The Swing

As much as players count on favorite lucky clubs, hats, rituals, and amulets of one sort or another for their success, they understand that the good swing is the key to getting and keeping the grace. Faith in one’s swing must be every player’s first faith. With a good swing, one that the golfer can duplicate over and over, he can confront every shot as if he carries within him the most powerful magic. His swing can prevail no matter what situation arises. The player need only choose the right club, and either choke it down, alter the loft, and slightly alter the pace of his swing and length of his follow-through, and the rest will take care of itself. As if he were giving advice to meet life itself, an old caddie instructed his player, who was faced with hitting a long, high, faded three iron needing to clear a run of traps and roll up to the green between two rough-covered mounds: “Take the club back full, trust in God, and let it fly.” A swing of great rhythm is a matter of beauty, but any functionally sound swing that allows the golfer to play the game free of a war with himself greatly enhances the pleasure of the game. The good swing permits the player to enter the inner sanctum of golf’s pleasures. He knows what it means to hit the ball solidly, crisply, delicately, and powerfully. He experiences his own body as good, and he delights in its unity and harmony. Grip, stance, address, backswing, downswing, impact, and follow-through become one. He senses his body, legs, and hands flowing together. Just as the dancer is joined to his music, so the golfer, at his best, is joined to the flow of his swing. Freed from errant impulses and instincts and from exaggerated and abrupt messages from mind to body, the player can let his body perform what his eye has seen. The good swing is the holy grail of golf. To attain it, golfers practice, take lessons, lose their jobs, leave their families, and humble themselves by groveling before endless, useless, and stupid tips. In bathrooms, on airplanes, and in the waiting rooms of barber shops and trust departments of banks, the golf addict scours golf magazines for tips as precious as rare gems. Especially in the dead of winter, for example, the golfer ponders his swing’s improvement. Reason does not deflect the ardent golfer from believing that he can attain the coveted grooved swing. In his most desperate condition, the golfer loses his immunity to the most irrational ideas. I remember when our assistant club professional, Ralph Yanqui, called my friend Ron Helveston and I from behind the caddie shack over to the driving range to watch him hit what he called his new wonder shots. “I’ve got it,” he declared, and then proceeded to hit several shots with his seven iron. While they looked like the normal low-flying, slightly fat sevens he usually hit, he declared each shot to be more glorious than the preceding one. He explained that by reverting from the Vardon overlap grip to a baseball grip, the shots he struck were not flying with backspin, but were actually spinning like bullets. I jeered at his declaration, instinctively suspicious of anyone who claimed he “had it,” and I also didn’t believe that even Ralph Yanqui could change the laws of physics. My friend Ron, more docile than I and zealous of attention, accepted Ralph’s new-found secret. Ron saw Ralph’s shots spinning like bullets, while I laughed. Ron was rewarded by being allowed to hit balls with Ralph on the range. Ralph added to my punishment: “One day Ron will be on the tour, and you won’t.” A few days later, I noted that both he and Ron had quietly reverted to the Vardon overlap grip, and I never heard again of golf balls spinning like bullets. Every player of the game knows a fellow player who is a gnostic: someone who believes the key to the game is locked in its secrets. Bobby Jones’s father was such a gnostic. No sooner would Bobby report to his father’s law firm than his father, a dedicated golfer, would beckon him through the connecting office door to show him “something I discovered the other day,” and ask Bobby for his opinion. Bobby commented that his father “always seemed to think he was on the verge of discovering the secret of the game. It cost him untold agony, but he loved it. The secret he had shown me in the morning never worked in the afternoon, but he always discovered a new one on the seventeenth hole and went home happy and with something to show me next morning.” Jones himself worked through hundreds of golf tips. Many were simple and modest: Mentally prepare yourself to play golf before you start out; practice before you play; don’t rush to the first tee; swing within yourself during the first few holes. Other tips were subtler. For instance, the putt that has the greatest chance of sinking is the putt that dies at the hole, for it can use the whole cup; whereas the putt that is hit firmly must hit the back of cup to go in and, if missed, may leave you with a long putt back. Some tips became the basic elements of his swing and he claimed that they were keys to all good swings. For instance, Jones taught that a full pivot should be taken off the ball and that the left side should not be stopped prematurely on the downswing. At some point in the backswing, Jones specifically instructed, the player must pick up his club and take it fully back. Jones concluded a chapter on instructions: Swinging the clubhead back in a flattened arc around the knees, … makes it inevitable that the striking motion should become a rolling or a pushing action. The proper stroke, if I may say so, is a slicing action which does not slice across the line of play, but sends his club straight through the ball on the line to the hole. Tips about the swing abound. One recent book has for part of its title, “Over a Hundred Secrets of the Big-money Pros.” For nearly a century, there has been a growing swell of golf instructional literature. With a lot of text and a few photos, or a lot of photos and little text, they depict the swing as a set of steps from address to follow-through, which are to be learned step by step from start to finish. They imply that the swing, a matter of flow and rhythm, can be cut into pieces like so many still photographs. Some of these books aim at power (they usually stress a large leg and shoulder turn), while others stress rhythm and flow by concentrating on the fullness and pace of the swing. Some spend a lot of time on grip and set-up, while others spend time on take-away and position at the top of the backswing. As suggested earlier, some texts stress the natural swing, while others, like those by Hogan and Nicklaus, preach the methodical swing. The novice can emerge from an encounter with all the riches of these suggestions impoverished of all instinctsno longer certain (and painfully befuddled) whether he should meet, stroke, sweep, or hit the ball.
