Last night, much to the delight of atheists everywhere, I proved that golfing talent is almost certainly not “God given.”  Ladies and germs, with regard to my lifelong ambition to hit a golf ball like a PGA professional, I’m pleased to inform you that this godless author has arrived.  (*canned golf clap*).  If you’ve followed my Frodo-like golfing quest (I also starred as Gollum on several occasions) on Useless-Knowledge from its very inception, you would know that way back in October of 2005, I was not a man brimming with Tiger-like confidence in the Middle-earth realm of golf ball-striking.  I was not "The Lord of the Swings." In fact, I was a literal golfing buzz-kill.  Go ahead, it’s okay to say it.  As anybody who has ever met me knows, I can take a little criticism... every decade or so.

To be completely honest, contrary to what this triumphant essay may have suggested (written just one slim week ago), I was not striking the golf ball half as well as I’m striking it currently.  It’s like the remaining mental barriers, or the concrete dams in my mind, already leaking fresh water from a couple of recently punched holes, have burst open wide, and the trickles have now become a torrential river of pure understanding.  Indeed, on New Year’s Day 2007, I was aiming much too far right of the target.  My eyes were apparently still reluctant to adopt a perfectly square stance, even though Jack Nicklaus’s method of using a speck of discolored grass a few yards ahead doubtlessly indicated the error of my ways.  As a result of this lack of trust, something that plagues even scratch players from time to time, my shots were hooking excessively.  Despite this obvious flaw, my newly discovered trapping technique -- and the amazing flush ball-contact -- thrilled me to the core.

At the driving range last night, I imagined I was a hockey player, armed with a trapping, slattering paddle-stick, and I was hitting left-handed, backhanded slap-shots at the goalie (my former boss) using a supinated (flat) left wrist position.  I pictured the goal itself being located directly in my path to the target, and I squared my feet exactly parallel to a line the Golden Bear himself would have approved of.  After a few solid yet slightly blocked drives to the right, I realized my right hand was staying too submissive to my dominant left one.  Almost instantly my right forefinger “woke up,” and became energized through the impact zone, whereupon the trajectory of my shots began resembling frozen ropes fired by a Howitzer.  The range balls took off on line, and stayed on line, and at that moment I truly understood, for the very first time, why the top PGA pros stare so intently at the flight of their shots:  they are determining what kind of sidespin they’ve put on the ball, because every shot has a small amount of it, and it’s often difficult to determine whether the ball will drop to the right or to the left.  Ball contact is almost always square and flush in the professional game, and thus draws and fades are very subtle, resulting in at most a few yards of curvature.  Hence, the type of spin imparted to the ball -- along with its trajectory -- is everything on the PGA tour, and naturally these players are quite interested in how their shots move through the air.

Once again, the golf lesson was clear:  the level of understanding one can achieve by merely reading about something, compared to actually experiencing it in person, is as distinct as night is from day.

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Anyway, enough with the weekend news report.  I’m here today to wrap up the discussion of “trapping the golf ball” I began several days ago in Part 1.  Oddly enough, yesterday I would have written this article quite differently, had I started it before my range session began.   The flood gates of comprehension have definitely opened for me, and if I hadn’t practiced last night I would have told you that “trapping” is primarily a function of a “shut” clubface.  I’m inclined to modify this idea somewhat, because I now believe that effective trapping can also produce a fade (a controlled slice).  As I alluded to earlier, the top pros --  the ones who can “work” the ball both ways and strike downward through it with precisely square clubfaces -- never quite know if a ball will tend to the right or to the left, unless they are purposely exaggerating their swing actions under special circumstances (such as bending the ball around a tree, or compensating for strong winds, etc.), or they make a genuine mistake. Yes, contrary to popular belief, the pros make bad swings, too.

In fact, humorously, I’m not exactly sure WHAT constitutes “trapping” a golf ball at this point, or how to clearly explain the phenomenon, except to say that it differs significantly from “slicing” and “flipping," the two primary errors suffered by average golfers.  However, I did promise to show you some pictures, so let’s try that approach.

