8. Preparatory to the Swing

The experienced eye can make a very accurate guess at the handicap of a player after seeing him make a few practice swings, and as soon as his address is com­pleted we can be sure of his quality.

Now at first glance it might seem that it would be simple enough for anyone to learn to stand correctly before the ball—to cultivate an impressive address. Yet there is this difference which enables the cognizant to recognize even the subtle variation between the good and the very good golfer before the ball has been struck.

It is an interesting point and one of some practical importance, because it is directly related to the true aim and purpose of the preparatory movements. We can recognize a golfer's quality in these movements because they express both what he intends to do and how he intends to do it. The difference between the good and the ordinary golfer is that the good one feels his shot through his address.

Whether or not he has learned deliberately to play by feel, the good player feels, through his carriage and balance as he addresses the ball, the coming move* ment that will bring his club face squarely against the ball. Briefly to analyze the feeling of carriage and bal­ance—he feels he is set inwards and behind the back of the ball and his legs, hips and shoulders are all braced, inside and behind the ball.

Now this is a point where I must ask you to stop and consider and analyze carefully exactly the meaning I want to convey by the word braced because this is most important to a realization of the correct feel of the body.

My dictionary defines a brace as "anything that draws together and holds tightly," and I think that is clear and that it expresses the feeling we have when we are braced. But you may try it and promptly come back with the question, "But how can I feel braced and yet not become stiff?" A very pertinent question, and I will try and give you the answer.

When we take lessons in deportment we are told to walk with our hips pulled in, in other words to brace our hips. Yet we know that this does not make our car­riage stiff; it makes it not stiff but firm and decisive.

So also, when I tell you as you address the ball to keep your elbows close together, you will immediately feel a sensation of drawing in your elbows the one to­wards the other. As a consequence your arms will not feel like two separate and independent arms but like a linked united pair of arms; yet they will not feel stiff. The "holding together” of your shoulder blades holds the top of your structure together and links up with the power from your hips. You will find your biceps being pulled into your thorax, your shoulders and arms be* ing drawn together, and, if then the stomach is drawn inward, one definite (inward) direction of brace is set up.

The second direction in which we brace our bodies at the approach is upwards, yes upwards, towards the sky! The natural tendency as we stand to our ball is to droop from our hips and curve our backs. But if we are good golfers we resist this tendency by an upward brace—slightly bent over but pulled up to our full height and neither drooped nor curved.

Set like this we will feel our left side as straight as a poker, though not as stiff as one, and our left foot push­ing down into the ground. Of course as the weight is equally divided between the feet, this pushing down is a feeling in the right foot also. The result is a highly desirable one; as a reaction to our upward brace, we feel ourselves standing firm as we address the ball—a thing we are frequently told to do but rarely told how to do!

So with our hips, shoulders, and arms braced and the body stretched upwards and braced, we no longer feel a loose, flabby, drooping figure but an upright and yet compact one. But we have one more direction of brace to add—this comes from the hips and I can best de­scribe it as a twist forward which completes the brac­ing up of the whole body at the address.

As we stand to the ball our feet must not be too wide apart; the right foot should be at right angles to the line of flight, the left one pointed slightly out; a line across the toes of both feet should (like the line be­tween the shoulders) be parallel to the line of flight. From this position, we twist our hips round (horizon­tally ) to the left, not as far as they will go but as far as they can go in comfort, i.e., without pulling our hips out of shape. How far this is depends on how supple we are. Probably the degree of movement will be only slight, but the effect of this forward leftward twist is to tauten up the whole body without stiffening it.

Because we are anchored, first by our feet to the ground and secondly by our square-set shoulders held up against the forward pull of the hips, the right knee does not resist so we find our left side straight and our right side bowed inwards. And these, left side straight and right side bowed in, are very definite feels which come from (and can be used to check) correct bracing.

These three directions of brace should now make us feel a complete unit, which we can think of as "the set." I think they are what makes the good golfer feel com­pact. They give the f eeling that we can carry the club head back away from the ball by the body twist in­wards and behind the back of the ball. In other words, if you are properly braced there will be no sensation of wanting to lift the club head up. This is important; we should never feel that we lift the club head, but that we carry it back around with the body and along the ground.

This feeling that the club head keeps down is equally necessary in the follow through, after we have sent the ball on its way. We must feel that we have dis­patched the ball out and along but not up.

A pupil of mine once asked me, "But when my hands are up must they feel down?" My reply was, "Yes"— because the down feeling is not a feeling of position but of direction of pull. We call it that because it is most noticeable in two downward phases, (1) as we address the ball, and (2) at the moment of impact with it.

We are frequently and wrongly told to keep our left arm straight, when we should be told to aim for the feeling of it being down. If we look for that, our arm will be practically straight even at the top of our swing, because we are stretching it to obtain the down feel­ing. This is the reliable way of reaching this end, be­cause it is conditioned and controlled by feel not thought. Incidentally this explains why you can be a top class golfer even if your left arm is not straight at the top of your swing—not the straightness but the downness is the vital factor.

Now I hope you see the reason for adopting the set before the ball which I have been describing. It is so that you will feel that you will bring the club face square into the back of the ball, not from above but from behind it. When I say that I putt as I drive, I simply mean that when I putt I feel that I roll the ball along from behind—and I feel the drive is only an enlargement of this sensation, not something different from it.

