The Golfing Machine [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Generally, before buying a book these days, I look carefully at the one star reviews. These are unlikely to be written by the author or his publisher, and most of the people who genuinely hate a book have some respectable reason (assuming the book is not about politics). For those similarly inclined, I feel an urge to temper the vitriol of the one star reviewers of Mr. Kelley. Yes, it would have been nice if Homer had written the book in English (or at least had it translated), but I suspect that had he done so the book might have been too expensive to self publish and might have been too heavy to lift as well.

All the information a golfer needs to build a perfect swing (indeed a variety of perfect swings) is imbedded this book. Also imbedded in the book is all the information a golfer needs to protect himself from the army of charlatans coming out of the woodwork day by day to offer him the secret to golf for only three easy payments of twenty-nine ninety-five. The problem with The Golfing Machine is that NOBODY can sit down and read it. I have been a golfer for over fifty years and once played well enough to compete both in college and in the championship flight of club events. I will also match reading credentials, as I have been reading what seems like two hundred books a year for the past thirty years and enjoy a law degree from Harvard too. Nearly twenty years ago I stopped practicing law and began studying golf. I have been dipping into the Golfing Machine for nearly that long and believe I very nearly understand it. I have yet to find anything in the book which is wrong, but a great deal of it does seems unnecessary.

The problem with Homer Kelley's writing is that the sentences do not make sense and the paragraphs are often worse. On top of everything else, the book is divided into numbered sections and subsections and at the end of nearly every sentence there is a cross reference to five other places in the text which make no more sense than the sentence and paragraph you have just finished. Reading this book is like reading the Internal Revenue Code, or being the AFLAC duck in a conversation with Yogi Berra, or listening a Who's on First routine that continues for twenty years, except that you do not get the occasional laugh. I should add, however, that a William Gass or Thomas Pynchon novel is far worse than this, so golfers should count their blessings that Kelley was not a post modern academic.

Somehow, a would be reader must ignore all that and try to glean the essence of the author's Ideas, which if they are not exactly clear are occasionally startling and, in so far as I can tell, fundamentally correct. Now, is the book worth the current out of print price tag? I would certainly buy it in preference to another sloppy journalistic rehash published under the name of the latest tour star or television guru, most of whom have no more real idea of the geometry and biomechanics of golf than a squirrel understands mathematics, Newtonian physics or anatomy, although a squirrel can run and jump a good deal better than Isaac Newton ever did.

Words cannot express what this book has done for golf. Kelley's work is masterpiece. Golf instruction tends to be theory and opinion. There is absolutely no theory or opinion in the book. It is completely fact, it will remain that way as long as the basic laws of physics and geometry hold true. Just as there are thousands of philosophies and religons but only one science, there is also thousands of different golf books but only one Golfing Machine. It is not an easy read but that is because so much information is reduced to a 200 page handbook. It is basically golf swing engineering. All golf strokes have been divided into 24 components, three zones, 12 sections and three functions. Unfortunatly, just as the only people who can truly appreciate Einstein are those who have studied relativity, the only people who can appreciate the genious of Homer Kelley are the ones who have unlocked the information held within this book. Needless to say, I highly recommend it.

This book describes how (and why) every aspect of the golf swing works. Admittedly, the book is not easy reading, but the content holds what is probably the most accurate information on the golf swing available. The readers of this book can be confident that what they are reading/learning is correct, and not just based on someones opinion, but rather, years of research into the physics/geometry behind the golf swing. There are other books that have taken this "scientific" approach to teaching the golf swing, but for me, this is the only book of it's kind. I'm not going to name-drop, but I know of two PGA players (one of whom has won a major) who, at one point, would carry this book around like a bible. Definitely a book worth reading if you are a true golf-nut.