12. Interlude for Instruction - It is the Pupil Who Must Learn

These "Interludes for Instruction" will show you among other things why my job is so fascinating—at least to anyone like myself who is as interested in hu­man beings as he is in golf. That dual interest I may tell you is an effective substitute for some of the quali­ties which I have not got: patience, for instance!

Pupils are continually telling me how much they admire my patience, but my family (who know me better) will tell you that I am one of the most im­patient people imaginable with an almost objection­ably insistent temperament. So when a pupil tells me I am very patient, I say, "You think so! But what you take for patience is simply the result of ripe experi­ence. I am trying to build up good golfing habits in you, and I know that habits—good or bad, in golf or outside it—need time to consolidate.**

Indeed, I remember one pupil of mine who brought a Professor of Philosophy along to survey my lesson. Having watched me for some time he said to my pupil, "He is creating instincts." I said nothing to that, but thought a lot! I had visualized my work as the creating of habits, but if he was right and it went back a further stage to the creation of instincts—then I would need all the patience I could muster, if it was patience which enabled me to keep my good humor when a pupil misses the ball ten or twenty times in succession. Of course, I do not get out of patience when this happens. I simply say, "Carry on—don't worry, you will hit a good one soon." The point being that the pupil is doing as well as he can with the experience at his disposal. When he has had more experience, he will do better, but meanwhile neither my impatience nor his own will help him.

Now I want to describe a lesson which I once gave to a man and his wife. She was an Englishwoman and he a Japanese diplomat. The interesting point it il­lustrates is the completely different approach of two people, sympathetically akin, both wishing to learn to play a decent game of golf, yet completely opposite in inherent gifts and with absolutely different concep­tions of the golf swing.

They were both playing enough bad golf shots to convince them that they were wrong somewhere; so they came to me for advice. Though both were tem­porary members of St. Cloud, I fortunately took them in my Indoor School—fortunately, because the big mir­rors which I have before each driving net there hap­pened to be the very thing necessary for one of them.

I gave each of them a couple of half-hour lessons. She was English and so should have understood me much better than he did. As a matter of fact he hardly understood a word I said and never answered more than an unconvinced and muttered, "Yes" or "No”

Yet look at this very odd sequel. After the lessons I did not see either of them for some weeks, except to wave them good-day on the course once or twice. Then she came back to the school alone to see me.

"Do you know," she said, "my husband has made re­markable progress since those two lessons, but I have not. In fact I am worse than ever. It beats me; you did nothing for my husband but tell him to keep his balance and not dip his shoulders—and even that you had to do by signs, yet hey presto!—he is a reformed golfer. And I, who had the full benefit of all your eloquence, am worse not better. I think I shall have to give the game up."

Then we came to it. Would I please tell her frankly if she was too fat (though I don't think she used that word) to ever play good golf. She could not resist a glance at me and a queried, "You are not thin for a golfer are you?"

I will not say that I felt flattered by the comparison, but anyway I told her to count the question of size out. A very highly placed pupil of mine told me once that the lightest partner he had ever danced with was a woman who weighed over two hundred pounds. I told her this, and, from the quizzical way she looked at me, I knew I had scored a point. So I went all out for game and set!

"May I be permitted to tell you what your real trouble is, Madam?" She nodded assent. "It is nothing to do with your figure," I said. "It is that you cannot see, neither can you listen."

There was a slightly painful silence, which I waited for her to break—which she did by stammering that she did not understand.

"Don't you?" said I. "Well, I mean that, so far as learning goes, you are deaf and blind. Is that clear?"

"Yes," she said, "that is too brutal to be misunder­stood. You might have put it in another way."

"Impossible," I said. "That is just the literal truth. You did not listen to what I told you or see what I demonstrated. Had you done so, you would not have got your game into its present mess.

"So far as your husband is concerned, he is deaf and dumb—so far as conversation with me is concerned— but he is not blind. He can see, and his eyes enabled him to pick out the essentials of my lesson."

