The Natural Golf Swing (5 page)

The head goes where the body carries it.

First, I realized that the head had nothing to do with the swing. If we were searching for a natural swing, the head had to go where the body carried it. The idea of keeping the head still suddenly made no sense to me. How could I swing back from the ball and through it without my head moving along?

Allowing the head to move helped me realize that the head had no purpose in the golf swing. It would simply go where it wanted. It struck me that trying to keep the head still was unnatural. It also caused so many problems: poor balance, keeping the weight forward while moving back, picking the club up, and that reverse C position so many golfers fall into at the finish of their swings and that hurts their backs. (I’ll have more to say on this later.) So, as I said, I had one of those “aha!” experiences at Oakdale. Now I was going to put the swing into the form it best functions in. I was going to develop an impersonal swing.

Until 1960, I had learned so much, good and bad, from other people. I didn’t necessarily accept their ideas as the be-all and end-all, but I was curious and I’d experiment if I thought the ideas made sense. Logic was the deciding factor. I’d observed other players for a few years and was able to put things together in a reasonable fashion. It started with the grip and it ended with balance. I had persevered until I got it. I wasn’t going to let up until I had some answers. I was like a kid with his Lego blocks: pick up a piece here, add another there. I’d use what seemed logical. I was fitting pieces of a puzzle together, but I had to continually think about the pieces. I still didn’t feel I could perform the motion without contriving it. I still didn’t know that the natural swing was the one where you set up the motion at address and let it happen, by design.

I first felt that the swing must be impersonal just prior to going on tour in 1961. In the meantime, I’d won only one cheque in my first three years on tour – for a hundred dollars in the Crosby when I made the cut. But I didn’t care. I was learning. I’d come home and my head was full of things to work on. I may not have been making any money, but so what? This was a learning process. I was going to school and I had to go through it. I wasn’t at all discouraged. It gave me something to work with. That’s why I played so well in Canada. I had all kinds of motivation to get at it when I came home.

I didn’t lose very often at home. It wasn’t that I was that terrific a golfer or that I had any particular gift for the game. But I’d done my homework and was more knowledgeable than others. I kept saying, “Look at me, I’m nothing special.” There must have been something in my head that made sense. I had a passion to understand the why, the causes of good golf shots.

Still, I felt the tension in those early years. I was playing to make a living, but my real intent was to practise. That’s how I felt. I needed to practise to improve, yet I had to make a living. So I had to play with what I had at the time. I didn’t want to start changing while I was playing.

By 1960, I had practised for some ten years. Sure, I was winning Canadian tournaments and making a living, but I still wasn’t good enough for where I wanted to go: as far as my potential would carry me, the big leagues, world-class. I wasn’t going to make it the way I was going at it. I could accept that I was better than the next guy, but I felt forced and restricted – it was work, not fun. And I didn’t like the idea that I had to hold myself in to get the job done. Had I stuck with that approach I never would have succeeded. I’d have become rigid with anxiety.

I knew what the swing was about. I knew that I had to develop a pure, undisturbed plane – the path the clubhead travels on – and to maximize an arc, the perimeter or outer boundary of the plane. In both cases, I knew that I wanted them the same every time. That’s what Hogan had, and it meant consistency. You could live with consistency.

I also felt that I would be more consistent if I could keep the clubhead from fluttering during the swing. I would feel more secure if I knew where it was, if I weren’t flipping it around. So I had arrived at the notion of passive hands, where the hands do nothing but hold on to the club during the swing. They
move only because the lower body moves; we begin the swing with our weight shifting to our back foot and finish it with our weight totally on our forward foot. The hands and arms and the clubhead move in response to our footwork.

So I knew all that, and then in 1960 at Oakdale I had asked, “Okay, what form do you put this thing in?”

I had said to myself, “It’s a machine. It hasn’t got a head. What form will you put it in to make it create a perfect plane and to maximize an arc?” I knew I could build a machine with the same capabilities as those I was striving for. And so I decided what the form had to be. I knew the function. I knew what I wanted to create: plane, arc, source of power, variance in trajectory, distance, direction, and curvature. I worked with these thoughts.

Until then, I was trying this and that, and living with the result. If I got a good result, I felt okay. But it was an empty feeling because I couldn’t be sure of what was causing it. I had ideas, but no overall picture. I realized I had to know exactly what it was and what had to be done to have it happen time and time again. Then I would learn to vary the characteristics of the shot with minor alterations to the form. I knew it could be done. Yes, it could happen.

The process I used was to find a form in which I didn’t have to worry about my arms, hands, and the club. The motor is the body. I’m talking about a whole body swing. The head, as I say, went along for the ride. The feet became the pivot points; back to the right foot, through to the left. I started using them.

I’d never have come across this if I hadn’t asked the question about what I’d want if I cut my head off. “Let’s make this thing impersonal.” That was the best approach I could have taken to the problem of creating a repeating swing.

The consequence of this was that when I went out in 1961, I finally felt I did have some answers. I’d learned that distance comes from the pace at which we transfer weight; that is, the faster I move from my back foot toward my front foot, the more clubhead speed I’ll generate. I also understood that I could vary trajectory by varying weight distribution at impact; if I wanted to make a high shot, I’d just keep some of my weight back. It was like a teeter-totter. High shot, weight back. Low shot, weight forward, thereby altering the loft on the club at impact. It had also become apparent that the curvature of the ball depends on the plane relative to the target. As long as I was swinging toward my target, then the idea was to alter the plane to change curvature. And I could change the plane simply by drawing the right foot back for a right-to-left shot, or by moving it forward for a left-to-right shot. It was simply a matter of altering alignment.

