7. The Controlled Golf Swing

As you have already heard, my first endeavor is to teach the pupil the whole golf swing—or better, the golf swing as a whole. I do not believe in trying to impart the swing in stages or by sections; from the first lesson I teach the swing complete.

What the pupil gets from this first lesson is a grosso modo idea of how the swing works; what I get from it is mainly an indication of how the grosso modo strikes the pupil as an individual. For do not forget that what­ever I say and however I illustrate my points, every pupil will visualize the swing differently.

I had a heartbreaking experience of this early in my teaching days when I had to take classes, twenty pu­pils at a time. All the twenty heard and saw the same things, but the extraordinary interpretations some of the individuals put on them were astounding. I could not stand it and gave the job up. The trouble in writing about the game is that I realize that in a sense my read­ers are a class. So I must take endless trouble to insure that you shall understand what I write.

Now for our grosso modo exposition of how the swing works.

The beginning of the movement is in the feet; the movement passes progressively up through the body, through the arms, and out at the club head. What we try to do is to make the club head come down in the same path time and time again—in such a way that the face of the club comes squarely into the back of the ball every time. We have one fixed point (the feet) and one moving point (the club head) which we desire to move along the same line time after time. So the golf swing might be compared to the drawing of arcs with a pair of compasses. The reasons why we cannot be so precise in our stroking as the compass can, are that we are supported on two legs instead of one and we are full of flections and joints!

Again, we have not only to bring the club head down through the same line time after time; we must bring it down so that the club face is square with the ball at the instant of impact—and because the path of the club head is a curve, this means that impact must be timed correctly to an infinitesimal fraction of a second in the sweep of the swing. Also the club head must be accelerating at the moment of impact.

So we have not only to set up the mechanism to make a good swing, which we can all soon do if we only swing at the daisies, but we have to time this swing to the fraction of a second. Now I think that most of us overrate the value of good mechanics in golf and underrate the value of accurate timing. I was once watching, with a pupil of mine who had a most perfect swing, a fellow whose action was not pretty—to put it kindly. But he kept hitting nice long shots down the middle. "Not much to look at," I remarked to my pupil. "I would not care a damn what I looked like if I could repeat like that chap!" he replied.

The awkward one could repeat his best shots time after time. His mechanics were ungainly but his timing was near perfect.

Well, you may say, if that is so, why should you go to so much trouble to give us a good mechanical swing? The answer is that good timing plus a good swing is better than good timing plus an awkward swing. The best swing, mechanically, is the one that pulls the ball a little and then makes it turn a bit to the left at the end of its flight, but if you get your maximum golf hap­piness out of a swing which slices the ball all around the course, there is no reason to alter your mechanics!

If you do want to make an alteration, it may not be an extensive one. I remember one day at St. Cloud an American came and begged me to give him even fif­teen minutes—which I did out of my lunch time as he seemed so insistent.

His trouble was that every now and then his iron shots to the green would finish in the bunker to the left of the green. For three years he had failed to find a permanent cure. So on the advice of a friend he came to me. It did not take me long to see what was wrong and to explain to him that now and again his foot-and-leg work was sluggish, and in consequence the club head came in too soon—to put his ball a little to the left.

After that brief lesson I never saw him again, as he was on his way back to the States from Paris. But he left me a note of thanks and a handsome present, and when I inquired of the caddy who had been out with him in the afternoon learned he had broken 70. Some time later I saw his photograph in the American Golfer with the news that he had won the West Coast cham­pionship.

Too much thought about the mechanics is a bad thing for anyone's game. Now the reason why golf is so difficult is that you have to learn it and play it through your senses. You must be mindful but not thoughtful as you swing. You must not think or reflect; you must feel what you have to do. Part of the difficulty arises because, apart from simple things like riding a bicycle, we have never learned to do things in this way.

The most difficult thing about learning golf is to learn to distract your mind from everything except the feeling of what you are about to perform.

Now no teacher can tell you in exact words how it feels when you make a certain movement correctly. You will have to use your imagination to interpret what he says, and if he is wise he will encourage you to use it.

Let me give you an example. I want to teach you to pivot from the hips. Now I can show you how it is done and issue the usual mass of detailed instruction, but that does not call up your imagination and it gives you no conception of how it feels to pivot correctly.

