The fallacies of golf are many and of various kinds. Some deal with the mental approach, some with a specific action, others with the mechanical principles which underlie the golf swing.

We will not attempt here to make a complete list. We will cover the two dozen or more that are most prevalent and have caused and still cause the most damage, and particu­larly those which must be exploded thoroughly if you are to assimilate the new thoughts, principles, and actions we will give you in this book.

Watch carefully. The fuse is lit!

"Relax." Rubbish. This fallacy is so old it should have been dead long ago. But it is a hardy perennial, and it has come down to us through generations of golf teachers right to the present day.

On the very face of it the advice is foolish. When you swing a golf club you are taking a comparatively violent action. Is there any other violent action you take while you are relaxed? Stop and think. Of course there isn't. It's im­possible. Do Ben Hogan or Cary Middlecoff or Arnold Palmer look relaxed when they take their stance or hit those prodigious drives? If they are, why are their lips compressed and their features contorted, as countless pictures show they are?

It is easy to see how "Relax" became fixed in the language of the golf teacher. He gives lessons to a great number of middle-aged men and women who never in their lives have done anything of an athletic nature. When these people get on the lesson tee they are so self-conscious and frightened that they tense up to the point, almost, of absolute rigidity. In order for them to swing the club at all, the pro has to loosen them up to some extent. He tells them to relax. Then, since that advice has a beneficial effect, he promptly adopts an unsound line of thought. If a little is good, he thinks, a lot must be much better. He now makes a fetish of relaxa­tion. Everybody has to relax as soon as he takes hold of a club.

We do not want a rigidity of the rigor mortis variety. But we do want a firmness, a feeling of muscular movement under constant control, ready for instant response.

Nor do we want a mental relaxation either. Don't get the idea your mind should be a complete blank when you step up to a shot. If it is, you might as well be asleep. The mind should be alert, thinking about what should be done and what should not be done, which side the trouble lies on, which way the wind is blowing, whether the tactical situ­ation of the match or round calls for safety or boldness, and what adjustments, if any, should be made in the golf swing.

So forget everything you have heard about relaxing. For the purposes of playing good golf it is sheer rubbish.

"Use a light grip." This is a first cousin of "Relax." They go together, naturally. If you are completely relaxed as you address the ball, you are sure to have a light grip. One of our modern masters, Sam Snead, wants us to grip the club with no more pressure than we would use in handling a knife and fork. The immortal Bob Jones had a grip so light, in his heyday, that his left hand opened at the top of the golf swing, and he wanted it to open.

In the face of such advocates, we would certainly be the last to say that you can't play good golf with a light grip, but we do say, emphatically, that better and more consistent golf will be played by the average golfer when he adopts a tight grip. And by tight we mean tight all the way through, from address to the end of the follow-through.

It is noticeable that the top pros of the modern era are all firm-to-tight grippers, and that their hands (Snead's included) never loosen, even a little bit, at the top of the golf swing.

We do not mean that the grip should be so tight that it stiffens and cramps the muscles of the wrists and forearms. But, with practice, a surprisingly tight grip can be taken with the fingers and hands without stiffening the forearms. That is the grip we want. And it must be kept that way all through the golf swing.

"Be loose." This is the second cousin of "Relax." At first glance they may look like twins, but there is a difference. Your golf swing can be loose even though you are not wholly relaxed. This becomes possible with a big hip turn on the backswing, a sway, bad wrist and foot action, and a certain type of grip.

Back in the 1920's and 1930's such a golf swing was thought to be highly desirable, and the fellow who had it was spoken of, admiringly, as being "loose as ashes."

Regardless of what the pros write or say, their swings in the 1950's were very definitely tight. They were shorter, more compact, with less movement of fewer parts. This tight golf swing was gradually developed by the American touring pros, whose very livelihood depended on how long and how straight they could hit the ball.

Tension, once thought to be the deadly enemy of good golf, now is rightly regarded as something to be striven for. A restricted turn of the hips on the backswing, along with a full turn of the shoulders, a different wrist action, and a tight grip all combine to produce the muscular tension that, when released, gives greater power to the golf swing.

