Sometimes I wonder if I’m the very first nerdy engineer to ever really care about the technical details of the golf swing.  I do care, very deeply in fact, a situation my fans on Useless-Knowledge are painfully aware of, and unfortunately my Stanford engineering degree has equipped me with the analytical skills to bore them once again to tears, with yet another golf-related rant.  Not to worry though, this one won’t be nearly as dreadful as some of the others, and I promise to include a picture or two to give everybody a much needed break from my insipid prose.

 

To be completely forthcoming, I already know for a fact that the frabjous sport of golf has been blessed with numerous technical geeks in its long history, among them the great Bobby Jones, Larry Nelson, and Karsten Solheim to name three, as well as perhaps Scotty Cameron and Rock Ishii.  Regarding the last two however, the former is a putter guru, and the latter is the balls behind Nike, so they don’t really count in my swing-obsessed book.  If any of these respectable gentlemen ever plumbed crooked-stick mechanics to the agonizing, excruciating depths I have, they thankfully kept it to themselves, and I will intentionally ignore the lesson contained in that realization for the purposes of this essay.  (Please keep the snide comments to yourselves, in other words.)

 

After 12 years of hard labor, I’ve come to the surprising conclusion that reading somebody else’s instructions on how to properly swing a golf club -- even if they are a demonstrated expert -- is next to useless, and that’s why my articles on this subject continue to plague our beloved U-K website.  As a case in point, consider the following passage by Peter Kostis, a famous teacher and television analyst possessing indisputable talents, on the subject of “trapping” versus “scooping” a golf shot:

 

Good players hit down on the ball with the shaft leaning toward the target approaching impact, so they trap the ball between club and ground and trust that the ball will spin up into the air. Practice on the range to find the ball position that allows you to do this.”  Golf Digest, March 2002.

 

I take considerable issue with the above paragraphs, which, for a rank beginner, appear to be generous endowments of sage wisdom.  If you’ve been faithfully following my self-imposed prison sentence on U-K, you would already know that I just recently learned what "trapping" actually means in terms of correctly striking a golf ball, and I assure you that the language employed by Mr. Kostis does not capture this important phenomenon very precisely.  Please understand, I have nothing but jealous admiration for Peter Kostis – an outstanding player -- and other gurus who spend years straightening out the slices and shanks of the hacking hordes, but having stared for hours at written advice of this kind, until my eyeballs virtually developed dimple patterns of their own, I respectfully submit the following opinion to novices in the gallery who are trying to learn golf:  run, Johnny… run for your golfing life.

 

It’s not quite as bad as all that, especially if you supplement such typical golf magazine advice with family-sized buckets of driving range nuggets, but hear me out.  First of all, in my many observations of beginning golfers taking their first baby steps, I rarely see anyone attempting to “scoop up” the golf ball.  Winston Churchill may have called golf clubs “instruments ill-designed for their purpose,” but the eloquently beleaguered English Bulldog would never have mistaken a 5-iron for something that also handles dog poop.  Furthermore, nobody I’ve ever met shifts the golf ball forward in their stance to facilitate an impotent scooping motion -- they move it toward their front foot because no less than Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus TOLD THEM TO.  And finally, no golfer on God’s green Earth has ever actually “trapped” a golf ball between their clubhead and the ground, because it’s quite physically impossible to do!  It’s nothing short of ludicrous to think the ball could be literally squashed into the sod by a golf club having even a paltry 16˚ of loft (equivalent to a one-iron), unless the golfer was doing his best Paul Bunyan imitation.  (More details on this popular myth later.)  In my view, most beginners -- if not all -- labor under one grand, mental misconception:  they think it is either wrong, or impossible, or both, to hit down and through the golf ball with a “shut” (or “closed”) clubface.  They simply can’t visualize what should truly occur through impact, and they are hence victims of an open clubface “delusion” of sorts.

 

A “slice,” the bane of the vast majority of golfers worldwide, is caused by an open clubface at impact.  Likewise for a blocked or “pushed” shot.  A “flip-hook” (or duck-hook), generally a problem for more experienced players, has at its evil roots an effort to square-up the wide-open clubface with a vigorous and excessive wrist-flipping action through the impact area.  Players that hook the ball are generally (if not acutely) aware of the horrors of an open clubface, and having recently graduated from this school myself, I know for a fact that my sickness did not lie in trying to “scoop” the ball off the ground at all.  A much better description would be I was trying to “wrap” the clubface around the golf ball using rotational clubhead momentum, in the hopes of avoiding the embarrassing (and ultimately revealing) “slice-o-rama.”  After all, golf is nothing if not one gigantic male-ego trip, and publicly displaying my lack of ability to fellow players via the occasional banana-ball was absolutely the worst of all possible fates, not to mention its effect on my wallet… believe me, those lost Titleist Pro V1’s can get very expensive.

