And here it is: The Feel of The Club Head: The Final Part!
I was able to edit this entry the day before my honeymoon starts. I will not be making any entries four about 14 days.
You may want to look around the site and read the abridged copy of Joe Dante's Four Winning Moves to Winning Golf.
Alternatively, you may want to check out the rest of the golf articles in this blog. Remember: "Carpe Diem!" (Seize the Day!).
Any how, here is Percy's final part of the feel of the club head.... (Click on the following link If you have not read Part 1 of The Feel of the Club Head series.
Percy was explaining how to build up a force-center, and that when you have built it up, you should be able to feel the club head in it.
You will be able to do this only if there is no break in the connections between the club head and the force-center, but one of these connections-the arms-is the most liable to disconnection of any in the whole swing.
At first glance this would seem easy enough to control, because the arms should work in exact relation to the shoulders and chest.
The thorax and biceps should become one in movement. But things do not work out this way, because we do inherently-and in spite of ourselves-consider golf as being played with the arms.
So we use our arms, ever so little it may be but enough to make us disconnected.
Now this is a fine and most delicate point in which lies most of the difference between a good, a very good, and a superlative golfer. It is by the management of the arms that championships are won and lost.
For it is no use to have built up perfect connections to bring co-ordination to the whole body throughout the whole swing if we then break the connection at a vital point by allowing our arms to work independently of our chest and shoulders.
They must be not independent but reactive. The body in the swing must be a unity.
Now at first we are likely to find ourselves contradicting this idea of unity at some point or other, because we will probably have one or two points of feel that do not seem to fit into the scheme.
But give your muscles a little experience of the new movements required of them and they will soon settle down.
Then you will go on from day to day, testing new feels-rejecting some but accepting those which fit into your swing.
So you will become more and more clear about the feeling of a good swing.
I must remind you again, because it is fundamental to this blog-book, that learning by a sense of feel is something quite different to learning by the intellect.
Intellectual memory may be of use in learning golf but it is never paramount.
What is paramount is what I have called muscular memory, a memory for the right feel ing of a movement which enables the muscles to repeat that movement time after time, without directions from brain or will.
What I have been trying to do in this book, and I can assure you it is no easy task, is to put on paper a method whereby you can pull the ends of your swing together and get it all properly connected.
But when you have done this, it is up to you to make yourself so familiar with the feel of your controlled swing that you can produce it automatically, practically by reflex action, whenever you like.
But I warn you again that a single break in the connections will render the success of a shot a matter of chance, whereas you want it to be a matter of certainty.
You know the type of player who has to depend upon his lucky day-disconnected! He can produce a good swing or he would never have a lucky day; he cannot produce it regularly because he loses connection somewhere.
And the chances are that he loses it by using his arms. And why does he start using his arms? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred because he tries too hard to hit the ball!
Yes, it is usually Golf Bogey No. 1 which induces us to use our arms.
That overwhelmingly common-sense impulse to hit the ball where we want it to go.
And how can we hit but with our arms? So, all our carefully-contrived controls go overboard, and we take vicious scoops and lashes at the ball.
What a pity! What a pity! For if we had inhibited our desire to hit the ball and concentrated upon producing a perfect swing-power from the pivot, shoulder controlled by heel movement, arms acting re-actively to the shoulders, and freeing our wrists - we would have sent it twice as far and straighter. And we should have felt the club head in our power center and have known that we had the secret of successful golf.