When a golf swing is loose there are several parts of the body that are just going along for the ride, as it were; they con­tribute nothing. The pros today want no parts of the body to go into the action which are not working parts. And isn't this a sound principle?

"Take the club back inside." The idea here is based on producing the inside-out golf swing. The thought is that, if the club should approach the ball from the inside on the down­swing, why not facilitate matters by taking the club back well on an inside line?

Going back sharply on the inside is something that is not taught, we are happy to say, by many pros. It is something that the average club player figures out for himself. He can't hit the ball with an inside-out golf swing, but he thinks he can do it by going back on the inside. So, in his efforts, and backed by a lot of misdirected determination, he comes back more and more to the inside, until he is almost whipping the club around his knees. Yet he still hits from the outside, and he can't understand it.

The fallacy in this is that the inside-out swing is not pro­duced by the way the club is taken back, but by the way it is brought down. You can take the club back on the outside and still bring it down on the inside, hitting the ball with an inside-out golf swing.

"The club follows the same path coming down that it takes going up." The thinking here is closely allied to the last misconception. It is surprising how many people, who should know better, still think that the club head follows only a single path going up and coming down.

The club head does no such thing, in the correct golf swing. It comes down inside the path it took going up. This is accomplished not by any tricky hand action or even by con­scious effort, but by the correct hip and (especially) shoulder actions at the beginning of the downswing. With these ac­tions the club automatically shifts the golf swing plane to the inside. When these hip and shoulder actions are not correct, they shift the plane from the inside to the outside coming down.

But the conception of the club head following a single path is astonishingly common. We knew one intelligent young fellow—he hadn't yet played much golf—who carried this thought to a ridiculous extreme. His idea was that he would hit the ball straight if he kept the plane of the golf swing —both backward and forward—completely vertical. You have never seen, we assure you, such fantastic gyrations as this misdirected effort brought forth. You have never seen such an upright golf swing either. We mention this merely to show how far off base an intelligent but uninformed person can get when he starts to think about golf.

"Pause at the top." This has been a much-discussed action for a long time, some theorists favoring it and some con­demning it. The general argument for it is that it gives the club a chance to change direction. It is an established me­chanical principle that any object moving in one direction must come to a complete stop before moving in the opposite direction. This the club head certainly does, whether or not we see it or are conscious of it.

Thus far those who take this position are right. But what the average player thinks of when he thinks of a pause at the top, is that not only does the club stop for an instant, but that everything stops—shoulders, trunk, hips, knees. In effect, he freezes.

This is wrong. What happens at the top of the golf swing is that while the club is stationary for a fraction of a second before it changes direction, the lower part of the body is moving—moving into the downswing. This movement, ac­tually, begins before the club gets all the way back. The pictures of any good golfer show this action and show it invariably. There can be no argument about it.

On the other hand, when a player freezes at the top he is almost certain to destroy whatever rhythm he had in his swing and to ruin the golf swing itself. Advocates of the pause claim it helps the player to start the downswing in a leisurely manner. Nonsense. To freeze at the top causes the average player to do just the opposite. He takes off like lightning on the downswing, because he has lost motion and rhythm and must then move from, as it were, a "standing start."

What about Middlecoff? you will ask. Doesn't he have a pronounced pause at the top? The answer is that Middle­coff's club is stationary at the top longer than the other top-flighters', but his knees and hips are moving. The latter you don't notice; you are looking only at his club. The thing that makes the Middlecoff pause so obvious is that while the doctor moves the lower part of his body as early as the other pros, his shoulders move a shade later, and as long as his shoulders don't move, the club doesn't move.

So forget about the pause at the top. If your golf swing is right you will get all the pause that is necessary, and without trying.

"Turn the hips to the left." This well-meant advice has spoiled more golf swings than all the caddies who ever rattled a bag of clubs.

What is meant here is that the first movement of the down­swing should be a turning of the hips to the left. They are turned to the right as the body turns and coils to the right on the backswing, and as the weight goes over to the right leg. Therefore, you have been told, start the downswing by turning the hips to the left.

This instruction has caused its widespread damage because it has come from such high places. It is pronounced by no less an authority than Ben Hogan, who even writes of it as "spinning the hips."

But to turn the hips to the left as the first movement of the downswing is asking for disaster. Nothing less.