Here is a picture typical of the kind you might find in golf magazines.  My main objection to this rendering, is it seems to suggest a pronounced “flipping” is required to square the clubface at impact, because the clubface itself is shown in a wide open orientation, it has nearly arrived at the ball, and the path it follows is drawn like a hairpin turn at Monte Carlo.  The casual observer is fooled into thinking that a rapid rotation must be occurring through the ball, at least in terms of degrees of clubface rotation per linear inch of travel, and this is simply not the case at all.  Plus, the path of the clubhead is in reality a 3-dimensional curve in 3-D space, and any illustration on paper is obviously limited to two dimensions.

The picture also promotes another popular myth:  a golfer wishing to avoid a slice must aim at the “inside quadrant” of the golf ball, which is marked in the illustration with a black “X.”  For me, this particular visual virtually propelled me into my own “flipping” phase of swing development.  After all, what better way to strike the inside quadrant of the golf ball, than to aim one’s feet way right of the target line, and try to “get under it” by flipping one’s hands at it?  Years of pushes, fat shots, and smother-hooks were my hard-earned reward for heeding this misleading “sage” wisdom.  Novices who perpetually slice the ball with “over-the-top” swing flaws may indeed be aided by a visual construct that divides the golf ball into four quadrants, with the inner quadrant being Hooker-Heaven and the outer one being Slicer-Hell, but for someone trying to master trapping the ball, this image is very confusing and largely worthless.  Interestingly enough, my current perception of trapping is much more concerned with allowing a slightly shut clubface to “spank” the outside quadrant of the ball rather than the inside one.

As the great Nick Faldo has said more than once (in this video, among others), golf is a game of "opposites.”  What he means is, if you are attempting to improve your swing, you may be puzzled more than once to find that “inside” really means “outside,” and vice-versa.  I’ve been struck as if by a thunderbolt many, many times in my 12 year golf journey by this important realization.  If you’re stuck in a particular habit, you might do well to try the opposite thing, even if it seems a touch crazy.  You may be pleasantly surprised!

Although this next picture also suffers from being a 2-D representation of 3-D geometry, it clearly shows the difference between striking through the ball with a shut clubface as opposed to an open one.  As I protested to Peter Kostis in Part 1, the idea that a golf ball could be literally “trapped” or squashed between the clubface and the ground is simply wrong unless the club is wielded by a lumberjack.  The loft of the clubhead prevents this from happening, otherwise the ball would never leave the ground… trust me -- a Stanford engineering graduate – here.  Topspin doesn’t play an important role in golf, like it does in tennis.  In every golf shot, with the possible exception of a trick-shot produced by an artist armed with a steep-faced driver and a long tee, the golf ball flies by generating aerodynamic lift via significant levels of backspin, which is produced by the LOFT of the clubhead design, as well as the presence of grooves and the inherent friction produced during the high-velocity collision of impact.

Lastly, this picture was formerly intended to be the main thrust of my attempt to capture the concept of “trapping,” and I would have advocated the idea that a vector “normal” (or perpendicular) to the clubface is trapped or contained by a vector tangent to the clubhead path.  When the face is shut (or closed) as in the upper half of the diagram, one can see how this happens, and in the lower-half diagram, it is clear the normal vector (in red) diverges noticeably from the path vector (in green).  Unfortunately, as I confessed sheepishly at the outset of this overcooked technical gumbo of an essay, I don’t necessarily believe this to be true anymore.

So what exactly IS trapping a golf ball, you ask?  Hell if I know. 

I will, however, leave you with the following homework, and admonish you with something my former teacher Rick Walker used to browbeat me with:  don’t rely on FEEL to determine what is correct in the golf swing.  Ranger Rick’s advice means just what it says, which is don’t trust the feel of the club in your hands to guide you towards solid shotmaking, especially if you are not an advanced player.  The homework exercise is simple:  close your eyes and have someone put a random golf club into your hands (grip end first, smart guy).  Then, keeping your eyes closed, tell the person assisting you which way the clubface is pointing.  If you can successfully do this, and you are not an expert golfer, you need to unlearn this skill.  Forget your intuition, my friend.  Ignore what your hands are telling your brain about the position of the clubface, because it will not help you understand how a professional traps the golf ball, and thus it will not help you to improve your golf swing.

What?  Don’t trust the feel of the clubhead?  Isn’t this idea exactly the opposite of what you might think?  Indeed, and if you don’t trust me, you can trust 3-time Master's champion Nick Faldo.

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