Many players have observed the fact that they can swing beautifully at the ground when they have no ball there, and yet they make a mess of the stroke when they attempt to strike the ball. Ninety times out of a hundred the practice swing is wrong for it is hard to tell when you are swinging correctly if you do not hit a ball. The ball shows how correctly you really do swing.

As a general rule a practice swing is decidedly misleading and is very apt to put you off as you accustom yourself to swinging with no opposition and the balance is entirely different. As the club goes through the air so fast, meeting with no resistance, it throws the timing of the effort off because the stroke is finished so much more quickly with no ball there.

The player attempts, when he swings at the ball, to get the same timing and it cannot be done. When the club head meets the ball there is a tremendous amount of drag applied to the speed of the swing, far more than is realized, and the habit of swinging hard is a great handicap.

I know I took twenty-seven practice swings playing one hole in a match once and did not realize it until an enterprising reporter called my attention to it after the match. I have learned since and seldom take a practice swing now and when I do I swing very slowly.

If your club was so heavy that it took your entire ability to swing it merely, you would depend principally upon the weight of the club to do the work of propelling the ball forward and would be satisfied to devote your entire attention to striking it accurately.

If the ball was made of lead and was a little larger you would find that the shaft of your club would break because the weight of the club would not be sufficient to get the ball away quickly enough to transmit the strain from the shaft, and something would have to give. The ball would not give, it would be the shaft.

The reason, that the shaft does not break when you hit your ball is that unlike a leaden or iron ball your ball is made of rubber which is very elastic and yielding, much more so than the club head, and so the strain is taken up by the ball.

Now the first effect of the blow is to transmit much energy to the ball, which is compressed partly and propelled forward partly, and if the power is not kept up or "followed through," as the saying is, the amount of power in the blow which made the ball collapse would be lost because the ball would spring back into shape again as soon as the club head ceased to be against it. But if the power is "followed through" properly so that the club head is still going forward and against the ball while the latter is springing back into shape a very considerable impetus is added.