There is no telling how many home-club pros all over the world have had to put the brakes on hip-spinning among their members. The poor pupil, getting to the top of the golf swing, turns his hips violently to the left, leaves his weight on his right leg, brings the club down across the ball, hits a horrible shot, and then argues with the pro.

The turning of the hips does take place, of course. But they turn naturally, and they turn only after they have first moved laterally to the left. You will find, if you try to move your hips laterally as far as you can, that they will turn as they move toward the limit of extension. In fact, you can hardly stop them from turning.

If the lateral movement is not made, the weight will be very liable to stay over on the right leg instead of shifting to the left, as it must. If the weight doesn't move ahead of the golf swing, the shot will be ruined.

What actually takes place is a lateral turn of the hips.

It is quite possible that with some, as Hogan says, the lateral movement takes place involuntarily and that all they have to think about is the turning. This is undoubtedly true in his particular case and in those of a few others who keep a great deal of weight on the left leg during the backswing. But in the vast majority the reverse is true—the turn is in­voluntary but the lateral shift must be a conscious effort.

Another thought that may help you is that it is physically possible to turn the hips without moving them laterally, but it is almost impossible to move them to the limit laterally without turning them.

The importance of the lateral movement was stressed by Dow Finsterwald when we once asked him to name the first movement of the downswing.

"Why, a turn of the hips to the left," answered the former PGA champion.

"You mean," we said, "just a turn? Nothing else?"

"Well, no," he replied, "you have to move them to the left too. If you didn't, you'd leave too much of your weight on your right leg. You have to get the weight over."

The actual effort many players make to do nothing more than turn the hips brings about two actions that will ruin any golf swing. The turn, without the lateral movement, leaves the weight on the right leg, as we have seen, and it throws the arc of the swing outside the line of flight, so that the club head comes to the ball from the outside in, instead of from the inside out, as it must if a good shot is to be hit.

So don't think of turning your hips. Think of moving them laterally. It's a lateral turn, of which you will hear much more later.

"Keep the head still." This impossible advice has been given in one form or another for about as long as there has been any literature on golf: "Keep your head down." "Keep your head still." "Keep your head fixed." "Keep your eye on the ball." "Don't lift your head." "Don't look up." You've heard these directions a thousand times.

If they would only say, "Keep your head back," they would be much closer to being right. Because the head does have to stay back, whether or not it moves.

But the head does move. A careful study of pictures of the best golfers in the modern game reveals a very definite pattern of movement. The head stays steady on the back-swing, or perhaps turns on the neck a little to the right. Once the downswing gets well under way, though, the head moves to the right and comes down. It doesn't move ten or twelve inches, nothing like that. But it does move, con­sistently, in the right-and-downward pattern from one to three inches, perhaps more.

This movement is not an idiosyncrasy of certain individ­uals. In the correct golf swing it must take place, and the pictures show that it does. Arnold Palmer, Bill Casper, Middlecoff, Snead, Hogan, Finsterwald, Byron Nelson—they all have it.

It is caused by the rocking shoulder movement that takes place, a rocking that brings the left shoulder up and the right shoulder down, and by the bowing-out of the body toward the target as the weight is moved far over to the left. The rocking shoulder movement causes the head to move to the right, the bowing-out of the body brings the head down.

These actions of the head will be explained in greater detail later, as we get into the Four Magic Moves. Mean­while, don't let anyone convince you that the head doesn't move in a good golf swing. It has to.

"Start down with a pull of the left arm." If you've ever read any golf instruction you're pretty sure to have read this. Forget it. Starting the downswing by pulling down with the left arm can ruin your golf swing just as effectively as spinning your hips.

The pull-down technique, if such it can be called, is vir­tually certain to throw the golf swing outside as well as start it down too soon from the top. It also starts the downswing in the wrong place and with the wrong part of the body. The first move from the top is by the hips, which are close to the axis of the turning body.

Any early action from the top by the arms is sure to bring about two other unwanted results—an early hit instead of a late one and an immediate loosening of the tension that has been built up during the backswing and which we want to hold as long as possible.

