50 Years of Golfing Wisdom

If you’ve watched professionals on the practice tee at tournaments, you may have wondered why they spend so much time and effort checking their alignments at address – more in many cases, than working on actual swing moves. The above is the answer. Good golfers are good golfers largely because they have learned and accepted that, no matter how fine the gun’s firing action, unless it is aimed correctly it won’t deliver the missile to the target. Lesser golfers are so impatient to pull the trigger, or so wrapped up in the mechanics of the swing, they never master what comes before.

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_b96b5068-82de-5898-875a-cb673a0d9b98)

Building a Better Golf Swing (#ulink_b96b5068-82de-5898-875a-cb673a0d9b98)

How to start back ‘square’

A lot of rubbish has been talked and written about the way a golfer should swing the club back from the ball. There have been those who advocated rolling the wrists, those who advocated holding the clubface ‘square’ as long as possible, and those who swore by hooding the clubface during the takeaway.

The ‘squares’ are the ones on the ball, but the trouble is that they don’t always define what is truly ‘square’. The golf swing combines an arc and a plane. How, then, do you get ‘square’?

The answer is by swinging the club away from the ball in one coordinated movement – without any independent action of any part of the body, especially the hands and arms.

Prove it for yourself as follows. Take your aim and set up correctly for a full shot. Now, without rotating your hands and arms or consciously cocking your wrists, but making the club as near as possible an extension of your left arm, turn and tilt your shoulders slightly and let your arms swing back in concert with this movement. The club will have moved back inside the target line – there is no other place it can go if you have set-up and turned properly. And the clubface – where will it point? Not at the sky – which would have happened if you had rolled your wrists clockwise. Not at the ground – which would have happened if you’d held the face down or hooded. It will be pointing more or less forward – at right angles to the arc of your swing.

This is ‘square’, as you can very quickly prove by turning your shoulders back to their original position, when the clubface will return squarely behind the ball.

And that is the correct takeaway.

Turn your body, cock the wrists

I had played golf from childhood – and had a club in my hand from the time I could stand up. I suppose, at 15 or 16, I could get round Lindrick on occasions in under 70, but at other times I would have to walk in from the course because I had run out of golf balls. I was gifted in the sense of being able to hit the ball because I had grown up with it and had the chance of watching fine players in the area – Arthur Lees, Frank Jowle, Johnny Fallon and, of course, my cousin Jack. So when Willie Wallis (my boss and the head professional at the Hallamshire where I got my first job as assistant) said to me: ‘You must turn your body and use your lumbar muscles and you must cock the wrists,’ I took notice of it.

Today I will tell pupils they must turn the body because you have to do that to get the clubhead swinging from inside to inside, and you must cock the wrists otherwise the club will follow the body too much. What Willie was saying was similar to what I am saying today. The difference is that I explain it, whereas he didn’t.

Keeping it simple

You are now taking great care to pre-programme, as far as possible, correct impact through your grip, clubface aim, ball position, and body alignment and posture. All that remains for you to play the best golf of which you are capable is to swing the club on a plane and in a direction that transmits your address ‘geometry’ to the ball, while also generating sufficient clubhead speed to propel it the required distance.

How do you do that?

Because the ball is lying on the ground to the side of you, the answer is with an upward and downward swinging of the arms combined with a rotational motion of the body.

How much swinging relative to how much body motion? How ‘steeply’ up and down should your arms swing relative to the ‘aroundness’ of your body motion? Which drives what – the arm swinging the body rotation, or the body rotation the arm swinging? Where does the power come from – the swinging motion of the arms or the rotating of the body?

All of those questions, and all others like it, will quickly become moot if you will simply do as follows:

Swing your left arm directly back from the ball, allowing it to move progressively upward and backward – i.e., to the inside of the target line – as a natural response to the rotation of your shoulders around the axis of your spine.

Can the golf swing really be that simple?

Well, if you ever reach the point of feeling that your chief golfing problem has become ‘paralysis by analysis’, forgetting everything but the above concept of backswing motion might delightfully surprise you.

Wind up – don’t lift up

When teaching, I get pupils to finish the backswing completely, before starting the downswing, by asking them to point the clubhead consciously at the target before starting down. This virtually ensures a full shoulder pivot and a complete wrist cock.

