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... [Chapter Incomplete]

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