25. Inverse Functioning

There is a curious evolution in the learning of golf which for want of a better phrase I have called in­verse functioning. It arises because we have to teach certain movements directly in order that they may later be used indirectly.

Consider the pivot. We have to teach you how to pivot by telling you or showing you how it is done and asking you to do it that way. That is, we teach it di­rectly as if it were an end in itself. Yet, no good experi­enced golfer pivots directly like that—his pivot is the outcome of his correct conception of the follow through.

The act of pivoting has two basic functions:

1. to guide the club head,
2. to generate power.

We know that we must feel that the club head is brought onto the ball from in-to-out and that the peak of the activity of the club head is reached two or three feet beyond the ball. So we do not hit at the ball or down the line of flight—and the experienced golfer has found that the pivot is an essential factor in producing the in-to-out sweep, through the ball that he has found to be correct because effective.

Now it is really important for you to get this differ­ence in outlook or feeling clearly realized, because un­til you do, you cannot be anything but a mechanical golfer. So I will put the same thing to you in another way. When you watch a good golfer driving, you may feel that he has a perfect conception of the pivot, but you would probably be much nearer the truth in think­ing that he had a perfect conception of the follow through.

If you asked that same golfer how he pivoted, he would quite possibly propound some involved and elaborate theory to you when actually he would have been more truthful had he said, "I don't really know how I pivot, but I do know that when I feel like I felt today I can sock that ball milesl" In other words, again, his beautiful action has evolved not out of the study of how to turn his body but out of a feeling of how to swing past the ball.

So, when I explain to a beginner the mechanical workings of the pivot, I know that I am beginning backwardsj But, just as soon as I can, I reverse the pu-pil's conception. As soon as the pivot is sufficiently well established for the pupil to feel the club head move from in-to-out, I switch over from the pivot as a move­ment to be made to the pivot as a means of encourag­ing the club head to travel from in-to-out. And soon most of the emphasis can be put on the feeling of in-to-out, because if he retains this feel his pivot can­not have been lost.

I have just told you that the pivot has two functions, to guide the club and to generate power. Some good golf analysts combine the two and compare the body to a lever, and while this means practically nothing to the moderate golfer, it is suggestive to the top-notcher. For he may feel his body as a steel bar turning around between his two feet, with all the time the bones of his big toes opposing the movements of the club head— the extremes of the swing.

We must never lose sight of the fact that we are all in different stages of evolution as golfers and that a technique or a conception may be good in one stage and yet disastrous in another. For those who can reach it, the turning bar analogy may be fruitful; it certainly is true as you can feel for yourself that the leverage in golf comes up and out from the bones of the feet.

You will feel it better (even the greatest expert can feel it better) if you swing without a club rather than with one. There is so much more going on when you swing a club that delicate feels are more difficult to de­tect. There is, of course, still more going on when we add a ball—and yet more again when it is zero hour and our name is called out on the tee! Do not forget that I was a scratch golfer years before I hit a decent shot off the first tee at Meyrick Park.

What has this to do with our subject? A great deal. The point of this chapter is that, while you have to learn golf by direct mechanics, you must play it—as soon as you are able—not mechanically but through your conception of how it should be played and the feels which you have built around this conception. The correct conception is the basis, and that is why I have told you in this book many things that are pos­sibly too advanced for you to make practical use of.

You will probably never come up to the standard which I have set you, but if this book has given you a more correct and comprehensive conception of golf movements, you will get nearer to the highest stand­ards than you would have had you been content with a purely mechanical concept. And, which is perhaps equally important, you are much less likely to recede under pressure.

Even if you do recede a little and if you are unable to play your shots in a tournament as well as I have taught you to play them on the practice ground, re­member this: Your opponent is equally anxious to win his match; you will both (in consequence) fall back from your normal standard—but, other things being equal, the one of you with the more correct and com­prehensive conception of the game will fall back the less.

"But," you may say, endeavoring to pull me back to a point from which I may seem to have wandered, "do you suggest that I must not think of pivoting?"

That is exactly what I do suggest, if you are ripe for it. Your shot and my shot both depend upon the pivot. In the early stages you have to concentrate upon pivot­ing in order to be able to pivot at all. But I have reached a stage where I can concentrate upon playing a good shot via a good follow through which is quite a differ­ent outlook.

Do I neglect my pivot in consequence of this? Oh no! I continue to pivot because I know that if I do not I cannot follow through, and I know the consequences of not following through. Inverse functioning, that is all! And I do not even follow through because I know I have to but because I feel that there will be no shot unless I do. In fact I have evolved through to inverse feel.

On this matter of inverse feel, I must digress for a few minutes. Long before he plays a shot, the first-class golfer has made up his mind how it should feel. The beginner of course has no such pre-shot feeling—which is why he so frequently makes shots which surprise him!

Now I call this pre-shot feeling and its results, the set. My dictionary tells me that to "set" is to "put into condition for use," and that is exactly what the set does for a golfer's mechanism. The average golfer walks up to the tee and addresses the ball—we set our­selves before we get to the tee and then, through the feeling which the set has produced, address the ball.

Do not think that this is mere playing with words. It is in hard fact one of the fundamental differences between the good golfer and the great one. It will be obvious that, if the set is the state of the feel that pre­cedes the mechanical movements necessary to play the desired shot, then the feeling of the set and the stance which it induces will differ when we play a chip shot to when we play a full drive. For though the prin­ciple underlying every golf shot is the same, the man­ner of approach to the shot in hand will differ with the lie of the ball and the distance it is desired to propel it.

And note also that the set is not static. It is an image of the whole operation—stance and swing—and if this image is correct and is correctly followed out by the mechanism of the body, the shot must be one hundred per cent effective. The set is the image of the whole operation from stance to follow through.

