5. The Road to Golfing Health

Now I could write a whole book on the experience of my pupil briefly outlined in the preceding chapter. It might be made a very interesting book too, for the case contained all the elements of a perfect illustra­tion of the desirability of some sort of conscious control that could be used to check the often fatal tendency to do the obvious thing. For do not forget it was Golf Bogey No. 1—the natural tendency to do the obvious thing—that upset my pupil's game.

As soon as she wilfully tried to drive down the mid­dle of the fairway she was a mess. When she reverted to the proper method of considering the stroke, not the ball and not the distant green and tried to sling her club head out into the rough on her right—she became a beautiful, sweeping machine again. But note that we only arrived at this happy state when reason had dominated instinct—when her golf had evolved from instinctive end-gaining to conscious control of the stroke.

This conscious control, as I see it, can only be built up in some such manner as I have used in my teaching. Conscious control by feel certainly cannot be made use of simply by accepting its theoretical basis! Nor can it be made use of by copying the style and swing of someone who possesses it! It has to be built up in the individual golfer. And how? My own method will be described in later chapters.

It may be timely to suggest here that the "conscious" in conscious control is a warning that a fine and ex­perienced golfer is not necessarily a good teacher of the game. Why? Because many cracks do not know how they play themselves—when it comes to anything like a close analysis of their shots—and they have no idea at all of how a beginner must feel in order to make the shots that they make.

Let me illustrate that last point, because it is funda­mental to teaching and to learning. All crack players feel that they swing from in-to-out when driving. I have been doing this so long that it no longer feels a "guided" or unnatural swing to me. Indeed if I feel myself making any other sort of swing I know it will result in a bad shot. Yet with the beginner this in-to-out swing does feel unnatural and gives an impression that the ball will be pushed into the rough to the right. This feeling will of couse be corrected by experience. This disparity in feeling about shots as between the crack and the beginner must never be lost sight of in teach­ing.

Every teacher has to keep continually in mind the fact that the natural thing for any golfer to do if he thinks first of hitting the ball to the hole rather than of making the shot correctly—is to swing the club head down the desired line of flight. The urge to do this is so strong that a merely academic knowledge of where the club head ought to be felt to go cannot stand against it. William James said that where there is a conflict between the Will and the Imagination, the Imagination always wins. So no Will to make a correct swing—unless reinforced by our conscious control-can resist, when imagination of the ball flying straight for the hole supervenes. What usually happens is that before the back swing is completed, the player trans­fers his attention from the matter of making the correct swing to the matter of where he wants to hit the ball, i.e., somewhere at the top of his swing he switches from a correct in-to-out swing to one along the desired line of flight. Consequently he comes down outside the ball.

Anyone who is not a pupil of mine will admit that "you came down outside" is their tutor's most frequent admonition. And why do I say, "who is not a pupil of mine?" Well because I never just tell them that! It is quite useless to tell a pupil he has done wrong when acting instinctively unless you tell him why he did wrong and so enable him to avoid the fault in future. That I always do.

The player who comes down outside is almost in­variably thinking of where he wants to put the ball, and the only effective way of overcoming his trouble is by getting him to concentrate on the swing that ex­perience tells him will place it there. If this is done his conscious control—his feeling for the right move­ments, plus a steady intention to follow will inhibit his natural desire to take disastrous short cuts.

So Golf Bogey No. 1 can only be defeated by build­ing up a swing which can be accepted by the mind as well as the muscles as a satisfactory means to the end desired, and then concentrating on the produc­tion of that swing. With a properly felt swing, the swing becomes the aim and the matter of where the ball will fly is left (as it should be) to take care of itself.

And finally, the good golfer feels his swing as all one piece. It is produced by a psycho-physical unison and its control is outside the mind of the player. Any con­trol that is within the mind is subject to the state of the mind and is therefore unreliable.

Here we come back again to my reason for standard­izing as many shots as possible so that they can all be played with the same set of "controls." Only so I be­lieve can you learn to play entirely by sense of feel. Today, if I play a bad shot I do not start asking my­self why I played it badly, what I did wrong, etc.— questions which are liable to lead to more bad shots as we all know! I just take an easy club and try it until I get the right feel again. Then because my shots are felt I know that the right feeling must lead to the right shot—and further, that as all my shots are made funda­mentally the same, I know that if I get the right feel with say a No. 5 iron, a very easy club, I shall be making my shots with even the difficult clubs correctly and with confidence.

As I said before, these controls to which feeling a club gives the key, are probably in muscular memory plus tracks worn in the mind. But wherever they reside it is clear that the fewer there are of them the more reliable they are likely to be. If I play a pitch one way, a drive another, an iron shot in yet another, and a putt quite differently again, it is obvious that no single and consistent line of controls will be set up. Confusion as between one set of controls and another is very likely, and if I go off my game I may go off it very badly!

On the other hand if my system is used, a single sound line of controls is set up—by consistently prac­ticing the same fundamental swing for every shot. Working on these lines and refusing to be side-tracked by extraneous ideas such as "hitting a long ball" or "driving straight down the middle," you can begin to feel a complete assurance that you can at least rely upon producing your best shots every time. They will become a habit with you.

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