Each and every golfer has at their disposal an infallible teacher. This teacher never lies, doesn't discriminate and doesn't try to force a lot of theoretical or hypothetical 'garbage' down our throat's... this "best teacher of all" is the golf ball and if we take the time to understand what it is telling us on each and every shot, we can speed up the learning process tenfold. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that every "fallible" teacher, when first working with a student should spend as much time as needed until the student totally understands the "laws" and "mechanics" of ball flight (and the various types of curvature that may be imparted to the ball).
Maybe because I started playing pool when I was barely tall enough to see over the edge of the table, or because I was pretty much a "curve ball" pitcher in my youth and a pretty decent bowler in my teen years, counting on the counter-clockwise spin of the ball to give me that diving hook into the one-three pin pocket at just the right moment - I've always "sort of" had a basic understanding about the affect of the spin that is imparted to a spherical object. Some might say this is like comparing apples and oranges since pool balls and bowling balls (for the most part) don't really have "flight characteristics" but the only real difference (and the main reason golf will ALWAYS BE THE MOST CHALLENGING SPORT) is the fact that all golf clubs (yes, even the putter) are designed to impart "backspin" to the golf ball which will cause the ball to become 'airborne' for a certain length of time - additionally, if impact doesn't happen perfectly on that imaginary perpendicular line between ball and clubface, some degree of sidespin will also be imparted - hence the geometric complexity inherent in golf.
Since all golf clubs have, basically flat faces (excluding, of course, the slight bulge and roll often found on drivers, fairway woods and hybrids) and those faces are set at certain angles related to a 90 degree perpendicular (imagine a perfectly perpendicular clubface - hence, it would have zero degrees of loft and without some sort of hand manipulation, would never get the ball airborne, all the way down to a clubface that lies flat on the ground at address pointing skyward - this club would have 90 degrees of loft and a perfect swing with such a club (maintaining that 90 degree angle) would result in the club totally sliding under the ball with no forward thrust applied at all... the ball would/could not go forward.
Thankfully, the clubs that we generally use to play the game have varying degrees of effective "loft" and therefore are designed to send the ball on a certain angle of flight with whatever forward thrust we are capable of imparting based on our swing characteristics. But therein lies the rub. Unless we can "perfectly" swing the clubhead on an arc that might cover 20 to 30 feet and return squarely into the back of the ball at right angles to our intended line of flight* and also see to it that the ball impacts the club at the optimum "center of gravity" or "sweet spot" (this "spot" per se, can be measured infinitely into a fraction so tiny, we might just decide to throw in the towel and give up the game entirely because of the implied measure of precision required to consistently make contact with a spot, say, 1/10,000 the size of a pinhead).
For sanity's sake, let's assume that a reasonable sweetspot is the size of a dime (or even a nickel or quarter). Please don't panic just yet... as fairly coordinated, intelligent, somewhat athletically inclined individuals - through a few basic fundamentals (grip, stance, address - coil and recoil) we are capable of hitting that sweetspot more often and more accurately than we may have dreamed possible. "Do you think you could hit a target 10,000 times in a row?" If you said "no way", well, when was the last time you missed your mouth with your fork when you were eating? (from "Zen Golf", Dr, Joseph Parent). OK, I'm getting a little off track here.
Let's assume that we can reasonably and at fairly regular intervals, create an acceptable clubface to ball contact. It is what happens afterwards that we must study and learn from - the flight of the ball. The flight should reveal everything you need to know regarding the quality (or lack thereof) of your 'strike'. For our purposes, I will try to dumb it down as much as possible (there are many web sites that would do Einstein justice regarding the physics/mechanics of ball flight).
Let me introduce some phrases that every golfer knows (or should know) and then we'll delve a little bit into cause and affect. (Assume a right-handed golfer)... the Hook, the Slice, Draws, Fades, Straight shots, Pulling the ball, Pushing the ball, Topped shots & Thin shots, Fat shots etc... for sake of argument, pretend that the golf ball at address mirrors a clock face - with 12:00 pointing at an imaginary, perfectly straight line that is your intended line of flight. You would therefore be standing parallell to the imaginary line between 12:00 and 6:00 for all normal golf shots (with some slight deviations regarding intentional draws and or fades).
Since golf is a "side-on" game (we don't face our target - we face the 'line' that runs through the ball to our intended line of flight) - it should only make sense to us that the correct approach of the clubface to the ball MUST COME FROM THE SIDE OF THE TARGET LINE WE ARE STANDING ON (using the clock face I mentioned above, we could imagine a swing path following an imaginary line between 7:00 and 1:00) ... ideally, we can take this one step further and use Mr. Hogan's (Five Lessons - The Modern Fundamentals Of Golf) swing plane paradigm... at address, imagine a plane of glass that rests on our target line and leans towards us just enough so that the pane rests on our shoulders (with a hole cut out for our head's to stick through). The angle of this pane of glass will naturally change depending on the club we are using - the steepest incline would be with the shortest clubs because we naturally stand closer to the ball - the driver, therefore, should give us the shallowest angle.
