1. What Teaching Taught Me

Anyone who has taught golf or who has even watched closely a number of beginners at the game knows that there are two great classes—those who are natural golfers and those who are not. My brother Aubrey was born a golfer; I had to make myself one and a hard time I had doing it. Indeed we were both extreme members of our respective classes.

A study of the difference in mental and physical make-up between the natural golfer and the made one is intensely interesting. So is a study of their ulti­mate capacity for the game. Not all the advantages are on the side of the natural player. Of course if his early game is guided by a far-seeing nature, as Au­brey's was, he is fortunate. But too often the natural golfer is so successful at first that he is content to be self-taught—and the self-taught golfer is usually a badly taught one. Why? Well for a number of reasons which this book will make clear, not the least im­portant being the fact that the soundest and most permanently profitable motions in golf feel unnatural, and "all wrong" to most people when first tried.

Further we are all imitative to some degree and un­less we learn a whole and comprehensive technique of the game from a teacher who has a coherent idea of the relationship of the various shots, we are apt to pick up a bit here and a bit there by watching others. The result is a patchwork game, full of pretty shots maybe when it is running well, but so loosely hung together and so self-contradictory in some of its com­ponent parts that it is unreliable and may be expected to break down or blow up when the strain comes.

A well-taught golfer rarely breaks down and rarely goes off his game completely and if he does strike a bad patch one or at the most two lessons will pull him back again. But patching up a badly taught player is one of the most difficult and thankless tasks a teacher can undertake. I have refused to take on hundreds of such cases, because I do not believe that any instruc­tion that is not part of a consistent system can be of any permanent benefit.

"Tips" which are guaranteed to improve your game are easy enough to come by. Every club-house is full of them, and you have only to go a few holes with a friend to know what his own particular disease is by the "cures" he hands out to you! It is human nature to feel sure that everyone else is afflicted by the same troubles as those which torment ourselves. But all this advice is dangerous for it is just impossible to build up a sound game by accepting tips and instructions and advice from all those who are willing to offer them.

Does this apply only if we copy or take advice from bad examples? Oh no!—anyone from a beginner to an experienced golfer who has tried to take too much expert advice from too many sources will have been baffled and confused both in his mind and in his style by the opposite theories and contradictory practices of acknowledged masters. This fact alone is sufficient to prove one of the main contentions of this book, that the mechanical muscular movements employed in golf are not the whole secret of it.

The truth about the conflicting theories of experts is quite simple. The masters play as it suits them to play and then evolve theories to explain why the particular movements which they discover themselves employing are right I Unfortunately a shot that may be effective enough in the hands of a master may have disastrous results if "copied" by some less expert player.

Of course the muscular-mechanical movements in golf are extremely important but they are not every­thing. After teaching myself first and then for thirty-five years teaching others, I have arrived at concrete conclusions as to what the important factors are and I would summarize them roughly as follows:

1. Every good golf shot is the outcome of a satisfactory psychological-physical relationship.
2. It is this relationship which gives control and con­sistency.
3. These good relationships (and consequent con­trols) are built up most easily and firmly when the muscular-mechanical requirements of the game have been simplified.

And so—

4. It is desirable to learn to play as many of the shots as possible with the same movements.

Let me illustrate this last point which is fundamental in my theory of teaching, by describing the case of a pupil of mine, a lady no longer young who came to me more or less in despair. She had tried hard to play golf but had been defeated because she had never succeeded in driving even one hundred yards!

I taught her golf with one club only, her driver, and only off the tee. All I taught her was how to drive. When she came to me later and said, "How do I play pitch shots?" I replied, "As you drive." When she asked, "How do I putt?" I replied again, "As you drive."

I continued, "As the shot, and consequently the club, becomes shorter, we stand a little more open to the hole and draw the feet closer together and bring the ball back nearer to the right foot. When playing with the driver the ball will be placed just inside the line of the left heel—with a No. 8 iron it will be just inside the right heel."

 I did not need to explain to her that the more we face the hole the nearer to the line of flight will the club head go back—or that the nearer we stand to the ball the more vertical will be our swing (because we are looking more directly down, our shoulders dip more on the way back and in consequence our club head comes up more steeply "naturally"). I did not need to explain these points because the correct action is the natural outcome of the position taken up—pro­vided that the fundamentals of the swing are not in­terfered with.

Teaching golf as all one shot simplified her game. It prevented her other shots from interfering with her drive or her drive confusing her other shots, because all the shots were fundamentally the same. And though this pupil was taught with a driver only she now plays the most delicate run-up shots, and pitches excellently, in fact, she runs up better than do many players with handicaps lower than her own 15. Incidentally I look on that 15 as one of the outstanding proofs of the soundness of the theories propounded in this book.

The fault with much of the golf teaching of today, professional as well as amateur, is that the teacher tries to eradicate specific faults by issuing specific in­structions. In short, the "good tip" system again. This is fatal, mainly because it is no system at all but just a conglomeration of golf patent medicines. The true aim of the teacher who desires to build up a sound and dependable game in a pupil, must be to link up in the pupil a line of controls. And for reasons which will become obvious as this book is read, the aim of the pupil must be to carry out the teacher's instruc­tions irrespective of immediate results.

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