11. To Keep (or not to keep) Your Eye on the Ball

I suppose the most often repeated piece of advice in the whole realm of golf is "keep your eye on the ball." It is given and accepted as a profound golfing truth (which properly understood it is), but it is neces­sary to examine what we mean by it and how it fits into the rest of our golfing program.

Very early in my teaching of a new pupil I tell him to keep his eye on the ball, because I know that un­less he does so he will never achieve any class as a golfer. But I do not harp on the idea or rub it in—I point out that its importance actually lies less in the sight of the ball than in the reactions which it produces —for instance that it keeps our heads still.

And I put this emphasis on the reactions rather than on the sight of the ball because, to my mind, it is only the bad golfer who actually sees the ball out of his eyes. The good golfer I am convinced feels where the ball is more than sees it.

Now to the ordinary golfer that may seem an absurd statement, or if he does accept it, it may be confusing. So I will try to clarify my meaning.

When Aubrey and I were playing a lot together, we were often congratulated, upon the deftness of our short game—and the congratulations were usually fol­lowed by the comment, "How long you keep your head down after the ball has gone!" Their idea was obviously that I kept my head down because it enabled me to "keep my eye on the ball." But what I was really doing was to keep my head down in order to retain the feel of the swing and to keep my controls going even though the ball had been dispatched. Few of the spec­tators realized that I often played these shots with my eyes shut; yet I did so.

But when I play with my eyes shut, my senses are wide open. My main concern was to see that my gen­eral muscular feel and sense of balance went right through to the end. Not until the follow-through was finished did I look up to see where the ball had gone. I never miss a shot through looking up too quickly; I do sometimes miss one through fear of missing it! The primary fault is not in looking up but in losing the feel of the swing.

Incidentally I have taught many pupils to play beau­tiful pitch shots without looking at the ball. One very well-known golfer to whom I taught this brought out his "better-half" to watch him "do his circus stuff." He played some beautiful shots high in the air over gaping bunkers, dropping close around the pin every time and all the while looking me straight in the face. His wife was utterly astonished; then she saw the funny side of it and laughed herself nearly into hysterics!

My view is that the good golfer can only see the ball when his swing is working smoothly, and then it looks as big as a tennis ball! The beginner sees the ball in an­other way, and because of this, more often than not he misses it. His attention is so concentrated upon see­ing the ball that he cannot feel his swing operate. The business of seeing the ball occupies him too ex­clusively.

Do I mean by that that the beginner needs to learn how to see the ball? That is exactly what I do mean. He must learn not to see the ball to the exclusion of all his other senses. So when I tell a pupil to keep his eye on the ball I at once go on to the work of building up a swing that makes looking at the ball a necessity. Of course every pupil "looks up” badly at first to have the pleasure of seeing where the ball has gone, but this is a primitive stage and soon over.

In the next stage, when I am impressing him more and more with swinging correctly, I find that he often becomes so engrossed in the swing as to be unable to Temember to keep his eye on the ball. But in such a case I believe the cure must come by making the "head down" a natural outcome of the swing. If I simply in­sist upon "head down," I run a risk of getting my pu­pil all stiffened up, "frozen on the ball" as we call it, and consequently only able to make hacking, chopping movements.

Now in this matter of seeing the ball, I would ask you to consider a golfer at the other end of the scale. How does a very good golfer see the ball? In my opin­ion, through his very highly developed sense of feel, he sees the ball (in some proportion) through his hands.

Sees through his hands? Perhaps the idea is not so fanciful as it might seem. I began to think about it first after I had read an article by Sir Herbert Barker some years ago. This is what he said: "We take our hands too much for granted. Their possibilities and powers are seldom discovered or developed. Most people pass through life with these two implements untrained, unexplored, unknown. . . ." Then he goes on: "When we take for granted the localization of our senses in certain organs we go too fast. Localized they are, but not completely so." Then at a later date my interest was reawakened by the declaration of Dr. Fougools, the French savant, that in the skins of our hands are potential eyes. He says that they are nerve eyes atro­phied for the simple reason that we have developed two ocular instruments so much superior to them.

