The Soul of Golf

by P. A. Vaile

These are, unquestionably, words of wisdom. There can be no doubt whatever that the straight ball is the ball all the time in golf, and it is absolutely certain that what Vardon says about the effect of the wind on the golf ball is true. Wind has remarkably little effect on the golf ball which is driven without spin. I have had no doubt on this subject for at least seventeen years. I had my lesson in one ball during the course of a match played over my home links in New Zealand. One of the holes was on top of a volcanic mountain at a place where New Zealand is only a few miles wide, and there was a howling gale raging from ocean to ocean right across the island. I can remember as if it were yesterday, the champion of New Zealand, as he was then, playing this hole. He drove a very high and perfectly straight ball from tee to green, and the ball travelled to all appearances as directly as if there had been no wind whatever, whereas had there been the least slice on the ball it would have been picked up by the wind and carried away into the crater which lay sixty or a hundred yards off the course.

Speaking of Mr. Low reminds me that he makes some extraordinary statements with regard to spin. At page 35 of Concerning Golf he says: "I have said that a ball with left to right spin swings in the air towards the left in exactly the opposite direction from a sliced ball and from contrary causes." It is obvious that this is wrong, for the spin of the slice is from left to right, and of course, as every one knows, that spin makes the ball swerve towards the right, which is the swerve of the slice.

At page 32 Mr. Low makes the same error. He says there: "Now a pulled ball comes round to the left because the sphere is rotating from left to right, or in the direction contrary to the hands of a watch." This, of course, is a contradiction, for the hands of a watch as we look at them do rotate from left to right, but in any case Mr. Low's explanation is quite incorrect, because the spin of the ball is not in a direction contrary to the hands of a watch laid face upwards on the ground, as Mr. Low affirms.

Mr. Low says at page 31:

Every child nowadays seems to know how to slice a ball; you have only to ask the question and the answer will come quickly enough, "Oh, draw the hands in when you are hitting," or, in other words, spin the ball in the direction of the hands of a watch laid face upwards on the ground. The ball advancing with this spin finds it is resisted most strongly by the atmosphere on its left side, and therefore goes towards the right in the direction of least resistance. The converse is the case with a pulled ball in the sense of a ball which curves in the air from right to left.

We have already shown in dealing with Professor Thomson's article that this statement is quite incorrect. In passing I may also refer to the fact that Mr. Low's idea of the production of the slice, viz. by drawing the hands in when one is hitting, is also wrong. There is no drawing in of the hands at the moment of impact in the properly played slice. It is the drawing in, if we may use the term, of the head of the club in its travel across the intended line of flight, but not anything which is done intentionally during impact. However, that is by the way.

Mr. Low is evidently under the impression, as was Professor Thomson, that the spin of the ball in the slice is about a vertical axis. This is an error in itself, as we have shown, but it is not nearly so bad an error as it is to say that the pull is the converse of the slice in this respect, for, as we have seen, if the ball were merely spinning about a vertical axis it could not possibly have the running powers which it possesses, to say nothing of its low flight. Although Mr. Low has got somewhat mixed in describing his rotation, it is evident from his reference to the hands of the clock that his ideas are correct in so far as regards the general direction of spin, but where he is at fault is in stating the axis of rotation of his ball.

If we accept Mr. Low's statement about the axis of rotation we shall have the pulled ball, when it lands, striking the earth with a spin equivalent to a sleeping top, but that is not what we want in the pulled ball, for neither would it give us the low trajectory which we desire so much, nor would it give us, on landing, the running which we desire, if anything, still more. The spin which we desire to produce and which we must have in our minds to produce when we are playing the stroke, is such a spin as will give us, when the ball lands, approximately the spin of a disc top as it falls to earth when its spin is nearly exhausted. I am speaking now, of course, not of the question of degree, but of the plane of spin. We must have our ball spinning in such a plane that when it touches the earth it will behave in the same manner as the disc top does when its side comes into contact with the floor.

In dealing with "The Science of the Stroke," James Braid in Advanced Golf goes into an analysis of the effect of spin on flight. He says early in the chapter:

At the present time most players know how they ought to be standing, and what the exact movements of their arms, wrists, and body should be in order to swing the club in the right way and make the ball travel as far as possible, but they do not all know, and in few cases one suspects have ever troubled to think, what is the process by which these movements, when properly executed, bring about the desired effect.