18. Power

Most of us do not pay enough attention to what we are told, how we are told it, or by whom we are told it. In fact most of us need to learn how to learn. When I use the words "power," "strength," "energy," or even "moving force," some of my pupils take no notice what­ever—they do not try to understand or analyze what I mean.

Some pupils of course do try to understand, and they soon realize the difference between the expressions which I have so carefully selected to indicate power and those which they had previously confused with them, such as "speed," "quickness," "velocity," and even "hurry." Which distinction is highly desirable, because, if they aim at speed, quickness, velocity, and hurry, they will kill any chance they may have of swinging with strength.

It is the strength of the swing of a very good player that intrigues us. He seems to swing slowly, even laz­ily, yet drives prodigious distances, and we marvel at it and wonder why we cannot do the same. For me there is nothing to wonder at; he swings strongly from his legs upwards while we swing quickly from the club head downwards by means of our shoulders, arms, and hands. He tries to produce power in his swing; we try to impart speed to the club head.

And please remember before we go on to consider its application that power at golf is centered around the hips. Please note centered around; the power is not produced by the hips (or very little of it is) but by the feet, calves, and thighs—but it is gathered up and given the correct centrifugal golf direction by the hip brace and pivot. And we will fail to drive the ball far and straight as soon as we fail to take control of the club from the top of the swing with the feet, calves, and thighs.

Now each shot in golf is a separate situation, and when we contemplate a situation—preparatory to play­ing the shot—we have to sense through our carefully built-up sense of feel how much power we need. How much power, not how much swing. A half-shot with a mashie does not mean a half-swing with that club but a swing with half power. We can play—or we should be able to play—a three-quarter shot with a full swing or a full shot with a three-quarter swing.

I realize that this conception may be difficult to grasp, but it lies at the root of the superiority of the really great golfer.

I say the really great golfer because there are many well-known and successful players who can play noth­ing but full shots; a controlled shot is right outside their golfing range. Yet the great golfer plays every shot controlled, that is he plays every shot with what he feels to be the correct degree of power not at full pressure. This control is the secret of his greatness.

The test of a golfer's control is in his ability to play a shot of 70 yards with every iron club in his bag. Think that out; it will give you an idea of what control of power means. Every shot will be played firmly, but the power applied will obviously have to be varied greatly with the different clubs.

I do not claim that I was ever a great player but I did teach myself to perform this tour de force, for a tour de force it is. It took me most of my golfing life to learn how to do it. "And why," you may ask, "should you expect us ordinary golfers to be able to do a thing which it took you, an expert, a lifetime to learn?" Well, I did not say I expected you to be able to do it ... what I do say is that understanding how it is done and endeavoring to do it yourself will give you a real con­ception of controlled power in the golf swing.

In my opinion, we cannot lay too much stress upon this matter of getting the right conceptions. It is sur­prising what you can get people to do once they clearly understand what it is that has to be done. To reverse this, I contend that many of us are playing bad golf not because we are incapable of playing good golf but simply because we are thinking of golf in the wrong way.

I have known cases of such players who improved their swings and their games without intending to, simply because they came across and adopted a better conception of the swing. The truth is, of course, that just as if we appreciate good manners we will become good mannered in spite of ourselves; so also, if we appreciate the true ethics of the golf strokes, we will become good golfers.

Why do I use the word "ethics"? Well, because golf is a matter of ethics, that is (according to my diction­ary) "relating to manners or morals." To prove this, cast your eye round the club room. The chances are you will find the most modest man in the club is also the best player and that he is out in the caddie shed. I have never known a great golfer who was not modest, and that goes for Walter Hagen, who in spite of his showmanship was a charmingly modest fellow and a great gentleman.

I hope that the reason why I have wandered off into moral implications in this particular chapter is clear. Our subject is power and power like fire is a good serv­ant but a bad master. Uncontrolled power is the very devil—in golf or anywhere else.

In golf, power must be controlled in two ways: in the matter of morals and in the matter of mechanics. The mechanical control we may liken to the control of a motor car. The power at golf—the gasoline—is repre­sented by the nails in our shoes, no gasoline, no power! But this power is not applied direct; it works through a clutch, and the clutch in the golfer's mechanism is the hips. That is where the power is gathered up, given its right direction, and put into action or not. Then the hands we can compare with spark plugs—get them operating too soon or too late in the cycle of operations and your swing backfires. Your swing like the, ignition on your car must be timed.

Without suggesting that this comparison should be pressed too far, it has its value. One of the points it emphasizes is that clutch slip must be guarded against —that is, there must be no slip, no sloppy movement in your hip work.

We must be fully conscious of how our hips should operate. If the right hip twists inwards as the hips return on the forward swing, we will have swung from in-to-out—that is, correctly. But if the right hip is al­lowed to slip outwards and around on the downward swing, this result cannot be achieved. This is because the club head performs the same actions as does the right hip; they are connected (as regards direction) by the right shoulder.

The effect of bringing our right hip inwards with a twisting movement is to guide the right shoulder in the way it should go. The right shoulder is totally sub­jective to the right hip; so, when the latter is braced and twisted inwards, the shoulder follows, coming in­side and behind the ball—in-to-out.

Do not think that all this is a digression from our subject, power. For power must be guided as well asproduced. We find that it is comparatively easy to drive the ball far; the difficulties begin when we want to add "and straight"; that is when we want our power applied with great accuracy. And in this matter of the accurate application of power, hip brace and move­ment are fundamentally vital.

