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Foreword - In the years before the war when there was more leisure to play and study golf, I tried to help Percy Boomer evolve some of the ideas which he presents in his book. This may be the reason why he has asked me from among all his more proficient pupils to write a foreword, and because he used to find me the most persistent in the search for the secret of the correct swing.

Plan - This is not a book on the science of golf, but about learning it. Everything on the science of the game has been written, little on how to learn it. So I outline a method of learning and stress certain points about the golf swing. And please remember that long experi­ence has told me what to emphasize when teaching. Some of the points which you will find me making a fuss about are considered minor details in the science of the game, but they are important to me because they relate to feel rather than to mechanics—and it is through feel that I play and teach.

Genesis Book - Golf is in the Boomer blood. My father was a village schoolmaster in Jersey. As an educationist he was generations ahead of his time. He saw no use in forc­ing a boy to try to learn subjects which he was obvi­ously incapable of absorbing—and of which he could make no use anyway, but he did help his pupils to develop such talents and natural aptitudes as they possessed.

01. Teaching - Anyone who has taught golf or who has even watched closely a number of beginners at the game knows that there are two great classes—those who are natural golfers and those who are not. My brother Aubrey was born a golfer; I had to make myself one and a hard time I had doing it. Indeed we were both extreme members of our respective classes.

02. Golf + Senses - Every intelligent person who has played golf must have speculated on the relation between the mental and the physical aspects of the game. This is one of the fundamental problems of golf and I had early rea­son to think about it, for as already related—as soon as I had become a professional the very fact that I had become a Pro seemed to have made it impossible for me to hit a decent shot from the first tee at Meyrick Park. Why? If we could find the answer to that we should understand golf "nerves" and maybe see how to avoid them.

03. The Swing - I have already explained briefly why, both in my own game and in my teaching, I have adopted the simplest possible swing and have insisted that as many shots as possible should be played with fundamentally the same movements. Now that I have outlined the idea of teaching by feel you will better understand why I attach such importance to this point.

04. Golf Bogey - I have christened it Golf Bogey No. 1 because it is the most seductive and destructive medium in the game. It took me most of the years of my golfing life to discover it and even then I could not formulate my ideas about it or counteract it effectively in my teaching until I had come to a proper understanding of the relation between the physical and mental in golf.

05. Golfing Health - Now I could write a whole book on the experience of my pupil briefly outlined in the preceding chapter. It might be made a very interesting book too, for the case contained all the elements of a perfect illustra­tion of the desirability of some sort of conscious control that could be used to check the often fatal tendency to do the obvious thing. For do not forget it was Golf Bogey No. 1—the natural tendency to do the obvious thing—that upset my pupil's game.

06. Concentration - In whatever class of golf you play you will agree that the quality which enables the fellow just above you to give you strokes is not so much his ability to make shots which you cannot, as his knack of keeping his average shot nearer his best than you can. And this prime virtue of consistency is commonly credited to concentration.

Learning + Teaching - Before we go ahead with the next chapter, which is the first dealing with the practical side of learning to play golf, I want to say a few things about learning the game and about teaching it. I ought to know some­thing about these subjects for I have been learning golf for forty-five years—and teaching it as well for the last thirty of them.

07. Controlled Swing - As you have already heard, my first endeavor is to teach the pupil the whole golf swing—or better, the golf swing as a whole. I do not believe in trying to impart the swing in stages or by sections; from the first lesson I teach the swing complete.

What the pupil gets from this first lesson is a grosso modo idea of how the swing works; what I get from it is mainly an indication of how the grosso modo strikes the pupil as an individual. For do not forget that what­ever I say and however I illustrate my points, every pupil will visualize the swing differently.

08. Preparatory - The experienced eye can make a very accurate guess at the handicap of a player after seeing him make a few practice swings, and as soon as his address is com­pleted we can be sure of his quality.

Now at first glance it might seem that it would be simple enough for anyone to learn to stand correctly before the ball—to cultivate an impressive address.

09. What we Mean - What we mean when we say - when my boys at St. Cloud found a particularly annoying pupil, they usually managed on one pretext or another to pass him on to the Boss! So when one day I was told that Old Zambuck insisted upon having a personal lesson from myself, I suspected trouble ahead! However it turned out to be an entertaining and thought-provoking experience.

