14. The Force-Center

I think that few experienced golfers will disagree with the dictum of that great teacher Ernest Jones that our strivings to attain a good swing will have been largely in vain unless at the end we have learned "to feel our club head."

Now this is a difficult thing to feel and an exceed­ingly difficult thing to teach a pupil to feel, though I have often succeeded in teaching it. The real difficulty is that you cannot teach it by teaching skill in the phys­ical movements of the swing—yet this physical skill is a basic necessity before the feel can be induced. So we have to build up the good swing and then seek for "the feel of the club head" somewhere in its cycle.

We can pick this feel out most easily with the shorter clubs. Their heads are relatively heavy and the short shaft restricts the swing. It was with the No. 5 mashie that I personally first detected this feel. Incidentally, I should hate to tell you how long I had played golf before I did really feel that the club had a head to it! Very, very few of us feel the club head right from the time we walk up to address the ball until it fades away over our shoulder. In some great players this feel is so pronounced that you can actually see them seeking it and using it. Walter Hagen approaching and on a tee was a lovely example of this and so today is Henry Cotton—no other modern player gives so strong an impression of club head feel as does Cotton in his drive. For though the feel is most easily detected in ourselves with the shorter clubs, its presence in others is most easily recognized in the full swing of the drive.

Now after years of study of this matter of club head feel, I came to a very curious conclusion about it, and it was this conclusion which enabled me to be quite exceptionally successful in imparting club head feel to my pupils. Here it is: we do not feel our club head with our hands; we feel it with our bodies.

What I mean is that, though the hands, being the "railhead" of our feel, do of course play an important part, yet the feel does not stay in them—the hands (and arms of course, though less consciously) transmit this feel to the body to the central organization of our golf mechanism. And arising from this the most common mistake we make in trying to feel the club head is to look for the feeling of it in our hands instead of at the center.

This matter of feel at the center is so important that I have coined a name for its seat, for where it is felt. I call it the "force-center." I cannot give you an exact anatomical definition of where the force-center is, be­cause its position varies with different shots. As the shot (and the swing) become longer, so the force-center rises; as they become shorter, the position of the force-center drops. Yet there is always the feeling that we swing from a center, wherever that center may be. And where it is, there also must be the feel of the club head.

Having reached this conclusion as to the location of club head feel, it was easy to see why this is the most difficult of golfing feels to develop and the easiest to lose touch with. Between the club head and the force-center there are a number of connections in the swing (such as the wrists and the shoulders), and should any of these connections be broken, should our swing be­come disjointed, then the feeling of the club head can­not be transmitted back to the force-center.

This breakup of the swing most usually occurs to­wards the top of the swing, where we can lose con­nection by breaking the left arm at the elbow or by opening the hands—two very simple and common mechanical faults. When I began to reah'ze the rela­tionship between a connected swing and club head feel I found a curious thing, that my driving swing was cut down automatically to three-quarters. Incidentally an excellent illustration of the importance of a right conception]

The more you study it, the more you will see that the modern three-quarters swing is simply a connected swing and that the three-quarters is the limit of the swing because it is the limit to which most of us can go without breaking the connections. When first I came to this conclusion, I went to as many Championships as I could and watched the boys and tried to pick out those who followed my idea of swinging from a connectec center and those who did not. One thing that I noticed at once was that the connected swingers—so-called controlled swingers—were always firmer and slower, the quicker swingers were less controlled and their swings were more liable to come unstuck. Also I no­ticed that as a general rule the controlled swingers did not hold their wrists down as they addressed the ball; they held them up in a line with the arm and club shaft.

Now that was an interesting point, and when I tried it out, I found that it had an important bearing on the whole matter. This position of the wrists gives us at once the feeling of the club head being down. Please note this is a club head feeling. This particular feeling, club head down at the address, has always been recog­nized as part of the correct golf feel. Our forefathers told us to keep our wrists down as we addressed the ball through a misapprehension of it; they felt down when they hit a good shot and thought it was their wrists that were down, whereas it was really the club head.

Because of that initial misconception, they had to make corrections and compensations on the way up and on the way down, but we can now eliminate these and make the swing more simple. The fewer unneces­sary movements you make in a swing the better. A sim­ple swing always has been and always will be desirable; so I aim at eliminating every unnecessary move­ment—and I can assure you I got rid of a big one when I concluded that the wrists should not be held down, yet the club head should feel down. Try to get this nuance, it is important.

