Chapter One

First Things First

A DIFFERENT APPROACH

Using the genius you were born with:  This instruction, to my knowledge, is unique in several ways.  The first is in its exploitation of the capabilities of the human brain and its ingenious neuromuscular system.  I have never seen anything in the literature or in film/video that capitalizes on our innate ability to learn to execute a good golf swing in the way that I set forth here.  I harbor the conviction that “you already know how to swing a golf club, but you don’t know it yet.”  It’s as though you had a gold coin somewhere in your house and didn’t know where to look for it.  I hope this enables you to find it.

Regarding our innate gifts, I know that their acumen cannot even be imagined or described adequately.  They have recently been highlighted and featured in a couple of National Geographic specials on television about those people we call “savants,” people possessing the ability to memorize, recall, calculate, and reason “a billion times” more easily and rapidly than the rest of us.   And again just yesterday I saw a rebroadcast of the segment about the most noted of the savants, Kim Peek (the man interviewed by Dustin Hoffman 20 years ago in preparation for the movie, Rain Man), whose mental powers are beyond astonishing.  And as concerns golf, it is said of the man considered the greatest ball striker in the entire history of the game that his phenomenal ability with a golf club was due to a similar mental capacity.  If you Google “Moe Norman,” you will find hundreds of things he did that will test your credibility for what a human being can do with a golf club: the Norman phenomenon is perhaps even more unbelievable than the Kim Peek story.

Using a method of instruction that taps into our inborn talent, as opposed to what I perceive is a rather patronizing style of teaching by mechanics or by model, what is written here will be considerably different from what seems to be the mainstream method of instruction, “This is your grip, this is your stance, … etc.”  We routinely perform many actions daily without awareness of mechanical or physical process, things that on analysis would be proven to be indescribably complex.  It is my intention to access this talent in all of us that makes an incredibly high level of human achievement possible and to apply it to the learning of golf.  It involves penetrating to and engaging intuition, clarifying concepts that become self-evident when the lights are focused on certain facets of them that usually are not highlighted, and tapping into the same ingeniously designed neuromuscular system (to use words woefully inadequate to convey their full significance) that performs all our physical tasks for us for our whole our lives without a conscious thought. 

The express route to quality golf:  A “perfect” golf swing can be easily learned.  In a short time in a couple of lessons, or from a short instruction in a book or from a video instruction. 

Preposterous claim, no?  No.  Not to say that adjusting and tweaking to apply it and then make it more precise won’t be appropriate once the basic motion is learned, but the “engineering” can be right and effective at the very start.

No one will believe this.    

Either because of their own experience, where they have struggled themselves, perhaps having been embarrassed trying to hit a ball for the first time; or if totally new to golf, from the common perception that a golf swing is very hard, and that it takes years to learn to swing well.  It does take a lot to become precise and to learn to score very well.  But a good workable golf swing ready for becoming precise is available almost overnight.

I stand by this—i.e., that a better-than-good swing—actually a near perfect one— can be taught in a short manual like this or in a couple of lessons lasting an hour or two each, one that can be used in a short time after that for hitting golf balls.  The next step, after getting familiar with the swing motions that must be learned and obviously before hitting golf balls is introduced, is finding how to put your hands on the club and where to put YOU relative to a golf ball on the ground so that impact of the club on the ball occurs square and in the center of the club face, and causes a trajectory in the desired direction.  I make this statement because it is almost universal for golfers to rush to the judgment that their mis-hits are due to swing faults, when the real issue is much more likely that they placed their bodies in a position before the swing started that compromised their intended motions, and/or that they stood too close or too far from the ball for accurate impact. 

In mis-hits, the ball is struck by an edge of the club or off center, or with a face out of square to its path.  If a golfer with a decent motion, not necessarily a perfect one, simply keeps his “swing center” steady during his motion, his clubhead will track a predictable orbit, and realizing that, the golfer simply needs to know where that orbit occurs relative to his own body as the clubhead approaches the ball.  Then his practice will be for the purpose of learning where to place himself and how to align the clubface in his hands at setup so that his motion will produce perfect centered square impact.  These items must be established before the swing even begins so that he may continue without disruption mid-swing from the most common golf shot destroyer—the subconscious mind’s recognition that something is out of whack.  That, the power of the subconscious, hijacks our “best intentions” because it triggers impulses to attempt to “fix” the direction of the swing, the orientation of the clubface on the way to the ball, or our upper body position after we have already started the swing.   “Searching for the ball during the swing” is common and the impulses that occur to accommodate this or the other swing-wreckers are instantaneous and undetectable.  Getting things right before the swing begins—i.e., finding out exactly how high and far from the ball to stand, how to orient the club in the hands, how much to tilt, etc., is the harder part.  The process for determining them requires some trial and error and knowledge of some critical details, a couple of which are apparently never explained or clarified for golf pupils.  But having a good swing, and then achieving good ball striking from correctly measuring and setting up does not require near as much “practice” and devotion as is perceived by most people.  This instruction zeroes in on these essentials with singular focus.

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