This pull-down idea has been repeated so often by so many top players in their writings that we feel they have come to believe they actually do start the downswing this way. What happens, we think, is that the top player is coiled so tight at the top that when he makes his hip movement to start down, it exerts a pull (which he feels) on his left arm, and he thus can easily believe it is the left-arm pull, rather than the hip, which starts everything. Certainly no pro is going to advocate any movement which he knows is wrong. The mistake is an honest one, but it is still a mistake.

We are also certain that some of the top-name players believe the arm pull is the thing to teach, whether they believe in it or not.

One of the best of the women pros was holding a clinic at a club a few years ago, and she was telling the girls to start down with a pull of the left arm.

Afterward we were talking to her about the golf swing.

"Do you, yourself," we asked, "start down with a pull of your left arm?"

"No," she answered.

"Well, do you start with a pull of your right arm or right hand?"

"No," she replied. "In fact, I don't start down by pulling anything."

The left-arm pull-down just seems to be something that many pros feel ought to be said.

"Have the face open at the top." The old-timers make a fetish of this position. The early pros who came to this coun­try from Scotland and England were open-face swingers, which means merely that at the top of the golf swing the face of the club is vertical with the ground and the toe of the club points directly down at the ground. This was the classic method during the early years of golf in this country. So strongly was it stressed that there are still today pros who teach it and pupils who feel that the toe of the club should point down.

The theory was that the open face would work to prevent a hook and that the face would be closed or squared as it came into the ball either by the body action or by rolling the wrists into the shot. We have read it both ways and it cer­tainly is a fact that the old pros taught a rolling wrist action. They rolled to the right on the backswing, which was called supination, and rolled to the left as they came through the ball, which was known as pronation. Books have been written on pronation.

Certainly the ball can be hit this way, and was by a great many immortal players. But it's the hard way to do it. The easy way, the modern way, will be described in a subsequent chapter.

"Don't let the body or hands get ahead of the club." You rarely hear this advice any more, but just in case you have and it's sticking in the back of your head somewhere, forget it.

What it meant was that the body, the hands, and the club should all go through the ball together. Once slow-motion pictures of the golf swing began to gain circulation it was seen, of course, that the body always was ahead of the club, way ahead of it, on the downswing, and that the hands led the club all the way down, with the club barely catching up at the ball.

"Be comfortable." Ah, yes, by all means be comfortable— and play bad golf. If you are learning the game or if you play it fairly well but want to improve, forget any idea of being comfortable. The golf swing feels comfortable and easy and simple to the expert, but only because he has swung the club so much.

The fact is, the golf swing, especially at the top, calls for a strained and certainly not comfortable position. You are deliberately turning and winding yourself up on your backswing and trying to attain a stretched, tension-filled position of the body. This isn't and cannot be, in the accepted sense, comfortable. As a matter of fact, the unconscious action of millions of pupils as they near the top of the golf swing is a movement that enables them to be comfortable. This move­ment, which is a bending of the left elbow and a cocking-back of the left wrist, enables them to get the club up and and back—even to overswing it—without being uncomfort­able. This movement has to be fought against. So don't try to be comfortable. For the average golfer, the correct golf swing should be uncomfortable.

"Break the wrists late." One more sacred tenet bites the dust. Since the beginning of golfing time, almost, we have been admonished to break the wrists late on the backswing. This enables us to take the club back low to the ground and get a big arc. There is no gainsaying the fact that thousands of great golfers have done exactly this.

We do say, however, that it is not at all necessary and, further, that it does more harm than good.

There is no particular value in taking the club back low to the ground, except that it helps transfer the weight to the right leg. It isn't necessary for the transfer, though. So far as getting a big arc is concerned, that is strictly a fallacy. The length of the left arm determines the arc of the golf swing —the longer the arm the bigger the arc. The arc the club head follows is something else and something that is mis­takenly regarded as important. Why should it be? The arc of the club head is decidedly smaller on the downswing than it is on a conventional backswing. We don't try for a big arc on the downswing; in fact, we try to have it as small as possible. So what is the value of a big arc on the back-swing? You tell us.

The late wrist break also leads invariably to an open face at the top of the golf swing, which is something modern golfers have proved to be not only undesirable but dangerous. Since the pros have been moving toward a square or even some­what closed face at the top, they have been breaking earlier. For the golf swing we will teach in this book, a late break is poison. If you have one, prepare to get rid of it.

