Houston has a particularly rich golf heritage that is reflected by the fact that such golf notables as Jack Burke, Jr., Jimmy Demaret, Dave Marr, and Claude Harmon, Sr. lived here for much of their lives. The Chronicle’s Steve Campbell notes one of the more low-profile Houstonians that has contributed to that rich tradition with this piece on golf instructor and golf course design expert, Jim Hardy, who has become sort of a last hope for several professional golfers who are struggling with their swings and ready to give up competitive golf.

Peter Jacobsen, Hardy’s longtime business partner, was Hardy’s first reclamation project. 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) through Hardy’s tutelage. 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 his 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 key 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 this 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 the wonderful world of golf.