10. Centered on Wrist Action

There is no action in golf less understood than the use of the wrists, for curiously enough we do not have to work them, but we have to let them work themselves —like the hinges on a door.

This is important because the wrists will only be used correctly when we have the right idea of their correct mechanical action. If we get the wrong idea, the opening of the wrists in the region of the ball is bound to be mistimed. You will never get perfect tim­ing if you try to flick the club head through the ball by wrist and hand action—perfect timing will come only when the opening of the wrists is brought about automatically by the momentum of the whole swing.

To put it in another way, the movements of the feet, legs and hips belong to the active, intentioned part of the down swing; the opening of the wrists belongs to the passive, purely reactive part of it. So keep at the forefront of your mind that the hands and wrists do not and must not "nip the club head through the ball."

The trouble in learning to let your wrists open them­selves (which is what they must do) is, that at the top of the swing, the club head seems so far from the ball that you feel that, if you do not help it down with wrist and hand action, it will never get there—or will get there so late as to make a horrible slice. The result is that you do work your wrists, you come down too soon, and pull instead of slicing! Low ground shots to the left are most frequently due to this premature and faulty wrist action.

Now this feel of the club head being a long way from the ball and a long way from your left side is actually a most desirable one. Register it in your feel cabinet, and if you can widen the gap between the club head and your left side, do so; you can never get it too wide. The gap means that you are "coming down one after another."

Personally I detest the word "flick/* Apart from be­ing an anaemic conception anyway, it suggests a local effort where there should be none. That is why teach­ers now prefer the word "flail" to describe the function of the wrists. You know the flail with which the peas­ant threshes his corn—two sticks connected by a free link—and you know he could not apply the same power anything like so effectively with a single solid stick. Well, your wrists are the link of the flail, the club the threshing stick.

Another image that has helped some of my pupils to visualize the development of a correct swing is that (in this section of the swing) our arms and the club form a fan—the line of the left arm being one edge of the fan, the club being the other. The two are pivoted together by the wrists and (like the two edges of an actual fan) may be shut close together or opened out at quite a wide angle. We open the fan partially on the up swing, complete the opening at the beginning of the down swing—and snap together again some two feet or more past the ball.

The hands and wrists are passive agents, they are not free agents—they do not decide in which direction they shall go; they go in the arc set out for them by the turning of the pivot. This is true of the up swing as well as the down. The pivot not only provides the power, it also controls direction—guiding the club head in its correct plane through the ball. That is why a good pivot is so important.

But we must not forget that we are going to learn golf by feel; so here is a little exercise that will teach you to detect and ever afterwards to recognize the difference between feet activity and hand activity at the beginning of the back swing.

Take up your normal stance before the ball. Then without movement of feet, pivot, shoulders, or arms, take the club head back a full three feet entirely by wrist and hand movement. Note the feel. Then re-ad­dress the ball (being careful this time to keep your left arm and the club shaft in a straight line from shoulder to club head). Now turn your body around from the knees only until your club head is a yard back again—making no use of any movement above the hips. Note the entirely different feel.

In the first case, your hands lifted the club head back; in the second, your pivot carried it back, and you will have felt at once that the latter is much the smoother and much the more consistent way. It is this carry back beginning at the pivot which I want you to cultivate.

Please do not think that I am making an undue fuss about a trifle in going to such lengths to introduce you to the right feel at the beginning of the swing. I will go so far as to say that your progress will be very largely decided by whether or not you get this back swing right—once you get the correct feel of the carry back, you will find the rest of the swing flowing from it naturally. So, do study this feel quite profoundly. Properly considered it is the whole golf feel, because this initial carry back is the whole swing in embryo.

But now let us carry our experiment in feel a further stage. Do it mentally this time. Go (in your mind) to the top of your swing and then get the feeling of start­ing the down swing by the two different methods by which you started the carry back. That is, the first time feel that you start the down swing with hand and wrist movement only, the second time feel that you start it from the knees.