 

What’s most interesting about the ubiquitous “slicer’s disease” in golf, is that people will persist in slicing even if they’ve been clearly told how to avoid it.  I was on the driving range one evening several months back, and two college students were practicing in the stall behind me.  I was hitting it fairly well that night, and one of them began watching me, and then politely requested some assistance.  He looked like an athlete, and he was hitting tremendous boomerangs that often flew over the boundary net and into the adjacent tenth-hole fairway.  I prescribed a few of the more common remedies, such as adjusting his ball position and stance, but he continued to slice every shot.  I finally told him to loosen his grip, and while he was standing at address I took hold of the club, and rotated it radically in his fingers to produce an utterly shut clubface.  (A vector perpendicular to the leading edge of his clubface pointed dead left of his target line by at least 30 degrees, in technical terms.)  I explained to him that it may look and feel funny, but just try to take your usual swing.  The puzzled look on his face told me the club now felt exceedingly odd in his hands,  and I wasn’t surprised when he nearly missed the ball with his first swing, and still hit a low left-to-right spinning shot.

 

His face flushed for a moment with exasperation, but his demeanor told me that he had definitely felt something different, and his natural curiosity won the battle of emotions as he set up for another go.  He swung with more authority the second time, and the ball took off like a low rocket which curved dramatically from right-to-left.  He had struck the first hook shot of his life, and his eyes lit up with excitement.  His buddy laughed uproariously, and I smiled and returned to my own labors, knowing that the young man would return almost immediately to slicing a large percentage of his shots anyway, but also knowing that I had helped him experience something from which he could continue to progress.

 

Besides illuminating the singular difficulties of the golf swing, this anecdote illustrates the problem most people have in comprehending what is meant by “trapping” the golf ball.  (Cliché-ridden instruction containing explanations unsupported by physics doesn’t help much either.)  Protesting the examples offered by the esteemed Peter Kostis, I claim most beginners know full well what hitting downward on the golf ball implies.  What many beginners may not know is that they are also “hitting from the top,” a situation where the right elbow stays locked during the first crucial moments of the downswing, and this common malady produces a clubhead path which approaches impact from outside-to-inside the target line.  The primary problem is not really the out-to-in path, however, the big problem is that their clubfaces are wide open, and thus their shots start left of the target and slice way to the right with excessive sidespin (vice-versa for southpaws).

 

Similarly, if a golfer advances beyond the “novice-slicer” stage, and begins attempting to draw the ball (curve it from right to left) with an intermediate-level wrist-flipping action, he may indeed no longer be striking down on the ball sufficiently.  He may be preferring instead to “pick it clean” or “get under it” by unconsciously aiming at the underside of the ball, but the problem remains directly tied to a basic misunderstanding of how to “shut” the open clubface.  In other words, the intermediate player flips the clubhead from open to closed in a hands-oriented move whose success largely depends on split-second timing.  Additionally, to compound his problems, the margin for error between hitting the ground first (the fat shot), and thinning the ball (blading it) – is ridiculously slim.

 

Allow me to summarize my reasoning thus far:

 

(1)  A beginner attacks downward on the ball with an open clubface, causing it to slice in the classic fashion.  This person may not be consciously trying to hit downward on it, but their over-the-top swing action produces an out-to-in clubhead path which results in shots that start to the left of the target line, and curve dramatically right with left-to-right sidespin.

 

(2)  An intermediate golfer aims right of the target and attempts to close the open clubface by “flipping it” through impact with wrist action, causing fat shots, duck-hooks, and push-slices (shots that start to the right and curve further right).

 

Both cases share the same basic problem:  a wide open clubface.  The beginner doesn’t understand what hitting the ball with a “closed” clubface truly means, and may have rarely, if ever, felt this sensation in his hands.  The golfing world of Case #1 is a world filled with follies of the open clubface, and some unlucky souls never escape it.  Case #2 is a world of intermediates (and some lucky naturals with good hands) who DO recognize the dangers of an open clubface, but don’t understand the optimum solution, and thus fall victim to wrist-flipping remedies riddled with only rare and risky rewards.

 

TRAPPING THE BALL, with a slightly closed clubface and a mostly descending blow, is the answer PGA pros use.  We’ll find out exactly what this means in Part 2.

 

Oh yeah… and I promise to show you those pictures next time, too.