Under and out of the way

I have often asked myself what is common to all good strikers of a golf ball. The only thing I can find which they all seem to do is that they hit under. By that, I mean that the right side relaxes and swings under a taller left side through the ball. This means that in the hitting area the shoulders are tilted, and yet the left hip is turned to some extent towards the target so as to get the body out of the way sufficiently to allow the hands and arms room to hit through.

Let me now try to define the downswing. To allow the right side to swing under, the first thing to do in the downswing is to move the hips laterally to the left. This can only be achieved by good leg action. This is the under part of the swing. The start down with the lower half of the body will have brought the hands and arms down to hip height, leaving the shoulders behind.

From here we concentrate on the out of the way part as we cut loose with the hands and arms. The head, I hardly need to say, must remain still during all of this. Indeed, if there is a secret to hitting under and past the body it is to keep the head behind the ball until the ball is in its way.

The classic golf swing requires little more than ‘two turns and a swish’. Note the spine angle remains constant.

Don’t be a statue!

Are we not getting far too position-conscious and forgetting the all-important thing – to swing the club?

We have had in the recent past a spate of golf books, full of positions that dissect the golf swing. It is important to remember that the players shown in this way swing through the positions you see in the books, and I suppose never really feel the different positions you see when looking at the pictures.

All too frequently we see potentially great golfers putting themselves into that late hitting position of a Hogan and a Snead (or today, an Els or a Woods). This sort of thing is of no value whatsoever! In fact, I would say it is harmful, in that anyone who tries to put himself into this position has so obviously missed the reason why the great players are able to swing this way.

The wrists are not consciously held back in the downswing until the last moment. This really is too difficult to do. Learn to swing and swing correctly, and the wrists will uncock at the right time. I get the impression that many of our young players are making a conscious effort not to let the clubhead work in the hitting area. In other words, they are so keen on late hitting that they are never actually using the clubhead at all – despite the fact that hitting is surely the most natural thing to do with the clubhead, certainly more natural than trying to hold the clubhead back!

Grip, stance and pivot should allow for the hand and wrist action to be absolutely natural, and not forced in any way. If you feel you have to consciously hold the clubhead back, then there is something wrong and you are certainly not swinging.

In the past we have seen many unorthodox swingers playing great golf. The very fact that they have been swinging has helped them in the groove. I feel sure these players have never become too much bogged down by position. If you are in a wrong position, then certainly try to swing through a better one. But whatever you do, don’t try to put yourself into a better position.

A golfer’s waggle usually gives the show away, proclaiming whether he is a swinger or not. The non-swinger is so stilted that we know he is going to go from one position to the next, and never swing the club at all.

The top of the backswing and halfway down positions seem to be the most sought after. How often do we see a player admiring that late-hitting, halfway down position he has put himself into! He can feel where he should be. I venture to say that the finest players never feel this position; they feel a much more complete thing, that of swinging the clubhead through the ball to the target. We all freely discuss our golf swings but how many of us have swings, or have we just a set of many positions?

Timing – the elusive quality

Most modern books on golf have abundant and arresting action pictures, showing positions in the backswing, downswing, and followthrough. Perhaps it is this factor, as much as any other, which causes us to think of a swing in three distinct parts. To do that may be well enough, except that sometimes it can lead to the loss of that essential element in our swing known as timing.

What an elusive word that is in relation to the golf swing! One hears, so often, ‘my timing was a little bit off today’ when some unfortunate has had a bad day; and, as it happens to so many of us, it is perhaps not a bad thing if we try to be more specific and pinpoint this gremlin of bad timing, which can strike at the best of swings.

When it happens to me, I try to remember one thing, and often it helps; it is this: ‘Remember, I want my maximum speed at impact – not before’.

If I can let this really penetrate my mind, it is the easiest way to cut out that quick snatch back from the ball, or the snatch from the top. When I see it in pupils, I find myself saying: ‘don’t forget it is the ball you are hitting, not the backswing.’ Put another way round, what I could say is: ‘wait for it’, but I think it is easier to wait for it if you know what you are waiting for!

Distance is clubhead speed correctly applied

Let me remind you that ‘correctly applied’ means:

Clubface square to target at impact

Clubhead path momentarily coinciding with target line at impact

Angle of attack appropriate to club being used at impact.

Never forget that no matter how high your clubhead speed, the greater the error in any one of those angles, the less useful distance you will gain.

Straight enough