The view I take of this shot is markedly different from the view most spectators seem to have formed. They are inclined to glamorize the actual shot since it was hit in a pressureful situation. They tend to think of it as something unique in itself, something almost inspired, you might say, since the shot was just what the occasion called for. I don’t see it that way at all. I didn’t hit that shot then — that late afternoon at Merion. I’d been practicing that shot since I was 12. After all, the point of tournament golf is to get command of a swing which, the more pressure you put on it, the better it works.
What I have learned I have learned by laborious trial and error, watching a good player do something that looked right to me, stumbling across something that felt right to me experimenting with that something to see if it helped or hindered, adopting it if it helped, refining it sometimes, discarding it if it didn’t help, sometimes discarding it later if it proved undependable in competition, experimenting continually with new ideas and old ideas and all manner of variations until I arrived at a set of fundamentals that appeared to me to be right because they accomplished a very definite purpose, a set of fundamentals which proved to me they were right because they stood up and produced under all kinds of pressure.
In the golf swing, the power is originated and generated by the movements of the body. As this power builds up, it is transferred from the body to the arms, which in turn transfer it through the hands to the clubhead. It multiply itself enormously with every transfer, like a chain action in physics.
Crook the forefinger around the shaft and you will discover that you can lift the club and maintain a fairly firm grip on it by supporting it just with the muscles of that finger and the muscles of the pad of the palm.
Spreading the feet too far apart is somewhat self-defeating. By overextending your legs, you may lock them at joints that must remain supple.
I have been convinced since my early days in golf that there is one correct basic stance: the right foot is at a right angle to the line of flight and the left foot is turned out a quarter of a turn to the left.
When you start from the correct basic stance and complete a full hip turn, your belt buckle should point toward the toe of your squared right foot. However, when you start from the faulty stances, you hip turn will carry you well past this check point and your belt buckle will be pointing almost the exact opposite direction from your target.
If I stand with my left foot squared, my left leg and my whole body feel uncomfortably restricted when I’m hitting through the ball. Instead of everything moving cohesively and freely toward my target, everything is grinding under strain. If your left foot is correctly positioned, on the other hand, you can go through the ball with everything you’ve got. You can release the whole works. There isn’t an ounce of energy that isn’t imparted to the ball.
The fact that an apparently insignificant detail like the position of the left foot can affect your entire swing for better or for worse is an intrinsic part of golf. The explanation is, of course, anatomical.
During the swing, one of the 2 arms is always straight. There’s a very good reason for this. In order for the club to travel its maximum arc, one arm must be extended at all times. If a player breaks his left elbow on the backswing or break his right elbow on the follow-through, he shortens his arc appreciably. And if he swings with a shorter act, he gives himself a shorter distance in which he can accelerate the speed with which his club is traveling.
The closer you keep your 2 arms together, the better they will operate as one unit, and when they operate as one unit, they tend to pull all of the elements of the swing together.
The upper part of the arms should be pressed very tightly against the sides of the chest. The elbows should be tucked in, not stuck out from the body.
A word of emphasis about the elbows. You want to press them as closely together as you can. When you do this (and the elbows are pointing properly to the hipbones) you will notice that the “pocket” of each elbow will lie in the center of the arm, at the midway point. The pockets will be facing toward the sky, as they should, not toward each other.
As your arms become schooled, you will the the feeling that the arms and the club form one firm unit.
Your weight should be a bit more on the heel than on the balls of your feet, so that, if you wanted to, you would be able to left your toes inside your shoes. The back remains as naturally erect as it is when you’re walking down a fairway. Do not crouch the shoulders over the ball. You bend your head down only by bending your neck, not your back or shoulders.
With practice, these movements will all blend harmoniously together and fuse into one smooth overall movement. A bad swing is tiring drudgery. A good swing is a physical pleasure.
On the backswing, the order of movement goes like this: hands, arms, shoulders, hips. On the downswing the order is just reversed.
The truth is that few golfers really complete their shoulder turn. They stop turning when the shoulders are about halfway around; then, in order to get the clubhead all the way back, they break the left arm. This is really a false backswing. It isn’t any backswing at all. A golfer can’t have control of the club or start down into the ball with any power or speed unless his left arm is straight to begin with. When he bends his left arm, he actually performs only a half swing and he forfeits half his potential power.
Turning the hips too soon is an error countless golfers make, and it’s a serious error. It destroys your chance of obtaining the power a correctly integrated swing gives you. As you begin your backswing, you must restrain your hips from moving until the turning of the shoulders start to pull the hips around.
It’s the difference in the amount of turn between the shoulders and hips that sets up this muscular tension. If the hips were turned as much as the shoulders, there’d be no tightening up at all.
There is one aspect of this first part of the swing that we should take up at this time: the plane. Oceans of words have been devoted to the arc of the swing but only the merest trickle to the plane.
There is no such thing as an absolute and standard plane for all golfers. The correct angle for each person’s plane depends on how he is built. A fellow whose legs are proportionately shorter than his arms, for example, necessarily creates a shallow angle for his plane.
The effect of this exercise is to exaggerate a fundamental fact and feeling you want to have about the full golf swing: the action of the arms is motivated by the movements of the body, and the hands consciously do nothing but maintaining firm grip on the club.
The hips initiate the downswing. They are the pivotal element in the chain action. Starting them first and moving them correctly — this one action practically makes the downswing. It creates early speed. It transfers the weight from the right foot to the left foot. It takes the hips out of the way and gives your arms plenty of room to pass.
The faster the hips move, the better. They can’t go too fast.
The surest way to wreck this remarkable machinery is to start the downswing with the hands instead of with the hips. Nearly all poor players do.
After you have initiated the downswing with the hips, you want to think of only one thing: hitting the ball.
A great many golfers think that classical style prescribes that, at impact and throughout the follow-through, the left leg should be as straight as a stick. Definitely not. If you keep your left leg straight, you prohibit your hips from making their full turn and restrict the whole free flow of your body to the left.
Not long after this — in the middle 1930s — I got the correct hip-turn action clear in my mind, mainly from studying newsreel movies of the best golfers in action. It wasn’t until 1938, though, that I grasped the concept of the plane.
In 1946 my attitude suddenly changed. I honestly began to feel that I could count on playing fairly well each time I went out, that there was no practical reason for me to feel I might suddenly “lose it all.” I would guess that what lay behind my new confidence was this: I had stopped trying to do a great many difficult things perfectly because it had become clear in my mind that this ambitious over-thoroughness was neither possible nor advisable, or even necessary. All you needed to groove were the fundamental movements — and there weren’t so many of them. Moreover, they were movements that were basically controllable and so could be executed fairly well whether you happened to be sharp or not so sharp that morning.
He will be essentially correct in the impact area if he learns to execute 3 major movements:
- He must initiate the downswing by turning the hips to the left.
- He must hit through to the finish of his swing in one cohesive movement, hitting with his hips, shoulders, arms and hands, in that order.
- He must start to supinate his left wrist just before impact.
This is, essentially, all he need to concentrate on, provided he is in the correct position at the top of his backswing.
Say a golfer picks his head up and mis-hits his shot badly. His partner will usually tell him, “You didn’t keep your head down,” as if this were the true cause of his poor shot. It isn’t. The true cause was some faulty movement in the golfer’s swing that made him pull his head up. If you are swinging correctly, you can’t look at anything but the ball.
The golfer-reader who has applied himself with some diligence to these lessons, spending at least a week on each, should already be well on his way to developing a correct, repeating swing. However, you cannot expect to acquire a real control of the correct movements in a month’s time.