This sleight-of-hand is related to the other impact illusions.  To see if you are being fooled by this one, place a golf ball on the ground in front of you, and then with a pointer or pencil, point to the place in relation to the ball, where you feel the bottom of the arc would be, with a 7 iron shot.

If you pointed directly under the ball, you are slightly missing the point, but if you pointed to the right of the ball (assume right hand golfer), you are really being duped; get ready to expose an illusion 8D1 that is causing you a world of problems.

What we are dealing with here is the bottom of the arc.  Think of a hula hoop tilted on its side.  That hoop has a low point, after which it starts going upward. Contacting the ball on the upswing with any club other than a driver will cause less than good shots.

Now, back to the divot.  If you were one of the multitude of golfers who thought the club should bottom out before getting to the ball, yet you have seen good golfers take a hunk of ground with iron shots, then you must have believed that the divot should be under the ball.  Which implies that your club enters the ground slightly before it hits the ball.  Think about it! Do you want this huge ball called mother earth getting in between your club and the golf ball?  Of course not.  Air has much less resistance than earth.  The divot, dear reader, is taken after the golf ball has been cleanly struck on the sweet spot.  The bottom of the arc is fractionally after the bottom of the ball.

As the clubs get longer and less lofted, the bottom of the arc will come closer to the bottom of the ball, resulting in less divot.  With a driver on a tee, the club might even be going slightly upwards at contact.  But that’s only because there’s no earth to get in the way.

Here’s another way to look at it.  Take a 7 iron, a bottle of white-out or some other sort of marker, and make a dot on the sweet spot.  It should be 3 or 4 grooves up, right in the middle of the face.  (Did you think it should be higher? Fooled again!).  Next, address a golf ball with that 7 iron, on a flat surface (wood floor or low rug).  Now, put the sweet spot of the club on the ball. You will find that you surely cannot do it if the handle of the club leans away from the target, you can’t even do it with the club straight up and down, as in address position.  You can only place the sweet spot of the club onto the ball when the club is leaning forward!  Back to the illusion of impact = address.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  You now know; which is the first step to being freed!