The Swing

My observations of professional golfers have taught me a great deal about the swing.
One thing that I noticed at once was that the connected swingers—so-called controlled swingers—were always firmer and slower, the quicker swingers were less controlled and their swings were more liable to come unstuck. Also I noticed that as a general rule the controlled swingers did not hold their wrists down as they addressed the ball; they held them up in a line with the arm and club shaft.

Now that was an interesting point, and when I tried it out, I found that it had an important bearing on the whole matter. This position of the wrists gives us at once the feeling of the club head being down. Please note this is a club head feeling. This particular feeling, club head down at the address, has always been recognized as part of the correct golf feel. Our forefathers told us to keep our wrists down as we addressed the ball through a misapprehension of it; they felt down when they hit a good shot and thought it was their wrists that were down, whereas it was really the club head.

Because of that initial misconception, they had to make corrections and compensations on the way up and on the way down, but we can now eliminate these and make the swing more simple. The fewer unnecessary movements you make in a swing the better. A simple swing always has been and always will be desirable; so I aim at eliminating every unnecessary movement—and I can assure you I got rid of a big one when I concluded that the wrists should not be held down, yet the club head should feel down. Try to get this nuance, it is important.

If you try and compare these two feelings with a club, you will find you can push the club head down on the turf with the sole flat but not when the toe is cocked up in the air. This sole flat and down is the right feel. You see, golf force is centrifugal so the arms must be at full stretch when we come into the region of the ball, and we can only get this full stretch down at the foot of the swing if we feel down right through the swing.

I remember telling this to a pupil of mine, a good pupil in the sense that he was a good analyst, and he looked at me in astonishment. "Do you mean that I have to feel down when I am at the top of my swing?" he asked. "You do," I replied. He said nothing at the time, but one day later he said to me suddenly, "I can feel that down feeling when I am up now and by George! I like it! It keeps me beautifully down to the bottom of the ball automatically." The automatically was what I liked.

"But," you may say, "as I address the ball with my club head on the ground behind it, I must naturally feel down." Not necessarily. Feeling down is connected with the correct brace of the body. You will never feel down if you slouch over the ball; the feeling comes by opposing the club head by bracing the body. You must push down against something, and the down feeling is the feeling that you are braced upward against the club head as it is down behind the ball.

The first thing I do with a new pupil is to kneel on the ground and hold his club head and ask him to pull against it. I ask him to hold his position and then relax my pressure, and he at once feels what it is to feel pushing down. This is the feeling he must get as he comes into contact with the ball—which is why I repeat and keep on repeating, "Full stretch, full stretch all the time!" Even as you go through the ball you must feel down; "down while through the ball" is an exquisite golf feel.
So much for one end of the feel! What about the other end, the force-center? This is obviously a difficult feel to fix, and the best way I have found is by making the pupil stand in an imaginary barrel. Swinging in this barrel gives him the feeling of keeping his hips up; at the same time he must now stretch down (even when his hands are up chest high). Because the body is braced, there will no longer be any tendency for the knees to sag in towards one another; they will roll round at a constant height as he pivots and this is a very essential feel in the back swing.

Now we are building up so that you will shortly be able to feel your force-center, but first another word or two about the hips. The feel of holding them up that you get through the barrel image is a good one. So is the sort of hip brace you can get by pulling your hips in as you walk. I often tell pupils to do this. You get the feeling of holding your hips firmly together and that they no longer sag or dip first to the right and then to the left.

The good swing is based on a pivot with the minimum of to-and-fro movement. Both hips and shoulders are held up and braced, and they move in the same circular path except that the turn of the body slightly inclines the shoulders as they go round. Now if you stand before an imaginary ball, holding an imaginary club, with your arms stretched down but held lightly (with little tension, I mean) as if you were ready to play a shot, and then turn first right and then left, rather briskly and getting the movement from the knees, calves, and feet, you will begin to feel the pull on your arms from the force-center.

The power is largely produced by the feet and legs, but it is the force-center (somewhere in the pit of the back) which collects it and is responsible for its transfer to the arms and then out to the club head.

Now take a mashie and do very short swings to and fro with it. Soon you will begin to detect the center which you will feel controls both the setting up of power and the guiding of the club. Do not break the wrists or lift the club head during this experiment. The hands do nothing but keep the club straight out in front of you; let the arms feel supple and yet pushed down as the club head is down, while all the time you are moving to and fro from the legs. You begin to feel connected right through, from legs to center and from center to club head. Though you make this experiment first with a mashie (that being an easy club to feel), the full drive is simply a big edition of the same movement and must be just as connected.