If you try and compare these two feelings with a club, you will find you can push the club head down on the turf with the sole flat but not when the toe is cocked up in the air. This sole flat and down is the right feel. You see, golf force is centrifugal so the arms must be at full stretch when we come into the region of the ball, and we can only get this full stretch down at the foot of the swing if we feel down right through the swing.

I remember telling this to a pupil of mine, a good pupil in the sense that he was a good analyst, and he looked at me in astonishment. "Do you mean that I have to feel down when I am at the top of my swing?" he asked. "You do," I replied. He said nothing at the time, but one day later he said to me suddenly, "I can feel that down feeling when I am up now and by George! I like it! It keeps me beautifully down to the bottom of the ball automatically." The automatically was what I liked.

"But," you may say, "as I address the ball with my club head on the ground behind it, I must naturally feel down." Not necessarily. Feeling down is con­nected with the correct brace of the body. You will never feel down if you slouch over the ball; the feeling comes by opposing the club head by bracing the body. You must push down against something, and the down feeling is the feeling that you are braced up­ward against the club head as it is down behind the ball.

The first thing I do with a new pupil is to kneel on the ground and hold his club head and ask him to pull against it. I ask him to hold his position and then relax my pressure, and he at once feels what it is to feel push­ing down. This is the feeling he must get as he comes into contact with the ball—which is why I repeat and keep on repeating, "Full stretch, full stretch all the time!" Even as you go through the ball you must feel down; "down while through the ball" is an exquisite golf feel.

So much for one end of the feel! What about the other end, the force-center? This is obviously a difficult feel to fix, and the best way I have found is by making the pupil stand in the imaginary barrel described in the chapter on the "Swing." You will remember that swinging in this barrel gives him the feeling of keeping his hips up; at the same time he must now stretch down (even when his hands are up chest high). Because the body is braced, there will no longer be any tendency for the knees to sag in towards one another; they will roll round at a constant height as he pivots and this is a very essential feel in the back swing.

Now we are building up so that you will shortly be able to feel your force-center, but first another word or two about the hips. The feel of holding them up that you get through the barrel image is a good one. So is the sort of hip brace you can get by pulling your hips in as you walk. I often tell pupils to do this. You get the feeling of holding your hips firmly together and that they no longer sag or dip first to the right and then to the left.

The good swing is based on a pivot with the mini­mum of to-and-fro movement. Both hips and shoulders are held up and braced, and they move in the same circular path—except that the turn of the body slightly inclines the shoulders as they go round. Now if you stand before an imaginary ball, holding an imaginary club, with your arms stretched down but held lightly (with little tension, I mean) as if you were ready to play a shot, and then turn first right and then left, rather briskly and getting the movement from the knees, calves, and feet, you will begin to feel the pull on your arms from the force-center. The power is largely produced by the feet and legs, but it is the force-center (somewhere in the pit of the back) which collects it and is responsible for its transfer to the arms and then out to the club head.

Now take a mashie and do very short swings to and fro with it. Soon you will begin to detect the center which you will feel controls both the setting up of power and the guiding of the club. Do not break the wrists or lift the club head during this experiment. The hands do nothing but keep the club straight out in front of you; let the arms feel supple and yet pushed down as the club head is down, while all the time you are moving to and fro from the legs. You begin to feel connected right through, from legs to center and from center to club head. Though you make this experiment first with a mashie (that being an easy club to feel), the full drive is simply a big edition of the same move­ment and must be just as connected.

What I think you will find different in this braced pivot movement as compared with an uncontrolled swing is this: as your hips turn without sag, you will feel you are getting more power and getting it in a dif­ferent way. You develop rotary power, largely from the legs. This is what I want you to feel, because, when you feel it, you may know that you have got your nether regions well fixed in space.

Now we have to find a similar fixing for the shoul­ders, to control their position and direction of move­ment. How should they be held at the address and what is their movement? You have to incline them forward slightly as you address the ball, but see that it is only slightly, only as little as your build makes neces­sary. And keep them both up; especially keep the left shoulder up as you go back and the right shoulder up as you come through.

Just as the barrel has made your hips turn horizon­tally, with no sway, so should your shoulders feel that they turn horizontally. You can if you wish imagine a hoop from the barrel holding them in place. They will swing freely in this without touching it, but in a slightly inclined plane because of the forward bend of the body. But my own method of fixing the shoulders is different. It is to feel that there is a direct connection between the left heel and the right shoulder, a diagonal tie that keeps them connected and at an unvarying distance one from the other, as we go up, as we come down, and as we follow through.

