16. Rhythm

Ittook me a long time to make up my mind to write this chapter, and now as I sit down to begin it I am appalled by the huge gaps in my train of thought. In fact I would like another twenty years or so to think it over in, before writing about it at all.

But that will not do, because it is no use trying to write an intelligent book on golf and leaving rhythm out, for rhythm is the very soul of golf. So I must do the best I can, and in this chapter I will endeavor to tell you what I have discovered to date about rhythm in re­lation to golf. And that is not going to be easy with such an abstract and subtle subject, so I ask your indul­gence.

Rhythm we know in ordinary circumstances as -flow­ing motion, and in golf this resolves itself into timed movements. Let us start with an exceedingly practical example of what this means. The most accepted theory is that as the club head approaches the ball your wrists will flick or become taut. When? you ask. That has really never been defined, and the best definition I know of it is, "co-ordination of mind and muscle which enables the player to do exactly the right thing at the proper moment" ... so you must find your own rhythm.

So we can start from the familiar word "timing," which is an advantage. But though every golfer knows the word, fewer appreciate the significance of the sense which it represents. Because until timing does become a sense with us, a sense of something rhythmic, our attempts at co-relating movements can only be on a very crude mechanical basis. It is stretching the phrase to talk of the "rhythm" by which a self-change gear box shifts gears, but a soaring seagull is charged with rhythm at its highest. The trouble with golf is that we are gear boxes trying to become seagulls. We have to develop rhythm on a mechanical base.

We want rhythm, flowing movement, in our swing. But as we have already discovered we have to dissect our swing before we can play it—just as a musician has to dissect a composition before he can even play the notes. And please note that he may learn to play the notes and nothing more; that is he may never get as far as the rhythm and tone in which all the delicate beauty and meaning of music are hidden. So also with our swings: we may have memorized the mechanics fault­lessly and be able to perform them time after time, but, unless they can be blended by rhythm into a perfectly timed flowing whole, it will be a poor sort of soulless mechanical golf which we play. For, to repeat, rhythm is the soul of golf.

When we watch a really good golfer, we are im­pressed, of course, by the beauty of his swing, but per­haps even more by the sensation of prolonged effortless flight which his shots produce on us. They seem unaf­fected by the force of gravity, whereas our own poor efforts make for the earth at the earliest possible mo­ment, which—as one of my pupils brightly suggested— may be why bad golfers are dubbed rabbits!

The good golfer can make the ball do two things which the bad or merely indifferent golfer cannot make it do.

1. The good golfer can make the ball remain in the air a long time in the drive, or run a long way in the putt.
2. The good golfer can make the ball fly, or run, dead straight.

Now these two attributes of a good shot are due to a profound knowledge of the golf mechanics plus good timing. Since I have been at Sunningdale I have played often with a delightful old Blackheath golfer, Mr. A.T. Turquand Young—father of the great English Rugby forward. Though he is nearer eighty than seventy he is sweeping the ball off the tee perfectly, and, in addition to being academically faultless, his tee shots are al­most as long as my own. His swing is an object lesson in effortless rhythm.

So one day I asked him to be so kind as to jot down how he came to swing so slowly and smoothly, how he came to get so far with so little effort. And did he play directly with his hands and arms? He gave me the fol­lowing with permission to include it in this book.

"At the age of sixteen I found out in two things that 'slow movement’ beat 'force' every time. One was in throwing the hammer, the other was in throwing a cricket ball. As a result of this experience, I began to play golf with as slow a swing as possible, getting the power from below the waist with the result that with­out any effort I became a very long driver even in the gutty period.

"After a lapse of some years owing to illness I came back to the game just as good as when I left off, after an hour or so swinging with my clubs. The slow swing looks lazy, but the power is there and it certainly does not come from the arms and hands. Providing your back swing goes up all in one piece and your timing is correct, one can send the ball a very long way without effort. Of that there is no mistake, I know it from ex­perience."

There you have it! Mr. Turquand Young found that "slow movement beat force every time/' What a find— and what a grand age to make it at, sixteen!

Now as that story suggests, perfect mechanics alone are not sufficient in golf. Let us try and examine the ef­fect of accurate timing and see why it makes such a difference—the difference which we can all recognize between the almost perfectly timed shot and the per­fectly timed one.

It hinges upon the fact that golf is a dead ball game. We have to set the ball in motion from a state of rest and this largely accounts for the extraordinary com­plexity and subtlety of the game. Good shots are easier to play in live ball games than they are in golf because the velocity at which the ball comes to us sets up a rebound, which together with the speed of the head of the implement we wield increases the speed of our return blow. The relationship of ball velocity, club velocity, and rebound are simplified.

