In 1951 an engineering aid from Seattle, Washington had a problem.  He was playing very good golf, shooting in the seventies, in his very first year of playing golf.  Golf is supposed to be more difficult than this, he was told, so he wanted to know why he was playing so well.  He talked to several golf pros who taught the game but none gave him satisfactory answers.  Being a scientist at work and at heart he knew there had to be answers.  Se he begun what he figured to be a one week project mapping out the "science" of the golf swing.

Twenty-eight years  later he finished his project.  A wonderfully complete study of why the ball goes where it does, how the club moves to make it fly long and straight or short and crooked, and what the human body must do to get the club to move in this manner.

This study was published in a book, and has been updated 5 times since.  It has long been knowledged as THE most complete study on the way the golf swing actually works.  It has ALL the answers with its 241 pages.

Ever golf pro who has searched high and low to uncover or discover the mysteries of the swing and found the ANSWERS, have all wound up in the same place - this little yellow book.

The book separates fact from fiction and science from opinion,  It explains, by using physics and geometry, exactly what is going on during the stroke and at impact.  It breaks down the golf swing into its samenesses and differences.  The samenesses are what happens in every stroke and are explained in fine detail erasing all the mystery to the questions of power production and ball flight.  The differences are the variations of the 24 actions of the golf stroke that CAN BE DONE IN MORE THAN ONE WAY.  From these 24 components and their variations it is shown how countless effective golf "swings" can be executed to produce ideal ball flight.  The instructor can use these variations to custom fit a player with a "stroke pattern" that gives them their best chance to execute what the books shows as the three imperatives to good ball striking and what Kelley calls the "secret" of golf - sustaining the line of compression.

He defines sustaining the line of compression as keeping the original impact point of the clubface and the ball in contact with each other for the 3/4ths of an inch that it takes for the ball to spring off the clubface after impact.

It is this principle on which the system that the book supports is created around.

This system, The Star System of G.O.L.F. (Acronym - Geometrically Oriented Linear Force) is a synergy of two processes.  These processes consist of a "engineering system" and a "feel" system.  The engineering system isolates and coordinates the mechanics of the stroke pattern.  The feel system translates them into a describable sensation - describable to, and by, the individual player.  The result of this interaction is the slogan of The Golfing Machine - "Let mechanics produce and feel reproduce".

The book was presented to the PGA of America, the organization that trains the vast majority of club professionals and teaching professionals in the U.S.A., in 1973.  It was rejected as the official teaching manual of the PGA because it was considered to be "over the heads" of the PGA members and golfing public.  The PGA than crafted a "simplified" swing and teaching model based on the book that was incomplete and misleading.  When this "simplification" was finally updated into a book (The PGA Teaching Manual) it contained 600-plus pages with less information about how the swing works then the 241-page GOLFING MACHINE.

Despite the over 25 years the book has been on the market, most golfers have never heard of it.  A significant percentage of the golf pros and amateurs who have heard of it ridicule it despite sometimes never even reading the book.  There are numerous reasons for these opinions.

It is not a how to book.  The book is super complex to read.  Because Kelley tried to keep the book's size to a minimum, so that it could be easily carried around, there is little explanations of the explanations.  An additional reason for the "heavy read" is it was written by a genius engineer, not a English professor.  Because previously unknown elements of the swing were uncovered during the research, new terminology had to be adapted to classify these elements.

Perhaps the number one reason the book has remained an enigma is that most golf pros are severely undertrained as teachers.  Nearly all instruction manuals are written from the experience of the author and this often leads to a "simplicity by omission" that has lead pros not to question old empirical axioms.  Any thing, book, or person who is a threat to the assumption by the golfing public that "the pro knows it all," will be certainly denounced by some in any way possible.

So how can the average player, above average player, or beginner learn from this brilliant work, written by Homer Kelley?

Mr. Kelley, who passed away in 1983 while giving a seminar on his work for the PGA of America, in his wisdom, set up a program to authorize instructors to teach utilizing his system.

This authorization program requires the teaching professional to pass a fifty page test which is by far the most comprehensive and difficult in golf.  The instructor must then prove both their teaching and demonstration abilities to their authorizing instructor.  Only then are they certified at the first level of competency in the system.

There are over 120 Authorized Instructors if this system worldwide.  Authorized instructors have won every kind of teaching award there is including National PGA Teacher Of The Year (twice) and GOLF Magazine's 100 Best Teachers in America.  Their students have won every conceivable title in golf.  But most would tell you that they are most proud of their former 100+ shooters who now score in the 70's and one time powder-puff hitters who now win long drive contest.

There are dozens of other instructors who teach the system, who are not authorized, but use the information in their teaching as gospel.

Slightly more than half of Authorized Instructors of THE GOLFING MACHINE have attained the level of Master.  These Master Instructors teach not only amateurs and playing professionals, but teach teaching professionals to teach and authorize them in the system.

The first professional Homer Kelley authorized was a highly intelligent golf pro with the gift of imaginative thinking.  His name is Ben Doyle, and he instructs both players and teachers on his lesson tee at Quail Lodge Resort in Carmel, California.  The top teachers in the world, who have studied everything and everyone worth studying, consider him to be one of the two foremost authorities on the golf swing in the world (the other, Mac O'Grady was himself a student of both Homer Kelley and ben Doyle as well as an authorized instructor of THE GOLFING MACHINE before starting his own organization).  Hundreds of teachers have copied many of Mr. Doyle's  teaching methods  either directly from him or from one of his teaching or playing professional students. 

The Golfing Machine organization is run by Homer Kelley's widow, Sally, in Seattle, Washington.