So, instead of explaining all the mechanical and anatomical details of the pivot to you, I show you how to pivot and then tell you to do it yourself imagining that you are standing in a barrel hip high and big enough to be just free of each hip but a close enough fit to allow no movement except the pivot. At once you get the feeling of the pivot. Incidentally nine out of ten golfers would improve their games if they would use this im­age to the fullest degree in practice.

So far so good; we can learn to feel the body turn to the right and round to the left, beautifully fixed in space by the hips. Now carry the image a stage fur­ther: first, as you pivot sink down from the knees—you will feel that if you sink down, even ever so little, you will become stuck in the barrel. This will not do, so you must feel that you keep your hips up on a level with the top of the barrel. Do this and you will develop the feel of keeping your hips up as you pivot—a thing which unfortunately for our golf very few of us do.

Now do not think that we use imagination in teach­ing golf in order to evolve new theories. Oh no—there are too many theories already! What we use imagina­tion for is to translate theory into feeling, and to keep our minds awake and our circle of golfing sensations expanding. Every new golfing sensation (if it is to be deliberately induced and not left to happen by acci­dent) may need an introduction through the imagina­tion in this way—but once the image has done its work of introduction it can be put on one side and the feel that it has made known can be relied on. But put your images on one side—do not abandon them, because if you do lose the feel, the image through which you learned it will bring it back.

Now the golf swing is a connected series of sensa­tions or feels and when you get all these feels right and rightly connected you will swing perfectly. I have just given you the feel of the pivot—the movement on which the modern swing is based.

Now to that one basic feel, the pivot, we will add other feels, and every new feel gives you a new control until your whole game is controlled and you can play it as you will. But do not think you cannot play until you have this whole series of controls established. Lots of players go through their golfing lives and get a lot of fun out of the game without building up any controls at all! But the more controls you can build up and link together, the better for your game, the finer the con­ception of the swing you will evolve.

Let us get back to the visualizing of our swing. We have laid our foundation by getting the feel of the pivot from the hips. This movement goes up through the body to the next control point—the shoulders. And here I believe that wrong imagination does a great deal of damage to many people's swings.

We think that in the fine swing we see the left shoul­der come down as we come back and the right shoulder come down as we come forward; so we feel that this shoulder movement is right and tend to encourage it— to the detriment of our swings because it is wrong. And I say it is wrong, cheerfully certain that it is wrong in spite of its almost universal acceptance. How much the shoulders actually dip depends upon how erect we stand when addressing the ball. We should stand as erect as possible and I contend that we should not feel our shoulders go down but should feel that we are keeping them fully up.

As we address the ball we look at it a little sideways —we peep at it. The head is fixed (because you "keep your eye on the balT), and the movement of the shoul­ders is not an independent movement of the shoulders at all, but is due to the shoulders being moved around from the pivot. We can only keep the shoulder move­ment in a fixed groove and make it repeatable time after time, by keeping the shoulders at the limit of npness in whatever position the turn from the hips may have placed them. Any excess of upness (that is, actual shoulder lift) will result in the ball being lost sight of. In short, the fixed head determines the limit of lif t and dip of the shoulders.

You will see that this is why you must feel you keep the shoulders up to the same degree with, say, a driver and a full swing and a mashie niblick (a more upright club) and a half swing. The closer you stand to your ball the more upright the swing and the more directly downward your sight of the ball . . . also, the less extensive the swing you can make without losing sight of the ball.

Now try this conception of the shoulder action without a club, and link it to your feel of the pivot from thehips. Feel how the two become connected. This is the first connection in our building up of a controlled swing—and a very important one. You cannot take too much trouble in understanding it and building it up.

From the shoulders our power travels down through the arms, and as to arm action also I believe the com­mon conception to be erroneous. Most people think they lift their arms to get them to the top of the back swing. With a modern controlled swing they do not lift them . . . the arms work absolutely subjectively to the shoulders, that is why they are controlled.

But, you may say, if I do not lift my arms how do I get them up to the top of my swing? To find the an­swer, think this out. As you stand to the ball with the wrists slightly up, there is a straight line practically from the club head up the shaft and along your arm to the left shoulder, and as your hands are already waist high it needs only the inclining of the shoulders as we turn (on the pivot) to bring them shoulder high, with­out having altered their relative positions at all. They have not been lifted; they have gone up in response to the shoulder movement. This accounts for the curtail­ment and the control of the modern swing.

