Yes, you can play better golf. Anyone can, once he gives himself a chance by learning what to do and how to do it. You who score over 100 can break 100. The 90 player can get into the 80's. The high 80's can drop to the low 80's. And the low-80 man can break the barrier into the 70's.

And don't tell us this is a gross exaggeration, already dis­proved by the frustrated millions who play this most fascinat­ing of games. We assure you it is not an exaggeration. It has not been disproved. It is true.

We are not saying that all you have to do is read this book and go out the next afternoon and knock ten strokes off your score. What we are saying is that anybody who diligently applies himself to the principles laid down here, can cut a startling number of shots from his game.

The diligent application will involve several things. It will mean changing your mental attitude, for one. It will mean changing your swing. It will mean the determination to practice. And it will mean the time to play golf from two to as much as four times a week.

This price is not exorbitant. Sweat will be demanded, yes; but blood and tears are not involved. If you are willing to pay the price you can improve your game remarkably. You can play winning golf in your own handicap circle, and we don't care whether that circle is now around 82 or 112. You can drop to a faster circle. Depending on your present altitude, you can cut from five to fifteen strokes from your score.

You may have wondered, in a moment of idle reflection about this game, why more people don't play better golf than they do. It should be a simple game. You are hitting a ball that doesn't move. You are swinging clubs that have been designed with a great deal of care, involving time, money, and engineering skill. No one does anything to hinder you, either, or even to distract you.

One reason most of our scores stay high is our mental ap­proach to the game. We are beaten before we start. The game has defeated the player for so many generations that the player now has an inferiority complex that would defy the combined skills of Freud, Jung, and Adler. To the man who habitually goes around in 93, the thought of breaking into the 70's is the height of absurdity.

A complete reorientation is necessary. This has been ac­complished in other sports, particularly in track and field. The four-minute mile, the seven-foot high jump, the sixty-foot shot-put are only three examples. It would take a super­man, the track experts said, to run a mile in under four minutes. But once Dr. Roger Bannister did it a new plateau was established, onto which many other milers soon proceeded to climb. Back in 1920 Dick Landon won the Olympic high jump with 6 feet 4% inches. At Rome in 1960 a leap of 7 feet 14 inch was good for only third place.

The point here is that mental barriers were broken, as well as those of time and altitude. The 96 golfer has a similar mental barrier, and it, too, must be shattered.

Naturally, Dr. Bannister and the other pioneers in the track and field record-breaking did not set their marks merely by thinking they could. The new marks stemmed from im* proved training methods and, especially in the field events, from vastly better techniques.

Here we come very close to golf. Golf is a game of techniques. Training, in the sense of physical conditioning, is relatively not of great importance, unless we are engaged in tournament play. The average man, once he gets out on the course a few times in the spring, finds no physical difficulty in playing an eighteen-hole round. Often he is fresh enough to play eighteen more holes, or nine, anyway.

But technique is something vastly different. A siege o£ training that would bring a man to peak physical condition probably would not knock one stroke off his score for eighteen holes. But a 50 per cent improvement in his technique of hitting the ball—his swing—could drop his score from the 90's into the 70's.
That technique is what we are looking for so desperately. Why don't we have it?

The answer, in the large general sense, is because the golf swing is extremely subtle. The essential actions are small actions, not readily seen with the naked eye, and from which attention is constantly diverted by the larger, more spectacu­lar actions which surround them.

A second reason is that golf always has had the peculiar faculty of making its players think they were doing things that they were not doing at all, and vice versa. This led, a long time ago, to the establishment of a great many theories and principles which seemed sound and reasonable but which were altogether wrong.

* For example. Around the time of World War I the late Jim Dante, one of the authors of The Nine Bad Shots of Golf, was a young assistant pro at the Baltusrol Golf Club in Springfield, New Jersey. Harry Vardon, the great English professional, was touring America. He played a round at Baltusrol and explained his theories and his teaching methods to the Baltusrol pro, the late George Low. Low later passed them on to his assistants.

"But Mr. Low," objected the observant Dante, "Vardon doesn't hit the ball the way he says to hit it."

"The hell with how Vardon hits the ball!" roared Low. "You teach the way Vardon says, or look for another job."

Eventually the advent of slow-motion pictures showed that Dante was right. Vardon did not hit the ball as he said he did, which was as he thought he did. If the great Harry had ever swung at a ball with a throw of the club head from the top, as though to drive a stake into the ground (which was what he believed), he would never have won any tourna­ment, much less six British Opens and one American.

This insidious incitement to self-delusion is without the slightest doubt one of the fundamental characteristics of golf. It accounts, perhaps more than any other one thing, for the painful slowness in the advancement of technique.

Just how slow this has been can be shown by one other example. Golf enjoyed wide popularity in Scotland as long ago as the middle of the fifteenth century. So many Scots were playing it that it interfered with the more important pursuit of archery, which was the means of national defense. In 1457, not long after the death of Joan of Arc and thirty-five years before Columbus sailed for the New World, the now famous edict of the Scottish parliament was issued which "decreted and ordained that wapinshawingis [passage or ex­hibition of arms] behalden by the lordis and baronis spirituale and temporale, four times in the zeir; and that the futeball and golf be utterly cryit doun, and nocht usit.. .."

With all the golf being played then, it is inconceivable that the Scots were not trying to figure out the best way to stand up to the ball, to grip the club, and to swing it.

Yet it was five hundred years later, in the middle of the twentieth century, before the teaching committee of the Professional Golfers' Association of America finally elicited enough agreement among its members to put in writing what it considered to be, and what it entitled: "The Five Basic Principles of the Swing."
Even allowing for the many and radical changes in balls and clubs, which have called for somewhat different methods over the centuries, it is still amazing that the basic principles of the swing escaped detection. But since they did, it is not amazing that so many widely differing theories have taken root and grown—to the eternal frustration of the average player.

This brings us back to our original thought: Why don't more people play better golf than they do?

The blunt truth is that they don't because the golf swing is heavily overlaid with a sludge of fallacy, misunderstand­ing, faulty theory, myth, and just plain ignorance. So thick is this coating that it is a wonder anyone ever gets through it and down to the hard, clean mechanics of the sound swing.
 
It is this sludge, most of which has been covering the swing for so long that it now acts as an insulation, that we will cut away in this book.
Once the myths and fallacies are exploded and the true machinery of the swing is laid bare for all to see and under­stand, golf becomes a much less difficult game.

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