Bobby Jones on Golf

by Robert Tyre Jones

  A person beginning golf is usually advised to omit the driver from his first kit, for the reason that, until he gains some idea of what it is all about, he will find the brassie, or two-wood, with its greater loft, a far more satisfactory club, even from the tee. This is not bad advice, for like the one-iron, the driver is more difficult to play than its more lofted brothers, the brassie and spoon. It demands a more accurate and more powerful stroke to get the ball into the air and to propel it along a proper line of flight.

  I have even heard the opinion expressed that a properly designed driver was practically useless to 80 per cent of the people who play golf, and I have been told that Chick Evans played in at least one National Championship playing all tee shots with a brassie, the only wood club he carries.

  The sponsors of the Oregon Open Championship in 1932 saw fit to revive the old custom of having a driving contest in connection with their golf tournament. Some of us can remember when no invitation or sectional tournament was quite complete without its quota of driving, pitching, and putting contests, and consolation flights to furnish excuses for giving away a little more silverware. In this particular instance, however, the Portland people apparently had a very good and a very interesting reason for adding this event to their program. Each contestant drove three times with the new standard ball and three times with the 1931 standard ball thus affording an opportunity for actual human demonstration of the difference between the two.

  The manufacturers and the U.S.G.A. had told us that on a 250-yard drive the new ball was approximately five yards shorter than the old. But that was the figure determined by tests with a driving machine. It is comforting to see that the human experiment arrived at approximately the same result.

  Gene Sarazen made the longest drive with the old ball, and tied with two others for top position with the new, his best efforts being 253 yards with the old and 242 with the new. This shows a difference of eleven yards, but a better measure is found in the average of the ten best drives with each ball. These average figures were 236 and 231.2, a difference of only 4.8 yards, within two-tenths of a yard of the approximate difference the officials had noted.

  It was possible also to draw another conclusion comforting to the dub—that it is the long hitter who loses most distance by the change. I am sure that we who declared that a difference of five yards in 250 meant less in 175, were not taken very seriously. The Portland driving contest seemed to indicate that this was true; for while the top figures varied eleven yards with the two balls, yet when the distance became less than 230, the difference became smaller, so that the average difference was reduced to less than five yards—not a conclusively accurate demonstration, but a fairly good indication.

  One other thing of importance by way of comparing the two balls was shown, and this may be taken as encouraging or not, depending upon whether the individual desires that golf be a test of skill or become as easy as possible. From all that appears in the report, the same number of drives were made with each ball, each player driving three of the old and three of the new. Nineteen of the first finished within the boundaries, while only fifteen of the latter were fair, indicating that the lighter ball is a bit more responsive to inaccuracies of striking.

  A driving contest always shows up our exaggerated notions of what constitutes a long drive. It always teaches us that the prodigious distances we read about are either inaccurately guessed at, or are due to hard ground, downhill roll, following wind, or some other unusual circumstance. We read about a lot of drives over three hundred yards, but we are rarely aware of the exact conditions of play. We become so accustomed to figures above 275 that we regard 240 yards as a puny effort for a first-class golfer.

  I have seen two driving contests in which really first-class golfers competed. In one at St. Louis in 1921, at the time of the National Amateur Championship, I was myself a competitor. Both were staged on level ground—at St. Louis on a polo field—with no appreciable wind stirring. The only difference lay in the condition of the turf—at St. Louis it was rain-sodden, while at Lytham-St. Anne’s in England, a fair roll was obtainable. I myself won the St. Louis event with an average for three drives of 229 yards, and the longest single shot was by Bob Gardner of Chicago, good for 246 yards. The winner of the St. Anne’s event—I think it was Archie Compston—averaged less than 250 yards, and the longest drive traveled 263 yards, roll included. In 1932 Sarazen’s drive of 253 yards was the longest among a field of good pros.

  I have heard that there was in New York an operator of a driving range of three hundred yards of level ground who offered a wager of five thousand dollars that no one could drive the length of it both ways within a time period limited only so as to make it unlikely that he might be driving in both directions with the wind behind. He permitted the taker to pick his day and time. I hope no one took him up without considering that when a yard becomes thirty-six inches of level ground, three hundred of them go a long way.

  3 HITTING HARD

  The more one sees of golf, the harder it becomes to make anything out of the various theories about how hard or how gently a ball should be struck. We hear that “pressing” is a thing to be avoided; but when we determine to avoid it, the first thing we know, some kind friend will inform us that we are steering the ball, and that we should hit it harder.

  Truly, it is a difficult thing to know just what to do. There is unquestionably a world of grief ahead for the man who continually goes all-out after every shot. Extremely hard hitting necessarily involves a considerable sacrifice of control, often with no increase in length, because the ball is not squarely struck; but there is equal danger when the player pulls his punch, easing up the stroke in an effort to guide the ball down the middle of the fairway.

