To sum up and to simplify advice to the club golfer on the tools of the trade, we could say that you owe it to yourself to:
make certain that your clubs are right for your swing, in terms of swing weight, flex and lie; and
choose and use only the golf balls that suit your game and your course conditions best.
This will bring you a certain peace of mind when you next tee off. Let’s see how you should use this equipment for the best . . .
THE LAZY GOLFER’S SWING TECHNIQUE
Whenever a real golfer gets a new anything to do with golf (new clubs, a special wedge, the ‘ultimate’ secret from the latest book, whatever) he can’t wait to try it out on the course. But before you trot briskly off to the first, satisfied that at last your clubs and balls really suit you, there are some basics to consider and ponder about. Not least, what type of swing have you been using over the last ‘x’ years?
You do already appreciate that everyone has an individual swing, very individual as you will see if you scrutinise the line of players at a driving range. The world’s top Tour pros are also different, if not so divergent, in the overall appearance of their swings. Nick Price, for example, has a decidedly brisk tempo. Fred Couples, on the other hand, swings almost drowsily, lifting the club with his arms, turning his shoulders late and looping the club inside to be on plane at impact. Ian Woosnam seems to stand a long way from the ball, yet he smacks it with very little apparent effort a long way down the fairway, as does Greg Norman, who seems to stand almost on top of the ball, which he assaults with a vigourous, gut-wrenching action.
These four are instantly recognisable by their swings, even at the distance of a well struck drive. Yet they all have in common a sound swing technique which maximises their physical abilities and they are, to a man, top-notch exponents of the ‘modern’ swing. This is something of prime importance to really understand. For there are two distinct basic types of swing; the classical and the modern.
The Classic and the Not So Classic Swing
Misunderstanding the different principles of the two types (and worse, using bits of one with parts of the other) has wrecked the swings of many golfers – and even a few Tour pros.
The classic swing is more of a hands and arms action (rather than the ‘whole body’ movement of the modern swing, where the arms follow, rather than lead). Dating from the days of brassies, spoons, cleeks and mashie-niblicks, it was exemplified by the flowing movement of Bobby Jones, who started his swing with the hands leaving the clubhead behind, contrasted to the compact three-quarter action of Sir Henry Cotton.
The classic grip was more in the fingers, promoting a faster hand action, and the classic golfer typically aligned slightly right of the pin and positioned the ball further back in his stance (centre for the 5-iron and even nearer the right foot for the short clubs).
Foot action was also more pronounced, with the left heel lifting high off the ground in the backswing, basically because the thick tweeds the players wore restricted easy movement. The arms were also kept close to the body, the right elbow tucked in at the top, the left on the follow through, and the overall action was quite rotary on a flattish plane. The classic swinger also hit against a ‘firm left side’ which, with his set-up and swing shape, produced theoretically a right to left shot, hopefully a draw.
The modern swing, in contrast, has much more emphasis on body movement. The legs drive, the hips turn, the arms follow and, in theory, the bottom of the arc is extended through impact, keeping closer to the ground for longer and hitting the ball further.
The modern grip is more in the palm of the left hand, more neutral, and exponents talk of “taking their hands out of the game.” They align square or more open to the flag and generally position the ball for all clubs (except the driver) some two inches inside the left heel. With lighter, less restrictive clothes, modern swingers roll their left foot on the backswing and stretch their arms a little further away from the body, creating a more lateral and upright swing, with the clubhead travelling more down the line to the target. All this tends to produce, particularly with modern clubs, a higher ball which flies left to right, hopefully as a power fade.
CLASSIC OR MODERN: BOTH CAN BE RIGHT FOR YOU.
Now what you as a club golfer must further appreciate is that using a hands and arms swing, a classic action, today is not wrong because it is outdated. Equally, it is not imperatively right to use a leg driven modern swing just because most top Tour pros do. The classic swing developed because of the whippy shafted clubs used in earlier times and the need to hit long, low shots under the wind on the firm turfed links. The modern swing is an evolution based on the technology of much stiffer, lighter shafts and the need to hit longer, higher shots, particularly on the stretched, lush courses in the US.
Some top pros appreciated this evolution and quickly adopted it, one being Tony Jacklin. When he started to play on the US Tour in the late 1960’s, he had a classic hands and arms swing. But then he studied the action of fellow pros like Jack Nicklaus and Tom Weiskopf and was soon convinced that he was not making adequate use of his legs to suit the courses they played. The change for him, which simply meant bending his knees a bit more and driving with his legs, took quite a time. Teaching pros today advocate practising a swing change sixty times a day for three solid weeks to groove it. For Jacklin, it involved hitting thousands of balls on dozens of practice areas and he believes he ended up with a slower, more rhythmic action which hit the ball further than he’d ever done before.
Doug once tried to change his swing in a similar way, having read of the ‘new’ Jacklin swing in his favourite golf magazine. He did it in a desperate attempt to cure his hook and hit a few balls on the practice ground one day, taking his remodelled swing onto the course the next. There he found to his horror that he had developed a pernicious push-slice, the ball flying right at forty five degrees to his intended line and then curling even further right, to end usually out-of-bounds, almost level with him. When, in desperation, he tried to revert to his ‘old’ swing on the eighth, he started to take deep divots, advancing the ball only thirty or forty yards forwards at a time. It took him a month in the end to cure his ‘cure’. What he should have realised from the start is that any small swing change, never mind a major reconstruction, demands practice, practice and yet more practice before it can begin to work. Doug, as a club golfer, should also have consulted his club pro before he started and have been guided by him throughout the change.
With the basic differences between the classic and modern swings however, there is one thing you must be very clear about. The hands and arms alone do not solely create the motive power to propel the ball. The whole body plays a part, while the legs are certainly active, not frozen as some would believe. Equally, with the modern swing, while the lower body drives, the arms must swing down fast and free. Both actions are essential motive forces that add power to the swing, be it classical or modern.
Body power is generated by coiling the upper torso against the resistance caused by a flexed right knee and solid feet – a good foundation