"And what were they?"

"Well he had seen that all good golfers turn away from the ball, so he did so too. He did it wrongly be­cause someone had told him to keep his eyes on the ball (probably you told him; it is an English idiom), and he dipped his shoulders in consequence. All he had to pick up from me was that to see the ball you need not dip the shoulders. He used his sense of sight and being naturally intelligent got his pivot right."

"But do you mean to suggest that he sees more or sees differently from the way I see?" she asked.

"Of course he does."

"But being able to understand what you say should more than counterbalance that?"

"Maybe!" said I. "But don't forget that you have not only two chances of being right, you have also two chances of being wrong and you took them both] He got an extraordinarily pure conception of the move­ment by sight alone—and as he has probably more brains than the two of us put together, he seems to me to have all the advantages!"

"Well," she said quietly, "I think you may be right."

"Of course I am right. Nothing verbal can replace an intelligent visual conception of the swing. You have never seen a swing as your husband has seen it, be­cause it is obvious from your own swing that you think the golfer's arms produce the power, like the arms of the windmill. This is not so; the golfer's powerhouse is below the waist. If he is a good golfer, he never hits with his arms. He gets his power by twist or spin."

I took up a wooden tee between thumb and first finger and spun it, like a top. "That is golf mechanics in its purest form," I said.

"But you don't expect a stout old lady like me to spin?"

"Why not! You do in the ballroom; why not on the golf course? And you need not worry about the slim flapper; she doesn't spin too well! You can turn on the pivot, and if you do, you will play good golf. But so long as you slide you are doomed."

"You suggest I slide?"

"Yes, you do," I said. "You don't turn because you are afraid of missing the ball. So you stand close to the ball and try to make up for the restriction which this puts on your power by sliding over the ball. It is a hopeless style.

"Your husband is a man and links cause and effect. He sees all good golfers play in a certain way; so he plays that way too. You, being a woman, do not care to consider causes, and the effect you want is to get someone to say, 'Good shot!' as your ball creeps off the tee. But you cannot earn the 'Good shot!' unless you concentrate on the cause, on a good swing.

"Now," I continued, "let me see you make a few swings first without a ball and then with one."

"Oh," she replied, "I can always swing well when there is no ball."

"Why?" I asked.

"That is what I want to know. Why should a stupid little ball perched up there ruin my swing?"

I chuckled. "Because you try to hit it!" I said.

"But surely I must try to hit it."

"Surely you must not! What you must try to do is to swing your club. Which at the moment means you must concentrate on pivoting not on hitting the ball."

"Don't you try to hit the ball?" she asked woman­like.

"No. I try to swing my club head correctly (that is, from my legs), so that it swings past the ball, taking the ball in its passage."

"Then you said I was all wrong in what I did with my hands and arms. What should I do with them?"

"Just keep them out as wide as you can. You will feel you are stretching down when you near the ball, and that is good. What you must never feel is that you are lifting the club head, either on the way back or through. If you lift, you will scoop not swing."

"But how can I get my club head up over my shoulder if I do not lift it there with my arms?"

"Study and practice the pivot and you will see] Ac­tually of course, the arms do lift the club, but it should not be an independent arm movement; it should be reactive—simply transmitting the power from the pivot. You say you cannot keep your left arm straight, and that is another certain sign that your idea of power is up and down with the arms, whereas ours is around and along from the pivot."

She picked up a club and took a few swings, much shorter than before, the body much more stretched and with more leg work.

"Is that more the idea?" she asked.

"Much more."

"But I am not hitting the ball any better!"

"Not yet, but you will, because you are now begin­ning to swing correctly."

"But I feel I can never connect with the ball from away back there."

"Oh yes, you will, very shortly too, and with much more consistency than with your old scoop."

"But even if I do, I feel I have no power at all that way. I cannot use my wrists."

