Not so long ago, one quiet winter evening I was sitting watching pro golf from some far-flung exotic place.
A place that was a darn sight dryer and warmer than where I was watching from, but that’s beside the point.
Midway through the telecast, one of the networks hired in pundits starts a little session where he was breaking down the hot little starling of the moments golf swing, laying it out for all and sundry to feast over.
He would draw lines on the screen, little wiggly bits here and there, the odd circle and run the thing at God knows how many micro frames per second, all whilst waxing lyrical about how good this particular swing was.
And it was a good swing.
But it got me thinking. Not about the swing, but why so many people struggle to improve.
Analysis such as what flew across my TV screen that night is exactly the reason why so many people struggle with this game and modern, mass coaching methods are partly to blame.
I’ve said it many times before, tour players are the worst people in the world to try and learn from.
It’s like trying to take a painting lesson from Michael Angelo or a music lesson from Mozart.
When it comes to the golf swing, what a tour players feel when swinging a club, what they say they feel, and what they actual do when swinging a club are all completely different things.
But tour players aren’t really to blame, they’re just get used as “poster boys” or girls as it were. The real issue is with the instruction and instructors themselves.
Most modern instructors will coach a person to do this or that with their golf swing, purely because they see what tour players do, they see the action and thing this is what needs to be done, because this is the excepted norm.
They look at pictures; they look at footage of tour players swinging a club and think this is what people need to do in order to play better.
And it leads to frustration and disaster for most people.
You see, when you look at a picture of a good player swinging, it’s a frozen image, a still moment in time. It’s not much better looking at a swing on video either.
Reason being, all you are seeing is effects, the resulting images of an athlete performing a certain motion. What that person is actually doing in the golf swing to make the club or their body look like what it is doing in the pictures and the video are two completely different things.
And this is why so many people get led down the garden path to a lifetime of frustration and misery when it comes to their golf, never really improving.
Very hard to get somewhere when you’ve been given completely the wrong directions.
Something to ponder as you go about your dealings this merry day.
Bob James PGA
www.theeasypar.com