The John Deere Classic PGA Tour event this weekend lost much of its luster after Michelle Wie came close but failed to make the cut on Friday. However, the tournament turned out to be highly entertaining even without the Big Wiesy as 23 year old Sean O’Hair — whose troubled life was profiled in this earlier post — fired a six under par 65 in the final round to break through and win his first PGA Tour event.
This has been a fascinating PGA Tour season so far, as young players such as O’Hair and Ben Crane have acquitted themselves in such a superb manner under difficult circumstances that they are now among my favorite players. In fact, it was a very good weekend for my favorite golfers as Peter Jacobsen — one of the genuinely nicest men in the game (see this recent Golf Digest interview) — won his second major championship in his second season on the Champions Tour as he fired a final round 66 to win the Ford Seniors Player Championship in Dearborn, Michigan.
Although he had been a solid player on the PGA Tour from the late 1970’s through the early 1990’s, Jacobsen’s golf game had fallen on hard times for several years when he revived his career in 1995 by changing from a two-plane swing (think Tom Watson, Hale Irwin, and Davis Love) to a one-plane swing (think Ben Hogan, Ernie Els, and Michelle Wie) with the help of his longtime business partner and Houston-based teaching pro Jim Hardy. Hardy recently used his experience in changing Jacobsen’s prior two-plane swing to a one-plane swing as the basis of an exceptional new book on golf swing instruction, The Plane Truth for Golfers (McGraw-Hill 2005).
In this new book, Hardy identifies the two-plane swing and the one-plane swing as the two basic — but much different — golf swings. In so doing, he makes the brilliant insight that much of golf swing instruction over the past generation has been counterproductive because of the failure of golf instructors to tailor their teaching to the particular golf swing that the student is using or should use. Inasmuch as the key elements of the one-plane swing are quite different from those of the two-plane swing, Hardy points out that attempting to teach two-plane concepts to a one-plane swinger (and vice versa) risks having the student adopt swing elements that are ill-suited for the student’s particular swing.
As with Hogan’s classic golf swing book Five Lessons, Hardy’s Plane Truth for Golfers is only a little over 100 pages. However, take it from a self-taught golfer who has read dozens of golf instruction books over the past 25 years, Houstonian Jim Hardy’s Plane Truth for Golfers is a landmark book in the area of golf swing instruction and another of the many contributions that Houstonians have made to golf over the past two generations.
Finally, long John Daly has not won a golf tournament this season, but this touching Bob Verdi/Golf World article tells a wonderful story about something far more important that Daly won for a family that was devastated by the death of its father 15 years ago. The overweight, chain-smoking and problem-laden Daly will never be the cover boy for the PGA Tour, but he is certainly in the competition for having the biggest heart among PGA Tour members.