"You mean you cannot use your hands and arms. That is exactly what we have been aiming at! Actually using the wrists in golf is a most delicate business, possible only to the very good player. When you think you are using your wrists, you are simply pulling the club down with your arms as fast as it will come/'

"Well if / dont pull it down, how am I going to get it to go swiftly through the ball?"

"Curiously enough you get maximum club head speed at the ball by exactly the opposite of your 'pull­ing down' plan. You get it by delaying the club head so that it lags behind the rest of the swing and then rushes forward. To get this effect you must let your wrists be a free link—any attempt to use them in your stage of experience will simply kill the speed of the club head."

"And that 'delay the club head?' Is that what you mean when you say 'swing slowly'?"

"Yes. Curiously, again, the sweeping swing which gives you maximum club head speed does not feel fast."

"Well, I will try! But it all sounds so illogical, and I do like to know what I am doing and why."

"I am delighted to hear that, because it means you will make progress. But do not try too hard to under­stand with your mind. So you will begin to connect with the ball, and then new sensations, or feelings, will develop, and these will give you a new and much clearer conception of what is going on."

"So! And how do I set about it now?"

"Well, just stand in front of your ball, not curved over it but slightly bent down and out towards it. Then without moving sideways, turn first back and then for­ward from the pivot. Now look at the ball, but do not stare at it or bend to get a closer view! Peep at it, a sly look at the ball is better than a stare. Don't hold your club too tight, for, if you do, your wrists will become wooden and wooden wrists are useless. And try to hold your club with no more tension at the top of the swing than you use at the address. You must hold the club firmly, neither tightly nor loosely, but firmly."

"But that reminds me. Will my grip do?"

"For what you need now, yes. You must realize that what you do now is done grosso modo, is done in a general sense and is not necessarily exact in detail. As time goes on and you become more familiar with the working of the swing as a whole, we may modify the different sections."

"You mean that some day we will study the grip or the stance in detail?"

"Exactly. But not too soon. It is hopeless for a be­ginner to concentrate on some single point and work at it and struggle to get it right when what he should be doing is to get some sort of movement going, based upon the correct principles of swing—which are a good pivot and a wide-sweeping movement, with good cen­tral balance and power from the feet and legs.

"All the working members of the golf swing are re­lated and linked up, and it is the perfect co-ordination of movements that makes the good player. Experience has shown me that where most people go wrong when they take up golf is in imagining that the power must be produced by the hands and arms. Yet the fact that they put nails in their shoes should tell them where the power comes from!"

My pupil took a few more swings and swept one or two balls away quite nicely.

"I admit that they begin to go a bit better and to feel better. But it is sheer luck if they go straight!"

"Why luck?"

"Because when I swing as you tell me, I have no idea of where the hole is or where I am aiming the ball. I feel too far from the ball to be able to guide it down the middle."

"Good, because that is not the way to get it down the middle anyway. Listen; when you have learned to sweep the ball away more or less truly four or five or six times in succession, you will begin to feel a sense of direction. You will begin to feel that when you operate in a certain manner, your ball will go in a certain direction. The ball will keep this direction as long as you keep the feel of the swing, but if you pull the swing out of shape or try to constrict it by trying to guide the ball, all certainty of direction is lost."

'Then I must definitely not try to drive the ball down the middle?"

"You definitely must not. You have tried to do that for years and have gradually become worse and worse. That is why you came to me for advice."

"Well you have given me plenty," she said somewhat ruefully.

"Yes," I replied. "It does sound very complicated all in a mass like that. It seems absurd to make such hard work of a game. But much of your trouble is in getting rid of false ideas and bad habits. Once you get on the right lines and begin to progress, like your husband, you will get a lot of fun out of working out each new problem as it arises. For each new sensation brings a new idea which must be fitted into your golfing system as a whole. That is the whole trick of progressing at golf: to add what you learn to what you already know."

When we parted she was doubtful if she ever could progress! But I am happy to say that she is now a very decent golfer, and an intelligent and analytic one.

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