The Golf Swing (illustrated): The Ernest Jones Method

The view of the golf swing expressed in this book forms the subject of a series of articles contributed by Mr. Daryn Hammond to Golf Illustrated of America. 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. Surely, says the writer in the Daily Express, among the thousands of golfers in the two hemispheres there is some one person who can make this plague of a game intelligible? There is. He is Ernest Jones. And if there is anything unintelligible in the following pages, it is the writer, and not Ernest Jones, who is at fault. In this book one lesson only is taught, and that one lesson is taught all the time. Each chapter is but a re-statement - from a different angle - of the principle enunciated in every other chapter. The risk of wearying the reader by reiteration has been preferred to the risk of leaving him in doubt. Welcome to the Ernest Jones Method of golf instruction.