Why you hook the ball, and which hook it is

Shut to the path, not shut to the target

About 19 yards leftCurve on a 275-yard tour drive, face 2 degrees shut to the path

A hook is one subtraction with a minus sign in front of it: the face aimed left of where the clubhead is travelling. The slice guide runs that arithmetic in full and there is no reason to do it twice. What it leaves out is the closed column of TrackMan's table, and the closed column is where a hook lives.

Their tour driver example carries 275 yards and curves about 19 yards left with the face two degrees shut to the path. Their tour 6-iron carries 183 yards and needs five degrees for roughly the same 20. That is nine and a half yards of curve per degree with the driver against the iron's four, and part of that gap is the drive's extra ninety yards in the air.

Your start line names which hook it is

4 degreesFace-angle error that walks a robot's 6-iron off a 40-yard fairway

Two shots curve left and they are not the same fault. One sets off right of the target and swings back over it. The other sets off left and carries on leaving. Both have the face shut to the path; what differs is where the path pointed.

The ball leaves close to where the face is aimed, and a left curve means the face was left of the path, so the path pointed right of wherever the ball started. A hook setting off right of the target has a path further right again: in-to-out, the shot a good player hits on purpose. A hook setting off left has a path right of the face but often still left of the target.

Gene Parente ran the face-only version on the Golf Laboratories robot for Golf.com's ClubTest: a 6-iron at 80 mph, swung down the target line, nothing altered but the face. Two degrees shut finished 10 yards left, four degrees 20. An average amateur fairway is 40 yards wide, the whole tolerance spent on face alone.

Seventy degrees to go, four hundredths left

70 to 100 degreesFace still to close with 0.04 seconds left before impact

Sasho MacKenzie, writing for Golf.com, put a figure on how late the face is still turning. With 0.04 seconds to go before impact, golfers, tour players included, have roughly 70 to 100 degrees of closing still ahead of them. Nobody holds the face square through the ball. It sweeps past square, and the shot depends on where in that sweep the ball sits.

Rate of closure peaks near impact, and for any group of golfers at any level it typically runs between 1,800 and 3,600 degrees per second. That puts two degrees of face at about a thousandth of a second at the slow end, half of that at the fast end. Two degrees was the 19-yard drive.

Video is a poor witness to it. At 60 frames per second the frames either side of contact sit 17 milliseconds apart, and the face turns 30 to 60 degrees inside that gap. Pebble Swing reads joint angles and the backswing-to-downswing tempo ratio from the frames, and no phone reads a clubface at contact.

The hook that arrives when the slice leaves

A player who has just cured a slice is the standard candidate for the second kind. If the face is what changed and the path was left alone, the path still runs out-to-in. A face that used to sit open to it now sits shut to it, and the ball leaves left and keeps turning left.

The instinct is to put the grip back. That trades one curve for the other around a path that has not moved, and leaves you missing on both sides, which is worse than missing reliably on one. The face is no longer the wrong number. It is the one that got corrected while the other waited.

Worth ruling out first: a shot that goes left and stays dead straight is not a hook. Face and path agreed, and both pointed left of the target. That is a pull, the straight misses have their own guide, and nothing here will move one.

Check the strike, then the grip, then the path

Impact tape goes on the face before any of this, because TrackMan states those curve figures for centred contact. Matt Saternus of Plugged In Golf sets out what an off-centre strike does: a ball hit on the toe launches right and then draws or hooks back left. A toe-side pattern is doing part of the curving on its own.

The grip comes next, and it is the mirror image of the change the slice guide asks for, so take the detail from there or from the grip guide. Vinnie Manginelli of PGA.com reports that some PGA professionals call a strong grip the primary cause of a ball moving hard right to left. No counted distribution of hook causes exists, so read that as lesson-tee experience, not a measured share.

The path is last because it costs the most to change, and because the direction it must move in is unknowable until the start line has named your hook. Push an out-to-in path further left when the ball already starts left and you rebuild the slice around it. Send an in-to-out path further right on the hook that already starts right and the gap only widens.