Ernest Jones Lost a Leg in the War, Shot 83 Months Later, and Taught America Three Words

Almost everything you have been told about hitting a driver lives in the lower body. Load the right side. Bump the hips toward the target. Slide, then turn. Drive the legs.

Ernest Jones could not do any of it. And he may be the best evidence golf has that the swing was never built out of those moves in the first place.

Who Ernest Jones was

Jones was born in 1887, near Manchester, England. He won a caddie championship at twelve, became assistant professional at Chislehurst Golf Club in Kent at eighteen, and was made head professional there at twenty-five. Not a legend, but a young professional with a real future in the game.

Then the war came. He served in France with the Sportsman's Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, and a grenade took his right leg just below the knee.

Within months of losing the leg, he went out to Royal Norwich and shot 83 on one leg. Thirty-eight out, forty-five back. Not long after, he was shooting in the low seventies.

Think about what that means. A man balanced on one leg cannot load a trail side he does not have. He cannot bump or slide. The only thing left to him is to turn around the one point he is standing on, and swing. If the slide and the leg drive were where the power comes from, that score should not have been possible.

The most sought-after teacher in America

In the 1920s Jones moved to the United States. He ran an indoor studio on the seventh floor of the Spalding store at 518 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and taught close to three thousand lessons a year, several times what an ordinary professional gave. He coached Virginia Van Wie through three straight U.S. Women's Amateur titles, in 1932, 1933 and 1934, and worked with Glenna Collett Vare, Betty Hicks, Lawson Little and Horton Smith.

He published Swinging into Golf with Innis Brown in 1937, and a later book, Swing the Clubhead. He died in 1965 and was later inducted into the World Golf Teachers Hall of Fame.

What "swing the clubhead" actually means

Jones was famous for teaching one thing. Swing the clubhead. Not turn your shoulders, not shift your weight, not keep your head down.

It sounds like a slogan. It is closer to physics. A driver carries nearly all of its weight in the head, at the end of a long, light shaft. Swing that weight and it pulls out and away from you, holding the shaft in line, the same pull that keeps water in a bucket swung over your head. Jones's argument was that this pull does the work of the positions golfers are told to hold: it squares the face, sets and releases the wrists at the right moment without being told, and extends the arms through the ball. The body parts, in his words, are "admirable followers."

Which is why working on the parts one at a time tends to make the whole worse. Control each position and you interrupt the swing that was producing them.

The handkerchief drill

You cannot feel a clubhead while you hold something rigid, because rigid things can be pushed, and nearly everyone pushes. So Jones took the option away. He tied a pocketknife into the corner of a handkerchief and had students swing it. You cannot push a handkerchief. It folds. You can only swing it, and the moment it moves in an arc the cloth goes taut and you feel the pull in your fingers.

You can do it tonight, or try a live version of the handkerchief in your browser first:

1. Knot something with a little weight, house keys or a padlock, into the corner of a handkerchief, bandana or dish towel. Hold the loose end in your fingers, not your palm.

2. Swing it back and through, slowly. Do not make a golf swing. Make the weight travel. Watch for the cloth going taut on the way down and staying taut through.

3. Let the rhythm set itself, and notice your hands go quiet. If they start working, the cloth folds and tells you.

4. Two minutes with both hands, then each hand alone. Then pick up a driver, no ball, and swing the head in the air until it feels the way the towel felt. Then hit one.

Why his method disappeared

Jones did not fade because he was wrong. His method had a commercial flaw: it could be taught in a single lesson, and once you had it you never needed to come back.

Then cameras reached the lesson tee. A photograph of a swing does not show a swing. It shows positions, and positions are wonderfully teachable. You can draw lines on them, measure them, and circle eleven things wrong in red. But those positions were consequences of swinging a weight, not causes of it, and a swing has an unlimited number of frames to find fault with. A positions model never graduates anyone. A one-lesson method has nothing left to sell.

That is the argument at the center of Golf's Great Lie. My father and the machine led me to Ernest Jones while I was rebuilding my own swing, and his story opens the book. The motion capture in the rest of the book measures the same swing from the ground up, the kinematic sequence that runs ground, hips, torso, arms, club. Jones felt it from the other end. And one leg took away exactly the move the book calls the biggest leak, the slide between two centers.