As those of you who have been following this blog know, one of my primary purposes is to introduce today’s golfers to some golf history that has gotten lost over time — the links that existed between golf and poetry. Thanks to Michael Whitmer, the Boston Globe golf writer and Suzanne Kreiter, an award-winning Globe photographer, I am getting some help. Take a look at http://www.boston.com/sports/golf/articles/2009/04/16/taking_a_shine_to_the_rhyme/ And I did make that chip!

When you look up “slice swing,” Google provides 1,540,000 results! But, then, the number of slicers is still far larger. So this Post is aimed, sympathetically, at all of you who seek to straighten out your swings.

The truth is that golfers have always been frustrated with balls that veered sharply right (for a right-hander). And instruction books from the beginning have tried to help duffers find a cure. Take, for example, the famous book The Badminton Library: Golf, written and edited by Horace G. Hutchinson and first published in 1890. In a chapter titled “Out of Form,” Sir Walter Simpson, member and once captain of The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, writes,

“Whether in the case of a beginner or an old player, the ball when driven has a great tendency to curve off to the right. There is perhaps nothing more difficult to get rid of than this form of bad driving. … It is very evident that to enable him to correct the result the player must know what is its cause or combination of causes.” [Read more…]