"It has been said that the power which drives a golf ball is centrifugal force. It is not centrifugal force. There are two distinctly different forms of stroke; the old St. Andrews arm swinging sweep in which the club was literally wound around the neck and which was best for the old solid Gutta-Percha ball, and the shorter swing in which the club head is snapped thru the ball by a powerful concentrated hit coming from the wrists. Of course, there must be some arm and shoulder sweep. A short swing composed chiefly of wrist action produces a snap, while a long swinging arm action produces a sweep.
The ideal swing is a moderate arm and shoulder sweep plus a terrific wrist snap."
'Golf Fundamentals Orthodoxy of Style' Seymour Dunn 1897, 1907, 1922, 1930, 1934.
"I don't think the fundamentals will ever change. As far as applying power goes, I wish that I had three right hands! On a full shot you want to hit the ball as hard as you can with your right hand. But this is only half the story. If you hit hard with only the right and let the left go to sleep, you will not only lose much valuable power, you will also run into all the errors that result when the right hand overpowers the left.
The average golfer's problem is not so much a lack of ability as it is a lack of knowing what he should do. The left is a power hand too."
'Ben Hogan's Five Lessons The Modern Fundamentals of Golf' Ben Hogan 1957
"When I first began to take a serious interest in golf, the great international hero was amateur Bobby Jones. Jones was then the pure amateur. When I studied Bobby Jones's swing I found that his hand action was particularly slack and loose. Yet, when people asked him about it, he said there was a buffer action in the swing. He was aware there was a shock at impact. He realized that the ball was 'shocked' off the club and that he had to absorb it. He wrote about this, but I do not think that many understood what he meant.
In other words, there was in his swing a sort of left hand against the right, a resistance to the right somewhere, and I think people overlooked that, and still do. Now, when a lot of players today write on the game, they ignore it too. They have been hitting balls for so many years that they do not realize that there is a point in the swing when you have to absorb the shock, to take it in your hands."
'Thanks For The Game The Best of Golf with HENRY COTTON' Henry Cotton 1980