Let me make this matter perfectly plain. We will consider that the beginner has taken his stance and addressed his ball perfectly. Let him now take his club back from the ball in the manner which the textbooks describe for an ordinary drive. Let him swing it thus back from the ball for a foot and let him swing it back against that ball and for a foot on the way to the hole. Let him do this once, twice, ten times, a hundred times, aye a thousand times, if so many be necessary for him to get absolutely and firmly settled in his mind the fact that this swing of one foot back and one foot forward is almost an exact replica of what happens every time he hits a good straight drive in actual play; that it is approximately a correct sample of the club action in that section of the swing back, downward swing, impact, and follow-through. This idea, and this idea only, is what the golfer must have in his mind, and when he has got this into his mind he will see clearly that the whole importance of using the wrists properly in golf is to get them to do their chief work in the early development of the power of the golf drive, but that by the time the ball is reached by the club head they have absolutely gone out of business and do not again come into operation until in the natural order of things they turn the club over, and pull it off the line of flight to the hole in the follow-through.

PLATE X.

HARRY VARDON Finish of a drive, showing Vardon's perfect management of his weight.

Braid is wonderfully hazy in this matter. He continues: "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." This really is very sad. We are repeatedly told that the golf stroke is a swing or a sweep, and that it must be of an even character from beginning to end, and yet we have James Braid in Advanced Golf telling us that the impact in the drive "seems to be a sort of flick." Well, all I can say is that I wish any golfer who goes into the flicking business much joy and great improvement, but I have not much hope that he will get it until he finds out that flicking is no portion of the game of golf.

Braid's idea of this most important portion of the drive is most remarkable. His haziness in connection with the matter extends even to his illustration. He says that this wrist action is "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 wrist right back; for a moment it is under high tension and then he lets it loose with a short sudden snap."

This is, mechanically, a marvellous statement. I do not profess to be a great authority on the subject of corkscrews, bottles - or their contents, but even in this respect I may confess to being a trifle more than theoretical, and I may say that I have inserted many a corkscrew into many a cork, but I have never yet used a corkscrew wherein I turned my wrist over as the right wrist turns over in the downward swing of the golf club. As a matter of fact, I never inserted a corkscrew into a cork where I did not turn my wrist from left to right. All the tension in putting a corkscrew into a cork is on the backward journey, or that which corresponds to the upward swing in golf. There is no tension whatever on the return, or that portion of the screwing process which corresponds to the downward swing in golf, whereas in golf the main portion of tension is in the downward swing; but I believe Braid is a teetotaller, so we may forgive him if in this respect his theory is unsound, and I think we can say that although he may be entirely theoretical in this, his theory is, in this instance, not more unsound than it is in regard to what he professes to describe as the wrist action in the golf drive.

Braid says that "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." This is correct and absolutely sound; the wrists must, unquestionably, be in their right place at the top of the swing, the right place being, as I have already indicated, and as indeed practically every respectable book on golf, with the exception of the Badminton volume, shows, underneath the shaft of the club at the top of the swing, but it is quite wrong to speak of any such thing as there being no place "for them to spring back from."

There must be no "spring." It is more a question of swinging than springing, although, as my readers know, I am opposed even to the idea of a swing in the golfing stroke. The stroke in golf is one of the finest hits in the whole realm of athletics, and I object entirely to it being called a swing or a sweep, or anything but that which it is legitimately entitled to be called.

Braid says at page 62: "After impact and the release of all tension, body and arms are allowed to swing forward in the direction of the flight of the ball." This sentence gives us pause. We have seen, according to Braid, that for the space of a yard, that is for eighteen inches before and after impact in the drive, the wrists come into the swing and do something with a " whiplike snap" - something that is a sort of a "flick." We see that this "whip-like snap," and this "sort of a flick," are kept up for eighteen inches after impact, but we are told a little farther on that at the moment of impact "everything is let loose, and round comes the body immediately the ball is struck."

How is it possible to imagine this kind of thing taking place within a swing of perfect rhythm? It is evident that Braid has a very rooted notion about this wrist movement. I must quote again from him, this time from How to Play Golf. On page 54 he says: