Boomer - On Learning Golf

A GOOD OUT
PERCY

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC .

Copyright 1946 by Percy Boomer. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York.

PUBLISHED JULY 11, 1946
REPRINTED THIRTY TWO TIMES
THIRTY-FOURTH PRINTING, APRIL 2008

eISBN: 978-0-307-80637-6

v3.1

By The Late Duke of Windsor

IN the years before the war when there was more leisure to play and study golf, I tried to help Percy Boomer evolve some of the ideas which he presents in his book. This may be the reason why he has asked me from among all his more proficient pupils to write a foreword, and because he used to find me the most persistent in the search for the secret of the correct swing.

Golf has been the subject of so much writing that Percy Boomer is to be congratulated on developing some original thoughts on the popular pastime. Although no game has produced more theories or evoked a greater divergence of opinion as to the methods of its teaching, I believe even the authors sternest critics will admit that he has achieved a pleasing combination of humour with plenty of good golf sense.

It is in no way Percy Boomers fault that I have not yet discovered the elusive secret, and it has to be as a disciple of the game and not as a low-handicap player that I recommend On Learning Golf, in the hope that it will help to reduce its readers scores and discourage their opponents.

ILLUSTRATIONS

A Good Out

Nearing the Top of the Swing

The Address

The Grip

Correct Feel of the Swing

Nearing the Finish

The Golf Swing in Embryo

Reversed or Putting Grip

The Swing

PLAN OF THE COURSE

THIS is not a book on the science of golf, but about learning it. Everything on the science of the game has been written, little on how to learn it. So I outline a method of learning and stress certain points about the golf swing. And please remember that long experience has told me what to emphasize when teaching. Some of the points which you will find me making a fuss about are considered minor details in the science of the game, but they are important to me because they relate to feel rather than to mechanicsand it is through feel that I play and teach.

I believe that the mechanical details, like the ball, should become incidental. They are of course of extraordinary interest and if this book arouses interest in the fundamental sensations of the golf swing I shall be tempted to write another (and much more extensive one) on its detail. But that is another matter.

In brief, the plan of this book is that in the six chapters of Part One I outline my theory of golf, and explain how I came by it and why I hold it; while Part Two consists of chapters which elaborate the various technical points, interspersed with Interludes for Instruction and Reminiscence which enable certain very essential points to be emphasized as well as providing a little light relief from the more solid matter.

Finally, this book could not possibly be complete without the magnificent photographs which my friends Val Doone have been at such generous pains to make for me. In the course of my golfing life (a grand one!) I have seen thousands of golfing photographs, and they were mostly all just the usual and rather useless pictures; they did not, as do these, reproduce most faithfully those subtleties of grip and stance, of the play of essential muscles, and of the poise of limb and club in motionwhich are, in the end, the grail we seek.

PERCY BOOMER