“I Can’t Throw”

Whenever I say the golf swing is a throw, someone bites back. I get comments on Facebook all the time and it always makes me chuckle…

It sounds reasonable and it’s said by people who aren’t foolish - they’ve just been told, for years, that their own movements are complicated and fragile and need managing. So the objection lands with a kind of weary common sense. Of course throwing’s a skill. Some people are good at it, some aren’t. Fair enough.

Except it isn’t. It falls apart the moment you actually look at it. So let’s look at it.

If you can toss rubbish at a bin, you can throw

Watch anyone screw up a piece of paper and lob it at the bin across the room.

They don’t line up their elbow. They don’t check a position. They don’t run a mental list. They glance at the bin, and they throw, and more often than not it goes in - or close enough that they’re annoyed it didn’t. No practice swing. No warm-up. No coach.

That’s a throw. That’s the whole skill, right there, done without a scrap of thought. If you can do that - and you can, you’ve done it a thousand times - then the “I can’t throw” argument is already over. You just proved it wrong with a ball of paper, on instinct, in the time it took to read this paragraph.

It’s older than almost everything else about you

This next part isn’t a hopeful little metaphor. It’s just true.

Throwing is one of the oldest, most deeply wired movements our species owns. We threw to hunt and to survive for a very long time - longer than we’ve had language, longer than farming, longer than more or less anything you’d think of as human. The overhand throw is close to ours alone; nothing else in the animal world does it quite the way we do. It isn’t a rare, delicate, coachable talent that some are handed and others aren’t. It’s standard equipment. It was installed a long time ago and it came with the body.

Telling a person they can’t throw is like telling them they can’t walk. You’d raise an eyebrow at that. Raise the same eyebrow at this.

“Throw” is a real word, not a vibe

When I say throw, I’m not being poetic and I’m not dumbing anything down.

Throwing is a specific, studied movement - a way the body sequences itself, the big heavy parts moving first and handing their speed out to the fast end last. It’s a well-understood pattern. It has a shape you can describe. And it happens to be exactly the shape an efficient golf swing takes.

So using the word isn’t me reaching for an easy image. It’s me naming the thing accurately - in a language your body already speaks - instead of burying it under a list of checkpoints your body has never understood and never will.

“Throw” isn’t the simple version of the truth. It is the truth, said plainly.

The smallest hinge moves the biggest door

Here’s the quiet beauty of it.

One intention - throw the club at the ball - organises the whole of you. The hips, the shoulders, the sequence, the lag, the timing: all of it arranges itself around that single idea, because that’s what the idea is for. It’s the smallest possible input producing the largest possible result. A tiny hinge swinging an enormous door.

Positions do the exact reverse. A hundred separate inputs, each one competing with the others for room in your head, all of them arriving over the ball at once and cancelling each other out. That’s not a door swinging. That’s a hundred people shoving at it from every angle while it doesn’t move an inch.

The throw beats a hundred checkpoints, and it isn’t close - because the throw moves everything together, and the checkpoints move everything apart.

Now the ridiculous part

Here’s the bit I most want to say out loud, because it’s the hinge the whole objection turns on and almost nobody notices it.

The argument, taken to its end, runs like this:

Stop and actually look at that.

It’s backwards. It’s completely backwards. If a simple, natural throw is supposedly too hard for you, then how on earth is chopping that same throw into a hundred separate positions going to be easier? It won’t be. It’s harder - for everyone, good thrower or not. Breaking a movement into pieces and asking you to manage the pieces by hand is the single hardest way to do anything.

The complexity was never the rescue. The complexity is what buried you.

That’s the whole tragedy of it, really: a golfer is handed a naturally simple thing, then believes it’s too hard for them, and then tries something genuinely hard as the solution. Small wonder so many struggle. They talked themselves out of the easy thing and into the difficult one - believing the complex approach is actually the path.

You get better by doing - the same as everyone ever

And here’s the answer to the honest version of the objection - but I’m genuinely not good at throwing.

Fine. Neither was anyone, at first.

Every good thrower who has ever lived got good the same way, and it isn’t a mysterious way. They threw. Over and over, from childhood, thousands of times, letting the movement quietly sort itself out. The pitchers and the shortstops people hold up as proof that throwing is “coached” didn’t get their arm from a manual. They made a hundred thousand throws, maybe millions. The coaching came later and sat on top of a thing that was already there.

So “I’m not good at it yet” was never a reason to stop. It’s the reason to keep going. Doing the thing is how you get the thing - in throwing, in golf, in every skill there has ever been. There is no other route and there never was. Nobody read their way to a good throw.

So, no

“I can’t throw” isn’t true. And even if it were, it wouldn’t change a single thing about what you should do tomorrow morning.

You can throw. You’ve been able to since you were a small child. It’s older than language and wired into the deepest part of how you move, and no amount of being told otherwise has actually taken it out of you - it’s still in there, exactly where it’s always been. Golf never asked you to become a pitcher. It asked you to throw a club at a ball two feet in front of you. And then a hundred years of instruction talked you, patiently and expensively, out of the one thing you already knew how to do.

Put the positions down.

Throw the club at the ball. Then do it again. That’s the golf swing right there.

The full argument - the science under it, and every objection your golfing brain is about to produce - is in The Golf Lie.