Tag: Gerald Mason

How To Buy An Older House And Save A Fortune

How To Buy An Older House And Save A Fortune

Article by Gerald Mason







When you have found a house in a desirable location that looks interesting, look it over carefully for evidence of quality construction or the lack of quality.

Does the house have the general appearance of being in good shape?

Do the doors swing freely, and do they fit the openings? A poor fit of the doors often indicates the foundation is settling.

Do the windows operate freely? If not, look out. Of course, sometimes paint may stick the windows and they can be pried loose and made to operate freely. Are the floors level and in good condition? If the floor is high in the center of the room, it is not because the floor has risen, but because the walls are settling.

Do not buy a house if the floors are not level. This situation is very difficult to correct and usually indicates a serious defect in the structure.

Look for evidence that water has been a problem. Are there spots on the ceiling or walls that show that water has been leaking around the roof area?

What about under and around the windows? Look around the bottoms of the walls near the baseboards for water marks. What about areas near the shower bath, or around the laundry trays?

What about water stains on the bathtub indicating a leaky faucet? Watch slab floors for signs of moisture; this might be indicated by buckled or uneven linoleum, or floor tile curled up at the corners. If you find many of these features, do not stop there, but keep on looking until you find another house.

If the floor is of frame construction, is the area under the house well ventilated? Crawl under the house and examine the framing under the floor.

Take your pocket knife and test the joists and sills to see if they have started to decay. Get up into the attic and look over the situation; it is surprising what you may discover. The two most important parts of a house are the foundation and the roof.

If these two are in good condition, it is a pretty good sign that the house is structurally sound. But structural soundness is not the only, or even the most important criterion to use in judging a house.

Study the Plan

The structure exists solely to enclose the space that you will live in. Study the room arrangement carefully. Does the passage from one room to another seem natural and easy, or do you have to walk too far to get anywhere? Do you enter the house gracefully?

Will the rain water drip down the back of your neck while you search through your purse for the key? Is there a closet near the front door for wraps? Do you come directly into the living room, or is there at least a hint of an entrance hall?

Will the living room be the principal passageway through the house, with traffic lanes across the carpet in a year or two? Where will you put the piano or the davenport? What about the television? Is there a good place for it and the spectators around it, where they can be out of the way of other activities?

Is the kitchen complete with adequate work areas where they will be convenient? Is there a good place to eat? Is there a place in the house for a dining table? What about the storage of food supplies?

Is the house light and cheerful, or dismal, dingy, and dark? A gloomy house can have a very depressing effect on a family.

Are there enough bedrooms, and are they large enough? Are wardrobes large enough, and fitted with rods, shelves and organized storage space? What general storage space is there for suitcases, fishing tackle, cameras, projectors, golf clubs, etc.?

Is there a special closet for cleaning equipment? Check the location and size of the bathrooms, and the arrangement of the fixtures.

In selecting a house, be sure to get the things in it that you have always wanted.

That is the reason you are buying instead of renting. If you want oak floors on a wood frame, don’t settle for asphalt tile on concrete, which is much cheaper to build.

Some people have trouble with their feet when they stand and work on hard cold floors, as concrete floors tend to be, even when covered with asphalt or vinyl tile.

If you buy a house to be paid for in twenty-five years, how old will you be when it is all paid for? How much repair will it need by that time? Will it still be a good house, or will it need to be replaced?

How long should a house last? If well built on a good concrete foundation and if the roof is kept in repair, a house should last several centuries. Many wood frame houses are still in use that were built in the colonial period of America.

They are still strong and in sound structural condition, but aside from their historic value, how well adapted are they to modern living? Houses do not ordinarily fall down; they just get out of date and show signs of the wear and tear of everyday living.

Minor repairs, patching and a good painting are all they need to be like new; that is, like they were when they were new. But fashions in houses change rapidly the same way they do in hats, except the fashion in hats may change a little faster than it does in houses.

When you do decide to purchase it is surprising how much you can save by using a mortgage calculator.



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Why An Early Break Is So Important In Golf

Why An Early Break Is So Important In Golf

Article by Gerald Mason







Whenever we go to a golf tournament and see a really good player hit the ball, we receive two vivid impressions. The first is how far the ball goes with seemingly so little effort. The second is of a certain measured cadence in the upward and downward movement of the club. Both are accurate impressions.

