24. Golf Analysis

I astonish my pupils when I tell them, as I some­times do, that for the first twenty years I was teaching golf, I taught it all wrong. They think I am simply de­crying my early efforts as a teacher. Actually I tell them this to suggest what an extraordinarily difficult game golf is to analyze and to teach.

You must analyze before you can teach. It is useless just to develop a fine swing yourself and say to your pupil, "Now copy me!" So we must analyze and base our teaching upon what our analysis reveals. But here is a warning—unless your analysis is very deep and close and based upon wide experience, it may mislead you.

Now this is a matter of immediate concern and inter­est to every advanced golfer whether he wants to be taught or to teach himself. So in this penultimate chap­ter I will give you a few examples of golf paradoxes which will show you what I mean and point out the sort of traps that golf analysis holds for the unwary. I will start with a question.

Why do you sometimes top your ball?

"That is easy," I can hear you say. "I top my ball when I take my eye off it, because this raises my head which fetches my shoulders up, and they pull up my arms—with the natural consequence that I either hit the top of my ball or swing right over it."

Now that or something very like it would be the answer of nine-ninety-nine players out of a thousand. It would have been my answer for the first twenty years of my teaching life, but I now know that it is wrong. You do not top the ball because you pull up your body just before impact but because you drop it.

You may think that that will take some explaining. It will! Also I can tell you that it took some analyzing to discover.

The first thing to get clear in your mind is the differ­ence between pulling up your body and stretching up through your body. This latter is essential to one of the most important feels in golf—the feel of down through the ball. And it is relevant to note (since it suggests where the ball is contacted) that the higher you want to pitch the ball the more essential is this down feeling, a feeling which is the opposite of scooping the club head up.

Now here is another relevant collateral point. When they study film pictures or flickers of great golfers, many people are intrigued and some made quite indig­nant—to see that some of them are right up on their toes during the impact period. And some of the very great­est golfers—Vardon, Bobby Jones, and Miss Joyce Wethered—are the worst "offenders.”

Some years ago Mme Lacoste came to me with a photograph of herself driving. She was as far up on her toes as ever Miss Wethered had been. But fortu­nately by this time I had begun to study and under­stand the question; so when she asked me what I thought of her picture, I said I saw nothing wrong with it.

"But look," she said, "I am right up on my toes." "I know you are/' said I, "but is that wrong?" "Every expert I have shown it to says it is." "Well," says I, "here is one who says it isn't. If you take my advice, you will forget that picture and any idea it has produced in you, and go on playing as you played that shot."

"But it seems all wrong."

"It is not all wrong," said I. "Look! your head and shoulders are beautifully down and that's all you need to have down. Then see your stretch up through the body—it's marvelous; that is what gives you your wrist snap and makes you such a long hitter for such a little dainty lady."

Now, how does this up-on-the-toes position work in with that point I am always harping on—that the first movement on the return is to bring the left heel solidly and squarely back to the turf?

The return of the left heel to the ground is neces­sary in order to have an equal balance between the two feet. By the time this balance is achieved, we are nearing the impact—and the stretching up through the body necessary to fling the wrists open reacts as a rising on the toes movement.

You can say that the up-on-the-toes is a reaction to the stretching up through the body or that the effective flinging open of the wrists is a reaction to up-on-the-toes. But whichever way you like to think of it, you will find that the prominent golfer is up-on-the-toes in the region of impact.

Now let me explain the difference between lifting up the shoulders and head and stretching up through the body from the feet and legs. You have only to shrug your shoulders to lift them, the stretching is rather more complex. It is an established feel in all good golf­ers that they stretch down through their arms as they come into contact with the ball, but you cannot stretch against nothing; so they have to stretch up from the feet to set up the necessary resistance in the shoulders. We have to fix the top of our swing by giving it some­thing to pull against; otherwise we cannot stretch tautly down from it. We fix the top end by bracing and stretching up to hold our shoulders firmly in place.

If we relax our brace and stretch and let our body sag down ever so little, this top fixing "gives" a little and we no longer keep the feeling of stretching down through the ball. That is where the topped shots come from.

There is a clear difference between lifting the shoulders and holding them up. If we lift our shoulders, we lift our arms out of position, but if we push up from our feet, we may be using equal or greater mus­cular force simply to hold our shoulder in position against the terrific down-pull of the club head. Conse­quently, we may even feel that we are rising up when actually we are doing no more than resisting in an up­ward direction the force of the club head which is pulling down. That is why you may find, if you study a whole film with an up-on-the-toes finish, that, in spite of the up-on-the-toes movement, the head and shoul­ders have not been raised even a fraction of an inch.

