The Golf Swing
Tips, testimonies and tantrums from players, coaches and the odd amateur

Swing easy and hit hard.
- Julius Boros

Everybody has two swings: the one he uses during the last three holes of a tournament and the one he uses the rest of the time.
- Toney Penna

The only thing you should force in a golf swing is the club back in the bag.
- Byron Nelson

Dividing the swing into its parts is like dissecting a cat. You'll have blood and guts and bones all over the place. But you won't have a cat.
- Ernest Jones

You swing your best when you have the fewest things to think about.
- Bobby Jones

Is there such a thing as a technically perfect swing? If there is, I have yet to see it.
- David Leadbetter

Through the ball we are all the same. We just have different ways of getting it there.
- Charles Coody

You don't hit anything on the backswing, so why rush it?
- Doug Ford

My golf swing is a bit like ironing a shirt. You get one side smoothed out, turn it over and there is a big wrinkle on the other side. Then you iron that one out, turn it over and there is yet another wrinkle.
- Tom Watson

As far as swing and techniques are concerned, I don't know diddly squat. When I'm playing well, I don't even take aim.
- Fred Couples

Rhythm is best expressed in any swing directed at a cigar stump or a dandelion head.
- Grantland Rice

Reverse every natural instinct and do the opposite of what you are inclined to do, and you will probably come very close to having a perfect golf swing.
- Ben Hogan

Mr. Agnew, I believe you have a slight swing in your flaw.
- Jimmy Demaret to his playing parnter Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew

Swinging at daisies is like playing electric guitar with a tennis racket: if it were that easy, we could all be Jerry Garcia. The ball changes everything.
- Michael Bamberger

Hitting a golf ball and putting have nothing in common. They're two different games. You work all your life to perfect a repeating swing that will get you to the greens, and then you have to try to do something that is totally unrelated. There shouldn't be any cups, just flag sticks. And then the man who hit the most fairways and greens and got closest to the pins would be the tournament winner.
- Ben Hogan

No one ever swung too slowly.
- Bobby Jones

The best place to refine your swing is, of course, on the practice range. You will have an opportunity to make the same mistakes over and over again so that you no longer have to think about them, and they become part of your game.
- Stephen Baker

The golf swing is like sex: you can't be thinking of the mechanics of the act while you're doing it.
- Dave Hill

Let the club swing itself through. Help it on all you can but do not begin to hit with it. Let it do its work itself and it will do it well. Interfere with it, and it will be quite adequately revenged.
- Horace Hutchinson

The golf swing is among the most stressful and unnatural acts in sports, short of cheering for the Yankees.
- Brad Faxon

A golfer has to train his swing on the practice tee, then trust it on the course.
- Dr Bob Rotella

A physicist can describe the perfect golf swing and write it down in scientific language, but the smart golfer doesn't read it. The smart golfer gives it to his opponent to contemplate.
- Dr Fran Pirozollo

To get an elementary grasp of the game of golf, a human must learn, by endless practice, a continuous and subtle series of highly unnatural movements, involving about sixty-four muscles, that result in a seemingly natural swing, taking two seconds to begin and end.
- Alistair Cooke

I may go for it or I may not. It all depends on what I elect to do on my backswing.
- Billy Joe Patton

We were always taught to swing slow with good tempo. But you have to have some acceleration throughout the swing. I think that's where a lot of women go wrong. They should try to whack it a few times and see what happens.
- Helen Alfredsson

A golf swing is a collection of corrected mistakes.
- Carol Mann

When your forward press is longer than your backswing, you've got to think about giving up the game.
- Charlie Crenshaw

Because golf exposes the flaws of the human swing - a basically simple maneuver - it causes more self-torture than any game short of Russian roulette.
- Grantland Rice

There is no movement in the golf swing so difficult that it cannot be made even more difficult by careful study and diligent practice.
- Thomas Mulligan

There are two things you can learn by stopping your backswing at the top and checking the position of your hands; how many hands you have, and which one is wearing the glove.
- Thomas Mulligan

The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.
- John Updike

Golf is like acting in that both require concentration and relaxation at the same time. In acting, you can't push emotion. You have to let it rise from you naturally. Same thing in golf. You have to have a plan and a focus; but then you need to just let it happen and enjoy the smooth movement of the swing.
- Jane Seymour

There are no absolutes in golf. Golf is such an individual game, and no two people swing alike.
- Kathy Whitworth

The Golf Hall of Fame is full of players with unusual looking swings. Some of the prettiest swings you've ever seen in your life are made on the far end of the public driving range by guys who couldn't break an egg with a baseball bat.
- Peter Jacobsen

If you think your hands are more important in your golf swing than your legs, try walking a hole on your hands.
- Gary Player

In golf, driving is a game of free-swinging muscle control, while putting is something like performing eye surgery and using a bread knife for a scalpel.
- Tommy Bolt

Having a great golf swing helps under pressure, but golf is a game about scoring. It's like an artist who can get a two-inch brush at Wal-Mart for 20 cents or a fine camel-hair brush from an art store for 20 dollars. The brush doesn't matter - how the finished painting looks is what matters.
- Jerry Pate

If we had to play Augusta National in one hour, the best athlete would win the Masters. But as it is, they give us time to hang ourselves. Every swing is a 'thought shot'. So instead of the best athlete, you end up with the best thinker as the winner.
- Joe Inman

Golf is the only sport I know of where a player pays for every mistake. A man can muff a serve in tennis, miss a strike in baseball, or throw an incomplete pass in football and still have another chance to square himself. In golf, every swing counts against you.
- Lloyd Mangrum

I assume my stance, and take back the club, low, slowly; at the top, my eyes fog over, and my joints dip and swirl like barn swallows, I swing. There is a fruitless commotion of dust and rubber at my feet. "Smothered it," I say promptly. After enough lessons the terminology becomes second nature.
- John Updike

My swing is so bad I look like a caveman killing his lunch.
- Lee Trevino

If the wind is in your face, you swing too hard just to get the ball through it; if the wind is at your back, you swing too hard just to see how far you can get the ball to go.
- Henry Beard

I still swing the way I used to, but when I look up the ball is going in a different direction.
- Lee Trevino

The moment the average golfer attempts to play from long grass or a bunker or from a difficult lie of any kind, he becomes a digger instead of a swinger.
- Bobby Jones

Forget the last shot. It takes so long to accept that you can't always replicate your swing. The only thing you can control is your attitude toward the next shot.
- Mark McCumber

"My swing is too fast" may be the biggest misconception ever. Think about it. If you take a fast, lousy swing and slow it down, all you've got left is a slow, lousy swing. Most people swing too slow, not too fast.
- Hank Haney (Swing coach to Tiger Woods)

If I swung the gavel the way I swung that golf club, the nation would be in a helluva mess.
- Tip O'Neill (Former Speaker of the US House of Representatives)