10. Wrist Action - There is no action in golf less understood than the use of the wrists, for curiously enough we do not have to work them, but we have to let them work themselves —like the hinges on a door.

This is important because the wrists will only be used correctly when we have the right idea of their correct mechanical action. If we get the wrong idea, the opening of the wrists in the region of the ball is bound to be mistimed.

11. Eye on the Ball - I suppose the most often repeated piece of advice in the whole realm of golf is "keep your eye on the ball." It is given and accepted as a profound golfing truth (which properly understood it is), but it is neces­sary to examine what we mean by it and how it fits into the rest of our golfing program.

12. Must Learn - These "Interludes for Instruction" will show you among other things why my job is so fascinating—at least to anyone like myself who is as interested in hu­man beings as he is in golf. That dual interest I may tell you is an effective substitute for some of the quali­ties which I have not got: patience, for instance!

13. Feeling - It is now time for us boldly to approach a subject which we have already skirted round and touched the fringes of, the in-to-out theory about which so much has been heard in recent years. We have already con­sidered certain aspects of it in the chapters on "Golf Bogey No. 1," and "Preparatory to the Swing." Now in this chapter I want to help you to feel how to swing from in-to-out, a thing of which many people realize the importance without being able to put it into prac­tice

14. 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."

15. Monologue - "Oh, good morning, Mr. Boomer.—You are Mr. Boom­er, aren't you? . . . I'm Mrs. de Vere de Vere; you know, Mrs. Pro Quid Quo sent me along to you, to get my swing fixed up. . . . Nothing much, but of course you know I'm an old golfer; so I'd better tell you all about my case. Possibly you have met my husband somewhere . . . he has played golf all his life more or less . . . plays very well too; no style, you know, but hits a very long ball and plays his irons to perfection . . . and his putting, my dear fellow, you should see his putting; it's marvellous. You see, he was taught by that St. Andrews Pro . . . famous chap. . . ."

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.

17. Dancer - I never consider I have succeeded with a pupil unless the pupil adds something to my own knowledge. A pupil who teaches me nothing has no originality, since what I am trying to impart is sensation and surely no two people should feel with exact similarity. So I encourage my pupils to talk and give their impres­sions of things, particularly of feels, and my experience is that if these impressions are banal neither the pupil nor I will learn anything! On the other hand, a pupil may come along with some quite absurd or fantastic conception of what I have tried to explain—and then I know there is fertility and that it is up to me to get a crop of ideas out of it.

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.

19. Mathematician - This is another true story that will show you what an interesting variety of people I meet and how many and different ways there are of thinking about golf.

One day a player walked into my shop and inquired for me. I happened to be out, but he booked a lesson for the following day. He was an internationally fa­mous mathematician and scientist and by no means of the abstract unpractical type.

20. Temperament - The secret of success in golf lies in temperament and that is true whatever grade of golf you may aspire to play. Tournaments are not always, not even usually, won by the greatest stylists. They go to the men with the best balanced outlook on the game. And how fre­quently we have seen the fellow with a rank, bad swing take the half-crown off a man who looked far better on the tee.

21. The Waggle - The most difficult lessons to give are those to players with handicaps around 5 and 6. They are in the "near scratch" class, and when they come to us it is either because they realize they have come to a full stop or because they have struck a thoroughly bad patch which they cannot get themselves out of.

22. Putting - If you want your golf to be based upon sound prin­ciples, beware of the feu de mots. Avoid falling a vic­tim to those slogans and catch-phrases with which golfing talk and golfing writing are so liberally pep­pered. The slogan is the enemy of thought, and the fact that a phrase has been current around club rooms and courses right through the golfing ages is no guar­antee that it enshrines a profound golfing truth—it may be just a superficially bright and catchy phrase. My own view is that the fundamentals of golf are not com­pressible into slogans

23. Reminiscence - One of the perennial joys of golf is the way it fits in with and illuminates the character of the fellow who knows all about it: The Omniscient Golf Maniac.

There are more maniacs in golf than there are in any other sport, and they have more fun too! You see, the golf swing is such an unknown equation to most people that any fellow with the gift of gab and twenty years* experience of pulling and slicing can make it sound as though he knows what he is talking about when he expounds it.

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.

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.

THE END