Now we can trace the two elements of rebound and club head speed in the drive, the longest of golf shots. But now because the ball is "dead" their relationship is no longer simple. It is necessary to get the correct proportion of each of these elements into the stroke or the resultant shot will not be perfect. A slight over­emphasis on either one or other of them completely changes the flight of the shot and such slight over­emphasis in either direction is not a matter of golf mechanics but is due to a delicate inflection of timing.

Let us see how this arises. It is generally assumed that the faster we swing the club head through the ball, the longer the ball will be. This is true if, but only if, the maximum club head speed is attained just after we come into contact with the ball. Hence the fact that we often get exceptionally long shots when we are try­ing to hit easy ones. With the slower swing, the club head has still been accelerating when it made contact with the ball and so has been able to "stay longer with the ball" and so make use of the rebound.

We have timed a shot well only when we feel we have remained a long time in contact with the ball, "gathering it up and slinging it off the face of the club head" as I have called it. If we are to do this, the club head must have sufficient power to take up the shock of impact and still keep accelerating. If at the mo­ment of impact we stop the forward pull of the left side (which is what we will do if we aim at the ball), this power is not available and the club head cannot, as it should, continue accelerating in contact with the ball until the ball rebounds from it.

We have timed a shot well only when we feel we have remained a long time in contact with the ball. If we stop the forward pull of the left side at the moment of impact with the ball, we do not set up the resistance necessary to take up the shock of impact and at the same time to keep the club head accelerating until the ball rebounds from it. In fact if we let up on the for­ward pull when we strike the ball, we "stop the club head at the ball/' an absolutely cardinal fault in swing­ing. That is why I always tell my pupils (and repeat it time after time in this book) never try to hit the ball; cultivate a sweep through the ball, and let the ball be nothing more than an incident in the swing.

Until you have built up your correct psychophysical reflexes to control Golf Bogey No. 1 you will have to use your will power not to try to hit the ball. Your club head has to sweep down and through, gathering speed progressively. But the climax of this accelera­tion, as I tell you, must be not at the ball but away past it. If we make the ball our center of attraction, our acceleration will culminate at that point, and since our effort will be exhausted, we shall not be able to "stay with the ball."

Now I have found that people who feel like this do so because they overswing. Overswinging is the nat­ural result of trying to hit the ball; the three-quarter swing is the natural result of trying to sweep through and past the ball. The three-quarter swing puts the natural climax of acceleration of the club head where it should be, about a yard past the ball, but if you go back too far, you will not be able to maintain accelera­tion to this point.

From which arises a curious and valuable illustra­tion of teaching methods. As you know, I do not like simply to say to a pupil, "You came down outside," or "You are overswinging." These faults are mainly not mechanical at all; they arise from a false conception, and if I correct the false conception, the fault cures itself. In this case I found that the people who were overswinging were doing so because they were con­centrating on the ball. When I had explained that the climax of acceleration must be a yard or so past the ball, their back swings began to shorten automatically —because they felt the need for a reserve of effort to enable them to go on past the ball.

In short the good golfer measures the length of his back swing by the feel of his follow through. He is notconsciously aware how far back he goes but he is aware of the acceleration climax point away past the ball. This point and not the ball is the true center of the swing, and obviously the farther past the ball it is placed, the shorter must the back swing be.

In passing, I may point out that the conception of the center of the swing being away past the ball ex­plains the meaning of the instruction to "hit your mashie shots on the down swing." If you try to do that, you will land into trouble. When using your mashie, you simply put the ball nearer your right foot (because of the shorter club) and again swing through the ball, thus taking it on the down swing.

Timing, then, is: (1) The gathering up of speed through the ball from correct mechanical movement, and (2) a correct conception of the location of the swing center. These two can only be blended into a whole which can be faithfully repeated time after time by our sense of rhythm.

If, as we stand on the tee, I tell you to hum over the first two bars of the Blue Danube and then the first two bars of the Sailor's Hornpipe, you will get the sense of two quite different rhythms. You will not find it difficult to recognize which is the rhythm of the slow, flowing swing—which it is that Mme Lacoste used when each spring we went out together to play a few shots to tune her swing up. She it was who told me that if she found herself swinging too quickly, this rhythm would put her right again im­mediately. Incidentally until your own rhythm is well established, it is liable to be affected by that of those you play with. One of the reasons why Mme Lacoste finds a few holes with me a good tuning-up process is; that my own swinging rhythm is very similar to her own.

Now we must go into the question of contact with the club through the hands. I know that this is a chap­ter on rhythm not on grip, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred when we break up the rhythm of a swing we do it by using our hands wrongly.

My own grip is a variation of Vardon's, with only two knuckles of the left hand showing and three of the right hand. My left hand is not turned over the shaft and the right is very much on top. As my wrists are fully up as I address the ball, I feel as if I am pointing a revolver down at it and my trigger finger is waitingfor the trigger pull. Obviously if you use a different grip, you will experience a somewhat different feel. Personally I find that the trigger finger of my right hand plays a great part in my rhythm. The right-hand power, which we feel (mainly in the trigger finger) as we come into contact with the ball, must be induced by resistance set up in the body, not by forward force set up by the right hand. For though the feel of golf may be largely right-handed, the power of golf is: centrifugal.

