True Believer

The son of a U.S. serviceman stationed in England and a woman from Wales, Arnie Frankel was born in Oxford during an air raid as 1943 bumped into 1944 and was hailed in newspapers as Great Britain's New Year's baby. To a war-weary nation, Frankel's birth was a symbol of hope. "I was put on this planet to make a difference," he says. "I know that." Sixty-one years and one month later, on a breezy Saturday morning in Palm City, Fla., Frankel, neatly set out in a green striped shirt and black pants, is holding forth for two new pupils at Hammock Creek Golf Club, home to the semi-itinerant, semisolvent Frankel Golf Academy, which Arnie runs with his younger brother, Ron. "Golf instruction is in the Dark Ages," he tells the students. "What I teach can revolutionize the game."

Frankel, a lifetime member of the PGA of America, burns with the righteousness of a true believer, his allegiance pledged to a single fundamental: Swing the clubhead. Learn to do this, he promises, and you're on your way to the promised land.

"A swing is a vibration," he explains to the students, demonstrating the proper motion by rhythmically swinging his only training device--a simple medallion tied to one end of three feet of string--back and forth like a pendulum. "A vibration is the first sign of life."

Frankel asks his pupils to take a club and show him their swings. Both are stiff and tense. One player at a time, he lays his hands on the golfer's and together they move the club back and forth at waist level. Before long, arms and wrists have loosened, and Frankel's string and medallion is moving on plane with the student's club. "I can feel this," says Raymond Orrie, 68, a retired pilot with Delta from Roswell, Ga. �Frankel is beaming. "That's freedom," he says. "Freedom is a wonderful thing."

When you come to Frankel for advice, he won't tell you what you're doing wrong and offer a correction. He won't videotape and analyze your swing. Nor will he load you down with positions, mechanics, swing paths or body parts.

Frankel won't do any of that because the master didn't, and Frankel sees himself not only as the lamp sent to light the way, but also as the resurrection of golf's greatest prophet. "I am Ernest Jones," he says.

O.K., not Ernest Jones in the flesh, but Frankel truly believes that he is the last person to have had Jones's instructional philosophy passed down to him directly from one of Jones's first disciples. Frankel parses Jones like others do the Talmud, and he often quotes chapter and verse from Swing the Clubhead, Jones's best-selling golf book, which was first published in 1952. Frankel is working on his own book about Jones, as well as an instructional video that he believes will once again popularize the master. "I'm the only one who can do this," he says. "I'm the only one who carries Ernest's truth. So many golfers are struggling needlessly. Ernest thought so, too."

A top English amateur, Jones developed his swing theory before World War I, but he honed it after losing his right leg below the knee in combat. Only four months after losing the leg, Jones shot an 83 without a prosthesis. Within weeks he was breaking par.

Playing on one leg led Jones to conclude that the swing was a single, unified motion controlled and led by the hands. The tremendous centrifugal force that motion created not only provided power but also naturally balanced the golfer. The motion could not be broken into parts (a.k.a. positions) and had to be felt with the hands--the only body part connected to the club--through the outward pull of the clubhead. (Jones designed his famous penknife-tied-to-a-handkerchief teaching tool to demonstrate the motion; Frankel is seldom without his string and medallion.) Everything else followed from that. All a golfer had to do was concentrate on feel. Swing the clubhead became Jones's mantra, and he'd sometimes say nothing else over the course of a lesson.

By the time Jones arrived in the U.S. in the 1920s, when he took a job as head pro at the Women's National Golf and Tennis Club in Glen Head, N.Y., on Long Island, he was already a sensation, but his reputation was enhanced through his work with champions such as Marion Hollins, Lawson Little, Glenna Collett Vare and Virginia Van Wie. When the National was sold in the early '40s, pilgrims flocked to Jones's small studio on the seventh floor of the old A.G. Spalding building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, where he gave thousands of lessons annually. In 1998, Jones, along with Tommy Armour, Percy Boomer and Harvey Penick, were the first four men inducted into the World Golf Teachers Hall of Fame.