You Can Play Better Golf! (Part 4)

Do you need proof that you can play better golf with Joe Dante's System?

Eventually the advent of slow-motion pictures showed that Dante was right.

Vardon did not hit the ball as he said he did, which was as he thought he did. If the great Harry had ever swung at a ball with a throw of the club head from the top, as though to drive a stake into the ground (which was what he believed), he would never have won any tournament, much less six British Opens and one American.

This insidious incitement to self-delusion is without the slightest doubt one of the fundamental characteristics of golf. It accounts, perhaps more than any other one thing, for the painful slowness in the advancement of technique. It can prevent you from playing better golf.

Just how slow this has been can be shown by one other example: Golf enjoyed wide popularity in Scotland as long ago as the middle of the fifteenth century.

So many Scots were playing it that it interfered with the more important pursuit of archery, which was the means of national defense.

In 1457, not long after the death of Joan of Arc and thirty-five years before Columbus sailed for the New World, the now famous edict of the Scottish parliament was issued which "decreted and ordained that wapinshawingis [passage or exhibition of arms] behalden by the lordis and baronis spirituale and temporale, four times in the zeir; and that the futeball and golf be utterly cryit doun, and nocht usit.. .." (It sounds' very Scottish, doesn't it!?). ;-)

With all the golf being played then, it is inconceivable that the Scots were not trying to figure out the best way to stand up to the ball, to grip the club, and to swing it.

Yet it was five hundred years later, in the middle of the twentieth century, before the teaching committee of the Professional Golfers' Association of America finally elicited enough agreement among its members to put in writing what it considered to be, and what it entitled: "The Five Basic Principles of the Swing." That was the first historical step towards playing better golf.

Even allowing for the many and radical changes in ballsand clubs, which have called for somewhat different methods over the centuries, it is still amazing that the basic principles of the swing escaped detection. But since they did, it is not amazing that so many widely differing theories have taken root and grown — to the eternal frustration of the average player.

This brings us back to our original thought: Why don't more people play better golf than they do?

The blunt truth is that they don't play better golf because the golf swing is heavily overlaid with a sludge of fallacy, misunderstanding, faulty theory, myth, and just plain ignorance.

So thick is this coating that it is a wonder anyone ever gets through it and down to the hard, clean mechanics of the sound golf swing.

It is this sludge, most of which has been covering the swing for so long that it now acts as an insulation, that we will cut away in this site.

Once the myths and fallacies are exploded and the true machinery of the golf swing is laid bare for all to see and understand, golf becomes a much less difficult game, and you'll play better golf, like you never dreamt before!

• Play Better Golf Part 1
• Play Better Golf Part 2
• Play Better Golf Part 3
• Play Better Golf Part 4

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