GOLF AU NATURAL.

Byline: Mike Stahlberg The Register-Guard

Before Dick Fosbury, all high jumpers faced the bar. Before Pete Gogolak, pro football kickers invariably used their toes to drive the ball through the uprights.

And before Jack Kuykendall, golfers gripped their clubs in their fingers and used a body-contorting swing that required the timing and precision of a high diver doing a one-and-a-half gainer with a twist.

Kuykendall, founder of Natural Golf, popularized a palm-grip swing that is about as complicated as a cannonball dive.

Or driving a nail into a wall with a hammer.

"If you can use a hammer, you can become a great ball-striker," said Peter Fox, author of "Natural Golf: Get a Grip on Your Game."

The name "Natural Golf" was coined by Kuykendall, a frustrated hacker who used his knowledge of physics and biomechanics to determine the most efficient and effective way of hitting a ball on the ground with a stick and making it go in a straight line.

Kuykendall's computer-generated blueprint for a better golf swing turned out to describe precisely what a reclusive, self-taught 19-year-old golfer named Moe Norman had come up with on his own 40 years earlier.

After other golfers told him about Norman, Kuykendall tracked down the Canadian, then in his early 60s, and hired him to promote and give clinics on his swing technique.

Since then, "Natural Golf" has grown steadily. "More than 200,000' golfers now use a swing patterned after Moe Norman's, according Rick Johnson, managing editor of Natural Golfer Magazine.

They include several former NFL players - including Mike Ditka and Ron Jaworski - and pro golfers Craig Bowden and Sandy Lyle.

"The last five years it's really exploded," Johnson said. With 200 certified instructors around the U.S., Natural Golf is now the largest golf school in the country.

The only certified Natural Golf instructor in Oregon is Jim Dodd, who spends the summer months teaching at RiverRidge Golf Complex in Eugene and the winter at a golf club in the Palm Springs area.

Dodd, who also teaches the conventional golf swing to those who prefer that method, laughs about his first encounter with Natural Golf several years ago. A prospective client mentioned on the phone that he was "a natural golfer."

"I thought the guy was telling me he was really good," Dodd recalls. "I didn't know he was talking about a method, because I'd never heard of Natural Golf before."

Dodd, however, knew all about Canadian golfing legend Moe Norman and his unorthodox method of striking a golf ball.

"I was very familiar with Moe Norman's swing - I had watched hours and hours of video on his swing," Dodd said. "Lee Trevino called Moe Norman 'the best ball-striker I ever saw,' and that's something I think any golf instructor ought to be familiar with."

When his new client began warming up for his first lesson, Dodd immediately recognized the swing.

`I told him, `It's obvious to me that you're emulating Moe Norman.' ' Dodd said. `He looked at me like I was nuts and said, 'Well, I told you that I was a Natural Golfer.' '

That was the first time Dodd heard the term, but far from the last.

He went on to become a certified instructor of Natural Golf, which he describes as "a method to hit a golf ball that simplifies the sequence of motion and adds a higher degree of consistency."

The method allows the golfer to generate the same amount of club head speed while utilizing a shorter backswing, thus giving himself less chance for error, less chance to lose balance, and less opportunity to get the club `off-plane.'

"I think the primary variable that you see between a conventional swing and a Natural Golf swing," Dodd said, "is a finish I call `out and up' - it has the club head follow the ball and then extending down the target line so that when you finish you're facing the target with both your hips and your shoulders, and your arms are between you and the target."

An out-and-up finish is used by some conventional golfers, Dodd said, most notably Arnold Palmer.

But most conventional golfers swing "through and around," and their arms and the club are behind their back at the finish of the swing. (See Tiger Woods.)

In addition to hitting more accurate shots, Dodd said, converts to Natural Golf often find themselves hitting the ball farther. Some extra length comes from eliminating distance-robbing slices. And some comes from the fact that the golfer "is actually free to swing at the ball more aggressively."

The Palm Springs area is a hotbed of Natural Golf, Dodd said, with several instructors available and periodic "school" sessions available. In Oregon, however, converts to the Natural Golf system generally have learned about it via television "informercials" advertising the company's instructional videos.

