Long before he became one of the most influential golf instructors of the last 50 years, Jimmy Ballard was a teenager in Birmingham who’d quit playing golf entirely. A chance round with Lee Mackey (the man who shot 64 at the 1950 US Open) got him back on the course, and got him introduced to Sam Byrd, the man who’d define the rest of his life.
Byrd played outfield for the Yankees alongside Babe Ruth, and the two were genuinely best friends. Babe was best man at Byrd’s wedding. And the single move Babe taught Byrd about hitting a baseball, keeping your arms connected to your body instead of swinging with your arms alone, became the foundation Ballard built an entire coaching career on. It’s the same principle he later used to help rebuild Curtis Strange’s swing from the ground up, patterned directly off the changes Ben Hogan made to his own game.
In Part 1, Jimmy takes us from his father getting him into golf at age five, through working Sam Byrd’s driving range for free, to why a 40 pound video camera John Brody gave him in 1979 proved that none of his students actually did what they thought they did.
Part 2 picks up right where this one leaves off, out Wednesday.
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Article Originally Posted Here.