"Swing the club head." Here is one of the most plausible principles golf teachers have ever come up with. Because it is so plausible, it is one of the most dangerous and mis­leading.

How can it possibly be wrong? you ask. We hit the ball with the club head, don't we? We have to get it to the ball. What do we do with it if we don't swing it?
As a quick explanation of what to do, we will say this: Swing your hands, not the club head.

Actually, that is the conclusion we reach in our explora­tion of this fallacy. Let's start at the beginning and put the horse in front of the cart, where he belongs.
Certainly we hit the ball with the club head, and of course the club head swings to get to the ball. But where do most of our troubles in golf originate? From efforts to manipulate, to do something with, the head of the club. We know we are going to hit the ball with it and we know the club head has to move rapidly to drive the ball very far. So immedi­ately, from the top of the backswing, we try to move the club head. Our thoughts are on the club head, our efforts are centered on the club head.

The result is that we get the club head moving too fast too early. It gets ahead, relatively, of the unwinding body. It gets outside the proper plane. The wrist cock is used up early. So we hit, time after time, too soon and from the outside in. All because we are trying to do something with the club head.
That is the natural tendency in hitting a golf ball. Think­ing of the club head and trying to manipulate it are instinctive actions. Now, if we are taught that the secret of golf is to "swing the club head," our instincts are not only encouraged but reinforced.

What we have to realize is that the head of the club is only a tool, and it does something to something else as we direct it. But this direction comes from our bodies and our hands, and those are the things we must think of. When you are driving an automobile and you turn a corner, you do not think of the front wheels of the car. You are conscious only of the pressure your hands exert on the steering wheel to guide the car where you want it to go, and of the move­ment of your feet to give it the necessary power.

If we do with our bodies and our hands what we should do with them, the head of the club will take care of itself. We don't have to think of it at all.

This is going to be very hard for most of you to get into your heads. But make up your minds to get it in, if you hope to improve your golf.

Where, you probably will demand, is the power to come from that makes the club head go fast at impact if we do not deliberately apply it?

The power, briefly, comes from the action of the body, supplemented in the later stages of the downswing by an effort to speed up the hands. This effort,
however, must not be confused with an effort to speed up the club head. It is merely an attempt to make the hands travel faster along the arc they follow as they come down past the position of the ball. The club head will take care of itself.

This, as we said, is a rather brief explanation of why you should not try to swing the club head or even think of it. Our reasons will be further substantiated on later pages, when we get into the mechanical principles that govern the golf swing.

Meanwhile, forget about swinging the club head or doing anything else with it. We will show you later that this eternal preoccupation with the club head is one of the worst sins of golf.

"Hit against a firm left side." To anyone who ever has given much thought to the golf swing, this always has been some­thing of a puzzle. We have been told on the one hand to hit against a firm left side and, on the other hand, to turn the hips and get the left hip out of the way so it won't block the golf swing. Can both instructions be right? Obviously not.

The image conveyed by the advice to hit against a firm left side is of the player stopping the unwinding of his body after he starts the downswing, holding the left side rigid, and then somehow hitting past it. This can be done, we admit, but no good shot could ever come out of it. Whether this is exactly what is meant by those recommending it, we cannot say, for they never have been able to explain to us just what they do mean.

Hitting against a firm left side is a myth. No good golfer ever does it. Pictures, both motion and sequence, show the left side moving steadily to the left on the downswing and then turning away from the direction line of the shot. The left side, in practically all good swings, bows out toward the target before the club reaches and passes the ball. With some players, former Open champion Dick Mayer for instance, this bowing-out is extremely pronounced. It is in Middlecoff too, and Hogan, Snead, Palmer, and Casper all show it.

What happens, of course, is that the left side, in a good golf swing, starts and stays far ahead of the club. It is always pulling and stretching. Hence there is always a feeling of great tension in it. It is this feeling, without a doubt, that long ago gave rise to the belief that we must keep the left side firm and hit against it.

Actually the left side is automatically kept taut and stretched in the correct golf swing, but it is moved far out of the way of the down swinging arms. These arms and hands do not hit "against" that left side. The left side gets out of their way, so they can hit through toward the target. And only by getting the left side out of the way can the full, free speed of the club ever be developed.