It's time to state another ABSOLUTE** regarding good golf shots/swings... unless we can swing the golf club so that on the DOWNSWING, our hands, club shaft and clubface all remain somewhere near or BELOW the imaginary pane of glass, WE WILL NEVER BECOME THE GOLFER WE ARE CAPABLE OF BECOMING. Please notice that I stated "on the downswing"... Hogan kept the club below that pane of glass throughout the entire swing, which may explain why he became one of the very best ever. A whole host of exceptionally good golfers consistently break that pane of glass on the backswing but almost never break it on the downswing.
Jim Furyk, one of the very best golfers on the planet immediately comes to mind. Mr. Furyk, to his credit and good fortune, has only ever had one teacher in his life - his Father. They have developed one of the most consistent swings on the tour and a bunch of wins, including a U.S. Open are the result. With all due respect to Jim Furyk though, his swing does require a "slight re-routing" of the club on the downswing - an additional 'swing element' or a slight deviance from the ideal - which is a simple swing with the least amount of moving parts and thus little need for mid-swing manipulations. Don't get me wrong here. Jim Furyk has grooved this swing to a degree that most golfers could only dream of... if he tried to make a change now, he might never make another cut. OK, back to what this section is supposed to be all about.
Assuming we make the type of downswing that keeps our arms, shaft and clubhead below the pane of glass, we can expect to MOST LIKELY hit one of the following types of shots... 1. a shot that is flushed with a perfectly square clubface to target line strike resulting in that rarest of all shots - the dead-straight shot... 2. a pushed shot - if for some reason we get everything else right, but do not get the clubface squared up to our target line (in other words, still slightly open at impact) and the club following a path to the right of our intended target line, well - the ball can do nothing else except fly dead right of where we are aiming... 3. using the last scenario, if we have the path of the clubface moving right of our intended target line but the face is square to the target, we will get either a draw or a hook, depending on the amount of variation from the ideal as it relates to swing path and club face. You can fairly quickly deduce that by studying the flight of the ball - most importantly - it's initial starting line and any spin that might be imparted by the clubface, we can fairly easily determine what must be done in order to get our shots started correctly and ending up where we want them.
If your golf ball consistently starts to the right of your intended target line but the angle of your clubface as it compares to the swing path produces a slight draw that curves the ball back to your intended target... well, congratulations... if you have a decent short game and can putt a lick, you are probably a very good golfer and will only get better if you work on the important things that bring better golfers improvement - short game and putting. If your draw happens to turn out to be a pretty viscious hook, well then, you need to address one or possibly two things.
Your swing path is probably TOO MUCH inside out and your clubface is pretty severely closed in realtion to your swing path. It might help to point out that the path your swing takes (as per above - too much inside out) is pretty much controlled by your address position. Try to make certain that everything - your eyes, your shoulders (most important), your hips, thighs, knees and feet (least important) are parallell to your intended line of flight (OK, let's use the old railroad track image - the inside rail is where you are standing and all of those things mentioned above should be in line with that track while being perfectly parallell to the outside track - the target line).
From there, you can start making MINOR adjustments (it helps to have a friend or a teaching pro here). You need to first determine where you are TRULY aiming as to opposed to where you THINK you are aimed (you'd be surprised how different they can sometimes be). You can even figure all of this out yourself if you have a video camera, a tripod and enough knowledge to interpret correctly what the video is telling you. The goal, obviously, is to get the club swinging on a better path - meaning less inside out and it should be fairly easy to do that by making minor adjustments to one, two or more things in your static set-up.
If you now have your shots starting right on the target line or just a little right of the line, but the ball is still hooking too much, you are most likely going to have to make a grip adjustment (let me caution you here that if you have been playing golf for a long period of time and are a better than average golfer, a change to your grip should only ever be considered as a last resort). It might take 6 months to a year or two for a fairly drastic grip change to feel "second nature". That being said, if you have a very strong grip (one in which the hands are turned way to the right on the grip and you just can not get rid of that nasty hook, well, you just might have to consider turning your hands - in very slight increments - more and more to the left - until you start getting draws instead of hooks (I don't consider this a 'drastic' grip change and it can fairly quickly become second nature) - OR - you can have a set of clubs built with the faces set about 5 degrees open at address.
