Word: swings
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...Hizballah fighter, dressed in camouflage trousers, boots and a cream-colored sweater, puts down his AK-47 rifle and stands before his small prayer mat, his head bowed for the early evening ritual. Behind him is a simple one-man hut next to a swing gate. It is the entrance to a sealed-off hillside base, one of many that have sprung up over the last year in the rugged mountains and stony valleys around Rihan, a southern Lebanese village. The entrance to another no-go zone, along a rutted dirt track, is advertised by a sign that reads: WARNING...
...Many professional golfers have criticized Carnoustie for its severity - "Carnasty" is a preferred sobriquet - but their debt to the course is immense. The modern golf swing that has brought them unparalleled control of the ball (and untold riches) was invented here and came about as a direct response to the course's difficulty. It's basic science: a sport, like an organism, can evolve only when it has challenges to overcome...
...solution was what would later be termed the Carnoustie Swing, now widely recognized as the embryo of modern technique. The mechanism of today's golf swing, employed by Tiger Woods and most of his contemporaries, goes against a fundamental understanding in all sports, stretching back to Greek ideals, that the body must act in unison. In the modern swing, the shoulders turn around a stable base like a coiled spring, building tension and potential energy, which unleashes a powerful, unerring ball flight. For years, golfers had turned their upper and lower bodies together, twisting back and then unwinding like...
...innovation by chance, then painstakingly improved it. It was a triumph of inductive reasoning over deductive, of scientific method over pure logic. Like the Enlightenment itself, this powerful new knowledge was destined to spread. Between 1898 and 1930, about 300 professional golfers left Carnoustie to teach the distinctive swing at clubs in North America - quite a feat for a town that then had a population of only...
...most famous émigré was Stewart Maiden, who left Carnoustie in 1907 for East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, where he was studied and imitated by a young Bobby Jones. Maiden's swing, passed on to Jones, had significantly more rotation than today's players exhibit - generations of golfers have further refined the Carnoustie technique - but its fundamental utilization of upper-body rotation instead of a full-body twist remains unchanged. Jones, the only golfer ever to win four major championships in the same year, would later write: "Stewart had the finest and soundest style I have ever seen...