This is a difficult connection to describe, but once you have grasped its full meaning you will realize its value. As we lift our left heel—going back—we will (if the tie is properly realized) feel our right shoulder move back in response. The shoulder and heel keep their distance, never getting closer or farther away; so when the left heel comes down, we will feel the right shoulder moving forward in a straight line against the ball—neither dipping under it nor rising over it. This is right.

The right shoulder should never feel to dip under the ball, though it should be felt to go down to it. As we can see when we look at the "flickers” it is true that the right shoulder is lower than the left as we strike the ball, but so it is at the address—and there must be no more feel of it being lower at the moment of impact than there is at the address.

In fact the feel of the shoulder movement in a cor­rectly braced swing is that the shoulders move round parallel to the ground.

Now when you have got this diagonal tie working and can give a peep at it and at your hip brace at the same time, you will feel properly compact and cen­tered as you swing. And it is only when you feel your­self to be centered that you can hope to feel the club head as you should.

For, please remember that all this discussion of brace and connections is relative to the feel of the club head. As I told you, you can only get this feel reliably at your force-center, and unless you build up a force-center by brace and connections, you will not feel it properly at all. For in the uncontrolled natural swing there is no force-center; that primarily is what is the matter with such a swing: too many separate forces are working independently in it.

So I have told you how to build up a force-center, and that when you have built it up, you should be able to feel the club head in it. You will be able to do this only if there is no break in the connections between the club head and the force-center, but one of these connections—the arms—is the most liable to disconnec­tion of any in the whole swing.

At first glance this would seem easy enough to con­trol, because the arms should work in exact relation to the shoulders and chest. The thorax and biceps should become one in movement. But things do not work out this way, because we do inherently—and in spite of ourselves—consider golf as being played with the arms. So we use our arms, ever so little it may be but enough to make us disconnected. Now this is a fine and most delicate point in which lies most of the difference be­tween a good, a very good, and a superlative golfer. It is by the management of the arms that championships are won and lost.

For it is no use to have built up perfect connections to bring co-ordination to the whole body throughout the whole swing if we then break the connection at a vital point by allowing our arms to work independ­ently of our chest and shoulders. They must be not independent but reactive. The body in the swing must be a unity.

Now at first we are likely to find ourselves contra­dicting this idea of unity at some point or other, be­cause we will probably have one or two points of feel that do not seem to fit into the scheme. But give your muscles a little experience of the new movements re­quired of them and they will soon settle down. Then you will go on from day to day, testing new feels—re­jecting some but accepting those which fit into your swing. So you will become more and more clear about the f eeling of a good swing.

I must remind you again, because it is fundamental to this book, that learning by a sense of feel is some­thing quite different to learning by the intellect. Intel­lectual memory may be of use in learning golf but it is never paramount. What is paramount is what I have called muscular memory, a memory for the right feeling of a movement which enables the muscles to repeat that movement time after time, without directions from brain or will.

What I have been trying to do in this book, and I can assure you it is no easy task, is to put on paper a method whereby you can pull the ends of your swing together and get it all properly connected. But when you have done this, it is up to you to make yourself so familiar with the feel of your controlled swing that you can produce it automatically, practically by reflex action, whenever you like.

But I warn you again that a single break in the con­nections will render the success of a shot a matter of chance, whereas you want it to be a matter of cer­tainty. You know the type of player who has to depend upon his lucky day—disconnected! He can produce a good swing or he would never have a lucky day; he cannot produce it regularly because he loses connec­tion somewhere. And the chances are that he loses it by using his arms. And why does he start using his arms? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred because he tries too hard to hit the ball!

Yes, it is usually Golf Bogey No. 1 which induces us to use our arms. That overwhelmingly common-sense impulse to hit the ball where we want it to go. And how can we hit but with our arms? So, all our carefully-contrived controls go overboard, and we take vicious scoops and lashes at the ball.

What a pity! What a pity! For if we had inhibited our desire to hit the ball and concentrated upon pro­ducing a perfect swing—power from the pivot, shoul­der controlled by heel movement, arms acting re-actively to the shoulders, wrists free for the flail—we would have sent it twice as far and straighter. And we should have felt the club head in our power center and have known that we had the secret of successful golf.

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