Question:

I thinks some of the confusion that I had and that seems to be present in this thread is that cocking one’s wrist at 45 degrees is damn near impossible.  But the illustration #6-7 on page 155 shows why this angle is attainable – it’s because the left elbow is slightly bent.  If the left arm were perfectly straight, an angle of 45 degrees would be unobtainable by just about everyone.

And the club is not vertical — the grip is closer to the observer than the clubhead (in picture 6-7) . So, with the club angling back further, the angle *appears* smaller (more acute) as seen from the front. What threw me off is the words "clubshaft and forearm must form at least a 45-degree angle", which I took to mean "45 deg. between shaft and foream, in the plane of clubshaft and forearm", with the picture showing something different. A minor glitch, but someone else had brought it up and didn’t come up with the page number, and I’d remembered that I’d had some difficulty with the description, so I weighed in. I think they do mean "that the angle is *smallest* at this point in the swing" further on in the text, not greatest. Do they? And I’ve checked myself, and I do get well past horizontal on the backswing — it just doesn’t feel that way. Had me worried for a moment. Worth another ding in the ceiling. Thomas Prufer

Response:

DOH! Now I see it! Sorry for the misunderstanding. In the downswing 45 degrees is an optical illusion, caused by projecting a 3D reality onto a 2D picture. The angle in 3D space is about 90 degrees but the club goes up and back so that from the front it looks like about a 45 degree angle.

Right! And I’ve seen that the can be parsed sentence to mean: "you should *see* an angle at least as acute as 45 degrees between forearm and clubshaft on the downswing, when the arm is about parallel to the ground."  A little different from "the wristcock is 45