Grace or Control?

The golfer wants to play by grace and control. He wants to play beyond himself and, at the same time, to play within himself. Our whole generation of the 1950s suffered this divided judgment of golf-as-grace and golf-as-control, and we expressed adulation for our era’s two best players, Hogan and Snead. We praised Hogan forat least it seemed so to ussubduing the game by the force of his will. We read with reverence his introductory masochistic proclamation in Power Golf (1948): I say that when you grip a golf club to take your first swing at a golf ball every natural instinct you have to accomplish this objective is wrong. Reverse every natural instinct you have and do just the opposite of what you are inclined to do and you will probably come very close to having a perfect golf swing. As much as we admired Hogan for his mechanical approach, our generation celebrated Snead for his natural swing. We took to his easier approach to golf, which counseled at the outset of his How To Play Golf (1946), “to err is human and it is natural to do incorrectly the movements that are required to swing the club successfully.” Earlier generations engaged in the same contradictory praise. They glorified Robert Jones for his natural play, often forgetting his strenuous years of youthful practice. At the same time, they praised Walter Travis (the first American player to triumph in the British Amateur after taking up golf at age 35) for his self-made swing and calculated play. This contradiction between grace and control was reiterated in the decades following the 1950s. As some players were praised for technique and control, others, like the young Arnold Palmer and Seve Ballesteros, were truly loved for their inspired and passionate style of play Palmer himself worried that golf had been given over to the graybeards of instruction who deny all the pleasure of “giving the ball a good healthy whack.” In the introduction to My Game and Yours (1963), he argued (perhaps thinking of Hogan and Nelson, mechanical players who led the age of emerging specialists) that golf teachers: have been lured into many complexities … people unfortunately do not take as naturally to swinging a golf stick, they usually have dif iculties at the beginning that make them a gullible audience… The game, therefore, lends itself to double-talk. We pros seem to be in possession of all sorts of occult secrets denied to mere common men… . I have seen golf books which were as dif icult to read as advanced textbooks in physics, which they in fact somewhat resembled. The division between the player’s conflicting views of golf as natural and mechanical is rooted in man himself. At one and the same time, the golfer wishes to play by grace and control. Simultaneously, he wants to play as an inspired artist and a coldblooded accountant. His pleasure itself can be lost in his effort to satisfy these two opposing impulses. Try as he can, he finds it difficult to yield to a wisdom that teaches: Accept a world in which grace is given, work is required, and results cannot be determined. “Practice makes perfect, or as nearly as perfect as golf can be; perfection makes assurance and concentration brings the mind into coordination with the body.… There is no order of relative importance. Each is as vital as the other.” Jerome Travis, The Fifth Estate “No matter how simple the correct golf stroke ought to be, the job of describing it in language everyone can understand is not so easy. ” Robert Jones, Bobby Jones on Golf