"What is wrong with the teaching of golf?" asks a writer in the Daily Express.

"That there is something wrong with it," he goes on, "is realized by all people who attempt to play golf, and by all those who watch them doing it.

"Undoubtedly golf is a difficult game, and undoubtedly it attracts a large proportion of devotees whose only qualification for playing it is their devotion. But it is not on these grounds alone that one can explain the pathetic failure of the average golfer's life, or the tragicomedy that is always being enacted by golfing contortionists over the links of the world. One must seek other causes. One must consider, not only the subject and the pupil, but the teacher.

"Broadly speaking, the teachers of golf are either professional golfers or enthusiastic amateurs. In the main, the professional golfer knows how to play golf, but not how to teach it; and in the main the enthusiastic amateur knows neither how to teach it nor how to play it.

Fig, 1. Ernest Jones before the War.

"It is one of the characteristics of golf that every exponent of it, no matter how immature his knowledge, no matter how spurious his methods, has moments of exaltation in which he is convinced that he has discovered the true secret of the golf swing, and that he must at once proclaim his discovery to the world at large. Probably what he has discovered is some bad trick which, combined with certain other bad tricks (constituting what he is pleased to call his swing), succeeds in giving him greater length or greater steadiness - for a while. Thereupon he rushes into print. Whereupon some other golfer, whose own box of tricks has gone unutterably to pieces, ingeniously works the new artifice into his golfing system, and emerges temporarily triumphant - not, however, because of the thing which he has taken pains to acquire, but because of the confidence (ill-founded though it may be) with which that thing has for the time being endowed him. And so the process goes on, in an ever-widening circle. Then the original prophet discovers that what he fondly imagined to be illumination is really hallucination; but even now his impulse to kick himself is arrested by some fresh flash of inspiration, obviously, unmistakably the real thing this time, and off he goes again. . . . He is a dear, human, lovable fellow, but he is a deadly foe to good golf.

"It is another of the characteristics of golf that the ability to teach it does not necessarily flow from the ability to play it; the champion golfer has probably enunciated at least as much false doctrine as the enthusiastic amateur. It should be borne in mind that the professional golfer has always lived in an atmosphere of golf; to him, indeed, golf is ' second nature' - a matter of instinct. He has a trained hand, but he has not a trained mind. What happens? He is asked to explain how he executes a particular shot; in a word, he is asked to explain how he does a thing which to him is instinctive, a problem which might well harass even the most highly trained mind; and it is not surprising that the professional should flounder. It would, indeed, be surprising if he did not flounder.

"The floundering is naturally worst when he attempts the explanation in writing; for in the first place he has not the art of writing, and in the second place he is unable to help out the explanation by an actual demonstration of the shot. The accidental is mistaken for the essential, the responsive for the initiatory, coexistence for causation, the sign for the thing signified. The results are seen in a bewildering mass of print, both in magazine articles and in book form; and they are reflected in the grotesque performances of countless golfers over the face of the earth. The writer is himself a sufferer, and this is his cri de coeur"

The present writer took up golf about ten years ago, when he was thirty. He had not been a cricketer, nor, in fact, had he indulged in any game in which a ball has to be hit, except lawn-tennis; and at lawn-tennis he had achieved but little success, because it was not until he took up golf that he grasped the only two ideas that matter in lawn-tennis: following; the ball on to the racquet and "hitting through." For a few months he played golf "in the light of nature" and derived - and gave to others- considerable enjoyment. It was then borne into him that golf was a game that he was likely to continue to play until old age, or something not less drastic, intervened, and that consequently it would be sane to try to acquire a sound method. He consulted the nearest professional.

This professional was a good fellow, and he played a fine game. He was animated, however, by an overwhelming passion for analyzing the swing, and it had never occurred to him that his powers of observation and deduction were unequal to the task. Nor did it occur to the writer until he had lived through six months of tribulation, during which he had heroically endeavoured to play golf by turning over the left wrist as far as it would go at the beginning of the swing, by squeezing his right elbow into his side, by tucking his left knee into his right knee, and his right knee into his left knee, and, above all, by straining every nerve to get into a statuesque position somehow or other at the finish of the swing, whether the ball had been toed, heeled, sliced, pulled, or topped.

The writer then took advice from another professional. This excellent fellow was not at all of the analytical turn of mind. He had but few theories, but he enunciated certain propositions which, though they appeared somewhat crude at the time, are now seen to be full of elemental truth. The writer now cordially subscribes to such dicta as, "The golf swing ain't a trick"; "You don't have to wriggle about like an eel: you just stand up to the ball and hit it"; "There's only one thing to remember - you've just got to put the club round your neck both ways"; "Not so much foot-work, sir; golf ain't a sparring match."