Now if you were observant of feel in your first ex­periment (the carry back), this second one will give you quite a vivid idea of what the beginning of the down movement should feel like. Of course it is the movement starting from the knees that is correct; it enables you to come down without using the hands actively. You will feel your hands, arms, and wrists coming down broken back—the wrists beginning to drop down towards the ball. This is what we mean by "dropping the wrists from the top" and "passive hand Work." So at each of the points we have examined there are two feels-the activity from the knees and the passivity of hands and wrists. The most notable difference is that at point 1 the wrists are straight while at point 2 they are broken. How they break on the up swing is our next study.

This introduces the question of tension, how tightly we hold our club and consequently our wrists—for if we grip the club with a stranglehold, ou* wrists will become inflexible. W.Q- want them and indeed our whole body flexible; so our grip should be light and sensitive.

As we take the club head back, from the knees, though the wrists have not taken part in the carry back, they will have been tightened—to hold the club shaft in a straight line with the left arm. How much should we tighten here? Just as little as will serve to carry away the club head where it should go; any more and you lose flexibility.

Those of us who have been in the Navy know what it means to "take up the slack"—"take the strain"—"haul away." They are three degrees of tension. Well, in golf we must always take up the slack, but we are never at haul tension until close behind the ball. Mostly we must use just enough tension to take the strain—to feel taut without feeling tight.

Now, having taken up the strain put on our wrists by the carry back from the pivot, we find that as the club head begins to gather speed and momentum on the way back and up, the strain on the wrists lessens (so our tension on them can lessen) and towards the top of the swing they again become perfectly free from all strain. The tension we noticed on the way back was forced on us by the weight of the club—and the earlier we can get rid of this on the way up the better for our swing. And the tension will certainly de­crease as experience teaches us how very little of it is needed, as we become familiar with the feel of a good swing. A good slow waggle will take a surprising amount of tension off our uptake.

Next, when do the wrists break, when should they break? This is an important point, and I did not make up my mind about it until I had made a close study of it in the swings of Lady Amory (Miss Wethered), Harry Vardon, Bobby Jones, and Henry Cotton. My conclusion is that the wrists should break as late as possible.

In order to break the wrists as late as possible on the back swing, we must carry our hands back quite a long way—indeed as far as 'possible, before we break. "It feels like an eternity!” a pupil once remarked to me. Well it does if you have always done the opposite: that is broken your wrists as the initial movement of the carry back. Now you feel your wrists will never break as you go up—and as a matter of fact that is a true feeling, because they actually only break when you are beginning to feel you are on the way down (see the note on the top of the swing on page 28).

Now let me describe an important little local move­ment hidden in this part of the swing—the reverse. The reverse is the part of the swing in which the club head is thrown over and pulled down. It requires a special name because it has a special feel, a feel curiously de­tached from that of the rest of the swing. We have our main feel of control and power down in our nether re­gions, but at the moment of reverse we are conscious of something happening up above, which is not in ac­cordance with what we are doing down below.

What happens at the reverse is that the club head-having so far to go—takes longer to get to the end of its journey back than does the body, the turn of which is soon exhausted. So before the club head has arrived, the body has begun to come back. As to check the re­turn body movement, or to check the completion of the club head's travel, would create an undesirable pause in the flow, we let them go on, and the club finds itself behind the body movement both in time and in posi­tion. This is as it should be.

When we are told to allow our wrists free play at the summit of the swing, it is so that we shall not break up—by introducing muscular hand force—the flow of movement which we have intentionally set up in the reverse region.

The feel in this region is that the club head is still going back when our force center begins to pull for­ward. The wrists do not break at a given point; their break is a retarded action set up to delay the club head and yet to keep the movement smooth. The swing is a continuous flow of movement, and we destroy its con­tinuous character if we divide it arbitrarily into two parts—"up swing" and "down swing." There is no up swing and no down swing; there is the swing com­plete. For the first three feet back from the ball we are "all together," but after that the club head—owing to the longer path it must take—loses ground, which it only catches up at the moment of impact with the ball. It will catch up then, even if you try to prevent it, and the further it has lagged behind, the faster it must travel to catch up.

