Tenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

In this essay I examine the first known written instructions on the golf swing as meticulously enumerated between January 1687 and December 1688 by Thomas Kincaid, a medical student at Edinburgh University. Kincaid’s diary of his studies and everyday experiences, replete with reflections upon surgery, poetry, and philosophy, includes perhaps most notably extensive and systematic ruminations on what he claims to be “the only way of playing golf.” Addressing fundamental issues such as muscular control, swing plane, bodily motion, and ball position, Kincaid enumerates in these passages what I suggest is a working mechanics and poetics of the golf swing, especially insofar as his careful and recurring articulations of club arc, arm and torso rotation, leg control, and shaft angle eventually cohere in verses that frame the repeatable golf swing (and the laws of motion that govern it) in metered rhyme. My paper focuses on Kincaid’s detailed criteria for effective golf and considers in particular the ways in which the diarist establishes a paradigm for effecting muscle memory through linguistic repetition and poetic form. Much like other sections of his journal wherein he attempts to “digest” medical authorities, these golfing passages, I hope to demonstrate, constitute an effort to incorporate, through syntactic and literary models, the muscular and mechanical aspects of the golf swing into comprehensible, theoretically informed, and, perhaps most important, reproducible bodily and linguistic routines.