I’d also realized an important factor concerning Hogan’s placement of his left foot. He wasn’t doing this only to establish a balance point so that he could finish flat on his foot. He did it to set up a point at which his swing would stop when he was facing the target. That gave him a place to go to and the direction for the ball. It set up a resistance in the left knee and hip that would stop him directly on the target. This was a superb way of ensuring direction.

When I went out in 1961, then, I was feeling pretty good. That year I won the Coral Gables Open. I was swinging pretty well, but I still needed another piece. That turned out to be extension, which I thought about quite a bit in the early 1960s. My arc was pretty much what it needed to be already because of my weight transfer, but I was still controlling the club, almost placing it at the top. It took a while to let go, to simply let the club track on its own once I’d started the swing. Eventually I got very relaxed and started getting the feeling of centrifugal force; I felt as if I were just
being carried along by the momentum of the clubhead tracking. That was the final piece. By 1964, I had become what people called a natural golfer. I felt powerful while relaxed; it seemed as if centrifugal force were pulling my arms out of my shoulder sockets. That’s when the game started to exhilarate me.

And yet there were problems. I still really couldn’t explain what I was doing to my satisfaction, not totally anyway. I still believed I had to maneuver myself and the golf club. I’d learned all these parts of the swing that added up to what looked like a natural golfer, but I didn’t really feel like one. I may have had what observers felt was close to a perfect swing, but I had an imperfect understanding of myself. I still didn’t appreciate, for example, that everything I had developed was based on balance. The grip is based on balance. Weight transfer is based on balance. The finishing position is based on balance. Balance is the most important aspect of the swing. Had I been able to tell somebody then what I was doing, it would have been that I was keeping the swing in balance. But I was doing it by trial and error. I may have
made
myself into a natural golfer, but I hadn’t let go of the mechanics.

I was never as relaxed as I would have liked. My swing might not have had any disturbances, but I had plenty within myself. For one thing, I thought that I had to be physically strong to play golf the way I wanted to. I felt I needed physical endurance to handle the lifestyle and the strains of competing and being in contention. Strength would solve everything, or so I thought. And why not? If the tour was so rigorous, it made sense to beat it with raw power. Meanwhile, I had little or no idea that it would have been far better to simply relax. It wasn’t natural for me to make myself into a bullfighter out there. But I tried. I repressed all my feelings and camouflaged them with brute force.

It didn’t work. Eventually, I realized I needed mental, emotional, and physical balance. I had the mental balance since I understood the swing. But because I had put the swing together in pieces, without realizing that balance was the heart of it all, and that the various pieces were nothing more than connective tissue that tied the starting position to the finishing position, I couldn’t relax. So I had very little emotional balance and only rarely experienced physical pleasure.

A good example of how I lacked awareness was what happened to me after the 1966 World Cup in Tokyo. That’s when I hit what I call my perfect shot, in the third round.

The aesthetics felt right to me. I was playing from a valley to an elevated green, and the air was so clear that I could visualize exactly what I wanted to do. I had no difficulty at all in selecting the type of shot I wanted to play. I was also in the heat of battle, in a very concentrated state.

I executed the shot and had this total mental, emotional, and physical experience. The shot came off to sheer perfection. The ball zipped by the hole, 180 yards away and uphill, and finished just a few feet away. I still don’t know how it didn’t go in. I don’t know whether I’d even dreamed I could play a shot that well. It was a feeling of, “Hey, I can’t do it any better. Is
that
any good? Give me more of that.”

I came home wanting more of this experience. I went directly to the range at Oakdale to see if I could get it. I practised and I practised but I couldn’t get the same response. Finally, I stopped and said, “You fool, you have to be in the heat of battle. You can’t get it while you’re practising.” I needed total involvement.

In 1968, I won the Phoenix and Tucson Opens in consecutive weeks. I played so well those two weeks, but really no better than in five other events I had played early that year. I really don’t think I could have made better golf swings than during those seven weeks. The fact is that I could have won five out of the seven tournaments if I’d made some putts. That’s how well I was playing. My swing was as good as it has ever been. At Phoenix and Tucson, I hit the ball so close to the hole that I couldn’t miss.

And yet something was missing in the overall picture. I just wasn’t feeling right. Something was out of balance.

Since October of 1966, I’d worked on a fitness programme in Toronto with the late Lloyd Percival. I’d found that I couldn’t play more than a couple of weeks in a row without becoming physically and emotionally depleted. I was getting totally exhausted: no starch left at all after one competitive week. The next week would be a washout. At 135 pounds, I had neither the durability nor the strength to play the way I was capable of. I thought I needed a programme that would give me more endurance.

By the time that 1968 season had begun, I was up to 172 pounds. I’d worked out with weights. I’d done isometrics and running. Now I felt I could keep going. I didn’t get drained nearly as easily. This was important to me. I’d won four tour events by the beginning of the 1968 season, but I hadn’t proven to myself that I could contend week after week. But in 1968, I played the first seven tournaments of the season, and, as I’ve said, contended every week. I was stronger. I wanted to see what I could do.

I started my first round in Phoenix on the back nine. I felt like I couldn’t miss a shot.

That’s what I’d been after all those years: the security of knowing where the ball would go. On my thirteenth hole, the fourth, I hit a shot eight feet left of the flag and twelve feet short. Not too bad by ordinary standards. But I was playing so well that Dave Marr, with whom I was playing, asked, “Where did that come from?” It seemed like a horrible shot. That’s how high a player’s standards can get when he knows where the ball is going. And I knew. I was absolutely knocking the flag down, stuffing it down the throat every hole. The game was very easy, and it stayed easy. Even though I didn’t get much sleep the night before the last round – I had a one-shot lead, and would rather have been a shot or two behind – I still had enough strength to go on and win. That was gratifying. My endurance programme seemed to be paying off.