Body English - learning the basics

Part 1 - Controlling the hook

Six times major championship winner Lee Trevino once said "You can talk to a fade, but a hook won't listen". This may be true, but it has not stopped generations of golfers from employing strong language - in the form of Body English, of course - to try and bring an errant ball back on course as it heads for the trees on the left.

Correct Body English for the hook is not, as one might expect, just a mirror image of the procedure for a slice or push (to be covered in Part 2 of this series). In keeping with the hook's status as the low handicapper's fault or power play, in contrast to the more feeble banana slice, the language is richer and admits a greater degree of personalisation.

After the ball is struck, the right shoulder and hip move around the body (left shoulder and hip for left-handers), and the weight passes onto the back foot. This is usually accompanied by a slight bending at the waist and a craning of the head and neck forwards and outside the line of flight of the ball (beautifully demonstrated here by Aaron Baddeley). With the eyes following - or "staring down" - the ball, we have now got the various parts of the body into position for the real Body English to begin.

The classic move is a tugging of the club, hands and arms into a "backhand" position AWAY from the direction of flight of the ball. The tugging, or "swishing", gesture can be repeated, faster and harder, if the hooking ball fails to respond to the first warning.

More advanced technique (demonstrated here by Sergio Garcia) involves lifting the back foot off the ground and swinging the free leg away from the "anchor leg" at 180º to the line of flight.

In extreme cases (eg. quick- and duck-hooks), several rapid steps in the OPPOSITE direction to the ball's flight can be executed, all the while remembering to "stare down" the ball with the eyes. A simultaneous backhanded swishing (see above) can be incorporated for added emphasis.

Do not underestimate the difficulty of this lesson. Even the finest players, despite years of practice, still find that these movements, executed under the intense pressure of competition at the highest level, fail to correctly influence the ball in its wilful plunge into the trees, water, rough or out-of-bounds on the left. Is the hook deaf, or just hell-bent on humiliating the golfer who, thinking he had conquered the slice, believed he was on the way to golfing nirvana? The hook ain't tellin'.

In Part 2 of this series: straightening the banana.