Now if we happen to be on the practice tee, where we can watch this player hit shot after shot, we will notice two other things. One is that he swings all his clubs at about the same speed; he doesn’t seem to hit the 3 wood any harder than he hits the 7 iron. The second thing we notice, when we let our gaze wander to other players practicing, is that while most of them are deliberate, there are differences in their swinging speeds.

Timing is the answer to the first accomplishment–the long hit with little effort. Rhythm produces the measured cadence in the upward and downward movement of the club. And the differences we notice in swinging speed among other players are differences in tempo.

The hands will take over soon enough, as an automatic, reflex action. The problem is to keep them out while still keeping them moving. If we keep them out while our body moves the club from the top, our timing will be far better

Yet the ball still flies out much farther than it should, for the effort the player seems to be putting into it. This is very marked in the graceful players of smaller stature, such as Gene Littler, 1961 National Open champion, and Dow Finsterwald, former National PGA champion.

Timing

The answer to the effort-distance puzzle being timing, just what is timing? For one thing, it is a word that has been used more loosely, perhaps, than any other in golf literature. We have been blandly told that we should work to improve our timing, that our timing is off, that without good timing we cannot hope to play well. But there, having given the word the once-over-lightly treatment, the oracles have left us. They have never adequately explained timing or told us what we should do to improve ours. Our private guess is that they don’t know themselves what it is.

A dictionary will tell you that timing is: “The regulating of the speed of a motion, stroke, or blow, so that it reaches its maximum at the correct moment.” In golf, obviously, this would mean regulating the speed of the club head so as to cause it to reach its maximum as it hits the ball.

The key phrase is “regulating of the speed.” The better the speed is regulated, the better the timing; the poorer the regulation, the poorer the timing. It is here that at least 95 per cent of all golfers have their worst trouble.

They have it because the regulation of the speed depends not on how the club head is manipulated by the hands but on how and when other parts of the swinging system operate: the hips, the shoulders, the arms, the hands. If these move in the right way and in the right order, they will automatically regulate the speed of the club head so that it reaches its maximum as it hits the ball. It is, in effect, a chain reaction of movement, with the club head getting the final effect.

The reason the vast majority of golfers have such trouble timing a shot satisfactorily is that, subconsciously or consciously, they try to regulate the speed of the club head directly with their hands, without using the intermediary links of the hips, shoulders, and arms. When they do this they get an early but never very great reaction, in terms of speed, from the club head. This is the old familiar “hitting too soon” or “hitting from the top.” When the intermediary links are used and the chain reaction is allowed to take its course, there is a late reaction by the club head, which then accelerates to great speed at impact. There is a common expression to describe the player who uses the chain reaction: “He waits on the club.” It may not be grammatical but it is descriptive.

What this all comes down to is, the expression of good timing is the late hit. The expression of poor timing is the early hit. We have already, in previous chapters, explained the moves that produce the late hit and the early hit. Here, as we discuss timing, we isolate one key move that leads to good or improved timing. It is this: Let the body not the hands start moving the club on the downswing.

Once you can do this you are on the road to vastly better golf. You will have the feeling that you are starting down with arms and club close to the body close to the axis where they should be at this time.

So much has been written over the years about the importance of the hands in swinging the club, that many of us are entirely too hand conscious. A standing vote of thanks is due Bill Casper for stating, in a description of his swing as it reached the hitting position: “At this point my body is still swinging the club.” Many of us have been sure of that for years, but Casper, to our knowledge, was the first of the top tournament pros with the courage to say it.

Nearly all good players will give us impressions of timing and rhythm. The more graceful the player, the more vivid the impression will be. Sam Snead, among the moderns, is the perfect example. Among the giants of the past, Bob Jones’s swing was once called the “poetry of motion,” and the late Macdonald Smith was probably the most effortless swinger who ever played the game. The players of today swing harder at the ball than did their predecessors, with the result that theirs is more of a hitting than a swinging action.



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How To Develop A Brilliant Golf Swing

How To Develop A Brilliant Golf Swing

Article by Gerald Mason







For a good golf swing we have not only to bring the club head down through the same line time after time; we must bring it down so that the club face is square with the ball at the instant of impact–and because the path of the club head is a curve, this means that impact must be timed correctly to an infinitesimal fraction of a second in the sweep of the swing. Also the club head must be accelerating at the moment of impact.

So we have not only to set up the mechanism to make a good swing, which we can all soon do if we only swing at the daisies, but we have to time this swing to the fraction of a second. Now I think that most of us overrate the value of good mechanics in golf and underrate the value of accurate timing. I was once watching, with a pupil of mine who had a most perfect swing, a fellow whose action was not pretty–to put it kindly.

