THE SWING PRINCIPAL
Teaching legend Manuel de la Torre on
the myth of weight shift,
Tiger’s smash golf,
how “forward trumps “up’—and
why swinging the clubhead is all that really matters.

My father taught me to play as soon as I could walk. Angel de la Torre won the Spanish Open six times from 1916 to 1935 and was the golf professional for the Spanish royal family. I was born in an apartment over the golf shop at my father’s club outside Madrid in 1921. Golf has been my life.

If I had to play golf the way it’s being proposed by some teachers today, I wouldn’t touch this game. Too complicated. What I teach hasn’t changed much from when I started in 1948. My teaching—and my father’s teaching before me—is based on what we learned from Ernest Jones [author of Swing the Clubhead]. It’s simply learning to use the tool—the club—correctly. If you allow the swing to happen, it will happen, and happen correctly. The hips don’t hit the ball. The shoulders don’t hit it. The hands don’t hit it. The club does. Ernest Jones was teaching this in 1920, and it’s just as true now.

When you draw a circle with a compass, the circle is perfect. Why? Because the fixed center makes the pencil come back to the same spot. A golf swing needs to have a fixed center. That means you shouldn’t shift your weight to your back foot on your backswing, or consciously shift it forward on the forward swing. Keep your center fixed through the backswing, and the natural swinging motion will cause you to shift forward automatically as you hit the ball. If you try to force this weight shift, you’ll do it too fast or too slow.

But tour players do it, you say? Don’t use tour players as your model. They need gurus because they don’t know their swings, and their timing gets off.

The toughest thing to do in golf is get rid of hand action. Everybody wants to hit the ball harder, and they think the way to do it is by hitting it with the hands or flicking the wrists. When you do that, your arms slow down. Speeding up your arms is the only real way to hit it farther, and the only way to speed your arms up is to let them swing in a circle, without interfering with that swinging motion.

Do you shop? Do you make a list of all the things you don’t want to buy? Of course not. But that’s the way people play golf. They stand over a shot thinking about all the things they don’t want to do, instead of focusing on what they want to do.

Players always tell me they can’t take it to the course. This happens because they have a change in purpose. On the range, the purpose is to make good swings. On the course, the purpose is to make a score. Keep your purpose the same—to produce good swings—and the scores will come.

Always take your grip while looking at your hands. You should be developing a clear picture of how your hands look to you when they are placed on the club correctly.

Take the club back with both hands. Don’t think about cocking your wrists. When they get over the shoulder, it will just happen.

It bothers me to see people teaching swing movements and body positions. Everybody has a different body construction, so you have to accept their individuality.

Artistry in the game of golf is disappearing. Clubs are so much more specific for the use now. My father shot 61 using two woods, two irons and a putter. That kind of game has almost disappeared. You don’t need to be an artist anymore. Seve Ballesteros was one, and that was some of the most exciting golf to watch. I’m afraid for tournament golf now. It gets to be very boring.

I don’t like to watch Tiger Woods play. It looks like he’s trying to smash the ball. He’s not as accurate as he could be. There shouldn’t be any effort in the golf swing. Effort is work, and work destroys the swinging motion. If he would swing with the freedom he used to have, he’d probably hit it farther.

My favorite player is Ben Hogan. He had the mental focus I see in Tiger Woods. My father used to take me to watch Hogan all the time. He was the best striker of the ball of all time. So consistent. You never saw Hogan vary his scoring as some of the fellows do today.

Have some things changed? Yes. Every generation gets stronger. The conditioning is so much better— both the conditioning of the players and the conditioning of the Courses. Milwaukee Country Club, where I teach, is in better condition now than any place tour players could have played in the 1950s. But the ball has done far more to contribute to people hitting it longer than anything else. They could tone down the ball for the tour players, but for average players, it doesn’t make any difference. Let them use what they like.

When I teach, I’m the general. A student might say, “I’d like to hit my driver.” I say, “Let’s see you hit the wedge first.” I went to a learning center yesterday, and of the 40 people there, 35 of them were hitting driver. And hitting them as hard as they could. They’re not getting any benefit out of that practice.

Practically everyone goes into the bunker with the intention of just getting it out. That’s the worst mental attitude you could possibly have for being successful. Instead, try scraping the sand and have the sand send the ball into the bank of the bunker. Do that and you’ll compress the sand against the ball. That compression is what raises the ball out of the greenside bunker.

If I asked you to draw an apple, you’d keep an image of an apple in your head until you finished drawing it. In golf, we should use the mind the exact same way. You have to visualize the club going directly toward the target while you’re actually doing it. That’s far more important than what most people do, which is visualize the ball going to the target. If you visualize what the club must do, the mind takes care of the mechanics that get the ball there.

Visualization is important in putting. Make a special effort to read the putt correctly, then place the putter face on a right angle to the line you have read. Then, visualize the ball rolling on that line. Do this instead of worrying about the mechanics of the stroke, and you’ll be amazed how many more putts you make. that are sound—principles that are inherent to the motion, and inherent in physics and geometry. Ernest Jones taught them to my father. My father taught them to me. As with any process, a scientist carries the idea to a certain point, and the next scientist carries the idea further.

My father made me a set of small wooden clubs when I was 18 months old. There are pictures of me swinging them from a magazine article published in Spain in 1923. I still have those clubs.

So many players can shoot good rounds now. The level of golf on the Nationwide Tour is incredible. The only difference between those players and the players on the PGA Tour is mental. They hit the same shots. It’s how you deal with the pressure.

How would I deal with it? Call it a round of golf. Call it a tournament and you start thinking, “I’ve got to shoot such and such score,” or “I’ve got to hit this kind of shot.” That’s what makes it hard for you to do things you know you can do. It’s just a round of golf. Call it a tournament once you finish.

I’m not outdated. Einstein’s theory of relativity isn’t outdated. I deal with principles that are sound—principles that are inherent to the motion, and inherent in physics and geometry. Ernest Jones taught them to my father. My father taught them to me. As with any process, a scientist carries the idea to a certain point, and the next scientist carries the idea further.

---

Manuel de la Torre was head professional at Milwaukee Country Club from 1951 to 1996. He was PGA Teacher of the year in 1986 and is a four-time Wisconsin professional of the year. His book, Understanding the Golf Swing, was published in 2001.

Ernest Jones began teaching golf in his native England in 1905. A clubmaker and player, he won the Kent Open in 1914. In 1916 he lost his right leg below the knee from shrapnel while fighting in France in World War I. Four months later, on the day he left the hospital, he shot 83 at the Royal Norwich Links, swinging on one leg. In 1920 he won the Kent Open again. Through a 60-year teaching career—including many years spent teaching in a seventhfloor loft in Manhattan—Jones stressed the simple message that the body responds to the swinging clubhead. Jones authored two instruction books, Swinging Into Golf (1937) and Swing the Clubhead (1952). A brief excerpt from the first book:
Swing the clubhead “Swinging and levering are diametrically opposed methods of applying power. In a swing the connecting medium between the power and the object swung (golf club) has both ends moving always in the same direction. In levering, the two ends move always in opposite directions. It is no more possible to join up the two in one unified application of power than it is to mix oil and water. “Moving a weight back and forth on the end of a string is possibly the simplest demonstration of a swinging action. A pocketknife attached to the corner of a handkerchief serves the same purpose. Since the handkerchief is flexible, it can transfer power through swinging, but not through levering.” Adapted from the “Classic Tips” series by Dick Aultman, Golf Digest, November 1987.

Golf Digest OCTOBER 2004 Interviewed by Matthew Rudy