[Jeff]

OB Left - you define Hogan's swing as a compensated swing. I can understand why you call it compensated because you have in your mind an idealised uncompensated swing. I suspect that you regard a TGM-idealised uncompensated swing as a swing where the head is stationary, and where the golfer pivots around a centralised pivot axis like a spinning top. Who swings like that - who has a perfect centralised swing?

My answer = Sam Snead. I believe that he executed the "ideal" swing (a totally uncompensated swing). If I could swing in any possible manner, then I would like to swing like Sam Snead because he fits the HK ideal of a perfect centralised swing. However, very few golfers can swing like Sam Snead because it requires extraordinary flexibility - not only hula hula spinal flexibility, but extraordinary flexibility of the hip joints, shoulder joints, elbow joints and wrist joints. Sam Snead was ultra-flexible. He called it "looseness". Other golfers thought that he had long tendons. In reality, I suspect that he had a genetic variant of a physical condition that results in increased elasticity of ligaments and tendons and joint capsules. The best word that I ever heard to describe Sam Snead's body movements is "pantherine". People say that when he walked on the golf course, that it seemed like he wasn't walking, but it looked like he was gliding over the surface of the fairway - like Fred Astaire on a dance floor. I think that Sam Snead is to golf, what Fred Astaire is to dance - an extraordinary talent who was genetically endowed with extraordinary physical attributes.

Tiger Woods, and Ben Hogan, and most amateur golfers, do not have that level of flexibility and that is why they have to settle for a compensated swing.

Jeff.