The practice range at the Milwaukee Country Club is plush and green, framed by stately maples clad in warm yellows and reds on an autumn afternoon. It seems unlikely that such a quiet place could be linked to one of the last century's most terrible wars. But a link exists, in the person of the slightly built, gray-haired teacher at the end of the range. His name is Manuel de la Torre, and, at eighty-three, he is the leading modern disciple of the late Ernest Jones.

Jones was a British golf professional who joined his country's army in 1915. Fighting in the trenches of France the next year, he lost his right leg below the knee. When he got out of the hospital, he had to come up with a way to swing despite his disability. He did, quite successfully. He was able to play respectable golf standing on one leg and, when wearing an artificial right leg, to score in the low seventies. His system also worked well for golfers with sound bodies.

Jones immigrated to the United States in 1924 and lived here till his death in 1965. He taught first at a club on Long Island and then at an indoor studio in the Spalding sporting-goods store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. He was one of the more prominent teachers of his time, and his following persists. In 1952 he published an instructional book, Swing the Clubhead, that explained his theories. The book is still in print and still—via Internet book merchants—selling well.

One of the people Jones met, befriended and influenced in England was a young Spanish golf professional named Angel de la Torre. After de la Torre came to America in 1925, Jones helped his protégé get a club job on Long Island. The two émigrés socialized frequently, usually talking about the golf swing. Manuel de la Torre, Angel's son, remembers those conversations. "When Jones explained the swing, what he said was so simple and sensible that even I, as a kid, could understand it," he recalls.

Manuel went to Northwestern, finished second at the 1942 national collegiate golf championship, spent a few years playing the pro tour and, in 1951, settled in as a teaching pro at Milwaukee Country Club. He has been spreading the Jones doctrine there ever since, and his own book and DVD, Understanding the Golf Swing, are also selling well, propelled by the same sort of word-of-mouth that keeps Jones in print.

De la Torre is a perennial on the lists of top teachers and has tutored major champions, notably the LPGA's Carol Mann and Sherri Steinhauer. Male professionals, the kind whose triumphs bring fame and fortune to their swing instructors, are harder for him to deal with. "The [male] Tour players don't like the system's simplicity," de la Torre says. "They want it detailed." So he remains unknown to many golfers who can readily identify Butch Harmon or David Leadbetter.

But for many others, simplicity is the attraction, which is why the books sell and the pupils make their way to Milwaukee from all over the country. A golfer under de la Torre's tutelage can forget about things like loading his right side, keeping his head still and trying to cock his wrists at just the right time. The only thing that matters is what the club does. The Jones theory holds that if a golfer can take a standard, neutral grip and a standard, square stance and move the club properly with a rhythmic, unified motion, all the movements the body is supposed to make will happen automatically.

It's not, de la Torre says, so much a different way of swinging as it is a different way of envisioning, thinking about and understanding the swing. On the face of it, de la Torre's instruction conflicts on several key points with, say, the swing instruction of Ben Hogan. To take one apparent difference, Hogan said the correct forward swing begins with a movement of the left hip. De la Torre says it's initiated by the upper arms. But the difference may be more a matter of how Hogan perceived what he did than what Hogan actually did. "My dad used to take me to watch Hogan all the time, and if you ever want to see a unified swing, that's what Hogan had," de la Torre says.

Indeed, the fundamentals of the Jones/de la Torre swing—in particular, the positions the club passes through—are the same as in any orthodox method. But de la Torre's emphasis is on learning the difference between swinging the club and manipulating it. To convey this, he uses a variation of a homely instructional device that Jones created by attaching his pocketknife to the end of his handkerchief. (See drill, below.) De la Torre's version uses a club-repair tool instead of a pocketknife, but the point is the same: for the student to swing the club back and forth rhythmically and smoothly in such a way that the weight stays with the shaft. If the action gets jerky or handsy, the weight and the shaft will separate.

De la Torre calls this a "leverage mistake," which can be understood as using the hands to manipulate the club. He understands that in any proper swing, with suitably relaxed arms, the wrists will hinge naturally. The problem occurs when the golfer tries to hit the ball harder by consciously using his hands. He may do this at the top of the swing, producing a casting motion, or at the bottom of the swing, but wherever it occurs, it diminishes power rather than enhances it. When a golfer hits at the ball with his hands during the forward swing, the butt of the club actually moves backward—a loss of acceleration. By contrast, de la Torre insists, swinging smoothly, with steady acceleration, maximizes clubhead speed.

When asked how the Swing the Clubhead principles can increase power, de la Torre hesitates. He has seen a rash effort to gain distance ruin many a swing. So he answers in the manner of a father whose sixteen-yearold, taking his first driving lesson, wants to know how fast the family car can go. Power, obviously, is a function of clubhead speed, he says. Once a player has gotten the feel for the smooth, leverage-free swing, there are only a few more things he can do to increase speed. He can lengthen his arc or he can move his arms faster. Neither is easy or quick to accomplish.

To get a longer arc, a golfer has to improve his flexibility, particularly in the shoulders. De la Torre recommends a reverse-swing exercise his father developed when he was getting older. (See drill, below.) "Every morning, my father used to swing the club back as hard as he could, right after he got out of bed. That's how he got his length back," he says.

A golfer also needs what de la Torre calls flexible arms. This is not quite the same thing as flexible joints. To demonstrate, de la Torre has pupils take a stance without a club and let their arms dangle. "Now bring your hands together without tightening your arms," he says. "That's the way you should be when you hold a club." The problem is that many players can't take a reasonably firm grip without involuntarily tightening their arms. This must be practiced. Then players have to resist the subconscious urge to get tighter when they're nervous. "The reason is the same reason you wouldn't straighten your arm and make it rigid if you wanted to throw a baseball farther," he says. Rigidity diminishes speed.

Finally, de la Torre says, a player who wants more distance can move his arms faster. He believes that the forward swing is initiated and led by the upper arms (from the elbow to the shoulder). But there's no drill, no secret to how to do it. You just do it. How fast you can do it may be a function of your genes as much as your intent.

He holds the back of his hand out in front of him. "Slap my hand," he says. The pupil complies. "Slap it harder," he says. The pupil hesitates. De La Torre's hand has the bony and fragile look that comes with being an octogenarian. "Go ahead," he prods. The pupil slaps harder and is relieved not to feel bones breaking.

"When you slapped it harder, how did you do it?"

"I moved my arm faster," the student says.

He nods. "You do exactly the same things with a golf club that you do when you do something like that," he says.

But he does offer one swing aid to help make sure that trying to move the arms faster doesn't distort the swing. It's a hula hoop with a club taped to it. The golfer swings the club while standing inside the hula hoop. (See drill, below.) "When you swing properly, the hula hoop stays on the same plane and in the same place relative to your torso," he says. "If you use leverage movement, it goes off plane or changes its relation to the torso."

No sooner has de la Torre explained this, however, than he gives another warning about the desire for distance, behind which lie eight decades of experience: "When I play, I just try to make my swing the best quality I can get and I accept whatever speed it has that day. Because it wouldn't do me any good to try to swing harder and miss it and then have 300 yards to go instead of 250. That's something every player should understand."

JAN 2005 Travel + Leisure Golf BY BOB CULLEN