On the much debated subject of grip and grip size, I decided to put this one to rest with a simple picture of three grips.  The Natural Golf  non-tapered grip and Moe Norman’s grip and a Standard golf grip.

You can easily see that Moe’s grip was larger than a normal grip.  You can also see that Moe’s grip is smaller than the Natural Golf Grip and that his grip is actually tapered.

 

We recommend a custom sizing of your grip to fit your hands and we also recommend a taper to your grip.

Let me take this grip discussion a bit further and talk about Moe’s Grip, his hand action and the effects of a grip size.

Moe won every tournament he ever played with an Overlapping Hand Position as you see pictured. Here you see a picture from 1955 where Moe is overlapping.  Below you see a picture from various years including 1984, 1971 and from 2000.  You can see in the picture from 2000 that he has a 10 finger position.

Check out the last picture “demonstration 2002” and the picture of Moe showing his hands on the club. When you would ask Moe to show you his hand position he would tell you that he held it in the palms as you see in this picture.  This was only for explanation. He did not actually swing this way.  What Moe explained and what he actually did were very different.

My suggestion is that you pay attention to the 1971 and 1984 Version of Moe’s hand position.  This is what we teach at the Graves Golf Academy.

 

Here is Moe’s actual Hand position. Notice the tucked thumb into the trail hand.  There is not way to hold the club into the “palm” of the trail hand if you have your thumb tucked.

Here’s my conclusion on Moe’s Grip.  It comes down to two main things:  1) The hands must work together (not against each other) and 2) You must have the proper rotation of the hands.

The Hands must work together.  This actually means that the wrists must work in unison and the best way to do this is to pull the hands as close together as possible.  That is why I prefer an overlapping trail pinky position.   This pulls wrist joints closer together.   

Secondly, notice how both of Moe’s hands are “flat” at the back of the wrists.  There are straight lines where the wrists line up with the forearms.

So what’s important?  When the hands are properly placed, the wrists are close together and the hand action (hinging of the hands) produces ideal clubface movement.  This is why I always teach an overlapping grip.

Those who have trouble overlapping and say that it causes pain in their pinky, usually have improper rotations of one of the hands.  there should be very little pressure in the “middle of the hands”.  The pressure points are indicated here:

Notice how the thumb is tucked into the trail hand.

And one final fun picture.  This picture I took by crawling on the ground between Moe’s legs so I could see the “trigger” of Moe’s trail hand.  The man in the picture is my good friend Larry Olson.