Next, we will never get effective rhythm into our swings unless we have a proper conception of that word "wait" or, as I have told you I now prefer, "de­lay."

I have told you that I dislike "wait" because it seems to imply stopping, and stopping breaks up the flow or rhythm of the swing. I used to wonder what I was to wait for and when and how it would catch me up. The club head perhaps? But what would it catch up?— the body? If so, if we stop the body at the ball and allow the hands to catch up, we make a direct hit at the ball which we know to be wrong.

So I analyzed it out to this conclusion: We begin the up swing all in a piece and naturally our leg and foot and hip movements are completed long before our wrists are fully broken back at the top, long before the club head begins its return journey. Since we must keep our feet, legs, and hips moving smoothly, they get far ahead of the club head. We actually encourage this gap by not clinging tight onto the club with our hands, but leaving our wrists flexible. What we are waiting for is the return power, the forward pull of the body that pulls the right hand and throws the club shaft back onto the trigger finger.

We must not intentionally pull with the right hand, we must wait for the body to pull it. We take up the feel of this pull mainly with our trigger finger; in a strong player the resistance may be so terrific as to burst the finger open.

So we delay while all the time we are going forward. We are waiting in movement.

You will now see why I explained my grip to you in some detail. But the regulated succession of move­ments is the same in every good swing, the point of contact (in my case the trigger finger) being the vary­ing factor. The detail of the grip is important only in that it must have a point of contact and resistance. This can be and often is in the left hand, but I personally much prefer my own grip which I have developed out of vast experience from the so-called Vardon grip. Perhaps I should add that although I have what might be termed a family affection for this grip—for was not the genial Harry a pupil of my father?—the reason why I adopted it is simply that it is the best suited to giving you the sense of connection between power and feel.

You will realize that in developing my ideas on rhythm in golf I have come up against many interest­ing points which are not immediately obvious. I re­member telling a pupil of mine the Blue Danube story. "Oh," she said, "do you really believe the ear has an influence upon golf rhythm?" Well did I? I suppose I did, as I told the story in all sincerity, but I had not thought the point out. The actual sound of a "swish­ing" swing cutting the daisies is different and suggests a different rhythm from the "sweeping" sound of a good shot.

The swishing sensation of the daisy cutter is too directly a simple one-two sensation; the sensation of the sweeping shot includes drag (from the "wait" or "delay"). When the Americans say they put draw on the ball (in English, impart a slight pull) they swing the ball slightly from right to left at the end of its it. That is the result of the feeling that we are drawing the ball in. This is the basis of the in-to-out theory; we feel that, as we come in behind the ball, the club head goes out with a corresponding reaction by the ball in flight.

As I have suggested, I do not think either "pull" or "draw" suggests the right sensation. Drag suggests it much more nearly. A horse pulls sl cart, a car draws a trailer (directly linked in each case) but we drag a fishing net, or a kite. In short, if we want to draw the ball, we must drag the club head. We drag the club head in order to draw the ball.

But you may say, "What has drag to do with rhythm?" It has all to do with it, with our feeling of flowing continuous movement.

Golf rhythm is a delayed dragging feel of the club head, developed from the power of the legs, kept under control by the braced turning of the hips, and finally loosened into a free, untrammeled movement of the arms outward and around the left side.

If to this we add a sense of balance, a sense of un­hurried calm, a feeling that there is lots of time to feel each movement blending into the others, we shall begin to feel the true golf rhythm. We must swing slowly yet determinedly. When children are lost in the dark, they hurry; when we are lost in our swing, we hurry! This rhythmic swing seems slow, seems to take a long time to develop. We must cultivate this feeling and see slowly and feel slow. We lose rhythm as soon as we hurry, and we hurry as soon as we are afraid.

The fear complex beats every golfer at some time of his playing career. Don't mind admitting it; you will be in gallant company—the late Lord Beatty told me at St. Cloud in 1920 that every man is a coward when he steps onto a golf course!

THE GOLF SWING IN EMBRYO

POINTS  TO  STUDY

For all golfers the most important picture in the book to study.

Above the line all movement is passive, below the line it is active.

Leg muscles have been used to push out the left knee and to pull back the right knee. No other muscle in the whole body has been used actively.

Relative to the club, the hips, shoulders, arms, and hands are in exactly the same position as at the address.

Conversely, to bring everything back to the position of the address, all that needs to be done is to straighten the left leg and slightlv to bend the right one.

The reason for keeping the wrists up at the address is now obvious. Had they been broken (held down) at the address they would be cocked up as the club was carried back.

THE GOLF SWING IN EMBRYO

PERCY

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