As I have said before, the swing is a continuous un­broken movement that cannot be cut into sections for analysis. So I was delighted when one day an ardent pupil of mine remarked, "I can now play with my set in motion." I was delighted (1) because he had pre­sented me with a clever piece of sense phraseology, (2) because he must have truly sensed the golf shot in order to be able to make such a remark, and (3) be­cause here was proof that after many years I had been able to teach what I feel to be the correct approach to the matter.

You have only to watch a great golfer to realize how much of his secret lies in his pre-shot attitude and ap­proach. To see him walk up to the ball and address it is all you need to tell you this is a golfer. His quality is demonstrated before his actual stroke, which merely confirms it. His set is his game.

The set has two practical purposes, to induce the right movements and to eliminate faulty ones. To take the second first, it is through his set that the good golfer feels his faults before he swings; the bad golfer only knows his after he has missed his shot.

It is because the good golfer has to induce the right feeling for that to induce the right movements, that men of the quality of Hagen, Cotton, and lately Locke are often blamed for being slow. Personally I don't play slowly, but I certainly cannot play at all unless I have time to contemplate and rehearse my shots. Of course we can exaggerate this, as I think Locke does, but we do need some time to get ourselves set or "in a condition for use."

Now, let us come back to the pivot and see how the inverse functioning of this is related to the set. When I go up to address my ball, I do not think of pivoting (as you do); I think of following through. I think of the end, not the means. So if you and I are standing to­gether on the tee, I am mentally playing my shot through to a finish while you are preparing to play yours, through your pivot—and it is quite likely that you will never get as far as the follow through except by luck. You will be lucky if you hit the ball; I will be unlucky if I do not hit a one hundred per cent shot, since my feel is based upon what constitutes a good shot, while yours is based upon what prepares the way for the creation of a good shot—obviously much further back in the golf conception.

But the beginner or moderate player must not be­come discouraged. We attain the ultimate in golf by stages of evolution and it is undesirable to jump a stage —those who do usually come a cropper. If our evolu­tion is gradual, it is all the better for it, for each stage is well founded before the next is added. And concepts are like food—they need to be well masticated and di­gested before they can be any good to you.

There is another aspect of the concepts by which we play that is worth considering. I will illustrate it by listing four things that the good golfer does that the bad golfer cannot or does not do. The good golfer:

1. Twists his hips into the ball.
2. Thanks to (1), twists his shoulders into the ball.
3. Thanks to (2), keeps the feel of his club traveling outwards, and
4. Takes his divot out straight.

Now this is an interesting little study. You will see that 1, 2, and 3 were all directed towards an effort to swing from in-to-out—yet as No. 4 proves he has played down the line of flight with his club head. In short No. 4 is a result which can only be brought about by the setting up of 1,2, and 3, each of which appears to have a different aim.

Actually all the three factors 1,2, and 3 are illusion-ary. No. 3 is the easiest to prove this of. It is only when we feel that we are swinging from in-to-out that we do play directly down the line of flight and take ourdivot out straight.

As to points 1 and 2, I suppose nothing in golf so puzzles the poor player as the way in which the good golfer keeps his right hip and shoulder inside, instead of letting them slop out and round. Their puzzlement is due as usual to a wrong conception. The bringing down of the right shoulder inside is not a thing that is done directly, a mechanical trick to be learned; it is a result of the proper conception of the timing of the golf swing.

Except for the initial start back from the ball, the golf swing is a one-after-the-other movement. The feet are one extreme of this movement, the club head is the other; the former move through a very small arc, the latter through a wide one. As a result, the feet finish their movement long before the club head does, if both are moving at the same pace as they should be in the initial stage. The bad golfer, finding that his footwork would be completed long before his arms and club head had even got to the top of their arcs, waits with his feet so that he can come down with his feet, shoulders, arms, and club head all together. This is why he comes down outside and is a bad golfer.

Footwork like everything else in the golf swing must be continuous. It is this continuous, unchecked feel that sets up a flow of power. And you can only come inside with your hips and shoulders if you keep your feet moving continuously ahead of your hips and shoulders. This enables you to twist from inside and behind, behind both in position and in time.

If you ask if the altogether descent, with feet and hips and shoulders coming in at the same time, in­evitably brings the right hip outside and around, I answer that it does, inevitably.

Today you must come down inside and swing from in-to-out to play championship golf. Why today? Well, it was not always so. Vardon, Taylor, and Duncan sel­dom tried to get inside any shot. Taylor told me him­self that he had never been able to play a shot with intentional pull, and Harry Vardon rarely played a wooden shot to the green dead straight; there was almost always a slight fade or slice to it. All of which was due, of course, to having learned with the old "guttie" ball; the chief difficulty with that ball being to make it rise quickly enough out of indifferent lies. Naturally the slightly cut shot gave additional lift.

The last of the out-to-in school was George Duncan. I remember vividly the championship occasion on which he had a spoon shot to play to the last hole at Sandwich to get a four and tie with Hagen. He played for a slight slice which did not quite come off—the ball kept dead straight to where he had aimed, to the left-hand side of the green. So he left himself with a chip shot to play and eventually took five.

I was standing behind him when he played the fatal spoon shot, and I realized then that I had witnessed the end of a great school of golfers.

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

The text of this book is set in Caledonia, a Linotype face designed by W. A. Dwiggins, the man responsible for so much that is good in contemporary book design and typog­raphy. Caledonia belongs to the family of printing types called "modern face" by printers—a term used to mark the change in style of type-letters that occurred about 1800. It has all the hard-working feet-on-the-ground qualities of the Scotch Modern face plus the liveliness and grace that is integral in every Dwiggins "product" whether it be a simple catalogue cover or an almost human puppet.

The book was composed, printed, and bound by H. Wolff, New York. Typography by James Hendrickson.