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Introduction
If you’ve ever hit a rasping, dipping forehand drive down the line; a scything cover drive for four; a zinging 7-iron to two feet; a delicate, perfectly placed, sliced backhand volley; or sent a bowl meandering across 30 yards of cosseted lawn to nudge its way gently between two woods and rest itself against the jack, and then thought: ‘how the hell did I do that?!’, then this is the book for you. Inside you will find the answer to the conundrum of the “occasional perfect shot”. You will, in fact, find a complete solution to the mystery of “timing”.
All perfect shots in all hitting and throwing sports have “timing” in common. Experiencing the results of a “timed” shot is what makes playing sports worthwhile. But every games player knows that “timing” is elusive in the extreme. Every player at every level knows what it is like to be “out of form”, when nothing will go right, when even the simplest sporting task seems to be beyond them: a straight black off the spot; a three-foot putt; an easy backhand volley inexplicably smashed into the net. By laying bare the mysteries of “timing” this book gives all players the ability to make their occasional perfect shots less occasional.
The answer itself is a head-shakingly obvious physical movement that has been completely overlooked. The movement is natural to us all and easy to learn. However, a note of warning: “timing” cannot be captured. Learning the movement that is fundamental to all perfect shots will not turn you into a champion overnight but it will, I guarantee, increase your enjoyment of your chosen sport as you reap the benefits of relentless and inevitable improvement.
The best example I have of the effect this book can have is that of my father. He has been playing crown green bowls for about 20 years. The season before last, fed up with only ever being quite good, he decided to try out my ideas. Last season he had his best season ever. On interrogation he will admit that his improved form is down to two quite subtle factors. First, he has the impression that he bowls more bowls closer to the jack; not all of them and not all of the time but enough to give him more of a competitive edge in his matches. Second, and of much greater importance, he thinks that my ideas have stopped him becoming nervous during a game. In fact, he now believes that the greater the pressure he feels he is under during a match, the better he plays; all this from a simple, easily learned and completely natural movement.
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Playing tennis in the dark
When I was a boy I loved playing football. I wasn’t very good at it but I loved it all the same.
I was about 9 years old when the newly formed Cub Scout pack in the town decided to put a football team in a local league. My Primary School didn’t play organised football so this was the first eleven-a-side team to come from the age group: it was big news in the playground.
Fortunately for me, a lot of the boys who were good at football had not joined the Cubs on the grounds that – like the Scouts proper – it was only for soppy, posh kids. As it turned out they weren’t far wrong and because soppy, posh kids are traditionally useless at football I had no trouble getting into the team.
Playing organized, representative football was a revelation. I found I could be mentally tough, physically brave and downright cussed simply because I was playing football for my hometown team. From being a distinctly average player of improvised football on spare patches of flat ground, I turned into a reasonably good player of proper, organized football on big fields with goalposts and nets. The extra pressures of organized team football such as playing away from home against strangers, referees, rules and a time limit were the making of me and, more significantly, the undoing of others.
I am not embarrassed to admit that playing football for my town or school was the be all and end all for me as a boy. Nothing could beat it and there was virtually nothing I wouldn’t do to get picked. But my lack of pure footballing ability meant that I was always on the verge of not getting picked. In my desperation to be rid of the worry of being left out of the team, I resorted to an activity virtually unheard of at the time in someone my age – I practised.
I spent hours on the school field taking corners and penalties with my left foot. I would tie a leather ball by its laces to a branch and practise heading. I would even resort to dribbling around evenly spaced obstacles imagining them to be the proper professional cones that proper professionals dribbled around. I tried harder than anyone else I knew to improve; and none of it made the slightest difference. Most of my short, intense footballing career was spent in the living purgatory that is substitute-dom.
I had truly believed that I could through practice and training turn myself into a better footballer and I was bitterly disappointed that it hadn’t happened. I wanted to know why all my hard work hadn’t paid off; and the more I thought about it the more I realised that the question I really wanted answering was: given that I was nearly a good footballer, what did good footballers have that I didn’t?
I had played all of my football with the same set of boys and was acutely aware of the relative abilities of each and every one of them. So it wasn’t at all difficult for me to come up with an answer: but my answer meant the end of a dream.
Footballers, according to my analysis, had two qualities that were as natural and individual as the colour of their eyes: pace and balance. Being natural abilities they were, by definition, unimprovable. My own efforts to improve had come to nought simply because there was nothing I could do to make myself a faster or better balanced footballer. Right or wrong, this line of reasoning brought an abrupt (if overdue) end to my boyhood dream of playing in the first division as a professional footballer. It was a typical little boy’s dream but I was sad, all the same. The brutal truth was that I was as good as I was ever going to be: God had seen to that.