So throw out one more old piece of trash, one of the many that have doubtless kept you from realizing the potential you have as a golfer.
"Snap your wrists into the shot." The carnage this clinker has caused over the generations is staggering.

There is probably not one golfer who has not been urged, at some stage in his struggles, to snap his wrists. It is always well-meant advice, of course. The giver thinks he is being helpful. The recipient dutifully tries—and tries and tries. But the wrists won't snap.

The advice is sheer drivel.

In exploding this little number we will first define what is meant by snapping the wrists. To the golfer it means a very quick forward motion of the hands, hinging at the wrist joints, just before the club head strikes the ball. The hands are used much as we might use them in snapping a whip.

It is generally felt that the good golfers use this snap­ping action to whip the head of the club into the ball at greater speed. If the good golfers do it, why shouldn't the poor ones? As a consequence, the effort to put the snap into practice results in the player trying to move the head of the club with extra effort. It is something like what happens when we try to swing the club head, only now we are trying to snap it. All this results in is an even earlier expendage of the wrist cock, an earlier loss of power, a quicker hit, usually from the outside, and a worse shot. Again it is the preoccupation with the club head that is the root of the trouble. We are trying, by snapping the wrists, to snap the club head.

In reality a snapping action of a sort does take place in the good golf swing, but it takes place as the result of a mechani­cal principle, not through any effort on the part of the player.

Halfway down, in a good golf swing, the angle formed by the club and the left arm is still about what it was at the top. It is approximately a right angle. As the hands get nearer the ball the speed of the club increases and the angle begins to open up. As the hands reach the ball the head of the club is traveling much, much faster and the angle is almost 180 degrees. At a point about eighteen inches to two feet past the position of the ball (which is now in flight), the club head passes the hands and causes the right hand to climb over the left.

The climbing-over is a rather violent action, and it is definitely felt in the wrists. The later the hit, the sharper it is, too. So fast is the sequence of events, however, that the climbing-over action seems to take place before the ball is hit, and it feels as if the wrists were being snapped.

This feeling is one of the reasons, we are certain, for the prolonged popularity of the unfortunate advice. Coupled with it is the fact that for a long, long time it was believed we had to pronate. This was a deliberate turning-over of the wrists as they came into the ball. With this action the old-timers were positive they were snapping their wrists. It is just one more example of the golfer's self-delusion.

Any reader can almost prove the foregoing explanation by taking a practice golf swing. With no ball to bother with, hold the wrist cock as long as you can but make no effort to snap your wrists. If your golf swing is anywhere nearly correct you will feel the fast climb-over action.

For complete proof, though, there is nothing to approach the sequence pictures of a seven-year-old child's golf swing, shown in Photo G. The catching-up action is shown clearly. This child, you may be dead sure, was never told to snap his wrists, and he couldn't have snapped them anyway.

So, into the ash can goes another misconception. If you will just swing the club right, the "wrist snap" will take care of itself.

"Hit hard with the right hand." The trouble with advice like this is that, while it is partly right, it can do more harm than good.

What is meant is to hit hard with the right hand in the low hitting area, just before impact. But we should hit just as hard with our left hand as with our right. And we do not mean hitting so that our hands bend to the left and get ahead of our wrists and forearms, either. That is disastrous. Hitting, to us, means moving the hands through the hitting area as fast as we can but with the wrists slightly ahead of the hands. No snapping action.

Another danger in even mentioning the right hand at the expense of the left, is that the right hand is usually our more active, responsive, and stronger hand for the reason that we are right-handed. The whole tendency in golf is for the right hand to take charge of the golf swing and overpower the left. This leads to hitting too soon and hitting from the outside, things the struggling club pro has been trying for years to stop his pupils from doing.

So, let's drop the right hand out of our thinking, so far as hitting the ball goes, anyway.

"Don't drop the right shoulder." You've been given this advice when you were in a fit of hitting the ground behind the ball—sclaffing, to give it the old Scottish name.

You've studied pictures of a good pro hitting the ball. Did you ever see one in which the pro's right shoulder wasn't lower than his left?