Now to my mind the value of that idea to the golfer lies largely in an idea which it promotes, that perhaps the greatest value of "keeping your eye on the ball" is the assistance which it gives in building up sight through feel.

For whatever may be the eventual verdict of science upon the tentatively advanced hypothesis of the two famous men quoted above, I can assure you that some sort of sight through feel is certainly possible. I have developed it myself, as have many other first-class golfers. I can see the face of the club and the angle it is at the top of my swing (when it is "out of sight" be­hind the back of my head), and long before I lift my head, I can see the ball fly away with the exact curve which I know my shot has given it.

But let us leave these metaphysical regions and come back to the ordinary golfer. Why is it that so often he can make perfect swings when the ball is not there, yet he becomes semi-petrified and makes the most ridiculous shots as soon as there is a ball, even a ball carefully perched on a perfectly prepared tee, for him to hit? And what would happen if you could put down an invisible ball for him? Is it knowing that the ball is there that upsets his swing or is it the sight of it?

Anyway the invisible ball reminds me of a story! A threesome had just driven off the first tee when a stranger to the players asked if he might join in. "Why certainly, with pleasure," they said. The stranger stuck his wooden tee in the turf, made a beautiful swing at an imaginary ball on it, and went half-way down the fairway and "played" his second similarly with an iron. His second "pitched" on the green, and he carefully went through the motions of taking one putt for a three!

Not unnaturally, his fellow-players asked him what was the idea of dispensing with the ball. He explained it simply enough. With a ball, he said, he never got around in less than 110, but without it lie could rely upon being somewhere in the low 70's.

The next day he brought a friend along, and the threesome followed as a gallery. On the first green an argument arose, and the gallery came up to find out what was causing the trouble. Their companion of the previous day smiled at them and explained. "You see," he said, "I have laid him a stymie and he does not know the rulesl"

A charming story, don't you think?

If you think this too fanciful (though the tale is true), it was recalled to my mind by a very practical job which I have recently undertaken—the re-educa­tion of a golfer who had not played except in his imagination for fifteen years. He was married at about that time and one of his marriage vows was not to play golf at week-ends. He had little other time to play, so when now and again he was able to get away in the week he would lunch at the club and then play nine holes with an imaginary ball. Something hap­pened to the union, and he is now playing again. And I assure you that, with two or three lessons after his fifteen-year break, he was as good as ever he had been, and now, after a dozen or so, he is quite a few strokes better than he was when he renounced playing.

But we must come back (again!) to the ordinary golfer who finds that the ball has a devastating effect on his swing. Why is this so?

It is so because the ordinary golfer is an unrepentant end-gainer. When he sees the ball, he becomes ob­sessed with the idea of hitting it; the ball is made the climax or the end of his activity. That is to say, the highest speed attained by his club head is at the mo­ment of impact, or, much worse still, he may try to stop the club head as soon as it has struck the ball. That is the effect of seeing the ball as something to be hit.

Now we know that for maximum effectiveness the highest speed attained by our club head (the dynamic center of our swing) must be some way past the ball-two feet past at least. So in one sense you must simply ignore the point in your swing where the ball sits on the tee. You must swing past it exactly as if it were not there. You must not get your eye frozen onto the ball, nor must you get your mind concerned with the problem of how far, how high, and how straight you are going to hit it.

The point I am making is that it is possible for us to be too conscious of the ball, for the ball to have too much of our attention. I suggested this to a pupil one day, and he retorted that in that case I should not give him a shining white ball to play with—a green or pink one would be less insistent. As a matter of fact he had some balls painted various colors and experimented with them with quite interesting results. But I had to point out that he was on the wrong track anyway. We use a white ball exactly because it is the easiest to see—and it is the degree of attention that is necessary to enable us to keep the eye on the ball that is the critical point.

Let me put it this way:

(a) You must not make an undue effort to keep your eye on the ball, but

(b) You must just keep your eye on the ball.

Here you see my difficulty again—the difficulty of find­ing a phrase that will accurately express a subtle shade of feeling. And however I express it, every reader will read and visualize it differently.

I remember one lady who came to me with her swing terribly constricted and tied up by looking too intently at the ball. She had no great physique, but she had patience and an analytical mind, and we soon had her sweeping the ball away in good style.

