If you keep your head still every instant occupied in making your swing, so as to see the ball clearly, and do not try to kill it, but merely swing in an easy, comfortable manner, you will find that it will accomplish more than hours spent upon your grip, your stance, or the hundred things the average player has on his mind.

I do not mean to hurry your stroke, but I do think that a player's common sense should tell him that he is tiring his muscles by posing in front of his ball and destroying the very elements which bring off the shot successfully.

The professional has no finer brain capacity than the amateur, and golf is not a brain fatiguing pastime. The difficulty is that the player endeavors to make a brain-racking game of it instead of a muscular exercise where the freedom of the play of the muscles is cultivated. Perseverance on a rigid, fixed method of play is not evidence of a superior quality of mind, but of pig-headiness.

Remember I do not urge that you use my schemes of play, but I am calling attention to facts which cannot be ignored. Golf is only a very difficult game because players make it so. The reforms in your method of play must be thought out at times when you are not trying to hit a ball, when your whole attention should be devoted to seeing clearly every instant what you are trying to hit.

All your calculations are based upon the idea that you hit your ball true, and when you do not do this the remedy is not in making more calculations. Cut out some of them and concentrate upon the simplest.
Back of all bad shots is the monumental egotism which makes you believe you can make up in effort what you lack in skill.

If you get only fifty yards and can put it where you intend to you are master of that shot. The foolish desire to equal a more experienced and skilful player will be your master if you will allow it. Per-severance and patience will accomplish what you desire.

The particular point to which I wish to call players' attention in playing the cleek is the matter of how the effort should "feel" when properly played. The real gage of the effort you can make successfully is your ability to keep your eyes on the ball without shifting the glance for the slightest instant. When you make the stroke
and accomplish this it "feels" as though you would never get any distance at all.

As a matter of fact it is one of the most difficult clubs to learn for this very reason. It does not seem as though you could obtain anything like the distance with a cleek when played this way that you do with the brassey because it. "Feels" so differently, but learn to swing very easily with your cleek and hit the ball absolutely true and it will soon convince you what wonderful distance the little apparent effort gives.

The effort, as a matter of fact, is the same. The same amount of energy is generated by an effort which "feels" in the case of the cleek about one-half of what you use in the brassey shot. The reason is that the, club shaft, being shorter, responds more quickly to the effort and as the swing itself is shorter, or should be, there is no strain upon the body and legs to get to the top of the swing as in the wooden shots, and this makes it "feel" that you are not applying enough power.