Of course the right shoulder drops. It has to. It's lower than the left shoulder at the address and it's still lower at impact. The reason the pro hits the ball and not the ground is because he shifts his weight to the left, something you neglect to do when you are sclaffing.

Of course you should make no effort to drop the right shoulder. If the start down from the top is made correctly, the shoulder will come down naturally, and if the same move from the top is done right, the weight will shift to the left. You, too, will hit the ball and not the ground.

"Hit down on the ball." The topper is the one who gets this advice thrown at him.
No special effort, we can assure you, is necessary to hit down on the ball. We will hit down naturally, if our golf swing is right. There is no other way to hit.

But when the poor player, with the bad golf swing, is told to hit down on the ball, he starts to chop at it. He brings the club up quickly with more of a lift than a golf swing, then chops down, often with a bend of the right knee, so he'll be sure he is low enough. This violates all the principles of the golf swing, of course, and while the fellow may not top the ball he will quickly get himself into other troubles equally bad or worse.

"Use your natural swing." This advice is the ace of ab­surdities, for the very simple reason that the good golf swing is not a natural golf swing. It's an action that has to be learned. Not one adult in a million, who has never played golf, will step up to a ball and hit it with a good golf swing. He'll hit it with what, for him, is his natural golf swing, but it will be terrible.

It might be good advice to give a person who learned the game as a child, who has been working at it for years, and who is now trying to copy some other player's golf swing.

But the natural golf swing of the average adult is the one you see on driving ranges, public courses, and even on private courses, where a surprising number of members will brag about the fact that they never took a lesson. If you want the golf swing you laugh at in these places, then by all means use your own natural talents and hack away.

"Follow through." This one, thank heaven, is on the way out. The more intelligent teachers and players discovered quite some years ago that the follow-through was not the cause of a good shot, it was the result. But we are including it here because the advice still pops up often enough to be dangerous.

From the early days of golf in this country and for a long time afterward, the core of all instruction could be summed up in one sentence: "Head down, slow back, and follow through."

Whatever value the first two admonitions had was lost by the third. People tried to get good follow-throughs without ever realizing that they first had to have a reasonably good golf swing. Nobody yet has hit the ball with his follow-through, but an awful lot have tried to.

Once you have a good golf swing, which comes from the in­side with a late hit instead of an early one, the speed of the club head will pull it up into the follow-through without any effort on your part. In fact, you can't stop it.

"Don't quit on the shot." Nothing quite matches this ad­vice for its ability to infuriate. The poor player is having all kinds of trouble. He is hitting the ball as hard as he can with the golf swing he has. And then some member of the four­some, trying to be helpful, says: "You quit on the shot."

If the recipient of the advice isn't seized with apoplexy on the spot, it's because he doesn't know any more about the golf swing than the fellow who gave the advice.

He thinks that, yes, he must have quit. And he tries to swing harder the next time.

The implication of the phrase is that somewhere during the downswing the player stopped trying and just let the golf swing finish itself. This is about as far wrong as it could be. The good player will occasionally do this—fail to hit hard through the ball—when he feels at the last moment that he has too much club, or a following breeze has sprung up, or something else. It is known as "coming off the shot." But the average player? No. His so-called quitting is not quitting at all. It is the result of a bad golf swing, and he will still "quit" even though he swings himself off his feet in an effort to hit hard.

The cause of what is called "quitting on the shot" is hitting too soon. The angle between the left arm and the club opens up early as the club starts down, instead of being retained. Thus the power that is gained by the late hit is expended much too early. With the wrist cock gone, there is little left to hit with. No matter how hard the player tries, he cannot produce anything more than a weak, flabby-looking slap at the ball. And the other players nod their heads sagely and think to themselves, if they don't come out and say it, "He quit on the shot."

This is one of the greatest misconceptions in golf and one of the commonest.

It is closely allied, of course, with a complete misunder­standing of how the wrist cock is retained through the first part of the downswing, and thus of how the late hit is accom­plished. We have all seen pictures of the good player which show his hands entering the so-called hitting area. The hands are maybe a foot from being directly opposite the ball, but his wrist cock has been largely retained and the club head is a long way from the ball, still above the player's waist.