Naturally, the more flexible we are the more we can get our hands up without breaking up this connection, that is, without moving the arms independently. The triangle formed by our arms and a line between the shoulders should never lose its shape . . . it should be possible to push a wooden snooker triangle in between the arms and to leave it there without impeding the swing back or .through.

Now to my mind the foregoing are the three basic  feels of the golf swing—the pivot, the shoulders moving in response to the pivot, and the arms moving in re­sponse to the shoulders. These are the basic move­ments of a connected and therefore controlled swing, and they must all be built into the framework of your  feel of the swing.

Of course there are many additional nuances and supplementary feels which you will build up and rec­ognize as your game develops, but though you will add to these three fundamentals you will never alter them. Therein lies much of their value. You will get used to taking a sly look at them occasionally as you go round the course, and so long as you keep these three pri­mary feels right, nothing much will go wrong with your game.

And if your game does go wrong, if the shots which you thought you had mastered desert you, all you need to do is to go back to the feel of these three basic points. You just take a peep back at them, and then with one or two shots your mechanism will feel familiar again— and all the other supplementary feels which you have built up by practice will be enticed back.

Now we might break off this chapter at this point. I realize that I have already given you plenty to think of and to work at. But there is a development in your game or in your way of playing it that I want to pre­pare you for; so, for that reason and for the sake of an­alyzing the matter out to its logical conclusion I add the following.

After a while by dint of pivoting correctly, not dip­ping our shoulders (i.e. not lifting with the arms), we begin to play some good shots, nice and straight and reasonably long. We have arrived at this stage by building on the basic trinity—pivot, shoulders up, and width—and by occasionally taking a sly peep at how they are going. So far we have never consciously pro­duced a good shot; we have merely made certain me­chanical movements which we have been taught will result in good shots.

But now we begin to realize how we should feel in order to produce a good shot. We are on the other side of the fence. We know now what it feels like to pro­duce a good shot, and now, instead of preparing for a shot by sly looks at our pivot etc., we instinctively get into the position which we feel will produce a good shot. And as we go on, the feeling of this preparatory state comes more and more into the foreground.

Also because we are working from a secure basis we can now begin to notice the nuances and subtleties. We find that we produce purer shots from one sensation than from another only slightly different. We are en­ticed to arrange our back swing according to the type of shot we wish to produce: an extra pivot if we wish to pull or a restricted pivot if we wish to slice. But please notice that this will not be a conscious, mechan­ical control—you will not say to yourself, "I wish to slice slightly so I will restrict my swing to an arc of so many degrees," you will simply alter your swing un­consciously in response to your feeling of what will produce the shot you want.

In other words, the control of your shots has now been placed outside your conscious mind and will. You have built up a feel that a certain swing will produce a slice—so you can produce a slice by getting that feel into your swing. This is only the beginning of control by feel to the very good golfer. He begins to hit a variety of shots, with little difference in flight or char­acter and yet each subtly different and with its individ­ual feel. He files away in the "feel cabinet" in his un­conscious memory all these subtleties. Consequently he never has to "think out" a shot on the course—he sees the lie and the flight required, and these produce, by an automatic response, the right feel from his cabi­net and so the right shot from his club.

In this connection consider the hanging lie. Now this golfer's bugbear is a bugbear simply because it is thought that a shot from a hanging lie must be difficult; so the very sight of such a lie produces difficulties in the mind. If you learn to play by feel, no such difficul­ties will crop up; the sight of a hanging he will suggest the feel of the necessary swing, restricted and slightly from the outside with the face somewhat open in con­sequence. Because of the lie you feel that this will give you a shot of normal height, though you feel (correctly again) that such a swing played on the tee would pro­duce nothing better than a vulgar slice!

In one sense, when I tell a pupil at his own request how to play from a hanging lie, I am telling him some­thing I do not know. All I know is the feel of how to play off a hanging lie—and I know that well, for when I was at my apex as a golfer I missed fewer shots from indifferent lies than I did from the tee—probably because I concentrated more severely on the difficult shots than on the easy ones. Difficulties help concen­tration. I would rather have a bunker to pitch over than a plain run up of the same distance to play.

I hope that this chapter is easier to read than it was to write. I like it as well as any in the book, because it does condense what I take to be the essence of the golf swing into a reasonable space, readable in a reasonable time, so that the beginning should not be forgotten before the end is reached. But it is a vast field to cover and much compression had to be exercised—so it might be as well if you turned back now and read it again!

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