Mindy Blake - The Golf Swing of the Future

During a friendly round with Mindy Blake at Wentworth, Ed Sullivan, the American TV showman, found himself experiencing one of those days which impel golfers to hurl clubs and trolley into the nearest pond and stomp off to the clubhouse, vowing never to set foot on tee again. I wonder, suggested Mindy, if you would like to try a different method. Ed Sullivan said despairingly that he would gladly try anything. He listened carefully, stepped up to the balland proceeded to belt it out of sight. To his surprise and gratification, for the remainder of the round he continued to play golf such as he had never played before, and, when they came off the 18th, he went straight to the pro.s shop, bought the entire stock of golf balls and made Mindy a present of them.

This story came to my ears in the autumn of 1968 and I thought it would make an interesting item for a column called Sports and Sportsmen which I was contributing at the time to the London Observer. I drove down to see Mindy at his Surrey home and, in the natural course of things, asked what golden principles he had imparted to his American guest. This book is an expanded version of his answer. I helped him to get it down on paper because he is a busy man with plenty of things (including playing golf) to occupy him, but all the ideas are solely his. They add a new chapteror, rather, several new chaptersto an already extraordinary life.

Mindy Blake is the son of a New Zealand country schoolmaster who, in order to send his son to university, mortgaged his salary to buy a small chicken farm where Mindy could live and also make some money while a student. For four years, between lectures and books, he hatched chicks, milked his cow and cooked for himself. At the end of that time he had an honours degree in mathematics and a job as physics lecturer at his university. He was also recognised as the leading gymnast in New Zealand; he had, furthermore, won the New Zealand pole vault championship with a new record height only nine months after taking up the sport as second string for his college; and, when his country introduced compulsory egg grading, he had begun his career as an inventor by coming up with an automatic egg-weighing machine which was to be used until long after the end of World War II.

In 1936 he came to Britain and joined the R.A.F. He was R.A.F. pole vault champion from 1937 to 1939 and from 1946 to 1948. The intervening period was taken up by the war, during which he was credited with shooting down ten enemy aircraft, won the D.S.O. and D.F.C. and bore what is technically known as a charmed life. He became, by accident rather than design, the first man to land a Hurricane fighter upside down in the foundations of a hospital, and, by design rather than accident, the first pilot to ditch a Spitfire in the sea and survive, and also the first pilot to bale out of a Spitfire at an altitude of 200 ft and live to explain how it was done.

The episode with the Hurricane happened during a night-flying exercise on September 8, 1939, five days after the outbreak of war. His squadron was based at Croydon, a grass airfield, and, with nobody very clear about what immediate course the hostilities would take, the aircraft were parked in the open and the pilots slept under the wings. When they switched the flares on for a few seconds as Mindy came in to land, he realised he was going to overshoot and opened up his throttle to go round again. His engine promptly stopped. At 300 ft in pitch darkness he had no alternative but to tighten his straps, slow to stalling speed and wait to see what happened . What happened was that the Hurricane hit the chimney of a nurses home, flipped over in the air and fell into the foundations of the new Purley hospital. Mindy stepped out of the wreckage unhurt apart from a head cut which required eighteen stitches, and he was flying again within a few days. Hurricanes had never been parked out in the open before and the cause of the crash was subsequently established as hay in the air intake, a verdict which seems appropriate to those unreal and early days of the phoney war.

The second incident occurred around 9 a.m. on an August morning in 1941 when Mindys Spitfire was shot up over Cherbourg. Over the radio he told the rest of his wing: Ive got a bullet in the cooling system. I reckon I have nine minutes before the engine seizes up. When you get back tell them Im putting down in the sea about seven miles off the coast. They said: Bale out. No, he said. I think I can manage it.

At that time nobody had ditched a Spitfire in the sea and come out alive. The problems involved, however, had been exercising Mindys mind for some time, particularly since he had seen Paddy Finucane, the legendary Irish ace, disappear for ever beneath the Channel waves. He had worked out that the retarding force applied to a pilots body when a Spitfire hit the water and stopped was from five to seven Gs, which meant you were either killed instantly or you were rendered unconscious and drowned. He had also hit upon a method which he was confident would reduce the G-force to around one- and-a -half, thus giving a pilot a reasonable chance of survival.

Seven miles off the coast, just as his Spitfire was about to hit the water, he tilted one wing-tip deliberately into the sea and cartwheeled the aircraft. A few minutes later he was safely in his inflatable dinghy and paddling for the English coast. With the aid of a following wind, he had already made more than five miles when search aircraft passed overhead an hour later on their way to look for him. They searched all day without success, constantly droning through the sky over his head. He was finally picked up twelve hours after the ditching, by which time he had paddled to within two miles of the Isle of Wight.

In 1942 Mindy invented the R.A.F.s first fighter gyro gun-sight , which allowed automatically for deflection and was used successfully throughout the war. He made an instruction film on its use and, as a climax, set off on the 1942 Dieppe raid to shoot down an enemy fighter. He succeededbut a few seconds later, at only 200 ft above the sea, was himself the victim of an attack. A cannonshell shattered his windshield at point-blank range, blinding him with Perspex.

He had also been aware of the possibility of finding himself in this predicament and had decided that, should it happen, there was only one real hope of escapeto slide back the cockpit cover, undo your straps, sit back in your seat, put your foot on the control column and send the plane diving straight into the sea. In the course of this manoeuvre he judged a pilot would be shot out of his cockpit like a stone from a catapult and gain valuable extra feet in height.

He proved quite correct. He described a graceful parabola through the air, his parachute opened a split second before he hit the water, and, within a few minutes, he had his K-type dinghy inflated and was paddling again. He paddled all day, all night and most of the next day although able to squint out of one eye for only a painful fraction of a second at a time. Five miles from Dover he was picked up by a German launch.

After he had spent three weeks in hospital outside Paris, it was decided to take him to Frankfurt for interrogation. He started the journey in a car with a driver, a sergeant and a German officer. At a lonely spot between the hospital and Paris, the car stopped and all three Germans got out and disappeared . Mindys instinct told him to make a run for it: his head told him to stay where he was. Eventually the Germans returned and, on the train later, the officer revealed that he had represented his country in the 400 metres at the 1936 Olympics. So you hoped I would make a dash for it back there in the car, said Mindy. Yes, said the officer, it would have made good headlines for me.