50 Years of Golfing Wisdom

The left arm is the radius of the swing arc and it must maintain that radius. To do this it need not be ramrod straight, in the sense that Harry Vardon meant when he said he loved playing against opponents with straight left arms. It must be straight enough, without being stiff. In any case, even if the left arm is slightly bent, it will be straightened out in the hitting area by centrifugal force.

Hitting straight

The beginner, and he who aims to improve his game, must have faith here. He must believe something quite simple; that there is no need to do any conscious squaring of the blade in the downswing, or in the hitting area, with the hands. The hands should be left free for hitting the ball. The correct downswing action from the top, in the correct sequence, will take care of the blade of the club as it swings through the ball.

It really does all depend upon how the body is wound up and unwound. The hands and arms need to swing freely from the hub of the wind-up. Wind-up, then unwind, and swing the clubhead while you are doing this by a free use of the hands and arms. This type of action works for every club in the bag, allowing the loft on each to do the work as necessary.

The right elbow

Ninety-nine percent of floating right elbows – the ones that stick up or out like a chicken’s wing – are caused by an incorrect pivot. If you tilt your shoulders instead of partly turning them, and take your hands back ahead of the clubhead, then you will get a floating right elbow.

Controlling the elbow won’t necessarily put the thing right, since it is caused by a combination of pivot and of wrist action following the pivot, which leaves the clubhead behind in the backswing. You cannot correct it by getting the clubhead on its way back first, so that it leads the elbow into the right position, which then feels strong while you turn.

You could, of course, hit good golf shots with a floating right elbow, as long as the elbow gets into the right place to hit the ball. But only a right relationship between hands and body can put you into the right position in the easiest way.

When teaching people, there is quite a simple general rule I follow: in both cases, floating right elbow and too-tight elbow, I use what sounds like a local independent variation merely to wipe another one out, in its effect when the player tries to do it. You tend to get a floating right elbow if you leave the clubhead behind your hands. If you then try to start back clubhead first, you often cure it.

Other things being equal, of course, faults can come from both variations. If I drag the clubhead back, that’s when I float it; if I start the clubhead back too much ahead, I go flat.

If you don’t get the clubhead moving on the way back, then you can’t get back to the top of the swing without moving the right elbow out from the body; and the delayed clubhead thus nearly always leads you to a steep position. You can easily spend five minutes explaining this to a player; and he can easily follow this and see how it all works.

There are actually thousands of people with this sort of trouble, because those who have read about and studied the game have been told so much to ‘take the club back in one piece’. Trying to do just this, if it is misunderstood, can lead the player straight into a floating right elbow!

With this particular fault, as with so many others in golf, we come back to just one basic thing. May I repeat myself once more and say it again: The relationship between your clubhead, your hands and your body is vital. If you get the right relationship between your clubhead, your hands and your body, you will never get a floating right elbow.

Don’t forget your hands

Nick Faldo’s swing changes in the 1980s centred around a few key elements. He widened his stance so that his legs would stabilize and support a more rotary body action. He then focused on winding his body over a more passive leg and hip action, which created resistance – in effect, energy – that he would then use to drive a more powerful downswing. The arms swung in response to the body motion, whereas in his swing of old the hands and arms dominated the action and the body just went along for the ride. Basically, Nick went from being a very handsy player to a more body-controlled, passive-hands player.

That was just the ticket for Nick, but overemphasis on body action is dangerous territory for the average golfer because it assumes you have a great hand action and, to be frank, most club golfers suffer from a lack of hand action rather than too much. That’s why I often prefer to use the arc of the swing to get the body moving. Once you get the correct in-to-in picture of the swing path, your body will clear out of the way virtually automatically, creating the proper release of the hands and thus the clubhead through the ball.

You ‘aim’ the clubhead at the top as well as at address

If your clubshaft parallels your target line at the top of the backswing, the club is ideally ‘aimed’ to swing back through the ball along the target line.

If your shaft is angled left of the target line at the top, there will be a tendency to swing the clubhead across the line from out-to-in and either slice or pull the shot. Conversely, if the shaft is angled right of the target line at the top, there will be a tendency to swing the clubhead from in to out across the target line and either hook or push the shot.

Understanding swing plane … in simple terms!

The plane on which you swing is established chiefly by your address position. As you stand to the ball comfortably and squarely, neither cramped nor reaching, your left arm and the club form a more-or-less continuous straight line. The angle of that line, relative to the vertical, is the ideal plane on which to swing the club up and down with your arms.

What you are aiming to do, in golfing terms, is to shift your right side out of the way in the backswing and your left side out of the way in the throughswing, so that at the moment of impact the club is being swung freely by your arms with the clubhead moving straight through the ball, along the target line.

More about swing plane!

Numerous enlightening books and articles appear describing varying aspects of the golf swing. But there are some aspects that rarely find their way into print. Plane, for example. I intend here to single it out for the special attention it merits, if rarely attains. Why is plane so important? Because if the plane of your swing is correct, the angle of attack on the ball is correct. That sounds difficult. Let’s look closer.

Generally speaking, a swing in the correct plane gives you a fairly flat bottom to the swing, which is what we want in order that the power we are unleashing will proceed directly through the ball. The same amount of power, or more power, applied more steeply or from an incorrect plane, cannot hope to hit the ball so far.

