What is "the controlled golf swing"?
My foremost goal is to teach my golf students the whole golf swing - or better, the golf swing as a whole.
I do not believe in trying to impart the swing in stages or by sections; from the first lesson I teach the complete golf swing.
What my students get from this first lesson is a general idea of how the swing works. That way I get a general idea of how a student "generally" strikes as an individual.
Don't forget that whatever I say and however I illustrate my points, everyone, including you, will visualize the swing differently.
I had a heartbreaking experience of this early in my teaching days when I had to take classes, twenty students at a time.
All the twenty heard and saw the same things, but the extraordinary interpretations some of the individuals put on them were astounding.
I could not stand it and gave the job up. The trouble in writing about the game is that I realize that in a sense my readers are a class. So I must take endless trouble to insure that you shall understand what I write.
How the golf swing works
The beginning of the movement is in the feet. Then, the movement passes progressively up through the body, through the arms, and out at the club head.
What we try to do is to make the club head come down in the same path time and time again-in such a way that the face of the club comes squarely into the back of the ball every time.
We have one fixed point (the feet) and one moving point (the club head) which we desire to move along the same line time after time. So the golf swing might be compared to the drawing of arcs with a pair of compasses.
The reasons why we cannot be so precise in our stroking as the compass can, are that we are supported on two legs instead of one and we are full of flections and joints!
Again, we have not only to bring the club head down through the same line time after time; we must bring it down so that the club face is square with the ball at the instant of impact - and because the path of the club head is a curve, this means that impact must be timed correctly to an infinitesimal fraction of a second in the sweep of the swing.
Also the club head must be accelerating at the moment of impact.
So we have not only to set up the mechanism to make a good swing, which we can all soon do if we only swing at the daisies, but we have to time this swing to the fraction of a second.
Now here is something for you to think about until my next entry: I think that most of us overrate the value of good mechanics in golf and underrate the value of accurate timing. Find out why, in the next entry about the controlled golf swing.
