There are many other incontrovertible and very interesting conclusions
arrived at as the result of the reckoning of this distinguished
scientist which one would like to discuss if there were room for it. It
is enough to say at the finish that while these reflections will serve
to give the golfer a more intelligent view of the scientific aspect of
the game and its mysteries, and very likely even tend to a change in his
policy in some departments, he will not be led towards any disbelief in
the standard methods of good driving or to any deliberate seeking or
regulation of under-spin, the fact being that more than a century of
play and groping about in unscientific darkness brought the player to
the discovery of the way in which the longest ball could be obtained,
_i.e._ to the way in which translatory force and rotation were blended
to the best effect. The stance and the swing, when properly performed
with a proper driver, bring about that blend, though generally the
player has been blissfully unconscious of the part they have played in
conveying rotation to the ball. A pregnant paragraph by the scientist
may be quoted at the end: “The pace which the player can give the
clubhead at the moment of impact depends to a very considerable extent
on the _relative_ motion of his two hands (to which is due the ‘nip’)
during the immediately preceding two-hundredth of a second, while the
amount of beneficial spin is seriously diminished by even a trifling
upward concavity of the path of the head during the ten-thousandth of a
second occupied by the blow. It is mainly in apparently trivial matters
like these, which are placidly spoken of by the mass of golfers under
the general title of knack, that lie the very great differences in
drives effected under precisely similar external conditions by players
equal in strength, agility, and (except to an extremely well-trained and
critical eye) even in style.”
I should explain that all these things were told by Professor Tait, not
in simple language to an assembly of golfers, but in complicated terms
to a learned body of scientists, and I have thus endeavoured to explain
his meaning in a manner that all can understand, and in some cases--as
in that of the question of the proper centering of the rubber-cored ball
to carry it forward to its application to the new conditions of play
that have been introduced since his life and studies came to an end.