So far in this chapter we have been concerned in analyzing the local feels which occur in the course of the swing, but this is only because, like the musician, the golfer has to de-compose a piece before he can play it. But the feel at golf is a transitory one, and soon these transitory local feels blend into the feel of the swing as a whole.

The fluency of the swing becomes greater as the swing gathers speed, and when the ball is swept from the tee, the flick of the wrists (hateful expression) has become a violent sweep—violent because of it's force, a sweep because of its fluency.

We are told and have evidence in the "flickers" that the wrists open as we come into contact with the ball, but this opening is not something that the wrists do, but something which they cannot help happening. And the art lies not in making the wrists open but in post­poning their opening as late as possible.

As the club head arrives in the region of the ball, our body (because of its comparatively short degree of action) has already got back into its "opposing" posi­tion, with left heel back on the turf, left side straight and firm, and right hip twisted into the left one—the whole giving a sense of secure brace to the whole body. By this time the arms are already half-way down, but the wrists are still pulled back. But now owing to the forward pull of the hips and the gathering momentum of the club head, something must happen—and what happens is that we can no longer keep the club head from flying past the ball.

We have done everything possible to delay the club head and to inhibit wrist movement, but finally the club head gets out of control (this is literally true) and flashes through the ball as if mad with rage!

Now this is as it should be. We purposely set up a state that would leave the club head free and un­checked in this region of the swing, and we must see to it that we do not interfere in any way with its ferocious passage through the ball. There will almost inevitably be some tendency to rigidity due to local necessities in this region (as in the initial take-up), but we must not feel the slightest check or guide attempting to con­trol the club head. Let its furious assault die away into a perfect follow through.

Do not hold or check or guide the club head but keep the left side firm and rigid and play on around it. That is the only way of keeping the fury of the club head on the right path. You have unleashed a storm, and all you can do is to control the center from which came its force and from which it will die away. Feel centered and balanced.

If after reading the foregoing you come to the con­clusion that the best thing to do with your wrists is nothing at all, my exposition has been successful. Since probably no one has told you before that your wrists are only a link, you cannot be blamed for not having realized it!

Too many people try to do something with their hands, thinking this to be wrist action. But when you analyze it, there is no deliberately induced action in the golf swing which corresponds to the mythical "flick of the wrists." Anyway, the word flick is appro­priate when we speak of removing ash from a ciga­rette—but utterly out of place in a movement which sweeps a golf ball two hundred and fifty yards down the fairway.

If you have built up a good powerful central or­ganization around which you whirl your club, the more you leave your wrists to their own sphere of activity the better will be your stroking. And the proper sphere of activity of your wrists is to act as the link in the flail with which you sweep the ball away.

Recently I was explaining to a coming champion my deduction that hand work wrongly applied to flick the club head through the ball was the commonest mis­conception in golf. He thought this over, and then said that he had read (and now began to understand what Bobby Jones meant when he wrote it) that on his way through the ball Bobby Jones felt that he was "free­wheeling."

The American mind is inventive of and receptive to the vivid modern expression, and Bobby Jones coined a great one in "free-wheeling" through the ball—as a corrective to the general misconception of the flick of the wrists being a sharp hand and arm attack applied directly to the ball.

THE GRIP

POINTS  TO  STUDY

Only two knuckles of the left hand are showing.

The right hand is held well on top of the shaft. The first finger of the right hand is held as on a "trigger" shoot­ing down at the ball—it will be pushing against the back of the shaft. It is pinched into its position by the thumb.

The right elbow is held down, and in consequence the right wrist is arched upward.

The hands are close together, so the two wrists are close together and can operate as one large hinge.

The elbows are braced. They seem to be held close to the body, but are in fact held close together by the brace.

THE GRIP

PERCY

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