For solid iron shots, especially with the short irons, you have got to make sure you descend down and through the ball. It’s like a hammer pounding a nail into a block of wood. You want to drive the club head into the back the ball.
Maintain the wrist cock for as long as possible on the downswing before releasing the club head through impact. Strike the ball with a descending blow, with the club-head making contact with the ball then the turf. That will give you a sensation of pounding the ball like a nail into the turf, as opposed to scooping or trying to lift the ball into the air.
A little lateral movement in the golf swing is OK. It helps you make a solid weight shift and generate power. But beware of overdoing it. Don’t allow your body to slide ahead of the ball on the downswing. If that happens, the arms and hands will lag behind, resulting in an open clubface at impact. Your shots will be weak arid to the right. On the downswing, I try to rotate my torso over a fixed axis my spine. This gives me plenty of room to release my hands aggressively through the hitting area and make a good, positive swing toward the target. I keep my spine steady by limiting the movement of my head. The position of my head re-mains the same even after the ball has gone.
The articles on the following pages contain, in exquisite and accurate detail, but in plain English, what every golfer needs to know on the gut subjects of the game from instruction to rules to etiquette. New or nearly new, golfers will surely benefit greatly from learning these fundamentals. Old-timers will find important things they either forgot or never knew.
Besides the mechanics for example, how to proceed other than to weep when your ball is embedded in a wasp’s nest—enjoyment of the game is a matter of attitude and mood. There is no text book on ideal dispositions for golf but here’s a starter:
• don’t be humble. Although you may have been lured to the game by its presentation on television, don’t think of the great players as icons. Once you start to play, it’s your game, not theirs. They are the fortunate beneficiaries of your interest in the activity If not for you; half of them would be unemployed.
• Please don’t play slowly. No one has ever established a correlation, because there is none, between scoring better and taking more time. Four golfers who can’t break 100 can easily get around in four hours or less. Although it’s hard to quantify what’s slow, think of it this way: Once the coast is clear and it’s your turn to play, there is no excuse for taking more than 20 seconds to play a stroke.
• “Smell the flowers,” the great Walter Hagen said, or is alleged to have said. He made a good point. What makes golf a better game than all the others is its unique arenas the courses. (And it’s a lot easier to smell the flowers when you’re walking, not flying by them in a golf cart.) Learn something about your course, when it was built and how it evolved. You don’t have to go overboard by learning the difference between Penncross and Penneagle, but it’s cool to know that most of these modern bent grasses were born at Penn State University Eventually, you can strike pedantic poses: “This course is overwatered,” and “What this course needs is a sharp chain saw.
• Play the ball as it lies. In the long run, it’ll make you a better ball-striker, and you’ll get more satisfaction from hitting a good shot, when you don’t play so-culled winter rules.
•Read some history. The more you know about how this all happened, over 500 years plus, the more fun the game becomes. There has been an awful lot of good golf writing. With apologies to the other inmates of this magazine, the best golf writing was done by the Englishman Bernard Darwin —it’s worth the effort to unearth his work at your local library. Other stars of the trade include the late Peter Dobereiner, Herbert Warren Wind and, yes, even Dan Jenkins.
Comments on this entry are closed.