There is a widely held conviction that the only way the club head can be made to catch up with the hands in time to hit the ball, is through the player's own physical efforts. He must drive the club head through with his hands and wrists at the last instant. This is where the "wrist snap" comes in. Only a player of long experience and considerable strength, it is thought, can accomplish this.

A book appeared in the late 1950's, written by Dai Rees, then captain of the British Ryder Cup team. One part of it dealt with the late hit versus the early hit. It was Rees's opinion that only a young, strong professional should attempt to get the late hit; all others should be satisfied with the early hit. The others should be satisfied, in other words, to spend their golfing lives hitting too soon, hitting from the top.

This is nonsense. The late hit can be accomplished by a seven-year-old child. It is governed entirely by the early movement of the downswing, not by any action near the ball. If that first movement is correct, the hit will be late; if it is wrong, the hit will be early.

If this first movement from the top conforms to the me­chanical principle that controls the action of the club head (which we will presently describe in full detail), then the wrist cock will be retained, the hit will be late, and the speed of the club head at impact will be high.

"Pronate your wrists." This one is very nearly dead, but we are including it so we can give it a final kick and send it, we hope, to its grave.

Pronation was the name given by the old pros to rolling the wrists into the shot at impact with the ball. The idea was that on the backswing the wrists were rolled to the right, opening the club face, and then rolled back to the left on the downswing to close it, or bring it square to the ball.

It was also generally accepted that pronation not only squared the face of the club but also added distance to the shot because the club head was turning over toward the ball at impact.

Most of the great golfers in the early years of the century used this action, many of them superlatively well. But it is worth noting that none of those players,
Vardon included, were as consistent in their scoring as the top pros of today. The pronating of the wrists had to be timed to a nicety, obviously, if the ball were to be struck squarely. A little too much rolling, or too early, brought a hook or a smother; not enough left the face open and produced a slice. The best that can be said for pronation is that it is a great way to live dangerously.

"Pivot the body." There is nothing wrong with the pivot, except the connotation the word has and the way the action has been so often described. The pivot in golf means the turning and winding up of the body on the backswing. It is described as being made around a fixed axis. Diagrams have been printed showing the poor golfer pivoting around a long iron stake which passes through his head, body, right leg, and into the ground. Such an axis is as immovable as anyone could imagine. We also have been advised to make the turn as though we were standing in a barrel.

Both images are wrong, because the axis of the turn is not stationary. It moves. As the turn begins, the weight moves to the right leg, not all of it but a considerable part of it. This means the hips, which are the center of gravity, also move. It doesn't mean that we sway when the weight goes over, because our head and the upper part of our body stay in the same position. The iron stake, to carry out that anal­ogy, could not be iron but something flexible which would bend in the middle.

The trouble with the word pivot is that we picture it as a turn around a fixed axis, and when we make it, we don't move the weight. We are very much inclined to leave the weight—too much of it at least—on the left leg. And when we do that we are in trouble. So, when you think of winding up the body, think of it as making a lateral turn with the weight moving.

"Positions at address and impact must be the same." More nonsense. About the only similarity between the positions is that the player is standing on both feet in each one. All you have to do to realize the differences is to think about them for a few seconds.

For instance, at address the position is stationary, the weight is about equally divided between the feet, both feet are flat on the ground, the hips are parallel to the direction line, the hands are even with the ball and the right shoulder is slightly lower than the left. But look at the position at impact. Here nearly every part of the body except the head is in violent movement. The weight is probably 80 per cent on the left foot. The left foot is flat but the right heel is off the ground and the foot is rolling in on the inside. The hips have moved and turned well past a position parallel to the direction line. The right shoulder is much lower than the left, which is higher than it was at address anyway. And the hands are slightly past the ball.

Why anyone should say these two positions are the same, or should be the same, is beyond us.

We have now examined and disposed of much of the ad­vice that has obscured the golf swing with myth and igno­rance far too long. We hope your mind has now been pretty well cleared of a lot of accumulated rubbish. It must be if you are to absorb and apply the fresh ideas to be given here­after. Some of your most cherished convictions have prob­ably been dealt with rather harshly in this first section. Maybe some of the excisions were painful. All we can say to reassure you is that an operation for appendicitis hurts too, but when the operation is necessary, you are better off without the appendix.

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