"One sensation for all shots." I keep harping on this because it is not the knowledge of what we have to do which leaves us on the course—it is the feel of what we want to do that is apt to evaporate unless we have built up a secure feel-memory of how the swing operates. The only way in which we can repeat correct shots time after time (and this is the greatest of golfing as­sets ) is to be able to repeat the correct feel of how they are produced. This feel must begin right as well as con­tinue and finish right, and that is why I have gone into such detail in the apparently simple matter of standing in front of the ball.

Now I do not suggest that you will get this properly braced feeling at once, or that you cannot play good golf until you do get it. My experience is that few be­ginners brace well, except mechanically. One pupil of mine who had made marvellous progress only fully realized the conception of bracing after two years— when he was already capable of an occasional 78. We knew, when he did realize it, that the 78's would now become more frequent because he would begin to re­peat his best shots more often.

It is always a pleasure to teach intelligent analyti­cally-minded players who think about their game, even if they are physically not capable of playing high-class golf. I remember a lady whose game had been largely messed up because to "cure" a somewhat persistent slice someone had told her to draw her right foot back a bit and hold her right hip back.

POINTS TO  STUDY

The stance is firm, compact, and braced, qualities essential to a fast swinger.

Note the  triangle formed by the two  arms  and the shoulders.

Although the right wrist is held arched (that is, up), the right elbow is held in and down.

Note the inclination of the shoulders, due to the left side being straight and the right side curved.

The right elbow is inside the right hip. The left arm and club are in line.

The shoulders and feet are square to the line of flight, the hips are profiled—that is, are at a slight angle to it.

The view of the ball from this position is a peeping at the back of the ball out of the left eye.

Preparatory to the Swing

Well, I squared up her stance and showed her how to brace and she be­gan sweeping the ball away so perfectly that she could hardly believe her eyes! The next day she came back and told me she had thought over what I had told her and had found a curious resemblance between my "hip brace" and something that Miss Irene Castle the dancer had said to her some years before.

"Do you know," she said, "that while studying the dancing of Egyptians from old illustrations, Miss Castle found that they did not dance with their feet and hips and shoulders square, but with the hips pro­filed to the other two lines, and Miss Castle put down much of her success as a dancer to the fact that she adopted this idea?"

Now that was exceedingly interesting to me, even if it did upset some of the reasons I had worked out for the hips being "profiled" at golf. Like most of those who had been lucky enough to see Miss Castle dance, I had wondered how she did it—and here was part of the answer. I am more than ever convinced that the correct bracing of the body in this way is as essential to good golf as it is helpful to good dancing and that it is something that we should all seek for whatever our caliber.

I remember playing with Lord Derby and, because of his rotund figure, reminding him of the old Scotch golf adage I had heard from Sandy Herd when I was a boy. "Pull in your tummy, my Lord," I said. He looked at me and smiled. "Do you think I am Miss Wethered?" he said! At that time Miss Wethered was a slim girl, at the peak of her perfection as a golfer.

As with many other ideas which have come recently to the front, now that we know more about the brace, we find traces of it going way back into history! One of the finest pictures I have ever seen of a golfer standing to the ball was one of Mac Smith reproduced in the American Golfer some years ago, to my mind a perfect illustration of the correct set. I have it in my scrapbook and often take a peep at it, for we cannot refresh our memories too often. Study the photograph of Aubrey addressing the ball (page 74). Note especially the close relationship between this set and the actual hit­ting position; there is almost no difference between them, and that is why the good golfer can feel his drive in his address.

When you are learning golf it is most helpful to Watch good golfers and to see how they apply the doc­trines which your teacher has impressed upon you. Some years ago I took a pupil of mine to study the play­ers at Sandwich. "They look so firm," was his comment. They looked firm because they started braced and re­tained the braced feeling right through the swing.

There is one other aspect of the brace that we must consider, that concerned with the position of the head. If the head and chin are turned slightly to the right (so that the ball is seen "out of the corner of the left eye," as one of my pupils put it), it will help the feel of the correct brace—mainly because it helps us to fix our shoulders, or rather helps our shoulders to resist the movement of the hips which is trying to pull the right shoulder forward (as it does pull forward the right knee, which does not resist).

I do not mind whether you say that this position of the head fixed the shoulders or merely that it helps to fix them, but I know that it is infinitely easier to brace correctly with the head slightly side-on in this way than when looking straight down. Also, as it brings the head and chin slightly behind the ball, it gives the right feeling that we are looking at the back of the ball.

For those who like delving into past theories and his­tories of the game, the following is illuminating. It is a translation from a book called he Jeu de Mail which I picked up in Paris for 10 francs. It was written nearly two hundred years ago. The extract is from the chapter on "Attitude of the Body."

"The body should not be too straight nor too curved, but slightly bent" (note the nuance "curved" and "bent." Even a couple of centuries ago they had to be careful in picking their words!) "in order that in hit­ting, it shall be held up by the strength of the hips (reins) while turning slowly backwards from the waist, without losing the ball from view."

It is this half turn of the body that we call playing with the waist (or better, pivoting) which gives a wide circle to the club head.

The old book continues: "We should not lift the club too quickly but in order to (uniquement) and without allowing oneself to be carried away” (sway, we should say now), "wait a little (se tenir un instant) at the top of the swing (la plus haute portee) in order to hit through the plane"(amusing this, sur le champ) "with vigour, adding however, the force of the wrist (la force du poignet) without changing the position of the body, legs, or arms, in order to conserve the same union of adjustments which we have taken up at the address."

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