The Genesis of This Book

Golf is in the Boomer blood. My father was a village schoolmaster in Jersey. As an educationist he was generations ahead of his time. He saw no use in forc­ing a boy to try to learn subjects which he was obvi­ously incapable of absorbing—and of which he could make no use anyway, but he did help his pupils to develop such talents and natural aptitudes as they possessed.

In consequence, though so far as I know his school never produced a Senior Wrangler and maybe did not show up too well when the Inspector came round, it did have the very remarkable record of producing five golfers of international rank in one generation.

I imagine that it is a world's record for a village school and one never likely to be beaten and if any memorial were needed to my father's devotion to the game the records of the great Channel Island golfers who were his pupils—incomparable Harry Vardon, and his brothers Tom and Alfred, the three Gaudins, Renouf, and Ted Ray—would provide it.

Harry Vardon wrote as follows in the story of his golfing life:

In due course we all went to the village school but I fear, from all that I can remember, and from what I have been told that knowledge had little attraction for me in those days, and I know I often played truant sometimes three weeks at a stretch. Consequently my old school-master Mr. Boomer had no particular reason to be proud of me at that time, as he seems to have become since.

He never enjoys a holiday so much in these days as when he comes over from Jersey to see me play for the Open Championship, as he does whenever the meeting is held at Sandwich. But when I did win the champion­ship on that course he was so nervous and excited about my prospects that he felt himself unequal to watching me and during most of the time I was doing my four rounds he was sitting in a fretful state on the seashore.

Incidentally when my father retired from school-teaching at the age of sixty, he joined me at St. Cloud and became a professional golfer. My brother Aubrey became a Pro at seventeen, and now my son George —having had his schooling cut short by the European upheavals—has started his chosen career at sixteen.

About myself. It was intended that I should follow my father as a schoolmaster, but as it fell out I pre­ceded him as a golf Pro! After very few years of school-teaching I decided that any talents I had lay elsewhere and being by then a pretty good amateur golfer I ob­tained the job of 8th Assistant at Queen's Park, Bournemouth. I was then twenty-two. After a short period at Bournemouth I moved to Barton-on-Sea, and from Barton to St. Cloud in 1913. My long period at St. Cloud was interrupted by the first Great War (when I served in the Royal Naval Air Service) and at least broken again by the second. It was at St. Cloud that I developed my ideas about the game and built up my experience as a teacher of it.

Though I have never had the physique required for the hard mill of championship golf I have won three International Open Championships, the Belgian in 1923, the Swiss in 1924, and the Dutch in 1927.

My brother Aubrey is thirteen years my junior. He joined me at St. Cloud when he was seventeen, with a fine athletic record at Victoria College behind him. Shortly after he also joined the R.N.A.S. and we both returned to St. Cloud early in 1919. In our first four-ball match together there we played the two top Amer­icans in the Inter-AUied games. The Yanks won the tournament, but Aubrey and I halved our match.

The best Aubrey has done in the British Open was second to Bobby Jones at St. Andrews. He holds the record for the French Open having won it five times; he has also won the Belgian and Dutch titles several times and the Italian once. By winning the Daily Mail tournament, the Glasgow Evening Herald meeting at Cleneagles and the Roehampton show, he played him­self into the British team in three matches against the Americans—two of them for the Ryder Cup.

It is also not to be forgotten that Aubrey holds the world's record for a single round. His 61 was done at St. Cloud in a French P.G.A. tournament against the American Ryder Cup team. The tournament was won by Horton Smith, Aubrey following him in second place.

Aubrey holds many course records, but I suppose the most curious one is that he has never played a shot over the course on which Harry Vardon learned his golf—though he was born in the parish in which the course lies, and indeed no more than a mile from the house in which the Vardons were born.

That was at Grouville, on the east of the island, and before Aubrey reached golfing age our family had moved to the other end of the island,

where—charac­teristically enough—my father proceeded to build the Le Moye course with the help of his family and a few friends. Cutting greens out of that magnificent natural golf terrain was my first introduction to golf archi­tecture.

Aubrey and I toured the Argentine together. We were in fact the first visiting Pros to do so—and the first to play that dynamic golfer Jose Jurado. I have al­ways considered that the tournament that Aubrey won there against the best of their Pros and in most difficult and unfamiliar conditions, one of his finest feats.

Some years ago I was playing in a four-ball match with George (Theory) Duncan, my brother Aubrey, and Mr. E. Esmond. We were discussing a shot that Aubrey had just played and Mr. Esmond said to George, "You know Percy was a schoolmaster at one time." George looked at me with his quaint grin and said, "I thought so—he plays like one!"

He was quite right, though it is not because of my early school-teaching that my game looks as studied and considered as it does. The truth is that though I learned the game in Jersey as soon as I could walk and Harry Vardon was my boyhood idol, I was not what is known as a natural golfer. There is nothing instinctive about my game. Everything I have ever done in golf I had to learn to do. Maybe having to teach myself was not a bad preparation for my future work of teaching others.

As a boy I was just a plodder, but I stuck to it and be­fore I took my first professional job I was a good three handicap amateur and held the amateur record of Le Moye with 78. I went back there a few years ago and did an approximate 64 in a four-ball match—nearly a stroke a hole better as a result of twenty-five years' hard work and study. But probably the more valuable gain was in the matter of consistency and in being able to play my best when I needed to play my best.

Do not think that this consistency and control "come naturally" to a professional. Far from it. My first shot as a Pro was at Meyrick Park, Bournemouth —and I topped it! Indeed the whole time I was with the Bournemouth Club I hardly hit a single really clean shot from that tee. The very fact that my living depended upon my golf made a shot which as an amateur I should have found easy enough, one of almost insuperable difficulty. Keep that in mind please, and so remember that when I talk of golfing "nerves" I have had practical experience.

It was probably due to my father's influence that when I set out seriously to teach myself golf, I decided

I must teach myself a simple style. For my father was always insisting that simplicity was the greatest of all gifts and the most laudable of all attainments. To il­lustrate this, he took me to London to see Gerald du Maurier act. How utterly easy he made acting look! You were not conscious of the years of toil that must have gone to the building of that superb technique. Remember that when next you envy the effortless ease with which a crack Pro drives!

So it came about that I set out at first to find a simple swing and then, at a later date to find a simple method of imparting this to others. The discovery, or rather the development of the swing itself was not so difficult, but it is only comparatively recently that I have learned how to teach it. And I freely admit that the teaching is still less simple than I would like it to be.

I have started to write this book twenty times in the last twenty years and I might still hesitate to write it had I nothing more than the theory of a satisfactory swing to impart. But now, teed up for my twenty-first start, I know I am going on until the book is finished. And why? Because this time I feel I have a solid con­tribution to offer to the teaching and learning of golf. It is upon an aspect of the matter which has been practically ignored by writers, teachers and players alike—but one which I have proved beyond doubt to be of fundamental importance.

So in this book, superimposed upon the fruits of my knowledge, experience, and theories of the game, you will find my account of the relation between the physical and the psychological in golf—a relationship which lies at the root of every form of control—of both individual shots and of one's game as a whole. Until I realized the importance of this relationship and dis­covered how to use it everything that I wrote seemed inconclusive. At so many points there seemed nothing further to be done but to shrug one's shoulders and repeat "Golf is a funny game!" But once the relation­ship between mental and physical was rightly realized these blanks filled in—and the practical results in teach­ing were astounding.

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