Trust the Golf Swing

There are several reasons why golf is so difficult. One is that the ball being on the ground, and not in the air, means the club has to brush the ground at a precise spot to achieve good contact.

Then there is the tilt of the body. A baseball swing is pretty easy, because the shoulders and hips rotate in parallel planes. In the golf swing, the planes are not parallel, and swing theory is born.

Let’s not forget the ball itself, which is pretty small. Hitting it with a small clubhead at high speed is no mean feat.

But there’s one other thing about the golf swing that can linger even when these physical problems have been conquered. The notion of trust.

As long as I've been playing golf, it’s still hard for me to believe that if I do just a few simple movements correctly, and rely on then to work, they do.

Let me describe the swing in such a way that no one deciding whether to take up the game would even want to try.

You set the clubhead behind the ball. Then you swing it away so the the club goes way over your head. The clubface is now upside down, and facing in a completely different direction. Your body is all wound up, too.

Now you unwind all this, swing the club back down at an accelerating speed, so the clubhead sweeps through the ball at just the right height, makes contact on just the right place on the clubhead, which will be square to the direction you want the ball to go, like it was when you started.

When you consider it for a moment, you might wonder how that can possibly work.

But it does.

There’s really only one thing to do after your mechanics have been ironed out -- trust that the swing will work.

By “the swing” I mean THE golf swing, not your particular one.

You have to trust that if you stand to the side of the ball, wind up then unwind, it will work.

So many errors arise in our swing because we don’t believe that will work, and we think we have to DO something -- we have to add something to that technique -- just to be able to hit the ball.

Even though you don’t.

There are three stages to go through.

Stage 1 - you consciously have to apply technique to be able to hit the ball. I’m there some of the time.

Stage 2 - you don’t worry about your technique, but are still getting comfortable with the idea that swinging back and through actually works. I’m there most of the time.

Stage 3 - the swing is just the means of getting the ball to go where you want it to go. I’m there maybe one time per round.