ABOUT KENN HUNDLEY

 

 

Golf Swing Emulator in Japan                                                   Kenn and Shunji Izumi

Kenn Hundley was born in southern Virginia in 1949. Kenn's brother is Randy Hundley who signed a pro baseball contract in 1960. For Kenn's high school graduation present, Randy allowed Kenn to travel with the Chicago Cubs for 10 days on a road trip. Kenn dressed out before the game and caught batting practice. This was a sports fantasy before there was fantasy baseball and Kenn's first glimpse at the mindset of a professional athlete.

When Kenn was 21 he hit the road. He moved to Canada just for the fun of it. Eventually he would travel to 16 countries for play and work. Kenn has done just about every blue collar job that there is to do. In most of these jobs Kenn has found a way to do that job better. He is an inventor at heart and all of his inventions come from a need that is not being fulfilled. Necessity is definitely the mother of invention for him.

Kenn bought his first guitar when he was about 21 and he immediately started to write his own music. He could hear the harmonies for his music but there was no recording studio in town to help him record his songs. Kenn's brother gave him a two track tape recorder. Kenn took it apart and then designed a process that used a series of switches that allowed him to record 8 tracks of music on the two track recorder. This was his first invention.

He has been designing and manufacturing strength training equipment since 1983. He has been training golfers all over the world since 1989. Here is a partial list of the places that he has trained golfers and sold the Long Ball Trainer in. Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Brunei, Canada, Chile, China, Columbia, Dominican Republic, Dubai, England, France, Germany, Hawaii, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, The Philippines and Venezuela.

His first patent was on a multi-function gear puller designed for the automotive and aerospace industry called The Complete Puller. Kenn spent one year as an actor and did commercials and five guest appearances on the NBC soap opera Santa Barbara. Acting became too boring since you sit around most of the time waiting to do your work. While he was acting, he startd to design some weight lifting equipment.

Kenn quit acting and set up a factory to make weight lifting equipment. He created some innovative improvements in the gym equipment industry through his company Perfect Body Fitness. In 1984, Perfect Body Fitness was the first gym equipment manufacturer, to paint gym equipment white. Up until then, everything was either black or gray. Kenn also created some innovative improvements to gym equipment that are still being used today. Kenn's second patent was for the line of sports emulators he developed starting in 1989. The only reason that the emulator technology ever came about, was purely accidental.

Kenn started to play golf on a regular basis in his late 30s. But there was a problem. His brain only knew how to swing a baseball bat. Kenn grew up in a baseball family. He even played one season of minor league ball for the Cubs. Kenn's brother is Randy Hundley who was an innovative catcher for the Chicago Cubs in the 60s and 70s. Randy was the first ball player ever to develop and use the one hand style of catching that was taught to him by his father, Cecil Hundley. Randy's son, Todd Hundley would eventually train on Kenn's Batting Emulator and set a lot of new home run records for the Mets and for all major league catchers. All of this baseball history was not helping Kenn's golf game.

When Kenn started to take some golf lessons, it did not take long to realize that the golf instructors could play very well and explain WHAT Kenn needed be to doing in his golf swing. The problem was that the instructors did not know HOW to get Kenn's body to perform these movements. He knew that there was a disconnect between what the instructors knew, and how to get Kenn's body to learn. He decided to approach the learning aspect of golf from a different perspective. So, he designed and built a training machine to help him learn the kind of golf swing that the pro golfers had. That was in 1989 and Kenn formed the company Specific Athletic Movement Emulators or SAME. Within a year, Kenn had also made a batting emulator, a throwing emulator and a football and soccer kicking emulator.

In 1992 Kenn traveled to Japan to set up a deal for a Japanese company to buy golf and baseball emulators. That year, Kenn sold several box cars of batting, throwing and Golf Swing Emulators to a company in Matsumoto Japan. In 1993, Kenn also allowed the field goal kicker for the Phoenix Cardinals, to use his kicking emulator for a week. At the end of that week, Craig Davis broke the record for the longest field goal ever kicked for the Cardinals franchise.

Also in 1993, Kenn sold a Batting Emulator to the Chicago Cubs. In 1996, Kenn sold a Batting Emulator to the New York Mets. In 1997, NBC in Phoenix, did a interview with Kenn that featured Sammy Sosa and Todd Hundley. The interview showed the before and after results of Sammy and Todd using the Batting Emulator, along with the before and after results of several other major league players. That interview can be seen on Kenn's YouTube channel under Sammy Sosa-NBC.

In 1995 Kenn established the first sport specific training facility in Scottsdale Arizona. The SAME Performance Center featured all of Kenn's individual emulators and he also started to train athletes. In 1996, a PGA tour golfer walked in off the street. He had heard about Kenn and his golf machine at a party. Kenn worked with this PGA pro for about three months in his facility. This golfer had to qualify to get into the 1996 US Golf Open. Not only did he qualify to play in the tournament, he went on to WIN the tournament. This has only happened twice in the history of the U.S, Open. Soon after this happened, The Golf Channel invited Kenn to their studios in Orlando to do a segment on the Golf Swing Emulator. An interview with Steve Jones is also on Kenn's YouTube channel and Steve is talking about how the Golf Swing Emulator helped him win the 1996 U.S Open.

Also in the same year, Kenn had gotten his golf handicap down from an 18 to a 3.3. By 1997 Kenn's Golf Swing Emulator was being carried around on the Sr. PGA tour. A handful of Sr. PGA pros had endorsed the Golf Swing Emulator.

Kenn was obviously on to something but he was not satisfied with what he had. He knew this technology worked, but he could not explain exactly why. This is when he started to do research in the field of neurology at the ASU Science Library in Tempe Arizona. That work started in 1998 and Kenn is still at it today. You can see one of the research papers that he wrote on the subject of motor memory learning by Goggling the phrase "How the brain learns the golf swing ".