But he kept hitting nice long shots down the middle. “Not much to look at,” I remarked to my pupil. “I would not care a damn what I looked like if I could repeat like that chap!” he replied.

The awkward one could repeat his best shots time after time. His mechanics were ungainly but his timing was near perfect.

Well, you may say, if that is so, why should you go to so much trouble to give us a good mechanical swing? The answer is that good timing plus a good swing is better than good timing plus an awkward swing.

The best swing, mechanically, is the one that pulls the ball a little and then makes it turn a bit to the left at the end of its flight, but if you get your maximum golf happiness out of a swing which slices the ball all around the course, there is no reason to alter your mechanics!

If you do want to make an alteration, it may not be an extensive one. I remember one day at St. Cloud an someone came and begged me to give him even fifteen minutes–which I did out of my lunch time as he seemed so insistent.

His trouble was that every now and then his iron shots to the green would finish in the bunker to the left of the green. For three years he had failed to find a permanent cure. So on the advice of a friend he came to me. It did not take me long to see what was wrong and to explain to him that now and again his foot-and-leg work was sluggish, and in consequence the club head came in too soon–to put his ball a little to the left.

After that brief lesson I never saw him again, as he was on his way back to the States from Paris. But he left me a note of thanks and a handsome present, and when I inquired of the caddy who had been out with him in the afternoon learned he had broken 70. Some time later I saw his photograph in the American Golfer with the news that he had won the West Coast championship.

Too much thought about the mechanics is a bad thing for anyone’s game. Now the reason why golf is so difficult is that you have to learn it and play it through your senses. You must be mindful but not thoughtful as you swing. You must not think or reflect; you must feel what you have to do. Part of the difficulty arises because, apart from simple things like riding a bicycle, we have never learned to do things in this way.

The beginning of the swing movement is in the feet; the movement passes progressively up through the body, through the arms, and out at the club head.

What we try to do is to make the club head come down in the same path time and time again–in such a way that the face of the club comes squarely into the back of the ball every time.

We have one fixed point (the feet) and one moving point (the club head) which we desire to move along the same line time after time. So the golf swing might be compared to the drawing of arcs with a pair of compasses. The reasons why we cannot be so precise in our stroking as the compass can, are that we are supported on two legs instead of one and we are full of flections and joints!



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The Importance Of Control In Golf

The Importance Of Control In Golf

Article by Gerald Mason







Everything helping the development of good control must be encouraged, everything hindering it avoided. Their building up is largely unconscious and unnoticed, in-deed even a successful pupil will often feel that little progress is being made–until perhaps quite suddenly he will be surprised to find himself playing effective, confident golf.

I remember with special pleasure how that happened to a young pupil of mine.She had been in my hands since her childhood and her first experience of a major tournament was when she went over to England for the Ladies’ Open. She actually led the field in the qualifying rounds and was only put out on the last green in the semi-final..

On her return she said to me, “I did not know I could play like that! No one was more surprised than I was. I just played–and everything went right.”

I was delighted, but not so surprised. I knew she had the golf in her and that sooner or later the controls we were building would enable her to play it. But I was delighted, because you would not normally expect a young pupil to play a bit above her best on such a nerve-testing occasion.

So when a golfer says to me, “I must learn to concentrate–concentrate–concentrate!”

I counter with: “No, you must build controls–controls–controls!”

Now I claim that the right way of learning golf has almost nothing in common with the “learning” we did at school; it is an entirely different process. Memorizing the capitals of Europe or a Latin declension, or ‘learning” chemistry or mathematics, are purely mental feats and depend exclusively upon mental memory, whereas I contend that to learn to play good and consistent golf you need muscular memory.

What you need to learn (or memorize) are not the technical or mathematical details of a good shot but the feel of it. If you and every component muscle in you can remember the feel of a good shot, you can make it–and you have become what I term a reflex golfer. That is to say, the good shot has become your “reflex,” or automatic response to the sight of the ball. But please remember that this golf memory is a memory of a cycle of sensations which follow and blend into one another quite smoothly.

Each sensation must be connected up with those which precede and follow it; it cannot be considered independently. The truth is that it cannot even be felt independently. You cannot, to take a crude example, feel the top of your swing as such; you can only feel a sensation between the sensations of the back swing and those of the down swing.

