Golf Wrist Action: Final Part

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This is the last instalment of the Golf Wrist Action series....

If after reading the foregoing you come to the conclusion that the best thing to do with your wrists is nothing at all, my exposition has been successful. Since probably no one has told you before that your wrists are only a link, you cannot be blamed for not having realized it!

Too many people try to do something with their hands, thinking this to be wrist action. But when you analyze it, there is no deliberately induced action in the golf swing which corresponds to the mythical "flick of the wrists."

Anyway, the word flick is appropriate when we speak of removing ash from a cigarette-but utterly out of place in a movement which sweeps a golf ball two hundred and fifty yards down the fairway.

If you have built up a good powerful central organization around which you whirl your club, the more you leave your wrists to their own sphere of activity the better will be your stroking. And the proper sphere of activity of your wrists is to act as the link in the flail with which you sweep the ball away.

Recently I was explaining to a coming champion my deduction that hand work wrongly applied to flick the club head through the ball was the commonest misconception in golf. He thought this over, and then said that he had read (and now began to understand what Bobby Jones meant when he wrote it) that on his way through the ball Bobby Jones felt that he was "freewheeling."

The American mind is inventive of and receptive to the vivid modern expression, and Bobby Jones coined a great one in "free-wheeling" through the ball-as a corrective to the general misconception of the flick of the wrists being a sharp hand and arm attack applied directly to the ball.

THE GRIP: POINTS TO STUDY

• Only two knuckles of the left hand are showing.
• The right hand is held well on top of the shaft.
• The first finger of the right hand is held as on a "trigger" shooting down at the ball-it will be pushing against the back of the shaft. It is pinched into its position by the thumb.
• The right elbow is held down, and in consequence the right wrist is arched upward.
• The hands are close together, so the two wrists are close together and can operate as one large hinge.
• The elbows are braced. They seem to be held close to the body, but are in fact held close together by the brace.

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