Among those is Fred Litzenberger, an assistant men's basketball coach at the University of Oregon.

"I loved the idea of developing a repeatable swing," said Litzenberger, whose schedule prevents him from playing or practicing much of the year.

"I tell you what, it's really helped my game in terms of being able to consistently go out and hit the ball better than I did before."

While he had some success teaching the method to himself using the videos, Litzenberger said his game improved even more after he started getting feedback from Dodd.

"I've probably taken five or six strokes off my handicap," he said. "I would highly recommend it to people who are struggling with the conventional swing."

One of the reasons people struggle with the conventional swing, according to Fox, the "Get a Grip on Your Game" author, is that it is not efficient from a mechanical perspective.

The conventional swing simply involves too many levers rotating on through too many different planes and on too many axes. A few world-class athletes blessed with great timing and coordination can make such a swing work (most of the time - see Tiger Woods) in spite of its inherent mechanical flaws. But the typical golfer cannot, he said, as witnessed by the fact that the average score posted by American male golfers is in the mid-90s.

The mechanical advantages of Moe Norman's swing should be obvious to anyone who watches Iron Byron, the golf ball-driving robot used to test clubs and balls. But they have also been verified by independent laboratories.

"The Natural Golf swing is ... considerably more efficient than the conventional swing," said Richard Hayden of Personal Training Systems, a Sudbury, Mass., company that specializes in analyzing biomechanics.

"In fact, we were amazed at the data, which showed the body of the Natural Golfer moving in virtually the same exact pattern, swing after swing."

The data were separately analyzed by The Biomotion Foundation, in West Palm Beach, Fla., which utilized it in a study of "shear forces" placed on the backs of golfers. Natural Golf's single-plane swing was found to place less stress on the back than the twisting, torque-filled conventional swing.

Advertised claims to that effect attracted Eugene residents Lee Hawthorne and Allen Heide to Natural Golf.

"I've had back problems my whole life and I couldn't play a round - my back would be out for a week," said Heide, a retired public school teacher. "I was about ready to give golf up when I heard about Natural Golf. I sent away for the tapes and it was like night and day - I can do that swing.

"I'm a real proponent of it. The swing is so simple, there's fewer places to make errors."

The change also helped his scores, Heide said. "I was shooting 100 to 105 and now, if I play well, I'm in the low 80s."

And with the palm grip taught, Heide said, "I immediately got rid of my slice."

Hawthorne, a retired auto dealership owner, says he was an 11 or 12 handicap when he sent off for the Natural Golf video tapes and instructional book. Now he's an 8, having fine-tuned the technique through attending a Natural Golf school session in San Diego and working with Dodd.

More importantly, Hawthorne said, the back pain that prevented him from playing two days in a row has disappeared.

"I can play every day and not have the back pain that was caused by the reverse C twist kind of motion" in his old swing, Hawthorne said.

For additional information on the Natural Golf method, log on to: www.naturalgolf.com.

NATURAL GOLF vs. CONVENTIONAL GOLF

Here are the four tenets of the Natural Golf swing, and how they differ from conventional golf:

Grip: Natural Golf places the grip in the palm of the bottom hand (right), not in the fingers.

Stance: Natural Golfers place their feet farther apart than the "shoulder width" stance favored by conventional golfers.

Swing plane: Natural Golf emphasizes a single-plane swing with the arms on the same plane as the golf club shaft. In conventional golf, the club is on one plane and the arms on another.

Impact position: The Natural Golfer faces the ball at the moment of impact; there is no rotation of legs, torso and hips prior to impact as in conventional golf.

- www.naturalgolf.com

CAPTION(S):

Jim Dodd, a local instructor, demonstrates the Natural Golf swing, which is characterized by a wider stance, a shorter backswing and an "up and out" finish, rather than the "through and around" philosophy behind the conventional golf swing. Natural Golf has gained popularity in recent years for its comparative simplicity. Chris Pietsch / The Register-Guard Jim Dodd shows the difference between the address position of a conventional golf swing (left) and that used in Natural Golf. The Natural Golf swing is hailed by many who have had back problems while using a conventional swing.