How Your Wrist Action Affects Your Swing

When we are told to allow our wrists free play at the summit of the swing, it is so that we shall not break up by introducing muscular hand force the flow of movement which we have intentionally set up in the reverse region.

The feel in this region is that the club head is still going back when our force center begins to pull forward.

The wrists do not break at a given point; their break is a retarded action set up to delay the club head and yet to keep the movement smooth. The swing is a continuous flow of movement, and we destroy its continuous character if we divide it arbitrarily into two parts—"up swing" and "down swing." There is no up swing and no down swing; there is the swing complete. For the first three feet back from the ball we are "all together," but after that the club head—owing to the longer path it must take—loses ground, which it only catches up at the moment of impact with the ball. It will catch up then, even if you try to prevent it, and the further it has lagged behind, the faster it must travel to catch up.

The fluency of the swing becomes greater as the swing gathers speed, and when the ball is swept from the tee, the flick of the wrists (hateful expression) has become a violent sweep—violent because of it's force, a sweep because of its fluency.

We are told and have evidence in the "flickers" that the wrists open as we come into contact with the ball, but this opening is not something that the wrists do, but something which they cannot help happening. And the art lies not in making the wrists open but in postponing their opening as late as possible.

As the club head arrives in the region of the ball, our body (because of its comparatively short degree of action) has already got back into its "opposing" position, with left heel back on the turf, left side straight and firm, and right hip twisted into the left one—the whole giving a sense of secure brace to the whole body. By this time the arms are already half-way down, but the wrists are still pulled back. But now owing to the forward pull of the hips and the gathering momentum of the club head, something must happen—and what happens is that we can no longer keep the club head from flying past the ball.

We have done everything possible to delay the club head and to inhibit wrist movement, but finally the club head gets out of control (this is literally true) and flashes through the ball as if mad with rage!

Now this is as it should be. We purposely set up a state that would leave the club head free and unchecked in this region of the swing, and we must see to it that we do not interfere in any way with its ferocious passage through the ball. There will almost inevitably be some tendency to rigidity due to local necessities in this region (as in the initial take-up), but we must not feel the slightest check or guide attempting to control the club head. Let its furious assault die away into a perfect follow through.

Do not hold or check or guide the club head but keep the left side firm and rigid and play on around it. That is the only way of keeping the fury of the club head on the right path. You have unleashed a storm, and all you can do is to control the center from which came its force and from which it will die away. Feel centered and balanced.

If after reading the foregoing you come to the conclusion that the best thing to do with your wrists is nothing at all, my exposition has been successful. Since probably no one has told you before that your wrists are only a link, you cannot be blamed for not having realized it!

Too many people try to do something with their hands, thinking this to be wrist action. But when you analyze it, there is no deliberately induced action in the golf swing which corresponds to the mythical "flick of the wrists." Anyway, the word flick is appropriate when we speak of removing ash from a cigarette—but utterly out of place in a movement which sweeps a golf ball two hundred and fifty yards down the fairway.

If you have built up a good powerful central organization around which you whirl your club, the more you leave your wrists to their own sphere of activity the better will be your stroking. And the proper sphere of activity of your wrists is to act as the link in the flail with which you sweep the ball away.

Recently I was explaining to a coming champion my deduction that hand work wrongly applied to flick the club head through the ball was the commonest misconception in golf. He thought this over, and then said that he had read (and now began to understand what Bobby Jones meant when he wrote it) that on his way through the ball Bobby Jones felt that he was "freewheeling."

The American mind is inventive of and receptive to the vivid modern expression, and Bobby Jones coined a great one in "free-wheeling" through the ball—as a corrective to the general misconception of the flick of the wrists being a sharp hand and arm attack applied directly to the ball.