THERE is no doubt that a proper wrist action in the drive is of very great importance, and it is just as undoubted that the real secret of wrist action has been enshrouded in mystery by anyone who has in any way attempted to deal with it. Indeed, so great a master of the game as James Braid, absolutely confesses that he does not know where the wrists come in during the drive. As Braid has already stated that it is almost impossible to teach putting, it really looks as though there is quite a considerable gap in golf which must be left to his pupils' imagination, but this is not really so. These great golfers really know golf and teach it much better than their published works would lead one to believe, and as a matter of fact in very many instances the matter which I am criticising so plainly is, I believe, not their own. I cannot believe that much of the ridiculous nonsense which is published in association with the greatest names of the world would be upheld by them in an ordinary lesson - in other words, I am firmly convinced that they suffer in the interpretation by persons whose knowledge of golf is extremely limited.

It will, however, be interesting to see what the great golfers have to say with regard to wrist work.

Let us turn first to Harry Vardon at page 70 of The Complete Golfer. There he says:

Now pay attention to the wrists. They should be held fairly tightly. If the club is held tightly the wrists will be tight, and vice versa. When the wrists are tight there is little play in them and more is demanded of the arms. I do not believe in the long ball coming from the wrists. In defiance of principles which are accepted in many quarters, I will go so far as to say that, except in putting, there is no pure wrist shot in golf. Some players attempt to play their short approach with their wrists as they have been told to do. These men are likely to remain at long handicaps for a long time. Similarly there is a kind of superstition that the elect among drivers get in some peculiar kind of "snap " - a momentary forward pushing movement - with their wrists at the time of impact, and that it is this wrist work at the critical period which gives the grand length to their drives, those extra twenty or thirty yards which make the stroke look so splendid, so uncommon, and which make the next shot so much easier. Generally speaking, the wrists, when held firmly, will take very good care of themselves; but there is a tendency, particularly when the two V-grip is used to allow the right hand to take charge of affairs at the time the ball is struck, and the result is that the right wrist, as the swing is completed, gradually gets on to the top of the shaft instead of remaining in its proper place.

There are several important statements in this paragraph. Vardon says, "I do not believe in the long ball coming from the wrists," and I say that there is no doubt whatever that in the ordinary acceptation of the term the long ball no more comes from the wrists than it does from the feet, for as Vardon indicates here, in a drive of perfect rhythm there is no such thing as getting the wrists into the work at, or about, the moment of impact, as is so frequently advocated by authors who preach what they do not themselves practise.

Vardon says that "except in putting there is no pure wrist shot in golf." I have already shown that not even in putting is there such a thing as a pure wrist shot in golf, unless, indeed, the player should be playing with a putter which has an absolutely perpendicular shaft. In this case, and in this only, is it possible to play a pure wrist shot in golf if one follows out correctly the instructions which arc recognised as being the soundest guide in good putting.

Before quoting from James Braid in Advanced Golf I must draw particular attention to what Vardon has said about the "snap" of the wrists at the moment of impact. He says that "there is a kind of superstition that the elect among drivers get in some peculiar kind of 'snap' - a momentary forward pushing movement - with their wrists at the time of impact, and that it is this wrist work at the critical period which gives the grand length to their drives." It is surely not to be wondered at that this, as Vardon terms it, "superstition" exists, when we read in a book such as Advanced Golf, which was published several years after Vardon's Complete Golfer, statements to this effect:

Then comes the moment of impact. Crack ! Everything is let loose, and round comes the body immediately the ball is struck, and goes slightly forward until the player is facing the line of flight. The right shoulder must not come round too soon in the downward swing but must go fairly well forward after the ball is hit. If the tension has been properly held all this will come quite easily and naturally; the time for the tension is over and now it is allowed its sudden and complete expansion and quick collapse. That is the whole secret of the thing - the bursting of the tension at the proper moment - and really there is very little to be said in enlargement of the idea. At this moment the action of the wrists is all-important, but it cannot be described. Where exactly the wrists begin to do their proper work I have never been able to determine exactly, for the work is almost instantaneously brief. Neither can one say precisely how they work except for the suggestion that has already been made It seems, however, that they start when the club head is a matter of some eighteen inches from the ball, and that for a distance of a yard in the arc that it is describing they have it almost to themselves, and impart a whip-like snap to the movement, not only giving a great extra force to the stroke, but, by keeping the club head for a moment in the straight line of the intended flight of the ball, doing much towards the ensuring of the proper direction. It seems to be a sort of flick - in some respects very much the same kind of action as when a man is boring a corkscrew into the cork of a bottle. He turns his right wrist back; for a moment it is under high tension, and then he lets it loose with a short, sudden snap. Unless the wrists are in their proper place as described, at the top of the swing, it is impossible to get them to do this work when the time comes. There is nowhere for them to spring back from.