Golf legend: Use the image of a railroad track to align your shot

Many golf books tell you how to align yourself by having you imagine you are standing on a railroad track, with a ball on top of the other, and the path the ball travels on is heading towards the target. They also warn that if you set up so that the path you take is pointing towards the target, you will shoot the ball 20 yards to the right. This image is not helpful, and the warning is wrong.

Let’s deal with the warning first. Parallel tracks when your feet will be parallel 150 yards down range. There is an illusion that they are diverging, which you see if you stand behind the “tracks” and look down, but that’s about it. This is an illusion defeated by European painters in the fifteenth century. If the trajectories are parallel, the trajectory of the ball goal and the trajectory of the stance goal will remain two feet apart, for example, no matter how far down range you go.

Try this experiment so you can see the truth for yourself. Get two golf clubs and lay them about 20 inches apart on the ground. Get down to the ground until you can see the worm’s eye along the right paddle and aim it at a distant target. Arrange the other club parallel to the right club. Now stand with your toes facing the left-handed club as if you were addressing a ball on the right-handed club. Turn your head to look at the target. Fix the location of the target in your field of vision – remember where it is.

Now go down to the ground again and point the left stick at the target and set the right stick parallel to it. Take the heading position on the left handed putter again and turn your head the same way you did before to look at the target. The target will be in the same place in your field of vision. You won’t be able to tell the difference from the first setup.

Let me say this again. Two parallel lines that are 20 inches apart at your feet will still be 20 inches apart when they are 150 yards apart. If you aim your body at the target, you will stop at an amount that could only affect Johnny Miller in the early 70s.

Geometrically, it doesn’t matter whether you line up your shot on the ball’s goal line or the player’s goal line. In practice, this is true, because it is difficult to align yourself with the goal line of the ball. If you were to aim a rifle, would you raise it to your eye and look down the barrel, or hold it at arm’s length and point it down? Alignment errors come because you’re trying to set up parallel to a line that’s been displaced from you, and you’ve got it wrong.

So forget the railroad tracks, forget the ball goal line. These pictures don’t make things any easier, in fact they invite misalignment. Line up with the target. Take a training swing and hold the end. Where you are looking is where your swing was directed. It’s that simple.