Some basic teaching texts strive for simplicity. My favorite is Byron Nelson’s primer. It was the first golf book I read. Long on photographs and short on explanation, it appealed to my youthful taste. Aside from a few essentials on grip and address, it proposes a slight alteration of stance (from open to closed) as one goes from nine iron to driver. Other texts have embedded in them the player’s own favorite tips, even though they did little more than justify the commercial venture of publishing a text. For example, I believe that Hogan’s technique of the extreme pronation of his wrists set back a whole generation of good players. And I would guess that Tommy Armour’s insistence that at the last moment one hit as hard as one can with one’s right hand accounted for innumerable outof-bounds shots wherever his book was read. All tips about the swing finally betray the golfer and rob him of both his swing and any pleasure he might experience, unless frustration is, as there is some reason to believe, his secret delight. Advice about the swing fails for a variety of reasons. The most obvious reason is found in the differences between human bodies. Proportions, muscles, and rhythms vary from player to player, and so must good swings. Recognizing this, the great Harry Vardon said that everyone should choose his own putting style and that even the best putters (among whom the older Vardon surely did not number) should not be imitated. Vardon even suggested that humans are like the capricious clock that, when turned on its side, ticks well. His concluding advice was even more humbling: that often great improvements have been made in a player’s putting results when an accidental hand injury causes the player to grip the club less tightly. Vardon himself experienced that the defiant short putt (when perhaps eye and body are too close to the cup to aim) has defeated the greatest golfers. A second reason why tips about the swing are suspect is that golf requires more than one stroke. A swing that is good for one shot may, indeed, not be good for another. Even if a player has one essential swing, he makes a different stroke with his woods and ironsthe shots he sweeps and the ones he hits. There is a significant difference between driving off a tee and playing a fairway wood off a tight lie; between keeping a long iron low and sending one high and fading; between a punched and a full iron; or between a soft and fluffed pitch and one hit low, with a lot of backspin. Swings have varied throughout the history of the game to accommodate changing styles, conditions, and technologies. Early golfers needed a longer, fuller, and more patient swing to account for the torque of the wood shaft of the older clubs, while modern players, in possession of metal or composite-material shafts, can slash at the ball. Confronted by heavy winds, traditional seaside players, needing to keep shots down, found the draw hook the preferable shot. Modern players, by contrast, who fire shots over obstacles at greens that take backspin are more likely to prefer high, faded shots, especially from their mid-irons down. In the December 1992 issue of Golf Illustrated, Johnny Miller claimed to have distinguished between two different swings: that of his and Nicklaus’s generation of the ’60s and ’70s, and that of newer players. The older swing, which he calls “the reverse C” (describing the player’s body at impact with the ball), relied on driving legs and had a fixed center; whereas the modern swing, which moves weight and head off the ball to the right side, is flatter and depends for its acceleration on returning the body to the ball and onto the left side that more quickly straightens and turns. Beyond differences in swings, golf tips usually go awry for other and more subtle reasons. There is, first of all, a set of problems involved with language: How well can language describe the golf swing, and, even to the degree it is successful, how well does the body understand and accept a logic of command. Talking to one’s body is an art, an art of no complete masters. It must be recognized that bodies, like minds, have moods; they can be keen or groggy, gentle or aggressive, nervous or relaxed. Some days the parts of a player’s body are in harmony, while other days, hands, eyes, and legs behave like strangers to each other. Bodies often need hours to be taught the simplest golf instructions, and, if learned at all, they are often promptly forgotten on the course. In contrast to bodies at rest, bodies in motion are particularly adverse to instruction. Anything other than the gentlest and simplest message will set them in open rebellion. Defiantly, they jerk, stop, and do the opposite of what they are commanded during the two seconds of the backswing and the one second interval of the downswing.