Knowing her to be an intelligent woman capable of expressing herself, and an interesting amateur painter, I asked her if she could explain the difference in hei attitude to the ball since we had "united" her swing —and whether she saw it differently now. Her reply was worth pondering over.

"I cannot explain why," she said, "but now I never think of the ball. I am busy trying to feel how I should swing the club. Really I do not think I can tell you if I actually see the ball at all now . . . yes I do, but not in the old way. It used to look like craters in the moon, now it looks like a star in the Milky Way/'

Seeing my look of surprise she explained, "It used to be a huge, frightening, gray object, pitted with cavi­ties; now it is a little star somewhere in the path of my wide sweeping swing."

Now that lady had found the joy of golf through getting an altered conception of the ball. For the joy of golf is to feel the ball snugly gathered up and thrown off the face of the club. In a sense no one can teach you that, you must find it for yourself—but some of us can certainly help you to find it, by giving you an understanding of what you are seeking.

The golf swing is governed by a chain of controls, and when the ball is introduced, it must not destroy, weaken, or dislocate any of them. Let us take four of the principal controls, purposely taken from points widely apart in the swing so as to represent the whole movement. Here they are:

1. Pivot.
2. Bring down the left heel early in the down swing.
3. Allow the wrists to break back slowly.
4. Continue the stroke on, through and around the left side.

These are just a selection of possible controls. They can be replaced by others or added to. But if a player will learn them thoroughly, by doing them slowly one after the other until they are linked up in his mind and muscles, he will become at least a decent golfer.

But if having got him this far, when he misses a shot I suddenly say to him, "You looked up!" the chances are that he will then look at the ball so intently, with such fixed purpose, that he will miss the next shot too! What he has to do to get things right is to try not to look up but without interfering with his basic controls. In fact, the "not looking up" must become a new link in the chain of controls. You do not weaken a chain by adding more links to it unless the new links are weak.

As I see it, good teaching must be based upon giving the pupil a few fundamental controls that will never need to be altered but that can be added to, packed round, and supported by other controls as the pupil's game develops. But the essentials are that the early controls shall never need to be altered and that other controls which are added later must fit in with them; never contradict them. I can assure you that one needs a very sound knowledge of golf (and an extensive one of human capacities and make-up) to teach that way.

Further, when something goes wrong and a pupil loses his game, it will not do to say what is wrong and so to emphasize this wrong point that it attains undue importance in the pupil's mind. If you do that he will so concentrate upon getting that one point right that he will throw everything else wrong.

For instance a pupil comes along for a lesson be­cause he has gone off his game badly. I see he is duck­ing his right shoulder and bending his knees and showing all sorts of faults which flow from these two. Now in my experience it is no use at all pointing out these faults to him. What I normally do, if I know him well enough, is to ask him what time he went to bed the previous night—and to suggest that he brace himself up a bit or he may fall to pieces—also that it is impossible to teach golf to a fellow who is practically down on his knees.

You would be surprised at the number of specific faults which I have cured that way! In fact it hardly ever fails. When your game goes to bits, try bracing yourself up.

Sometimes of course one has to be more specific, but even then I rarely point out the obvious fault as being an obvious fault.

Suppose a pupil comes to me and I see that his swing is too vertical; he is picking up his club head too quickly and so breaking his wrists (and even bending his left arm) too early. Plenty of faults to point out, but I do not point them out. What I do point out is that he is losing width, and in a short time just keeping wide will straighten his arm and correct the other faults. To get to this stage, I say to him every now and again, "That's fine, keep wide, don't stiffen, don't hurry, just keep wide." Soon he will begin to feel his swing again, and in a little it will be back to normal or maybe better than normal.

You may feel disposed to remind me that this chap­ter is supposed to be about keeping your eye on the ball! So it is, but these digressions on the controls have not cropped up by accident. I have introduced them here to illustrate the point (which I keep making be­cause it is so fundamentally important) that any one feature of the swing is of no use to a golfer and cannot even be understood unless it is linked up with all the other features. You can set a ball on your table and sit in a chair and learn to look at it all the evening, but that will teach you nothing at all about how to look at the ball in your swing. And as a golfer that is what you want to learn to do.

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