This part 2 of "How to Swing from in to out"....
Those were the days before in-to-out!
Consequently few players could get any draw on the ball, and mainly we just sliced our way around the course.
Well, it took me a good twenty years to learn to correct that natural tendency in my own game, and then I had to learn to pass it on to my pupils.
For make no mistake, everyone has to be taught; it does not come naturally.
In some respects teaching golf is like fighting the Devil!
From the first time we see golf played to the first time we take a club in our hands, we have instinctively formed a false conception of the movement.
We visualize the club head going up and over our shoulder and down onto the ball. You need only take any neophyte to see how he immediately takes the club up and down.
His conviction that this is the correct movement is strengthened by the fact that he sees the ball soaring into the air and concludes that it must have been hit with an upward motion.
So to make matters worse, he brings his hands into play also to assist the up-down-up movement-and is fully equipped for a career of scooping.
Now here are two devastatingly false impressions, and it is astonishing how long in many golfers' lives they remain.
We must not try to lift either the club head or the ball, and we shall never be good golfers until we can feel that we pull the club head along as we swing, along not up and down.
Let us put this in another way. If I were to ask you to:
- Drive a wedge under a door, and
- Drive a nail into the floor
... you would visualize two entirely different directions of hammer-head travel.
Driving the wedge under the door is the direction we must feel at golf. The force must go along through the length of the wedge, along through the length of the ball.
With this in mind, it becomes clear that in swinging, the weight of the club head should be brought along from behind the ball, not from above it.
This is what we call the wide swing, wide not high: a wide sweep that brings the club head in from behind the back of the ball.
Now another impression we get which impedes progress is that the club shaft goes up and above the right shoulder. In fact it does this not by arm or hand movement, but by the wrists being broken at the top of the swing.
Consequently you must not try to get your club up by lifting it with your arms; you must feel at the top of the swing that your club and left arm are in a straight line and are waist high.
Please ponder over this until you see its practical implications.
You can try it out anywhere without a club and you will find that, if you are standing well up and your body is braced and you have the straight-left-arm-waist-high feeling referred to above, you will not be able to hit in a downward direction, but you will be able to swing the club head along through the ball - with power from feet and legs.
