Fatal flaw                     Open-face take-away.
Awful results                 Slice, pull, smother, hook, scuff, or shank.
Magic move                 Early backward wrist break, with thumb press.
Check points                One knuckle of left hand visible, two of right hand, and none of club face when hands are hip high.

Now you are ready to start the golf backswing, to uncover the first fatal flaws that appear, with the horrible shots they produce, and to learn the first of the magic moves that will cut strokes from your score.

Ironically, these first flaws that creep into the average player's golf backswing produce an effect that is the exact opposite of what he wants. Just as you have, he has read and heard all his golfing life that certain things are essential. The first of these is that you must pivot, the second is that the club must be taken away from the ball inside the projected line of flight, the third is that the wrists should be broken late and upward.

We dealt with these three points individually in Chapter 2. Now let's see what happens when you put them into prac­tice. You twist your body as you start the take-away. This brings the club back on an inside line. Fine. It opens the face of the club too. Excellent, you say, for you know it should be open at the top of the golf backswing. You delay the wrist break as long as possible and then let the wrists break upward.

Then what happens? The very thing you wanted most to avoid. You hit the ball from the outside in, with an open face (usually), and you get an outlandish slice. If you close the face on the downswing you probably will get a pull, or a smother (if it's closed too much), or a hook. If the club is outside the line far enough, you will even get that most horrible of all shots, a shank.

You are then thoroughly crestfallen. You have done every­thing you'd been told to do and you still hit those awful shots. Why?

You hit them because your early movements got you into such a position at the top that you could hardly hit anything else.

Your early pivot, your attempt to "turn in a barrel," didn't permit you to transfer your weight to your right leg. You kept too much of it on your left leg.

Taking the club away inside (it was probably quite sharply inside) got it moving too flat, as well as opening the face.

Then, to get the golf backswing farther along, you had to bring the club up. At that point things began to get tight and un­comfortable. To ease them you stopped the turn that your shoulders were making and let your left wrist collapse, or bend back and go under the club. This let you raise the club and get what you felt was a full swing, without being uncomfortable. The face of the club, of course, was wide open at the top. (See Fig. 20.)

What happened next was inevitable. You started the down­swing by regripping with your left hand, which had loosened, which made you get the club head started moving too soon. Your weight, being mostly on your left leg, moved back to the right leg. You turned your hips and shoulders sharply, which threw the club onto the outside-in line you were trying to avoid. And you came down across the ball. Chances are that as you did, your left knee snapped back and locked and your right knee bent straight out in front of you. And your follow-through, what there was of it, carried the club around you instead of up and out after the ball.

You, however, see none of these things as the cause of your bad shots. You feel only that you haven't done well enough what you are trying to do, and in your efforts to meet the standards, you exaggerate the actions. You don't improve. You may easily get worse. And you finally end your practice session frustrated and dejected, or your round, if you are playing, with a shameful score.

The Magic Move

Fortunately, there is a cure for all this, a cure that is almost miraculous. The magic move that puts you on the right track immediately is simply this:
Start the golf backswing with an early backward wrist break.(

Of course this sounds too simple to be true. It violates every rule you ever heard about starting the golf backswing. Your first reaction is that Messers. Dante and Elliott have gone completely off their rockers. But it is true—and unless your golf backswing is now everything that you want it to be, you will find out how and why this magic move is made.

The wrist break itself is simple enough, actually, though if you have been breaking in the conventional way you may need a little time to convince yourself of what is to be done and to make yourself do it.

Since the backward break is one of the key points in our system, let's be absolutely certain you understand what it is.

First, hold your right hand in front of you, fingers to-gether and extended, thumb up and the palm squarely facing the left. From that position bend the hand to the right, trying to make the fingers, come back toward the outside of the wrist.. You can't get them anywhere near the wrist, of course, but a person with supple wrists can bend the hand back until hand and wrist form a right angle (Fig. 12).
 
This motion of the hand, straight back, is the backward wrist break.

