The Soul of Golf

by P. A. Vaile

Vardon refers to the pull and the slice as being the master strokes in golf. I have already said that if I had to pick any one stroke which could be called the master stroke in golf, it would be the wind-cheater, and it is open to question if the long plain drive is not entitled to greater respect than either the pull or the slice. Be that as it may, there is in my mind very little doubt about the respective merits of the wind-cheater and the other strokes referred to. The wind-cheater is the ball which is produced with a large amount of back-spin. Harry Vardon describes it at page 105, and he explains that in order to make the push shot perfectly "the sight should be directed to the centre of the ball, and the club should be brought directly on to it (exactly on the spot marked on the diagram, page 170)." I may remark here that the spot shown on the ball at page 170 of The Complete Golfer for a push shot is absolutely above the centre of mass of the ball, and that at page 106 Harry Vardon gives a diagram of "The push shot with the cleek." In this diagram he shows that the face of the cleek at the moment of impact is perpendicular.

It is quite certain that even if one could hit the ball above the centre of its mass with a perpendicular face, it would be impossible to get the ball off the ground in this manner. The push shot with the cleek must be played with loft on the club, and indeed it does not matter what club is used for this shot, there must be loft on the face of the club at the moment of impact if one is to obtain a satisfactory result, and not only must there be loft on the face of the club, but it is a certainty that the impact of the club with the ball must be below the centre of the ball's mass, and not as Vardon shows it at page 170 of The Complete Golfer, above it.

Vardon, for playing this push shot, uses a cleek with a shorter handle and with more loft than his ordinary cleek. This, indeed, is quite natural, for the shot is, in the nature of it, a very straight up and down shot in the line to the hole, and also as it is desirable that the ball shall be hit by the club before the club head has reached the lowest point in its swing, Vardon naturally has his hands forward of the ball at the moment of impact. This, of course, to a certain extent, counteracts the loft of the cleek, but in no case does it counteract it to the extent shown by Vardon in the diagram at page 106 of The Complete Golfer, for were the blow made as shown by these diagrams, it would be a mechanical impossibility to obtain the result described by Vardon.

The reason for keeping the hands forward of the ball is, as I have indicated, that the club head may make impact with the ball before it has reached the bottom of its swing, and Vardon's reason for playing with a club of greater loft than is usually employed is that this greater loft helps to make up for the fact that his hands are forward of the ball at the moment of impact. Playing this stroke with an ordinary cleek would rob the cleek of so much of its loft that the probability is that the flight of the ball would in its initial stages be too low to give a satisfactory result.

Vardon says at page 106: "The diagram on this page shows the passage of the club through the ball as it were, exactly," but the trouble is that it does not show the passage of the club through the ball "as it were, exactly," because at the moment of impact with the ball the club must have sufficient loft on its face to lift the ball, and, moreover, the face of the club must make its first contact at a point at most as high as the centre of the ball, but preferably much lower, so that the force of the blow has an opportunity of exerting itself upwardly through the centre of the ball's mass. Vardon plays this shot perfectly, but he does not describe it as well as he plays it. He says at page 106 of The Complete Golfer:

I may remark that personally I play not only my half cleek stroke, but all my cleek strokes in this way, so much am I devoted to the qualities of flight which are thereby imparted to the ball, and though I do not insist that others should do likewise in all cases, I am certainly of opinion that they are missing something when they do not learn to play the half shot in this manner. The greatest danger they have to fear is that in their too conscious efforts to keep the club clear of the ground until after impact, they will overdo it and simply top the ball, when, of course, there will be no flight at all.

There can be no doubt that this stroke is an extremely valuable one, particularly with the cleek, and it is a stroke which will well repay anyone for the time spent in practising it. There is, indeed, as Vardon says, a great danger of the player topping the ball if he tries to keep too far away from the ground until after the impact, but he must at all costs get out of his mind the idea of hitting the ball where Vardon says it should be hit, viz. above the centre of the ball's mass. This never was golf. It is not golf now, and it never will be golf.

It is almost incredible, but is a fact, that a golf journalist who presumed to say that he knew what was "at the back of his (Harry Vardon's) head" stated in an article in a sporting magazine in London, that this push shot, one of Vardon's most beautiful and accurate strokes, is obtained by thumping the ball on to the earth—in fact that the stroke is almost what one might term a "bump ball," to use the cricket term. Any idea more abhorrent to the true golfer than the notion of producing his finest cleek shots and approach shots by banging the ball on to the earth can hardly be imagined, nor anything more incorrect.

The wind-cheater is an invaluable stroke, but there can be no doubt that it is a stroke calling for a very considerable degree of skill in order to play it perfectly, or indeed very well, and in connection with this matter there was a very peculiar but entirely mistaken idea that for the production of this stroke it was necessary at the moment of impact to turn over both wrists. This idea obtained for years, and notwithstanding my repeated explanations, the deeply rooted notion was persevered in and used in such a manner by many players that it seriously interfered with their game.

Some of the criticism which I had to put up with at the time that I was instructing golfers in these matters was very remarkable. I must give one instance which seems almost incredible. I had explained in the pages of Golf Illustrated, the leading golfing journal of London, how the pull is produced, and I had therein indicated as clearly and decidedly as I now do that it was impossible to produce the pull by the method indicated by Harry Vardon. Mr. A. C. M. Croome, the well-known international player, solemnly asserted in the Morning Post that he had himself seen Harry Vardon produce the shot in the manner which I said was an impossibility, and that in effect an ounce of practice was worth a pound of theory.