Golf swing mechanics involve a connected series of sensations or feels and when you get all these feels right and rightly connected you will swing perfectly.
I have just given you the feel of the pivot: the movement on which the modern golf swing is based.
Now to that one basic feel, the pivot, we will add other feels, and every new feel gives you a new control until your whole game is controlled and you can play it as you will.
But do not think you cannot play until you have this whole series of controls established. Lots of players go through their golfing lives and get a lot of fun out of the game without building up any controls at all!
But the more controls you can build up and link together, the better for your game, the finer the conception of the golf swing you will evolve.
Let us get back to the visualizing of our golf swing. We have laid our foundation by getting the feel of the pivot from the hips.
This movement goes up through the body to the next control point the shoulders. And here I believe that wrong imagination does a great deal of damage to many people's swings.
We think that in the fine swing we see the left shoulder come down as we come back and the right shoulder come down as we come forward; so we feel that this shoulder movement is right and tend to encourage it to the detriment of our swings because it is wrong.
And I say it is wrong, cheerfully certain that it is wrong in spite of its almost universal acceptance.
How much the shoulders actually dip depends upon how erect we stand when addressing the ball.
We should stand as erect as possible and I contend that we should not feel our shoulders go down but should feel that we are keeping them fully up.
As we address the ball we look at it a little sideways we peep at it.
The head is fixed (because you "keep your eye on the ball"), and the movement of the shoulders is not an independent movement of the shoulders at all, but is due to the shoulders being moved around from the pivot.
We can only keep the shoulder movement in a fixed groove and make it repeatable time after time, by keeping the shoulders at a limit of upness in whatever position the turn from the hips may have placed them.
Any excess of upness (that is, actual shoulder lift) will result in the ball being lost sight of. In short, the fixed head determines the limit of lif t and dip of the shoulders.
You will see that this is why you must feel you keep the shoulders up to the same degree with, say, a driver, a full swing, a more upright club, and a half swing.
The closer you stand to your ball the more upright the swing and the more directly downward your sight of the ball . . . also, the less extensive the swing you can make without losing sight of the ball.
Now try this conception of the shoulder action without a club, and link it to your feel of the pivot from the hips.
Feel how the two become connected. This is the first connection in our building up of a controlled golf swing, and a very important one.
You cannot take too much trouble in understanding it and building it up.