Now this twisting inwards movement of the hips demands a muscular effort from the legs which is worth analyzing. As we pivot back, we turn, whereas on the forward swing, we twist. That is true even though a certain amount of muscular effort is needed to pivot back. Considering the swing as a whole, we have to gather up and increase our power gradually. The movement that starts up as a gentle turn develops on the down swing into a fierce twist. The turn is prepara­tory to the twist. So the effort of the leg muscles begins to be felt at the end of the backward pivot and is felt increasingly until the climax of the follow-through is reached.

The inward twist of the hips as we come down and through the ball demands great muscular activity in the calves and thighs, the generators of power in the golf swing, and it is the controlled direction of the hips that sees to it that this power is smoothly and gradu­ally applied in the exactly correct direction. So we must incorporate into our swing a hip movement which we can recognize and control by a definite feel, so that by feel we may control the degree and direction of power in our swings.

So "turn and then twist" must be our slogan. These are the basic feels of the golf swing; other feels which we may add to them may help us in building up repeatability, but they will only hinder if we have not built upon "turn and then twist" as our fundamental basis.

There is more power in the golf swing than that which comes from the legs; much of it comes from the flexibility of the body. "Flexibility" is different from "flail" yet it has similar reactions in our swing. A man of twenty-eight will be less flexible than he was at eighteen and more flexible than he will be at thirty-eight, but at eighteen it might be a loose flexibility, at twenty-eight a free flexibility, and at thirty-eight a controlled flexibility. Every shade and inflection of flexibility adds to or takes from our power.

A man who can only move his shoulders in conjunc­tion with his hips has little chance of becoming a golfer. He is stiff and wooden. We must be able to 'leave our shoulders behind." They have no direct tor-sional connection with the hips and must be able to rotate while the hips are held firm and unmoving by the brace. The fact that our whole body produces torque is what gives power to our swing, and, as we delay our shoulders, we add to the power. On the other hand, if we contract our shoulder muscles in an en­deavor to give power to the blow (to "hit harder"), we produce the opposite effect. The shoulder and back muscles must be flexible so that the torque of the body can be picked up by the shoulders and flung into the club head.

The shoulders are midway between the two extremes of the swing, our feet and the club head, and their function like that of the arms and hands is pas­sive; they must be passive to pass along the power generated by the body. While your shoulders are passive, your swing will be powerful and alive; the moment you tighten your shoulder muscles and try to hit with them, your swing becomes dead.

This is very important; so let us look at it in another way also. One of the most difficult faults to cure in golf is that of the right shoulder coming forward and out­side on the way down. It should come down inside and, when it does not, it is because it has become fart of the hips; its connection with the hips is so lacking in flexi­bility that it is controlled by them and follows their movement. Actually we should use the flexibility of our back muscles to delay our shoulder action (in its rela­tion to the pivot) in the same way that we allow our wrists to break back in order to set up delay in our club head.

It is not sufficient to delay the club head through the flexibility of the wrists only; shoulder flexibility must be added. When our right shoulder persists in coming forward, it is because this flexibility has been lost by the muscles of the back being too tense.

Now I have already told you that the club head fol­lows the movement of the right hip; that is, the brace^ forward and to the left of the right hip will induce the swing that feels to go from in-to-out. How does the right shoulder operate in this?

When you study the feel of flexible shoulder action, you will find a number of sensations. One curious sen­sation is that we do not feel that the right shoulder comes inside from the front of our body but from be­hind it. We feel not that it is being pulled inside by the muscles of the chest, but that it is being pushed inside by the muscles of the back. I talked of this feeling to a well-known surgeon and he told me that it was in­deed a correct interpretation of the anatomical facts. The muscles which hold us together and yet allow us flexibility are the cross muscles which join the base of the back (at the waist) to the shoulders. He also ex­plained that unless these muscles are held, as we feel it, very loosely, the shoulders have no choice but to move reactively with the waist—which is in fact what we want them to do in nearly every human activity except golf!

Here is a little test of your own flexibility. Stand with your feet together facing the wall and close to it. With­out moving your feet turn half right (so that you are looking square at the wall on your right). You can do this'easily because you can turn (a) from the knees, (b) from the waist, and (c) from the neck; probably you will use each of the three. Now turn farther, look­ing into the corner which is three-quarters behind you. Then farther still, looking directly behind you. How far can you go? At the farthest stretch, you will feel coming into play the muscles which come into play at the top of your swing. Then, if you start again and this time turn left, you will feel the corresponding muscles which come into action as you finish forward.

You can get some interesting and quite useful feels from that little experiment. The point to watch is that, though the back muscles (those I have been describ­ing) will be felt to stretch and so to come into action at the extremes of our turn in either direction, they must not he held tight. If they are held tight, shoulder flexibility is destroyed—just as wrist flexibility is de­stroyed by tightening the hand muscles and with just as fatal an effect upon the "flail/' For the flail comes from the combined flexibility of all the muscles above the waist.

Now I know that I have been lecturing on the pivot and flexibility and that this is a chapter on power. But I know also that undirected power is no use in golf, and it is the function of the pivot to gather up power from its main sources (which are below the waist) and redirect it so that it emerges from the club head as centrifugal swing.

We gather up power through our physical make-up, but the gathering up and redirecting has to be guided by our sense of feel. The instant that sense of feel is lost or becomes disconnected, our swing becomes dis­connected also—and our power evaporates into thin air, like the sparkle from champagne when the cork is left out!

Are You Ready To Move Onto The Next Lesson? Click Here….