  Once I was playing with Phillips Finlay at Pebble Beach. There had been so much talk about Phil’s long driving that the publicity given that part of his game must have affected the boy’s play. Few people appreciated that his long hitting was due to anything but unadulterated slugging; they could not understand that such distances would be covered by what, for Finlay, was a normal drive. So always when Phil had a bad day with his wood clubs, the criticism was always that he had been pressing.

  Whether Phil had been aware of it or not, this sort of thing had its effect upon his game. Whenever he found his drives going off line, the suggestion of critics was the first thing that occurred to him, so that he immediately eased up his stroke in an effort to hit the ball straight. On this day when we played, he had quite a lot of trouble on the first nine, getting a little farther from his normal stride at each tee shot as he held himself back more and more.

  Finally, after hitting a half-smothered hook off the ninth tee into the rough, where he lost his ball, he asked me what I thought was the trouble. I replied that he appeared to be holding himself back too much, and that I thought he would do better if he would take a good healthy wallop instead.

  He had been hooking steadily up to that time. At the tenth hole, he hit a very long ball, that barely missed the fairway to the right, and fell into the bay. From that point on, he drove very well, indeed.

  This does not indicate by any means that slugging should be the order of things. It shows merely that a conception of hitting that will cause the player to hold-up, or to fail to go through with the stroke, is entirely wrong—probably it will cause more trouble than the other in the long run. In driving, it has always been my idea that one should hit as hard as he can without upsetting the balance of the body and the timing of the stroke. Pressing causes trouble mainly by speeding up the backstroke. If that can be made slowly, and the downward stroke started leisurely, there may be any amount of effort thereafter without cause for worry.

  4 FAIRWAY WOODS

  Without overstepping the bounds of a proper conservatism, it is possible to say that a good part of the average golfer’s difficulty comes from the understandable desire and effort to do more than he can, and nowhere is this more noticeable than in his use of the wood clubs
through the green. Time after time, he may be seen diving into formidable rough with a spoon in his hand, or hauling out a powerful brassie to dig a ball out of a cuppy lie—shots that a golfer of greater skill and experience would not think of trying. The determination to get length at any cost, to use the strongest club possible, more often than not leads him to exceed his limit. Certainly, the average of his results would be greatly improved if he would make a practice of always using a club with which he could be sure of getting the ball up.

  At least part of the trouble comes from a confused idea of the relation between the individual clubs of the present-day four-club set of woods and those of the old driver-brassie-spoon combination. The inexperienced player is always more likely to choose a club because of the number on it than because of what he can do with it.

  To be perfectly frank, except for the exceptional case of the man who hits his long shots moderately well and with a fair amount of power but fritters away strokes around the greens, the player who is above the 85 to 90 class has little need for the driver or brassie of the four-club set. In almost every instance, players of this class have trouble getting the ball up, even from the tee, and they would be wise to drive with the two-wood, play their long fairway shots from good lies with the three-wood, and reserve the four-wood for shots of somewhat shorter range or from tight, unfavorable lies.

  It must be understood that the conventional four-club set covers approximately the same range of loft as did the conventional three-club set. It is merely divided among four clubs instead of three, in order better to meet the demands of the more accomplished players. Even before this arrangement was made available in matched sets, most of the pros and better amateurs were using four-wood clubs. Some called the additional intermediate club a driving brassie; others inserted it lower down and named it a brassie-spoon. My own set was made up of a driver and brassie, both of somewhat less than conventional loft, a spoon with the same characteristic, and a lofted spoon. I called these last two “big spoon” and “little spoon,” respectively.

  This, and similar sets put together by other players, were substantially the same as the modern four-club matched set. The brassie, being a bit more powerful than the conventional brassie of that time, was useful in stretching out to reach the long holes in two, when a good lie made this ambition appear reasonable. The big spoon could get good length from less favorable lies, and the little spoon could plant a steep shot upon a green from the shorter ranges. The big spoon, corresponding to the three-wood, could get the ball up more safely and easily, and had very nearly as much range as the ordinary brassie.

  It is not possible, of course, to tell a person just what he can or cannot do with a particular club; this he must find out for himself; but he might remember that the three-wood of the average set of today has about as much right to be called a brassie as the two-wood, and is often a safer club to use. When length is desired, it is, of course, best to use a powerful club, but one should always be sure that the club selected is one that will get the ball up easily.