I was still fretting about all this when my Dad decided he would teach me to play tennis.
We began with a few impromptu sessions in the early evening hitting balls against the surround netting of our local courts. As soon as I was sufficiently competent we moved on to the courts proper and began more serious coaching. My father had taught himself to play only a few years earlier and was keen that I should learn to play “properly”. This meant learning the orthodox grips for forehand and backhand; the correct feet placement and body position; the technique for top-spin and slice etc. I was a quick learner and soon had a solid, all-round, orthodox technique.
Quite by chance, at the same time as my father was teaching me to play tennis so my closest friend was being taught by his. Before long we were playing most of our tennis together, either at the local club playing mixed fours in the evening or just the two of us grinding out hour after hour of unstructured knocking-up.
Over the next couple of years we played a huge amount of tennis and progressed as one might expect, except that my friend progressed noticeably better than I did. His technique was no better than mine – slightly worse, if anything – he did not practise more than I did, he wasn’t more determined or competitive: he was just a better tennis player.
I suppose most people would have accepted that he was simply more talented and thought no more of it; me, I thought of little else. My constant musing on what made my friend a better tennis player than me led to a surprising and fascinating observation.
From my experience of playing football, I had expected that anyone who was more talented at tennis than someone else would always be able to hit better shots than the other person: pretty much like a fast footballer would always beat a slower footballer to a 50-50 ball. But this was not the case; my friend didn’t always hit better tennis shots than me. In fact, occasionally I would hit a shot that could not be bettered. No, the reason my friend was a better tennis player than me was because he could hit good tennis shots more often than I could.
This may sound to most people like a distinction too subtle to bother about but to a 14-year old desperate to be good at something, it was an observation full of hope and potential. My reasoning went like this: I had been forced to admit to myself that I would never make it as a footballer because there was absolutely nothing I could do to make myself faster or better balanced. But I had already proved to myself that I had the talent to hit the occasional perfect tennis shot. Therefore, to become a better tennis player all I had to do was to find out why the talent to hit the occasional perfect shot wasn’t there all the time: what made it come and go?
Now that I had identified that the phenomenon of the occasional perfect shot was a possible path to sporting success I just wouldn’t let go of it. I pestered my long suffering friend with my ideas on the “problem”. Whilst playing I would wait for a perfect shot to come along and then try to analyse what was different about that shot compared to all the useless ones that had preceded it. Many, many theories came and went; and many a promising adjustment to my technique lasted only until the next terrible shot.
All the hours and hours of observation, analysis and theorizing led eventually to the problem being stripped bare of all irrelevancies. I was now convinced that at the core of the problem was a phenomenon as mysterious as it was commonplace; a phenomenon so well known to every player of ball games yet so little understood; a phenomenon that meant the difference between perfect shots and awful shots; a phenomenon with a simple, evocative and elegant name: timing.
When every nerve ending in your body tingled at the sheer beauty of the execution of a shot – that was timing. When the shot felt as comfortable as an old man in a disco – that wasn’t. The task was simple: find out how timing works and the conundrum of the occasional perfect shot will be answered.
However, despite intense scrutiny of many hundreds of tennis shots timing failed to reveal its secret to me. In the process I became quite a self-taught expert on the mechanics of tennis shots but I got no nearer discovering the truth about timing. The only things I knew for certain about timing were: that I would occasionally time a shot; that where and when this would happen was beyond my control; that when it did happen it felt utterly wonderful.
The only other thing I was confident about was that there were a lot of things about timing that didn’t fit in with orthodox thinking on tennis technique. For instance, I remember arriving at the courts one evening just as the light was beginning to fade. Someone asked me to make up a men’s four to have a quick game before it got really dark. As the light got worse so my tennis got better. By the time it got so dark that we were more or less playing by ear I was timing each shot quite beautifully.
There were many such occasions when timing and its effects left me completely baffled; and even though my tennis became a wholly haphazard mixture of the good, the very good and the utterly hopeless, I was never less than completely fascinated by the vagaries, quirks and wiles of the elusive timing.
After about three seasons of incessant analysis I got to the stage where I had become convinced that there were complicating factors that I had to remove if I was to have a chance of discovering how timing worked. These factors were my old enemies pace and balance. I thought that there was the possibility that one’s ability to time a shot could be influenced by one’s ability to manoeuvre around the court at speed. I needed a game that involved hitting a ball but that didn’t require me to move around in order to do so. I took up golf; and so did my friend.