Fig. 12. The way the right hand should move from the wrist in the early backward break—straight back toward the outside of the fore­arm, with no turning or rolling.

The standard wrist break is quite different. Hold your hand again as you held it before. Now, instead of bending it backward, bend it up, so that the thumb comes toward you. That is the orthodox, accepted wrist break. Forget it. You will get it eventually, but you don't want it now.

You will remember that the grip we stipulated was one which, at address, showed only two knuckles of the left hand and one of the right hand. You will also recall that the right hand was put on the club so that the left thumb lay right down the middle of the right palm. This brought the heel of the right hand against the big knuckle at the base of the left thumb.

The Thumb Press

To make the backward wrist break we merely push the heel of the right hand down against the big knuckle of the left thumb. This is a downward pressure of the heel on the thumb. When it is done, without moving the hands otherwise, the right hand breaks backward at the wrist and the left hand breaks forward or inward, the hack of the left hand going under and facing, in a general way, toward the ground (Fig. 13).


Fig. 13A. How the backward break is made, with the heel of the right hand pressing down on the knuckle of the left thumb. The back of the left hand begins to turn down and under.

Fig. 13B. How not to make the break. Wrists and hands have rolled, the back of the left hand has turned upward. The right hand is rolling too, instead of bending straight back.

At this point the club will have come back slightly inside the projected line of flight but the club face will not have opened. The face will be at about a 45-degree angle with the ground and, as you stand there, you will not be able to see any of it (Fig. 14A).

Fig. 14A. How the backward break looks from the side. Note the bend in the left wrist as the back of the hand turns down, and the position of the right wrist. Notice also that the face of the club has not opened.

To be certain you are making the break correctly there is a perfect check point at this stage. If you look at your hands you will see, if the break is right, one knuckle of your left hand and the first two knuckles of the right. The left hand will be broken in, at an angle with the wrist (Fig. 15).

If the break is completed here, without letting the hands move away from their address position, the club will have been brought back and up until it is almost parallel with the ground.

How near it approaches the parallel depends on how supple your wrists happen to be.

Following our description of how the break is made, try it ten times. If you don't soon get the feel of it, try it twenty or fifty times. But do it until you get the feel, checking yourself each time with the left-hand and right-hand knuckles and the angle of the face of the club.

This is a key move—the foundation of the golf backswing—and you must do it right, get the feel of doing it right, and do it so much that it becomes automatic. It is easy to practice, requiring very little room, and can be worked on indoors or out, winter as well as summer. Get it, and get it right.

We have not put this into the actual golf backswing yet, remember. We are still working on the mechanics of the wrist break. It is just possible that at this fundamental stage you will refuse to believe that you can hit the ball with such a break. So make this test:
Fig. 14B. The wrong break, with wrists rolled. Note the difference in the left-hand position here and in Fig. 14A, and observe also the dif­ferences in the club-face positions. Never do it like this.

Go to the practice tee, or to a range or an indoor net. Address the ball. Make the backward break and do nothing else. Don't shift your weight, move your hips, or turn your shoulders. Just make the backward break. Hold it a couple of seconds. Now simply turn your shoulders, letting the shoulders swing your arms and the club up to the top, and then go right on through with the golf backswing and hit the ball.

You will be amazed at what happens after you try this a few times. You will find, if you keep the wrist position, that you not only hit the ball, but that you hit it solidly, hit it straight, and hit it a surprising distance.

You will also discover that the more you permit the turning shoulders to swing the club up, the better you will hit the ball and the farther you will hit it. Make no effort to swings the. Arms just let the: shoulders  move them and the club. The more the arms are swung independently of the shoulders, the less likely you are to reach a good position at the top.

Fig. 15. Here is what you should see when you make the backward break per­fectly—only one knuckle of the left hand but two knuckles of the right.

So picture the shoulders as the motivating force, the "motor."

The closer you bring this motivating force to the axis of the swing (the spinal column) the better the golf backswing will be.

