“Golf is “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”; the sooner you realize she is playing riddles on you, and exactly
what those riddles are and how to unwrap them, the sooner you’ll be on the path to real and sustainable improvement.”
Winston Churchill said Russia is “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma…”; I think we can safely replace “Russia”
here with “Golf”.
To be more accurate, let’s replace “Golf” with striking a golf ball properly as ball striking and scoring well in golf [let’s say breaking 80 on most public golf courses on most days] can be horses of a different color.
If I, or 99.9999% of you reading this article, had a 1,000 life times where we were free to spend practically all of our waking hours figuring out completely on our own how to best strike and compress a golf ball in a manner that was MOST conducive to how the human body “wants” to move , we still wouldn’t have figured it out.
It gets back to another quote I’ve often referred to per Ben Hogan, “Reverse EVERY natural instinct and do the [exact] opposite of what you are inclined to do and you will probably end up with a near perfect golf swing.”
The first riddle-mystery-enigma has to do with understanding the interaction between the club face and the golf ball at-through impact; that is, understanding gear effect and compression which I’ve covered ad nauseam in my training videos here on MGS…
> This is the first Truth that needs to be resolved in one’s mind because it is practically the only way your mind can even begin to accept the movements that the hands-body must make in order to dynamically lean the handle forward ahead of the ball at-through impact.
> Without this reverse-engineering from the dynamics of impact between club face and ball to what the hands-body must do in order to create those dynamics during that 1/2000 of a second when the ball is on the club face for about a half inch, folks will instead do the exact opposite of what works by leaning the handle back at-through impact.
> The vast majority of golfers never even realize there is a riddle-mystery-enigma going on here as it seems so intuitively obvious that if you want the ball to go high up into the sky one must lean the handle back at-through impact so as to point the club face toward the sky where you want the ball to go.
> So MOST golfers don’t even realize a riddle is being played upon them…ever during their golfing lifetime.
> That is, most golfers are lost and they don’t even know they are lost – they just figure that with enough practice they will be able to flick and scoop the ball up into the air;
– but no amount of practicing something that simply won’t work, except marginally once in awhile due to sheer luck, will lead to any real improvement.
Then there are perhaps 20% of golfers who see that the professionals are leaning the shaft forward at impact and they try to imitate what they see them doing;
– but what they see them doing is a mirage.
But they don’t realize it is a mirage as it seems so intuitively obvious from watching slow motion and high speed freeze frame pictures that these professionals are simply setting their wrists at the “top” and then holding that angle between wrists and shaft by pulling with the left arm at the ball and twisting their front hip open on purpose in order to do so.
The golfers fooled by this mirage are in good company because mainstream golf instruction is fooled by this same mirage as well – how do I know that?
> Well, I’ve watched perhaps 2,000 hours of Youtube golf training videos and that’s all I see them teaching except for the rarest of voices to the contrary and those voices are only nibbling around the margins of the truth as to what is really happening here in terms of creating dynamic shaft lean [versus manufactured shaft lean] at-through impact.
Now these PGA professionals hit the ball really well and many have the trophies to prove it, but they are [like I contend even Ben Hogan was as I’ve covered head on in my MGS videos] fooled by what they are REALLY doing versus what they feel, see and think they are doing.
> Mainstream golf instructors teach the mirage as if it were the truth because they really don’t understand that what is causing the pulling feeling in the back of their left-lead arm is a result of their effort to TRY throwing the club head directly at the ball RIGHT FROM THE TOP!
This should help to explain why there are so many golfers, no matter how ambitious and how good of an athlete they are, simply get to the point where they can only [honestly] barely break bogey golf.
> That is, they don’t even realize that ‘Golf’ is playing a riddle upon them – and, understandably, the professionals they seek for help don’t realize that a riddle is being played upon them as well;
– therefore there is a “blind leading the blind” effect, except that the pro doesn’t fall into the ditch in terms of their ball striking abilities because they are wrong for the right reasons,
– but that doesn’t help their students much from my experience having taken many lessons over several decades.
At the age of 56 years old I heard a voice crying out in the wilderness, from Australia to be exact.
I listened to this fresh voice, that of my mentor, Peter Croker, PGA-Australia, who shed the light on these riddles that were being played upon me [and my fellow golfers];
Seeing the big pictures truths, my mind was able to allow my hands and body to follow his wax-on wax-off methodology for how the hands move the body [versus the opposite approach per mainstream golf] for learning the pieces of his ball striking technique [and how to blend the pieces together] that led to dynamic shaft lean and proper compression of the golf ball;
> One year later, at 57, I became a highly competent and confident ball striker [and a pretty good teacher].
> At 58 I became both a highly accomplished golfer and teacher,
> At 59 I perhaps have achieved some level of mastery as both a golfer and teacher.
The same can happen for you – regardless of your age.
I hope you’ll allow me into your golf journey in 2021 – I’m as passionate about my golf journey as I am about the golf journey of anyone who is ready to see that competent ball striking isn’t what it seems to be;
> competent ball striking for proper ball compression is indeed a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma…
> first we need to recognize that this is the case, then we can start unwrapping it and getting to the truth of what is really going on so our minds can accept and allow our hands and body to be trained to move in line with that truth.
Yours in better ball striking…and Happy New Year,
Ted Williams, Certified Instructor – Croker Golf System