  CHAPTER NINE

  1 SLICING AND HOOKING

  2 CAUSE AND EFFECT

  3 CURING THE SLICE

  4 THE MAGIC LINE

  5 “EDUCATING” THE SLICE OR HOOK

  6 PULLING

  7 HOOKING

  8 FADING AND DRAWING

  9 SHANKING

  Unwinding the Trunk

  CHAPTER NINE

  1 SLICING AND HOOKING

  It is too bad, in a way, that so many persons are inclined to regard expert golfers as natural phenomena, playing the shot through some sort of instinct that enables them to swing the club subconsciously in the proper groove. Because they are so adept at swinging a club, it is thought, I suppose, that they were born with the knack, and that they never have to use an ounce of gray matter except in selecting clubs. I say that this is too bad. I don’t mean that it is too bad that the players are so misunderstood—they can bear this very well—but it is too bad that the average player cannot understand that even the very best pros have constantly to be on guard against the myriad faults that may creep into any swing, and that they all have to know how to correct each one of these faults, and to prevent a recurrence after one has been put down. It is too bad, because the average player ought to realize that he must study his faults, and learn to correct them.

  There are two directions in which a golfer may err in any particular stroke. He may be off line to the left or to the right; he may hook or he may slice. If he knows why he hooks, and why he slices, and is able to effect a rough-and-ready remedy, he is in fine shape to hand out a lot of good lacings to those he plays with. But it rarely does any good just to say that hooking or slicing can be corrected by shifting the right hand, or doing some other simple thing; for, although the actual spin that causes slicing or hooking is produced because the club strikes the ball in a certain way, still the fault of the stroke inducing such a contact is not always the same.

  Unfortunately, the natural reaction of the player, when he is fearful of either slicing or hooking, always tempts him to do the very thing that will cause him to exaggerate, rather than correct, the fault. Whenever a man standing on a tee suddenly thinks that he must not slice, almost invariably, as he brings his club down to the ball, he will pull his hands in close to his body in an effort to yank the shot over to the left side of the fairway. When he does this, he pulls the face of the club across the ball from the outside even more emphatically than he would have done had he continued his normal stroke.

  This much is common knowledge; the slicing spin, and the way in which it is produced, are generally understood among all golfers. But the manner of producing a hooking spin, or what to do to counteract a slice, is not so universally known.

  I remember my old friend J. Douglas Edgar used to say that the hooking spin was produced by compressing the inside of the ball—that is, by striking the ball, not directly from the back, but somewhat from the inside out. It is safe to assume that when a player is hooking badly, he is exaggerating this sort of hit; in other words, he is shoving his club out too fast, and probably taking the ball too much on the upstroke. I am, of course, excluding from this discussion the badly smothered shot, speaking only of the hook that gains a fair elevation, and is not merely bounced along the ground.

  So the average player has two extremes between which he can work. Let him know that when he is slicing he is cutting across the ball from the outside, and let him try to get his club more around his body on the backswing, so that he will be well behind the line of flight, and thus can have a better chance of striking outward at the ball; and let him know, too, that when he is hooking, he is taking the ball too much from the inside, and that he should endeavor to straighten out the path of his club head within the hitting area, so that it will pass more nearly along the line of flight, and not so much outwardly across it.

  To do this, he must watch his left hand and arm, and be certain that the left hand is not throwing the club away from the body. When I have been bothered by hooking, I have always found it helpful to pick out a spot on the left side of the fairway, and to try to swing my left hand through the ball, toward the spot. It is a curious fact that the simplest remedy for slicing or hooking is to try deliberately to hit the ball toward the spot where the slice or the hook usually lands; for, if one tries to neutralize a hook by shoving the shot out to the right, or to correct a slice by pulling the ball over to the left, the only thing accomplished is an exaggeration of the fault sought to be avoided.

  Douglas Edgar was a magician with a golf club. When driving along a fence marking a boundary of the course, he preferred to start his ball down the line of the fence, or even outside this line, and bring it back into the fairway by a fade or draw, whichever was needed. He said that if he played for a swing of the ball to either left or right, he knew it would move in that direction; if he tried to hit a straight shot, he could not be sure in which direction the ball might veer.

  2 CAUSE AND EFFECT


  Two very important things for the average golfer to remember are: First, that it does not help to throw the club head into the ball ahead of the hands; and second, that the right arm should not begin to rotate nor the right wrist begin to turn or climb over the left until after the ball has been struck. To attempt to get the club head in first, or to roll the wrists, are two favorite ways of trying to correct a slice. The only trouble is that neither ever works.

  To hit a golf shot correctly, the player must move toward the ball, not away from it, as his club gathers speed. At the instant of contact, he must be over the ball where he can perform consistently and accurately the job of hitting; and above all he must be in position to utilize the pull of his left side. He cannot expect to get results by standing back and throwing the club at the ball.

  The correct stroke causes the club head to approach the ball from inside the line of play. The factors making this possible are the forward shift of the hips during the downstroke, maintaining a bend in the right arm that keeps the right elbow close to the side of the body, and the backhand nature of the stroke dominated by a strong pull from the left side. These are the factors that make it necessary or inevitable that at the instant of impact the hands should be on a line with, or ahead, of the club head, and that the left hand should carry through the ball without beginning to turn.