ON LEARNING AND TEACHING

Before we go ahead with the next chapter, which is the first dealing with the practical side of learning to play golf, I want to say a few things about learning the game and about teaching it. I ought to know some­thing about these subjects for I have been learning golf for forty-five years—and teaching it as well for the last thirty of them.

Now I claim that the right way of learning golf has almost nothing in common with the "learning" we did at school; it is an entirely different process. Memoriz­ing the capitals of Europe or a Latin declension, or 'learning" chemistry or mathematics, are purely men­tal feats and depend exclusively upon mental memory, whereas I contend that to learn to play good and con­sistent golf you need muscular memory.

What you need to learn (or memorize) are not the technical or mathematical details of a good shot but the feel of it. If you and every component muscle in you can remember the feel of a good shot, you can make it—and you have become what I term a reflex golfer. That is to say, the good shot has become your "reflex," or automatic response to the sight of the ball. But please remember that this golf memory is a mem­ory of a cycle of sensations which follow and blend into one another quite smoothly. Each sensation must be connected up with those which precede and follow it; it cannot be considered independently. The truth is that it cannot even be felt independently. You cannot, to take a crude example, feel the top of your swing as such; you can only feel a sensation between the sensa­tions of the back swing and those of the down swing.

For that reason you must never in golf say, "I've got it!" when you think you have found the secret of some shot that has been evading you—unless what you have "got" fits into your cycle of sensations or, as we shall now call them, controls. Because, unless it does so fit in, it cannot become a reliable part of your game. And why do I call sensations controls? Simply because I want you to control your golf by these sensations in­stead of by thought.

There is another reason why your memory of a golf shot must be a memory of a cycle of sensations, not of a number of separate sensations. It takes an exceed­ingly skilful juggler to juggle with six glass balls at once, but if the six balls were threaded onto a string most of us could manage them—and the memorizing of sensations as a cycle (instead of as independent items) does thread them up for us very much in this way.

To turn for a moment from learning to teaching. Most of the teaching of golf is completely negative— and a purely negative thing can have no positive value. Why do I say that golf teaching is negative? Well we can all find faults in each other's game, millions of them, and we all start off to teach golf by pointing out these faults and "curing" them. I did this for twenty-five years, but I have now discovered that the right way to get a pupil to hit the ball satisfactorily is to watch for any good natural qualities that may be there and to build up the swing around them.

We all hit a good ball sometimes. Maybe with the beginner this is an accident, but the good teacher will use such an accidental shot, photographing it in his mind and starting away to build up controls around the qualities which made it possible.

In this way the beginner can retain his natural ca­pacity to hit the ball and will gain confidence in his ability to do it—and so go on enjoying his game and improving it. But if the teacher merely points out to him a dozen or more faults in his swing he will become perplexed, confused, and fed up. For that reason I never tell a pupil his faults (which is negative teach­ing). I notice the faults, of course, and suggest the necessary corrections (which is positive). So I never tell a pupil that he overswings and breaks his left arm, I explain width to him. That is to say I give him a posi­tive conception and by working on it he actually cures his faults without even being aware that he had them.

Now there is another point about teaching which I would like to emphasize. You will find that in this work I have not tried to set down a set of controls in one way and leave it at that. I have tried to set the same things down and explain them in many different ways. So when you find me repeating myself do not think it is carelessness! All good teachers must repeat, but never in exactly the same words or with just the same con­nections. I want to give you a clear idea of the controls which will enable you to produce an effective svring, and I do not mind if I have to say the same thing in a dozen different ways so long as one of the twelve gets home with you. I hope you will not mind either, be­cause you should be able to pick something new out of the other eleven also.

I learned golf by the long way—trial and error—and I want to lead you away from that to a method which is methodical and is effective whatever your age or your handicap may be. If you accept my method of learning you do not need a lot of practice on the course to improve; you can assimilate the principles in your armchair and put in useful practice on the hearth rug—where you need no club because ye»u can feel your muscular movements without it. You must learn to feel the sensations through your intellect and then forget them intellectually and leave them to your mus­cular memory or control system.

How long does it take to "learn golf"? Well I am still learning after forty-five years of it! I have known pu­pils who hit the ball very well after only four lessons and others who have taken a year or more to do even moderately well, but time is apt to level things out a lot. Golf is a curious game in being easy of comprehen­sion but (sometimes) very long in realization. There is much darkness in the early stages, and it is only after a few years at the game that we really come out into full daylight and can assess our own possibilities.

Early difficulties are often emphasized by age or physical make-up. While I was writing this I had just started two young ladies—one of sixteen who is still at college but weighs about one hundred and seventy pounds and another in the early twenties who weighs less than half that. Apart from the weight of their clubs the conditions will be the same for both, yet obviously their problems will work out very differently. And we have all got our physical individuality and peculiari­ties in the layout of bones and development of muscles. But I have found by long experience that these things usually level themselves out in the end—I have seen many gifted and precocious beginners fail simply be­cause they would not put in the hard work which is essential before the elementary stage is passed, and only when the elementary stage is passed can golf genius come to the surface.

On the other hand I remember one pupil of mine who started very young and at times could hardly get the ball off the ground; yet at eighteen she was scratch and Champion of France. And as I have already told, I started another lady at forty and though she was not gifted she was a worker and ten years later she elimi­nated Mme Lacoste from the French Open!

So do not despair if you are trying to learn golf, or better golf, and getting no results. It may be that you have been trying to learn too many things (like juggling with too many balls) and when you have tried to add just one more, your whole game has broken down on you. We will simplify the things you have to learn by stringing them together into cycles of sensation because they are then easier to remember and easier to add to.

If you work in this way your golf will be progressive. You will still (being human) get bad patches, but each bad patch will tend to be less bad and each good patch will tend to be better, because you are building up your game.

The foundation upon which it must be built up is the feel of the swing; so in the first practical chapter I give you an idea of the whole swing—just as I do in the first lesson when personal teaching is possible.

The subsequent chapters are what a musician might call "Variations on the Theme!" Hence the apparent repetition. Because I believe that all golf shots should be made with the same controls, you will not find any­thing fundamentally different in the chapter on Put­ting than that which you will find in the chapter on the Full Swing. Yet you might quite possibly get a control for your driving out of the Putting chapter; it depends on your make-up and on what you read into what I have written.

Some years ago I told a pupil, in the course of a les­son, "I drive as I putt." Three years later he said to me, "You once told me you drove as you putted—what you meant was that you putted as you drove." I let him have his own way! The great thing was that we had got the two associated in his mind and controls and so proved my system to be teachable and workable in others. I have had plenty of confirmation of this since. In finishing this chapter I will return again to the need to make your learning positive. Don't go out to find out what is wrong with your swing, go out to im­prove it. You will be none the worse if you start with a really big idea—to learn (or re-learn) the golf swing at your first try. If that is your ambition do not tie your­self up with theories; stand up and give the ball a crack —that is the most positive thing in golf.

Are You Ready To Move Onto The Next Lesson? Click Here….