To my immense frustration, my experience of golf was a replica of my experience of tennis: I soon grasped the mechanics of the swing; made the expected initial progress; timed the occasional shot and then progressed barely beyond mediocrity.
My friend’s experience of golf was also a replica of his experience of tennis and he duly became a better golfer than me, and for the same reason that he was a better tennis player than me: he hit good shots more often than I did.
We played golf for about three years; I stopped when I left home to go to college. My search for the secret of timing had failed. What I knew at that point could be summed up thus:
- Timing was capricious in the extreme: as soon as you thought you had it nailed it would disappear
- Timing had nothing to do with pace and balance – golf had proved that
- Everyone could time sometimes (probably)
- There was something about timing that was universal; something beyond and above technique, physique or training; something fundamental to the very act of hitting (or throwing) accurately.
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Seeing the light
I went away to college, worked here and there, did this and that, and played very little sport. By the end of this period I was back home living with my parents; I was single and unattached; working as a labourer and, most importantly, playing a lot of crown green bowls.
The importance of crown green bowls to this story cannot be overemphasised. I had played quite a lot of bowls in my teens and it had helped me to come to the conclusion that there was something about timing that was universal, that timing was a phenomenon fundamental to the act of hitting or throwing; or, to be more precise, the act of applying an accurate force to an object.
The importance of bowls to this story stems from the fact that as a game it is timing stripped bare. This is because, compared to tennis or golf, there are no complicating factors. A bowler cannot gain advantage by owning superior equipment; he doesn’t need to be especially fit or strong, or tall, or heavy; he doesn’t need to have exceptional pace or balance; there are no difficult techniques to master; and you don’t have to be young, or male, or wealthy. In fact, all a bowler needs is reasonable eyesight and the ability to move his arm a few inches backwards followed by a few inches in the other direction. Yet, somewhere in that few inches of movement lay the difference between a perfectly delivered wood and a perfectly horrible one. In other words, somewhere in that few inches of movement lay the secret of timing.
Promising as I have made this scenario sound, however, it was to be another two and a half years before I finally made the breakthrough.
The “research” method was the same as it had been with tennis and golf: play the game, make an observation, put it into practice and wait for it to fail. This time round, however, there was an additional element; my experimentation on the bowling green was conducted under the glare of proper competition as a proud member of Llanrwst Bowling Club.
Like most people I found being no good at something extremely frustrating. It was bad enough struggling on the tennis court and golf course but struggling on the bowling green was ten times worse because of the effect of letting down ones team mates and ones beloved “Club”.
I absolutely hated being no good at bowls. All I had to do – for God’s sake – to win my team a point was to get the bowl to roll a few yards and stop near the jack. Simple. Nothing to it. You just swing your arm back and forth and let go. What could be so difficult in that? A child could do it. And yet when my club needed me to play well and win them a point, I couldn’t get the wood to stop anywhere near the jack – no matter what, or how hard, I tried. If I hadn’t been such a nerve-less, bolshie football player I would have been forced to conclude that I had no stomach for the fight. But deep down I knew I wasn’t like that. There was nothing I liked more than a battle against the odds. However, wanting to win wasn’t enough. Wanting to win so much that your heart could break wasn’t enough. Without timing anyone could beat me.
For two and a half seasons I searched desperately for the secret of timing and, for my troubles, suffered one humiliation after another. I knew it was in there somewhere, I just couldn’t nail it.
Then, one hot Sunday morning in July, I was practising alone on the green. After a couple of frustrating hours I was, unusually, beginning to get into something of a lather. For about the only time in my life that I can recall, I was starting to feel angry. My anger was directed at my own unfathomable inability to roll a bowl a few yards across a manicured expanse of turf so that it ended up near a jack. Fanning the flames of my anger was a whole host of recollections from my sporting past: painful memories of dashed hopes, unfulfilled promise and a good number of humbling experiences on various courts, greens and courses.
At the point where I was about to give in to my anger and frustration and pack up for the day, I found myself with the jack in my hand standing right on the crown of the green. In something approaching a trance, I rolled the jack into one of the corners. As I stood there waiting for the jack to come to rest, my mind started to fill with all the half-baked, half forgotten theories and ideas I had ever had about “timing”. Fuelled by fifteen years of pent-up anger, I was analysing the few inches of movement that makes up a bowling action with an intensity I had never before been able to bring to the subject. For the next few minutes, unmoving and unblinking, I went through a thought process something along the following lines:
