THE weekend's glut of TV football coverage brought viewers the standard portrayal of life in the dug-outs, with close-ups of managers and their assistants gulping water as if they hadn't seen a drop for months. This has always puzzled me. The players do all the running about and the managers drink the water.
Of course, I realise that the health bods recommend sinking umpteen gallons a day, but I can't help feeling that there is a tendency to overdo things in this respect. I have a theory that many of the people who are considered to be obese these days a
re not obese at all – they're waterlogged.
This sort of disordered reasoning has a lot to do with the season of the year. The trouble with winter is that too much leisure time is spent moping and thinking. With nothing better to do, inquiring minds come up with mad ideas such as my one about waterlogged people. It wouldn't be so bad if that was all there was to it, but I know that when I'm driven indoors by wind and sleet, I find myself browsing through golf books which I'd sworn never to look at again and I know that when the skies clear, it'll take months to clear the system of the damaging debris I've picked up during the lull.
On this occasion, most of the debris consists of thoughts about getting the swing started, something with which I've always had a bit of a struggle, mainly due to the fact that I do it at such a speed. My swing sets off at full throttle and I find it virtually impossible to stay in control of ensuing events. The hands can't cope and the back and legs aren't too clever either. To complicate matters, I find that slowing down a swing fuelled by panic and doubt is a very difficult thing to do. Ben Hogan takes the business of starting extremely seriously, but then that's no surprise for he takes everything extremely seriously. He spends a lot of time on the pre-swing waggle and I must admit that by the time I was half-way through my first reading, I was ready for cocoa and counselling. Until I read it, the waggle meant nothing to me – merely an inconsequential twitch or two of the hands before the off.
Consider then my consternation when I read: "Each time you waggle the club back, the right elbow should hit the front part of your right hip, just about where your watch pocket is. When this takes place, the left elbow, as it must, comes out slightly, the lower part of the arm from the elbow down rotates a little, and the left hand moves three inches or so past the ball toward the target. As the hands move back to the ball on the forward waggle, the left hand also moves an inch or two past the ball toward the target."
I have to admit that on reading this I was tempted to review the whole situation and face up to the possibility that I'd taken up the wrong sport. Quite apart from the fact that I don't have a watch pocket and have, therefore, only a hazy notion of where it would be if I did, the grim truth was that before I'd even got round to starting the swing I appeared to be in dire straits, locked in the uncompromising grasp of a waggle that might take weeks to master. The extract is but the beginning. There's a lot more where that came from.
When, in the fullness of time, Hogan gets down to actually launching the backswing, he lists the order of movements as: hands, arms, shoulders, hips – but don't think for a minute that's the end of it. "Actually," he says, "the hands start the clubhead back a split second before the arms start back, and the arms begin their movement a split second before the shoulders begin to turn." He turns later to the role of the hips and the importance of restraining them, but this should be read only after a good night's sleep and a hearty breakfast.
If all this seems daunting, it's because it comes from an acknowledged master of the game who sought perfection all his life and expects those who would learn from him to do much the same. For backsliders like myself, Ian Woosnam's comfortingly rural images might be more calculated to do the trick. He invites us to imagine we're walking through a field, wielding a stick with which we occasionally flick off ears of barley as we stroll. Stand still and do it, he says, and the right side of your body is doing exactly what it does in the golf swing.
He reckons that, allowing for height and build, the actions he describes will take the swinger naturally to a point "pretty well where the top of the backswing should be." I find this homely approach encouraging and reassuringly imprecise. It reminds me of an old mentor in my early newspaper days who, when a story clouded by ambiguity or inaccuracy was brought to his attention, would advise the sub-editor to keep it vague. It always seemed to work.
The full article contains 884 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
