“Golf is a game of inches. The most important are the six inches between your ears,” is the quip attributed to legendary golfer, Arnold Palmer.
But for Galway city optician, and determined golfer Richard Hughes, it is how one sizes up the inches that is perhaps the most important trait for golf, and integral to this is which eye is dominant in relation to a player’s dominant hand.
“Vision is not performance defining, but what may be, is how our two eyes work together,” he says.
In his new book Visual Edge: How to See a Better Game, co-written with sports journalist Mathew Rudy, Hughes points out that around 70 per cent of the population is optically same-side dominant. This means that if you are right-handed, for example, your right eye is likely to be your most dominant.
Hughes’ research at the 2023 Irish Open, where he cunningly convinced golf pros to take a quick eye test during their practice rounds, revealed that 50 per cent of elite tour professionals were cross-dominant – wildly divergent from what general population optometry data would predict.
So does this mean you must be, for example, left-handed and right-eyed to improve beyond a certain ability ceiling in golf?
No, says Richard, who operates an opticians in Knocknacarra, but it may mean that half the golf professionals who dominate the sport’s tuition have a completely different method of interpreting visual space within Arnold Palmer’s six inches of grey matter compared to their students.
“Eye dominance determines how your visual system organises space. The game has been teaching the wrong model to most of its players, because its most influential teachers were the minority type,” explains Hughes.
Same-side dominance is the most common visual configuration in the general population. These ‘Type I golfers’ have a clean, direct visual line to their target - but they are also the most vulnerable to disruption from excess shoulder rotation, which moves the dominant eye out of position at the critical moment of the swing.
The coaching methods that defined modern golf were built largely by observing cross-dominant players, so Type I golfers have been working against the grain of almost everything the game has taught them.
“Practice does not fix a visual problem. It encodes it,” says Hughes.
Hughes points out that major golf champions, from Jack Nicklaus to Padraig Harrington, belong to the cross-dominant – for example right-handed, left-eyed – cohort of the population.
“Cross-dominant players enjoy the accidental advantage of a teaching tradition built in their image, but are not exempt from the visual instability, binocular imbalance, and dominance shifts that affect performance under pressure.”
And it is emotional pressure, and it’s physiological effect on vision, that may explain why some top golfers’ performances seems to fall apart at the stressful, business end of golf tournaments, suggests Hughes. If fatigued muscles around a dominant eye become twitchy, for example, the brain directs the other eye to compensate.
“And this can be why a top professional misses a simple, two-foot putt on a flat green in the final round,” says Hughes, himself a keen, amateur golfer. “It’s happened to me!” he jokes.
This is known in golf circles as “a case of the yips” an under-studied ‘condition’ where performance anxiety may lead to optical issues, such as focal dystonia, where the overuse of orbital muscles has neourological impact. Kind of like writer’s cramp for overworked typists.
Golfer Bernard Langer - “a great man” according to Hughes - managed to cure himself of the yips through will power. And it is studying golf that may hold the secret to breakthroughs in a number of ophthalmological mysteries.
“The smaller the ball, and the smaller the hole you have to get it into, the more vision plays a role,” says Hughes.
Visual Edge: How to See a Better Game is available on now Amazon.ie for €22, and from Richard Hughes Opticians in Seacrest Shopping Centre, Knocknacarra.
