50 Years of Golfing Wisdom. John Jacobs

       Take great care in forming your grip, so that it is repeatable.

      Start with your Vs pointing midway between your nose and your right shoulder. If the flight of your shots tells you that you are delivering the clubface to the ball looking to the right of your swing line, move both your hands gradually towards a strong position – i.e., so the Vs point more away from your nose and to the outside of your right shoulder. If your shots tell you that the clubface is arriving at the ball looking left of your swing path, move both your hands gradually towards a weak position – i.e., so the Vs point more at your nose.

      Your grip is right for you when your shots fly straight, even though you may be pulling the ball left or pushing the ball right of target. No curve on your shots shows that your clubface alignment and swing direction are matched.

       Hover the clubhead for a smooth start

      One distinctive feature of Greg Norman’s game is how he hovers the clubhead of his driver above the ground at address. It’s one of the things that he picked up as a young man from a Jack Nicklaus instruction book. Greg claims that it keeps tension out of his hands and arms, which promotes a smooth, wide one-piece takeaway and good overall rhythm in his swing. That makes sense. He also says it enables him to maintain a constant grip pressure, removing the tendency to re-grip the club at address. Again, sound advice, since a lot of club golfers have a habit of re-gripping which not only results in grip flaws, but also upsets the clubface alignment before the swing has even started.

      I think hovering the clubhead at address has another very important benefit. It encourages you to stand a little bit taller at address, rather than hunch over the ball, and that improvement in your posture helps promote a better turn.

       Simply Peter

      With his appointment as the professional at Sandy Lodge, I would sometimes practise with Peter Thomson. This was in the 1950s, when the Australian was picking up one Open Championship after another. He once went out to Sandy Lodge specifically to get me to look at his set-up – just that, his set up to the ball, nothing else. Satisfied that he was standing well to the ball, he then drove back into the centre of London. I draw an important lesson from this: ‘70 per cent of all the bad shots which are hit are due to a faulty set-up to the ball.’

       Back to basics refresher

      The grip controls where the clubface looks at impact, which determines the final direction or curvature of the shot through its interaction with the path of the clubhead.

      The alignment of the body relative to the target line largely controls the direction in which the clubhead is swung through the ball, which determines the starting direction of the shot – and, if there is no curvature, also its final direction.

      If you’ve watched professionals on the practice tee at tournaments, you may have wondered why they spend so much time and effort checking their alignments at address – more in many cases, than working on actual swing moves. The above is the answer. Good golfers are good golfers largely because they have learned and accepted that, no matter how fine the gun’s firing action, unless it is aimed correctly it won’t deliver the missile to the target. Lesser golfers are so impatient to pull the trigger, or so wrapped up in the mechanics of the swing, they never master what comes before.

CHAPTER 2

       Building a Better Golf Swing

       How to start back ‘square’

      A lot of rubbish has been talked and written about the way a golfer should swing the club back from the ball. There have been those who advocated rolling the wrists, those who advocated holding the clubface ‘square’ as long as possible, and those who swore by hooding the clubface during the takeaway.

      The ‘squares’ are the ones on the ball, but the trouble is that they don’t always define what is truly ‘square’. The golf swing combines an arc and a plane. How, then, do you get ‘square’?

      The answer is by swinging the club away from the ball in one coordinated movement – without any independent action of any part of the body, especially the hands and arms.

      Prove it for yourself as follows. Take your aim and set up correctly for a full shot. Now, without rotating your hands and arms or consciously cocking your wrists, but making the club as near as possible an extension of your left arm, turn and tilt your shoulders slightly and let your arms swing back in concert with this movement. The club will have moved back inside the target line – there is no other place it can go if you have set-up and turned properly. And the clubface – where will it point? Not at the sky – which would have happened if you had rolled your wrists clockwise. Not at the ground – which would have happened if you’d held the face down or hooded. It will be pointing more or less forward – at right angles to the arc of your swing.

      This is ‘square’, as you can very quickly prove by turning your shoulders back to their original position, when the clubface will return squarely behind the ball.

      And that is the correct takeaway.

       Turn your body, cock the wrists

      I had played golf from childhood – and had a club in my hand from the time I could stand up. I suppose, at 15 or 16, I could get round Lindrick on occasions in under 70, but at other times I would have to walk in from the course because I had run out of golf balls. I was gifted in the sense of being able to hit the ball because I had grown up with it and had the chance of watching fine players in the area – Arthur Lees, Frank Jowle, Johnny Fallon and, of course, my cousin Jack. So when Willie Wallis (my boss and the head professional at the Hallamshire where I got my first job as assistant) said to me: ‘You must turn your body and use your lumbar muscles and you must cock the wrists,’ I took notice of it.

      Today I will tell pupils they must turn the body because you have to do that to get the clubhead swinging from inside to inside, and you must cock the wrists otherwise the club will follow the body too much. What Willie was saying was similar to what I am saying today. The difference is that I explain it, whereas he didn’t.

       Keeping it simple

      You are now taking great care to pre-programme, as far as possible, correct impact through your grip, clubface aim, ball position, and body alignment and posture. All that remains for you to play the best golf of which you are capable is to swing the club on a plane and in a direction that transmits your address ‘geometry’ to the ball, while also generating sufficient clubhead speed to propel it the required distance.

      How do you do that?

      Because the ball is lying on the ground to the side of you, the answer is with an upward and downward swinging of the arms combined with a rotational motion of the body.

      How much swinging relative to how much body motion? How ‘steeply’ up and down should your arms swing relative to the ‘aroundness’ of your body motion? Which drives what – the arm swinging the body rotation, or the body rotation the arm swinging? Where does the power come from – the swinging motion of the arms or the rotating of the body?

      All of those questions, and all others like it, will quickly become moot if you will simply do as follows:

      Swing your left arm directly back from the ball, allowing it to move progressively upward and backward – i.e., to the inside of the target line – as a natural response to the rotation of your shoulders around the axis of your spine.

      Can the golf swing really be that simple?

      Well, if you ever reach the point of feeling that your chief golfing problem has become ‘paralysis by analysis’, forgetting everything but the above concept of backswing