50 Years of Golfing Wisdom. John Jacobs
This is a danger for any golfer. Whenever you get taught something new, the first instinct is to tighten-up and that process usually starts with the grip. You must be aware of this and avoid tension creeping into your hands. Never lose the gift of being able to swing the club freely. Keeping your grip soft will almost certainly help. As Peter Thomson used to say: ‘Always grip lightly because you’ll instinctively firm up at impact anyway.’ That’s not a bad philosophy to bear in mind whenever you’re trying to make changes to your swing.
If you wind yourself like a spring …
I like to compare body action in the golf swing to the winding and unwinding of a spring. Think of it this way and you will realize how important it is that the bottom half of the spring should resist the turning of the top half, in order to increase coiling (and thereby power).
The feeling should be one of staying relatively still, but ‘lively’, from the waist down, while your torso turns around the axis of your spine and your arms and hands swing the club back and up so that it ultimately points parallel to the target line. The left leg will give a little, turning in towards the right, and the left heel will usually be pulled rather than lifted off the ground. But the effort should be to prevent, rather than encourage, such movements – while making sure your shoulders turn as your arms swing the club back and up.
… automatically you will let it all fly
Create sufficient torque with your upper-body backswing wind-up and you cannot help but release it into a powerful throughswing. As your legs and hips win the battle of the opposing forces, and pull spring-like towards the target, swing your arms straight down before your shoulders spin. Never do anything to inhibit a free arm-swing.
Keep your head down? Forget it!
When I was on the instruction panel of the American magazine Golf Digest in the 1960s they carried out a survey of the leading 50 money winners on tour. They photographed each golfer hitting shots, with a grid pattern positioned behind them so it was possible to monitor their head movement during the swing. Of these, 48 of the 50 golfers moved their head to the right in the backswing. Some moved more than others and two golfers remained centred. But, not surprisingly since these were all good players, none moved to the left.
The obsession among some club golfers to keep the head down has kept me busy for 50 years. It’s like strapping a straightjacket on to a golfer; it restricts a full, free turn, so essential for both power and accuracy.
So if ever I hear of a golfer whose main swing thought is to keep their head down throughout the swing, the alarm bells ring in my head. In any good swing there is invariably a certain amount of lateral movement of the head and body. So long as this body action is harmonized with the hand and arm action, it is allowable and in many cases desirable for there to be a degree of lateral movement.
Careful of some other clichés
Let’s punch holes in a few more of some prime ‘book’ clichés:
‘Go back slowly’: This is nothing short of an invitation to disaster. It leads to moving rather than swinging the club back, in a motion completely lacking in rhythm. If you go back at the pace that the slow-back proponents suggest, you have got to control the club every inch of the way, which, apart from anything else, is too much of a mental exercise.
What you should do instead is set the swing off smoothly at a pace that will enable you to come down quicker than you go up. I find most players swing at the correct pace when they remember they want their maximum speed at impact.
‘Tuck in the right elbow’: A right elbow flying away from the body is usually caused by a steep tilt of the shoulders in the backswing, rather than a combined tilt-turn. It is equally wrong, however, to suggest – as some teachers still do – placing a handkerchief between the right elbow and the body and keeping it there in the backswing and downswing. The right elbow will find its correct position if the shoulder turn and the arm swing are correct.
‘Follow through’: Making a conscious effort to follow through nicely when the rest of the swing is thoroughly bad leads to nothing but confusion and frustration. The initiation of the downswing completely commits you all the way to and through the followthrough. So, if you think your followthrough is bad, look for something wrong much earlier – possibly your grip, set-up, backswing or the way you start your downswing. Remember that a correct followthrough is the result of a correct start down.
Sweep those arms down and through
The action of the arms is the most neglected area in golf instruction. There have been ‘hands’ methods, and ‘body’ methods, but the fact is that, whatever method he hung his hat on, every good golfer in history has swept the club through the ball fast and freely with his arms.
Words always in season
When I am teaching I continually find myself using some phrases over and over again to player after player. Since these would seem to be the ones I have found most helpful to the most players, it may be worth repeating them yet once more. They are:
1 Don’t lift up; wind up.
2 Start the backswing with the right shoulder getting out of the way.
3 Point the clubhead at the target in the backswing. This, incidentally, is a quick way of getting a beginner to pivot, and to cock the wrists.
4 As near as possible, keep your feet flat on the ground.
5 Stay ‘sat down’ as you turn your shoulders.
How – and what – to practise
I assume that the fact that you are reading this book means you want to improve your golf. I further assume that you want to improve badly enough to be prepared to give some time – even time that you would normally have spent playing – to practising the game. Some of us are ‘naturally’ more talented golfers than others, but all of us need to practise to develop and hold our full potential.
I have spent a lot of time teaching, so I know a fair amount about the habits of the average golfer in terms of their approach to practice. And what has come home to me is that he has a great deal to learn, not simply about the technicalities of golf, but about the sheer mechanics of practising it. What seven out of ten golfers do when they go to a driving range, or down to the club with a bag of balls, may be exercise, but it isn’t practice.
Let us start, therefore, by defining practice. It has three distinct forms.
The first and absolute primary form of practice you do at home sitting in an armchair, or driving the car to work. You can do it with your brain, and it consists of thinking through the cause-and-effect of whatever you were doing the last time you played golf. From here, still strictly on the mental plane, you decide through a logical reasoning process, not guesswork, exactly what you will be trying to achieve the next time you practise. Ideally, these thought processes should be based on lessons you have been taking from a professional in whom you have confidence. There is no substitute for personal tuition – for advice tailor-made for you as an individual. The vitally important thing, however, is never to practise until you have a clear picture of what you are trying to do.
The next form of practice is the physical execution of what you have planned mentally. This is swing-building and game-improving practice, and we will look at it in detail in a moment.
The third form of practice, which all good players do, and which I’d like to persuade you to do, is the prelude to any important round of golf. It isn’t practice in the previous sense, because you are not trying to rebuild your game (or at least you shouldn’t be). What you are trying to do, with anything from 10 to 50 shots, is to tune up the game you possess on that particular day; to loosen muscles, to get the ‘feel’ of the clubs, to bring the clubface into the ball squarely and solidly and thereby boost your confidence for the ensuing round. And to find one workable swing thought for the day. This is the form of practice