To improve golf swing performance many golfers blindly follow the cardinal rule: “always keep your eyes on the ball.”

“Seeing the ball to hit the ball” appears to be reasonable advice to improve golf swing performance. But is it?

Take a read of the article below. It makes a compelling case that golfers can improve golf swing performance without locking their eyes on the golf ball!

In his book, “On Learning Golf”, author Percy Boomer offers some expert advice to help golfers improve golf swing performance. He explains how “feeling” the ball is the new seeing the ball.

Boomer writes;

“I suppose the most often repeated piece of advice in the whole realm of golf is “keep your eye on the ball.” It is given and accepted as a profound golfing truth (which properly understood it is), but it is necessary to examine what we mean by it and how it fits into the rest of our golfing program.

Very early in my teaching of a new pupil I tell them to keep their eye on the ball, because I know that unless they do so they will never achieve any class as a golfer. But I do not harp on the idea or rub it in—I point out that its importance actually lies less in the sight of the ball than in the reactions which it produces —for instance that it keeps our heads still.

And I put this emphasis on the reactions rather than on the sight of the ball because, to my mind, it is only the bad golfer who actually sees the ball out of their eyes. The good golfer I am convinced feels where the ball is more than sees it.

Now to the ordinary golfer that may seem an absurd statement, or if they do accept it, it may be confusing. So I will try to clarify my meaning.

When Aubrey and I were playing a lot together, we were often congratulated, upon the deftness of our short game—and the congratulations were usually followed by the comment, “How long you keep your head down after the ball has gone!” Their idea was obviously that I kept my head down because it enabled me to “keep my eye on the ball.” But what I was really doing was to keep my head down in order to retain the feel of the swing and to keep my controls going even though the ball had been dispatched. Few of the spectators realized that I often played these shots with my eyes shut; yet I did so.

But when I play with my eyes shut, my senses are wide open. My main concern was to see that my general muscular feel and sense of balance went right through to the end. Not until the follow-through was finished did I look up to see where the ball had gone. I never miss a shot through looking up too quickly; I do sometimes miss one through fear of missing it! The primary fault is not in looking up but in losing the feel of the swing.

Incidentally I have taught many pupils to play beautiful pitch shots without looking at the ball. One very well-known golfer to whom I taught this brought out his “better-half” to watch him “do his circus stuff.” He played some beautiful shots high in the air over gaping bunkers, dropping close around the pin every time and all the while looking me straight in the face. His wife was utterly astonished; then she saw the funny side of it and laughed herself nearly into hysterics!

My view is that the good golfer can only see the ball when their swing is working smoothly, and then it looks as big as a tennis ball! The beginner sees the ball in another way, and because of this, more often than not they miss it. Their attention is so concentrated upon seeing the ball that they cannot feel their swing operate. The business of seeing the ball occupies them too exclusively.

Do I mean by that that the beginner needs to learn how to see the ball? That is exactly what I do mean. They must learn not to see the ball to the exclusion of all their other senses. So when I tell a pupil to keep their eye on the ball I at once go on to the work of building up a swing that makes looking at the ball a necessity. Of course every pupil “looks up” badly at first to have the pleasure of seeing where the ball has gone, but this is a primitive stage and soon over.

In the next stage, when I am impressing them more and more with swinging correctly, I find that they often becomes so engrossed in the swing as to be unable to remember to keep their eye on the ball. But in such a case I believe the cure must come by making the “head down” a natural outcome of the swing. If I simply insist upon “head down,” I run a risk of getting my pu¬pil all stiffened up, “frozen on the ball” as we call it, and consequently only able to make hacking, chopping movements.

Now in this matter of seeing the ball, I would ask you to consider a golfer at the other end of the scale. How does a very good golfer see the ball? In my opinion, through their very highly developed sense of feel, they see the ball (in some proportion) through their hands.

Sees through their hands? Perhaps the idea is not so fanciful as it might seem. I began to think about it first after I had read an article by Sir Herbert Barker some years ago. This is what he said: “We take our hands too much for granted. Their possibilities and powers are seldom discovered or developed. Most people pass through life with these two implements untrained, unexplored, unknown. . . .” Then he goes on: “When we take for granted the localization of our senses in certain organs we go too fast. Localized they are, but not completely so.” Then at a later date my interest was reawakened by the declaration of Dr. Fougools, the French savant, that in the skins of our hands are potential eyes. He says that they are nerve eyes atrophied for the simple reason that we have developed two ocular instruments so much superior to them.

Now to my mind the value of that idea to the golfer lies largely in an idea which it promotes, that perhaps the greatest value of “keeping your eye on the ball” is the assistance which it gives in building up sight through feel.

For whatever may be the eventual verdict of science upon the tentatively advanced hypothesis of the two famous men quoted above, I can assure you that some sort of sight through feel is certainly possible. I have developed it myself, as have many other first-class golfers. I can see the face of the club and the angle it is at the top of my swing (when it is “out of sight” be¬hind the back of my head), and long before I lift my head, I can see the ball fly away with the exact curve which I know my shot has given it.

But let us leave these metaphysical regions and come back to the ordinary golfer. Why is it that so often they can make perfect swings when the ball is not there, yet they become semi-petrified and makes the most ridiculous shots as soon as there is a ball, even a ball carefully perched on a perfectly prepared tee, for them to hit? And what would happen if you could put down an invisible ball for them? Is it knowing that the ball is there that upsets their swing or is it the sight of it“?

Improve golf swing performance by “feeling” the ball as opposed to seeing the ball!

Use Boomer’s professional instruction in your practice sessions.

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