This two-piece action is invaluable for practicing the immediate break, for getting the feel of the break, for check­ing whether you have done it correctly or not, and for proving to yourself its value and the value of the hand-and-wrist position. In fact, you can use it in actual play. We have pupils who do.

Into the Swing

The next step is to incorporate the early wrist break into the golf backswing itself, making it a single uninterrupted motion. For this we must start with what has come to be known as the forward press, for it is with this that the golf backswing begins.

The forward press is simply a device that gets us from the passive into the active stage smoothly, without a jerk. Standing in a stationary position, even for a few seconds, is tiring. Ask any service man who has stood at attention for any extended period. We don't pass easily from a stationary position into a big move. The trick in golf is to go from the stationary position of address to the big movement of the golf backswing without a jerky effort. The forward press pro­vides this transition. It is the little move that leads into the big one.

It can be done in several ways, with the right knee, with the hips, with the hands, with a turn of the hips. We want a lateral movement of the hips, no turn. It is a slight pushing of the hips to the left, laterally, about an inch or two. This press is in the opposite direction from the big move. But as the hips come back from their little pushing motion, they keep right on sliding and go into a lateral turning motion to the right—the beginning of the golf backswing—and we are off. This makes for the smoothest transition of all. As the hips move to the left in the press, they pull the hands with them, just slightly, only a, fraction of an inch.When the hips come back, the hands come back-Now, as the hips and hands come back from the press, push the heel of the right hand down firmly but not sharply on the left thumb. The back of the left hand starts to turn under—and   the   all-important   backward  wrist   break   has begun (Fig. 16).

This move should not be a sharp or a violent action. It should be firm and steady. And it feels much quicker than it looks or actually is.

Fig. 16. The backward break off the forward press. The "ghost" hands how position as the press is completed. The backward break begins as the hands move past the player's right leg.

The hands meanwhile are moving to the right as the wrists are cocking, and the hips are sliding into a lateral turn, taking the weight with them.

Before you realize it, your hands will be waist high. And at that joint the wrist break should be completed!

Fig. 17A. The completed break, with hands ap­proximately waist high. The "left shoulder has turned and not ducked, the club face is square.

Fig 17B. A common fault in executing the break. The left shoulder has ducked, the player substituting the duck for the correct turning action.

Fig. 17C. The wrong break altogether. Player has not broken backward, but has rolled his wrists and opened the club face wide.

Right here is the first check point. Stop the golf backswing and look at your hands. If the wrist break has been performed cor­rectly you will see at this point just the reverse of what you saw at the address:

You should see only one knuckle of the left hand, but two knuckles of the, right hand, those at the bases of the index and middle fingers (Figs. 18 and 19).

You should not be able to see any of the face of the club, either. The face should be turned away from you and some­what down, not at the 45-degree angle it was in the sta­tionary test, but still turned away and somewhat down.

You should see a definite inward bend of the left hand, a reflex angle formed by the forearm and the back of the hand. The shaft will be at about a 45-degree angle to the ground and the angle formed by the left arm and the shaft of the club will be somewhat more than a right angle, maybe 100 degrees. You should feel that the wrists cannot be broken any more. They will be, a little, at the top by the weight of the club head, but they should feel now as though the break were absolutely complete.

Fig. 18. What you must see when you turn and look at your hands after the backward break is completed—one knuckle of the left hand, two knuckles of the right, and none of the club face.,

If these check points are not all clearly visible (except the club-shaft position) exactly as we have given them, your break has been wrong. The chances are that you have pushed the heel of the right hand sideways against the left thumb, instead of down. This brings the club too sharply on an in­side line, tends to open the face somewhat, and doesn't get the back of the left hand started going down under as it must.

With such a break, when it is completed, you will see two knuckles of the left hand and only one of the right, just as you did at address.

So correct it by starting over again and pushing down on the left thumb. That brings the back of the left hand down and under and gives you the position you must have.

