The “Gear effect”
suppose you have two interlocking gears one big one with 100 teeth
and another smaller with 20 teeth. The effort to turn the big gear once
will turn the small one 5 times.
If your body is the big gear, and the ball the small gear, then the efforts of the body will have a greater impact on the ball, being the small gear.
Think of it this way, for most people, they will feel that if the don’t make a near perfect swing, the ball will go way off line. The slightest disturbance in the body, arms or hands, will cause radical changes to the ball flight.
Now for the master golfer, this gear ratio feels the opposite. The body becomes the small gear and the ball the big gear. Now the masterful player feels he must make big changes in the body to create small changes to the shape of the ball. This is what it feels like to be a masterful ball striker.
There are ways to have this experience, I know…
As a swinger in my early days, I always felt my body was the big gear, and the slightest deviations from “pure” would cause the ball to do terrible things. If my swing was 90% pure all day then that would be great, but that would still leave 10% of my swing less than perfect. Assume I make 36 swings in a round, then 3 or 4 swings a round I would not make perfect. This really seems to be about the right proportion in all my humanness. Those 3 or 4 bad swings, for whatever reason would really hit the ball off line. On days I got “lucky” and was able to recover, I would score well, but sometimes those shots would really be dead. So if I recovered 2 out of 4, then I would be assured two bogeys or worse per round, assuming I make no other mistakes, (three putt or whatever) bad bounce, and so forth.
This is really bringing back some memories as to why I switched to being a hitter.
The TGM players (Swingers) of my era, were just so pure most of the time, but had a reputation for hitting the “space ball” on occasion for whatever reason… (yes I know what these reasons are!)
But at the international pro level, you just can’t do that. You just can’t hit it off the planet every now and then and expect to have much of a career. Back in my day, there were just too many
Stuart Ginn’s or Jerry Anderson’s that will just keep taking your money if you do that.
Power golf is good golf, but dead straight power golf is even better.
