Washington State Golf Association.
Challender, 64, switched for medical reasons. His hands and back were aching.
These days, Challender can hit balls for hours.
"If you take this up after playing conventional golf, you have to work at it," Challender said. "I get some days when I'm so frustrated. It's like I'm trying to do two different golf swings at once."
He added, "The first thing you have to get over is the looks everybody else is going to give you. I'll tell you when it stops - it's when they start paying you (paying off bets) after a round."
Challender had an 8-handicap when he started Natural Golf last year. He is now a 7 and thinks he can get to 4 or 5.
He thinks it's particularly good system for golfers in their 60s and older.
"I've watched a lot of my friends get to their mid-60s and, all of a sudden, go from being good players to old players. They become 15- to 17-handicappers. I wasn't ready to buy that."
So what is Natural Golf?
"A better mousetrap," the suburban Chicago company that markets it loves to say.
Natural Golf's basic concept is this: If you have fewer moving parts, there is less that can go wrong with a golf swing. The Natural Golf swing reduces twisting and turning, and is designed to maximize the time the clubface is square to the ball.
Natural Golf teachers say there is nothing wrong with the traditional golf swing - except it's just too complicated for the average person to master and reproduce consistently.
As one Natural Golf instructor has said: "If you were pounding a nail, you wouldn't rotate the face of the hammer away from the nail and then try to rotate it back at impact (the case with the conventional swing). You always keep the hammer square with the nailhead. The golf club merely is a 3-foot-long hammer."
Here are the basic differences between the Natural Golf swing, which somewhat resembles a hockey slap shot, and the traditional golf swing:
• Grip. The club is placed in the palm of the dominant hand (the right hand for most people), not in the fingers as in conventional golf. To accommodate this grip, it is recommended that golfers get thicker club grips.
• Stance. It's much wider and limits hip rotation. The primary motion of the hips in Natural Golf is a "slide," not a rotation.
• Simplified set-up. The arms become a straight extension of the club at the address position. It's called the "single-axis, straight-line set-up." In conventional golf, the arms and golf club are at different angles at set-up. Also, the right shoulder is lower than the left at set-up, giving the body a slight tilt.
• Shorter backswing.
• Different body position at impact. The Natural Golfer's body faces the ball at the moment of impact. In conventional golf, the body has started to open (face down the fairway). Feet stay on the ground more in Natural Golf. "Dead feet" is a term sometimes used to describe it.
"Most people don't believe that a fast arm swing with a stable body is going to be enough," said John Rizzo, a Natural Golf instructor for the Puget Sound area based in Lakewood, Pierce County. "But it is. . . . Distance comes from clubhead speed."
Natural Golf traces its roots to Moe Norman, an eccentric Canadian golfer with an unconventional swing and such uncanny accuracy that fellow pros nicknamed him "Pipeline."
The Natural Golf company was founded in 1991 by Jack Kuykendall, a physicist who tried to come up with a simpler swing and unknowingly wound up incorporating many of Norman's swing features in it. When someone first mentioned how similar the swings were, a baffled Kuykendall reportedly said, "What's a Moe Norman?"
The company didn't take off until 1997, when it was purchased by a group headed by Tom Herskovits, a former food-industry executive. Herskovits was an 18-handicapper who took a Natural Golf lesson, shot 78 and was hooked.
The company's first infomercial aired in 1998. One current commercial shows a naked man and woman strolling down a fairway, their golf clubs covering their rear ends. Natural, get it?
The company says more than 100,000 players are using Natural Golf - 94,000 more than in 1997.
The company offers its own line of clubs, which are longer, more upright, slightly heavier and have thicker grips. A set of irons with graphite shafts sells for $895, and a set of three woods is $680. A golfer who wants to use his existing clubs can buy a set of Natural Golf grips for $100.
Natural Golf sells a "Lifetime of Better Golf" instructional package with two 30-minute videos, a 30-minute audiotape, an instructional book and a diary for $79.95. Natural Golf offers one-day schools for $349 thoughout the country and three-day schools for $949.
Rizzo conducts one-day schools at North Shore Golf Course in Tacoma. For individual instruction, he charges $60 for a 45-minute lesson.
Natural Golf has its critics. Some say it may be OK for beginners but too often trades accuracy for distance.
A common argument was voiced by a local pro who didn't want his name used.
"If Natural Golf is so great, why don't tour players use it?" he asked. "They would do anything to win."
Some Natural Golf advocates say a big "so what?" to the absence of tour pros using their system. Their argument: Tour pros are among the elite who can master the traditional golf swing and repeat it consistently. Natural Golf is for the rest of us.
Natural Golf defenders who want to take on the "why no pros?" argument point to Norman.
That doesn't impress the skeptical local pro.
"Moe Norman was so gifted he could have taken a tennis ball and a soup ladle and scored well," he said. "He had a system that worked well with his body makeup."
Bob Toski, a former PGA Tour pro and current instructor and TV analyst, once said, "Moe's swing isn't fundamentally sound. . . . He gets away with it because of intuition and instinct."