My idea of a correct plane is one in which if, at the top of the backswing, we extend the line from the left hand to the left shoulder downwards, that line should then approximately aim at the ball.

It is obvious, then, that the plane of the swing will vary with the distance one is standing from the ball. This in turn varies with whatever club we are playing. For example, one stands close with a 9-iron, because of its short shaft; and the resulting swing is much more upright than the swing with a driver.

There is no real problem with this change of plane, though; for from the player’s angle it is purely automatic and should merely vary directly with the length of club used.

Now, in the correct pivot in the backswing there is a certain degree of shoulder turn, linked with a certain degree of shoulder tilt. One can soon deduce how a swing with too little downward tilt of the left shoulder, and too much turn, will be too flat. Similarly, one with too much tilt, and not enough turn, becomes too upright.

Each swing, though, produces its own characteristics. A ‘too upright’ arc usually makes for better iron play than wooden club play, since these iron shots are hit on the downswing. Correspondingly, a ‘too flat’ swing often works very well with the woods, but is of little value for iron shots, since these are then hit nearer the bottom of the arc.

The present vogue is to aim at an upright swing – which I suppose I would prefer to a flat one. But why not swing in plane – which will then be the right degree of uprightness for all shots?

Don’t spin your shoulders

If you spin your shoulders too early in the downswing, it throws the club outside the ideal swing path which means you’re right on track for a pull or slice. This is perhaps the most common fault I see at club golfer level.

If that sounds familiar, think about how you swing your hands and arms down from the top. I’m reminded of the great Harry Vardon, six time Open champion, who said that as he changed direction from backswing to downswing, he felt his hands swung down to hip height before his body even began to unwind. In reality, he combined the perfect arm swing with the ideal body rotation, but his feeling was one of swinging the arms down first and this is a swing that that would definitely help you if you slice. It encourages the hands and arms to play a more dominant role, swinging the club down into impact on the ideal path and plane.

Don’t let tuition destroy your natural rhythm

As a teacher I’m forever conscious of the fact that tuition must never get in the way of the natural rhythm in a golfer’s swing. I remember teaching Seve at Wentworth in 1979 and thinking: ‘I’ve got to be careful here.’ He had such wonderful rhythm that I didn’t want to tell him anything about his swing that might upset it. So all of my advice to him was in consideration of that fact.

When Seve was playing well there wasn’t an ounce of tension in his body. I believe that some of the problems in the 1990s stemmed from the fact that he’d become perhaps overly concerned with techniques and swing thoughts, which has never quite been his style, and thus taken away some of that natural softness and impeded the free-flowing motion of his swing.

This is a danger for any golfer. Whenever you get taught something new, the first instinct is to tighten-up and that process usually starts with the grip. You must be aware of this and avoid tension creeping into your hands. Never lose the gift of being able to swing the club freely. Keeping your grip soft will almost certainly help. As Peter Thomson used to say: ‘Always grip lightly because you’ll instinctively firm up at impact anyway.’ That’s not a bad philosophy to bear in mind whenever you’re trying to make changes to your swing.

If you wind yourself like a spring …

I like to compare body action in the golf swing to the winding and unwinding of a spring. Think of it this way and you will realize how important it is that the bottom half of the spring should resist the turning of the top half, in order to increase coiling (and thereby power).

The feeling should be one of staying relatively still, but ‘lively’, from the waist down, while your torso turns around the axis of your spine and your arms and hands swing the club back and up so that it ultimately points parallel to the target line. The left leg will give a little, turning in towards the right, and the left heel will usually be pulled rather than lifted off the ground. But the effort should be to prevent, rather than encourage, such movements – while making sure your shoulders turn as your arms swing the club back and up.

… automatically you will let it all fly

Create sufficient torque with your upper-body backswing wind-up and you cannot help but release it into a powerful throughswing. As your legs and hips win the battle of the opposing forces, and pull spring-like towards the target, swing your arms straight down before your shoulders spin. Never do anything to inhibit a free arm-swing.

Keep your head down? Forget it!

When I was on the instruction panel of the American magazine Golf Digest in the 1960s they carried out a survey of the leading 50 money winners on tour. They photographed each golfer hitting shots, with a grid pattern positioned behind them so it was possible to monitor their head movement during the swing. Of these, 48 of the 50 golfers moved their head to the right in the backswing. Some moved more than others and two golfers remained centred. But, not surprisingly since these were all good players, none moved to the left.

The obsession among some club golfers to keep the head down has kept me busy for 50 years. It’s like strapping a straightjacket on to a golfer; it restricts a full, free turn, so essential for both power and accuracy.

So if ever I hear of a golfer whose main swing thought is to keep their head down throughout the swing, the alarm bells ring in my head. In any good swing there is invariably a certain amount of lateral movement of the head and body. So long as this body action is harmonized with the hand and arm action, it is allowable and in many cases desirable for there to be a degree of lateral movement.

Careful of some other clichés

Let’s punch holes in a few more of some prime ‘book’ clichés:

‘Go back slowly’: This is nothing short of an invitation to disaster. It leads to moving rather than swinging the club back, in a motion completely lacking in rhythm. If you go back at the pace that the slow-back proponents suggest, you have got to control the club every inch of the way, which, apart from anything else, is too much of a mental exercise.