What It Does

Heretical, you say? Of course it is. Awkward and uncom­fortable? Oh, yes, indeed. But you want to break 80, don't you, or 90, or whatever goal you have set for yourself? Then stick with it. Hit some balls with it, being sure your execu­tion is right, before you condemn it.

Meanwhile, look what it has done for your golf backswing already. The club head has been started almost straight back from the ball, as it should be. The club face has been kept square, as it must be if you are going to play better golf. The hip slide has moved much of your weight over to the right leg, where it must go, and your hips are now turning somewhat.

Fig. 19. What you will see if you have made the wrong break—two or three knuckles of the left hand, only one of the right, and plenty of the club face.

Your right elbow has been automatically brought in against your side, starting you on a tight, controlled arc. The wrist break at the same time has started the golf backswing in a plane that will prove to be ideal, neither too upright nor too flat. The shoulders have begun to turn and to tilt just a little, with the left going down slightly, and the right coming up. And, perhaps most important of all, your hands and wrists are set early in exactly the position they must be in.

All this adds up to the fact that although the golf backswing has progressed only about a third of its distance, you already are locked into actions which will bring you to the top in perfect position.

Your next questions, without a doubt, are going to be: Why is this first move so important, and why does it do what it does?

To answer these we will have to go back quite a few years in the theories of golf technique. Thirty years ago there was one accepted method of hitting a golf ball. That was with an open face and with a late wrist break. Those were the points the teaching pros taught then—the face should be opened on the golf backswing, should be open at the top, and should be closed to a square position on the downswing as the ball was hit. The natural way to get the open face at the top was with a late wrist break. The break never should be started before the hands were waist high. In fact, many taught that you should pay no attention whatever to break­ing the wrists; they would break by themselves. This is the way Vardon, Jones, Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen, and most of the others hit the ball. There were exceptions, such as Craig Wood, who won the National Open in 1941, and Lawson Little, who won the Open in 1940 and the American and British Amateur championships twice each, in succes­sive years. Shut-face hitters, both were looked upon as heretics.

After World War II, with competition on the American professional circuit getting ever keener, with ever more money at stake, the pros began to make changes here and there, tinkering with the golf backswing, both for accuracy and for distance. Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, and Ben Hogan made alterations. Then the younger group came along, Arnold Palmer, Bill Casper, and others. They made more.

In 1958 one of the girl pros, Betty Hicks, quoted another pro, Helen Dettweiler, as saying that the men were not prac­ticing what they preached. The men urged their pupils, she said, to sweep the club head low away from the ball and delay the wrist cock until the hands were hip high. But the men themselves, she observed, were with few exceptions starting their wrist cock at the beginning of the golf backswing, and she offered to produce movies to prove it.

In 1961 the great little West Coast phenomenon and 1961 PGA champion, Jerry Barber, described how he starts his wrist break even earlier—right off the forward press. Sequence pictures showed him doing exactly that. He has the break completed, he said (and again the pictures prove it), by the time his hands are hip high.

It is also noticeable in their pictures that both Palmer and Casper have the club face in a relatively closed position at the top of the golf backswing, not completely shut but closed at least 45 degrees. So do several others, including Wes Ellis, former Canadian, Metropolitan, and Texas Open champion. All are striving for what they consider a square face at the top. With it they know they will bring it square to the line at impact without any manipulation on the downswing. This is something the old-timers had trouble with. Being open at the top, they had to manipulate the club on the way down. Usually they succeeded; quite often they didn't. But that is one reason, we believe, why the modern pros are much more consistent, as well as longer, than their predecessors of thirty years ago.

All of which is background for the action taught in this book. The backward wrist break gives you the square po­sition so necessary for accuracy. The immediate wrist break locks you in the square position early.

So the first flaws that spoil a golf swing have been un­covered. You know what they are and the horrible shots they cause. More to the point, you have been given the first of the magic moves that will eliminate those bad shots and put you on the road to better golf backswing and lower scores.

Are You Ready To Move Onto The Next Lesson? Click Here