For that reason you must never in golf say, “I’ve got it!” when you think you have found the secret of some shot that has been evading you–unless what you have “got” fits into your cycle of sensations or, as we shall now call them, controls. Because, unless it does so fit in, it cannot become a reliable part of your game. And why do I call sensations controls? Simply because I want you to control your golf by these sensations instead of by thought.

There is another reason why your memory of a golf shot must be a memory of a cycle of sensations, not of a number of separate sensations. It takes an exceedingly skilful juggler to juggle with six glass balls at once, but if the six balls were threaded onto a string most of us could manage them–and the memorizing of sensations as a cycle (instead of as independent items) does thread them up for us very much in this way.

To turn for a moment from learning to teaching. Most of the teaching of golf is completely negative– and a purely negative thing can have no positive value. Why do I say that golf teaching is negative? Well we can all find faults in each other’s game, millions of them, and we all start off to teach golf by pointing out these faults and “curing” them.

I did this for twenty-five years, but I have now discovered that the right way to get a pupil to hit the ball satisfactorily is to watch for any good natural qualities that may be there and to build up the swing around them.

We all hit a good ball sometimes. Maybe with the beginner this is an accident, but the good teacher will use such an accidental shot, photographing it in his mind and starting away to build up controls around the qualities which made it possible.

In this way the beginner can retain his natural capacity to hit the ball and will gain confidence in his ability to do it–and so go on enjoying his game and improving it. But if the teacher merely points out to him a dozen or more faults in his swing he will become perplexed, confused, and fed up. For that reason I never tell a pupil his faults (which is negative teaching).

I notice the faults, of course, and suggest the necessary corrections (which is positive). So I never tell a pupil that he over swings and breaks his left arm, I explain width to him. That is to say I give him a positive conception and by working on it he actually cures his faults without even being aware that he had them.

Now there is another point about teaching which I would like to emphasize. You will find that in this work I have not tried to set down a set of controls in one way and leave it at that. I have tried to set the same things down and explain them in many different ways. So when you find me repeating myself do not think it is carelessness!

All good teachers must repeat, but never in exactly the same words or with just the same connections. I want to give you a clear idea of the controls which will enable you to produce an effective swing, and I do not mind if I have to say the same thing in a dozen different ways so long as one of the twelve gets home with you. I hope you will not mind either, because you should be able to pick something new out of the other eleven also.

I learned golf by the long way–trial and error–and I want to lead you away from that to a method which is methodical and is effective whatever your age or your handicap may be.

If you accept my method of learning you do not need a lot of practice on the course to improve; you can assimilate the principles in your armchair and put in useful practice on the hearth rug–where you need no club because ye»u can feel your muscular movements without it. You must learn to feel the sensations through your intellect and then forget them intellectually and leave them to your muscular memory or control system.

How long does it take to “learn golf”? Well I am still learning after forty-five years of it!

I have known pupils who hit the ball very well after only four lessons and others who have taken a year or more to do even moderately well, but time is apt to level things out a lot. Golf is a curious game in being easy of comprehension but (sometimes) very long in realization. There is much darkness in the early stages, and it is only after a few years at the game that we really come out into full daylight and can assess our own possibilities.

Early difficulties are often emphasized by age or physical make-up. While I was writing this I had just started two young ladies–one of sixteen who is still at college but weighs about one hundred and seventy pounds and another in the early twenties who weighs less than half that.

Apart from the weight of their clubs the conditions will be the same for both, yet obviously their problems will work out very differently. And we have all got our physical individuality and peculiarities in the layout of bones and development of muscles.

But I have found by long experience that these things usually level themselves out in the end–I have seen many gifted and precocious beginners fail simply because they would not put in the hard work which is essential before the elementary stage is passed, and only when the elementary stage is passed can golf genius come to the surface.

On the other hand I remember one pupil of mine who started very young and at times could hardly get the ball off the ground; yet at eighteen she was scratch and Champion of France. And as I have already told, I started another lady at forty and though she was not gifted she was a worker and ten years later she eliminated Mme Lacoste from the French Open!

If you work in this way your golf will be progressive. You will still (being human) get bad patches, but each bad patch will tend to be less bad and each good patch will tend to be better, because you are building up your game.

So do not despair if you are trying to learn golf, or better golf, and getting no results. It may be that you have been trying to learn too many things (like juggling with too many balls) and when you have tried to add just one more, your whole game has broken down on you. We will simplify the things you have to learn by stringing them together into cycles of sensation because they are then easier to remember and easier to add to.



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