So far, all of the above discussion has dealt with players who are the easiest to fix and are generally better than average golfers. In addition to hooks, the inside-out swinger is also prone to problems that come from an approach to the ball that is too shallow and this must be addressed as well if we are to be the best we can be. Too shallow of an approach means the occasional fat shot, more likely, though, is the thin shot or the "toed" shot (with the clubface approaching impact from inside the target line, we will sometimes catch the ball on the toe since it is the part of the clubface most rapidly approaching the ball). Once again, work on the static areas of your stance and address, study the flight of the ball and, with some minor modifications, you should be hitting them as pure as you are capable of.
My intention is to spend less time on the other side of the spectrum (we'll see if that holds true) - the golfer who never consistently learns to get their hands, shaft and clubface below that pane of glass. These golfers are capable of hitting all kinds of shots - most of them not good. Every slicer is guilty of "breaking the pane of glass" sometime during the downswing (I'm talking about a true slice - the ball starts way left of the target line and curves, usually dramatically and fairly weakly, back towards the target line)... "Anyone slicing the ball has reached the top of his game. The harder he hits it, the more it will slice." (Harvey Penick's "Little Red Book"). (Once again, using the clock face analogy, this type of golfer swings the club somewhere near an imaginary line between 5:00 and 11:00 or even 4:00 and 10:00 - NOT GOOD). I don't know about you, but if an instructor of golf dubbed (no pun intended) me a slicer, well I would move heaven and earth to undue that label as quickly as possible... if it means there is no hope for improvement, why even continue - UNLESS - you are like an old friend of mine who absolutely slices every shot he hits and doesn't seem to mind. This gentleman is a better than average athlete and has his swing so well grooved that he can aim 50 yards left of his intended target and more often than not, get the ball back into a playable position. The only problem with my friend is that he has been shooting basically the same scores all of his life - in other words, he has reached the top of his game. Because of his innate athletic ability, his slice will sometimes almost be a power fade and if he has a good day with the putter and gets up and down a few times from the 8 to 16 greens he will miss per round, he can shoot a fairly respectable score - AND HE IS HAPPY WITH THAT - so I never belabored the point to him that if we could just straighten out that slice a little bit, he could probably become better than he ever imagined possible.
As regards this section and ball flight characteristics, the "above the pane of glass" swinger will invariably approach inpact from 'outside' the railroad line. His approach is generally too steep and if he makes half-decent contact, the ball will always start left of the target (unless he catches it on the hosel first). Depending on the angle of the clubface at impact, he will either get that wild slice (face too open in relation to the path of the club), a dead straight pull (path too much outside-in but face square to the swing path) or he may get a pull-hook (the old double-cross) - an outside-in swing path with a clubface too closed to the swing path. The best and quickest way for this golfer to "become someone capable of improvement" is to immediately devote every moment of practice to HOOKING THE BALL! I don't care how he does it or what sort of contortions one must go through to hook the ball, until you can hit a big hook, you can never cure your slice.
Remember what causes the big hook... a shallow approach from inside (swing inside-out) with a correspondingly closed clubface. Try anything. Aim a mile right of your target and try like crazy to get your forearms to rotate - get that right forearm quickly rolling over the left forearm. Pretend you are standing on home plate and lined up to center field - try to start the ball at the second baseman. Turn your hands dramatically to the right on the grip - ANYTHING - to hit a hook. Unfortunately, despite apparently drastic measures, it is sometimes still very difficult to get an habitual slicer to hit any kind of hook or draw. All I can say, short of visiting a teaching pro and explaining to him/her that all you want to do is be able to hit a hook - JUST ONE HOOK - once you do it, repeating it will become easier and easier - I promise you. And don't worry, you are not compounding your weaknesses as a golfer - once you can hook the ball at will, it is fairly simple to "gradually' make the subtle changes that will turn your new found snaphook into a most pleasant, solidly struck and more authoritative shot - a draw"... from there, the possibilities are endless.
* With all due respect to A.J. Bonar who has apparently proven, through the magic of super slow-motion of impacts of club on ball, that the clubface, is in fact, ever so slightly open at the moment of truth and "squares up" sometime during the 0.0005 seconds that the ball is in contact with the clubface.
** Let me make a clarification regarding absolutes. It could be argued that there are NO absolutes in golf. If I stated that your best drive could only be made with both feet on the ground and a balanced swing, surely, someone who is determined to prove me wrong could, with a little practice, stand there all day and hit 'decent' drives while standing on just their left leg or their right leg or even on their heads. When I declare something I believe to be an ABSOLUTE, the inference is that IN ORDER TO HIT THE VERY BEST SHOTS WE ARE CAPABLE OF, certain ABSOLUTES must be adhered to.
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The Infallible Teacher