If you wish to analyze these movements in yourself by feel, do not try it with your long clubs first. The difference between the feels of lifting the body and of holding the shoulders up through the feet is subtle, so subtle that it is easily lost in the violence of a long shot. You will recognize it much more quickly with a mashie-niblick. The feeling you want is not a gross one, but a feel that we stretch upward against the ground with our legs and feet—gradually and without haste. The push of the ground opposes the pull of the club head.

All golf is opposition. We are in a state of opposing in every phase of our swing, even in the waggle. The very feel of the club head is only sensed when we are in a state of opposition to it.

Close students of the game will have noticed that the body sags down as the club reaches the top, so that the player's head may be inches closer to the ball at the apex of the swing; the player is thus opposing and re­taining the feel of the club head. At the bottom of the swing the forces and positions will be reversed. The body comes down when the club head is up and goes up as the club head comes down. Opposition again. These up and down movements are not something we do consciously; they are automatic adjustments of bal­ance in opposition.

To return to the upward stretch. Some of you may have been told in a more elaborate phrase to "elongate the left side." This, I think, is a bad doctrine. It does result in some sort of stretch, but an unbalanced one— and one of its most direct results is the plunging right shoulder. We must stretch through the whole center of our equilibrium, right side as well as left, right foot as well as left, right shoulder as well as left.

The plunging right shoulder is fatal because if your right shoulder dips below its correct position relative with the left, you cannot go on through the ball—you become blocked just as you get past the ball. The right shoulder must be felt to come square against the back of the ball, neither under nor above it.

This dipping is a fault of the right hip as well as the right shoulder. One is the counterpart of the other. When we see a fellow with his club and hands curled around his left leg at the finish, we know that his right side has buckled on the way down, and so his follow through has been blocked.

Now let us go into this question of the right shoulder more minutely.

POINTS  TO  STUDY

Obviously a very young swing, not faultless, but funda­mentally good.

1. A wide swing. Left arm straight, left wrist fully broken back. The shoulders are still turned away from the ball while the hips are turned towards it, giving body flail.
2. The left leg has straightened, but the wrists are still broken back.
3. Shoulders now square with the line of flight. Up on the toes, stretching upwards through the body so that the wrists will snap open downwards.
4. Left heel back to the ground. Head still down. Right arm straight . . . elbows still held together.

In the sequence, the hands, and consequently the club head, have come down yet along.

FAULTS In position 2 and 3 the right leg is too stiff.

He is looking at the ball with his right eye instead of "peep­ing at it with his left eye."

THE SWING 1, 2, 3, 4

GEORGE

(Age 17)

I want you to become much more con­scious of your right shoulder than of your left. When my left heel and leg are going forward I feel that my right shoulder goes back, but I have enough experi­ence to know that what is probably happening is that my right shoulder is stationary in relation to the hips. We feel we are pushing it back when actually we are holding it back—but that is the basic difficulty of ana­lyzing golf feels; we mistake opposition for move­ment.

Let me again stress here why I prefer the word "op­pose" to "resist." Resist suggests something static, op­pose is resistance in movement. Also, oppose suggests direction. If you resist a pull you stand stock still and resist with your weight; if you oppose a pull you op­pose by a pull in the opposite direction, which is what we are continually doing in golf.

A boy with a catapult is a good illustration of op­position; he pulls in the direction opposite to that he wants his shot to take. He stretches his elastic; we must stretch our bodies—only upwards. And the more you can stretch up, the more you can feel down, which is what I want you to feel beyond everything.

Now I think that a lot of nearly good players would become really good ones if they learned to manage their hips correctly. I talked just now of becoming blocked just past the ball. This is not due (as it is often assumed to be) to faulty arm work, but to al­lowing the hips to slide out in the direction of the hole—where they effectively stop any chance of the follow through being carried on and around.

If you will brace your hips in the way I have de­scribed, you will feel them as part of a whole not as a break in that whole. And it is when we feel the hips and waist as a break that we go wrong. Bending at the waist must be due to suppleness of the waist not to disarticulation of the hips. Of course, the hips do ar­ticulate during the pivot, but they must do so con­trolled by the brace; they must be moved, but they must not be allowed to slop around.

The braces and stretches of the golf movement, from feet up through the body and down through arms and hands, combine into one feel, the feel that we swing our club wide through the ball and on and around the left side. The correct manipulation of the hips enables this feel to be maintained, but if the hips are disarticulated the whole framework of the feel is broken up.

Well, there we are! Just a few of the considerations which arise when we try to analyze that elementary and fatal fault of lifting up. So I hope you will see how essential an accurate analysis is before we can hope to effect a true correction.

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