Careful With That Wood, Eugene

Filed in archive Golf Wanderings on February 21, 2007

Is the golf swing the most over-analyzed physical action in sports?

Are golfers closet lunatics?

I would say yes. Without a doubt. To both points.

In fact, an entire sub-industry in the game has been built around us: GOLF INSTRUCTION.

Can you name one seminal book on the slapshot or the 50 yard pass? But just about every golfer has heard of Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf by Ben Hogan.

That was just one of the books I devoured in the early years of playing and learning the game, back when I thought I could learn the golf swing from a book.

Hogan's book didn't do me any good. So I tried One Move to Better Golf by former pro turned instructor, Carl Lohren.
The book claimed one simple move to start the backswing would solve all my problems.

It didn't.

When instruction books gave way to video tapes, I got hold of as many as I could. Maybe watching the swing, instead of reading about it, would do the trick.

Nope. Not even the great Jack Nicklaus could help.

In between the books and the tapes, I delved into The Inner Game of Golf by Tim Gallwey. A great book that essentially said "let your inner golfer swing the club". But I didn't have the faith to let that happen.

I had a 7 year subscription to golf digest with new swing tips and advice arriving in my mail box every month. Entertaining. But, in the end, just very confusing and contradictory.

In the last few years, I've been making judicious purchases of select swing aids. Some of these have actually been helpful.

I'm no different from 90 percent of golfers who are looking for the Holy Grail of Swing Secrets. And that's the real reason that golf instruction is worth hundreds of millions of dollars every year and has turned a number of instructors into millionaires.

There's something about a golfer that defies reason. Recreational hockey players don't spend the kind of money on instruction books and videos that golfers do. Neither do pick-up basketball players. They all just get out and play the game they love.

But when golfers go out to play the game THEY love, they start to worry about dropped shots, 4-putts, not breaking 100, not breaking 90 - there's always some valid reason to fret and fail to enjoy the round.

And then, it's back to the drawing board, credit card ready to order the latest series of DVDs.

I read somewhere many years ago that the percentage of recreational golfers who break 100 on a regular basis is ridiculously tiny. Less than 10 percent, I think.

That should have been comforting to me but it just made me want to become a member of the "10 % Club".

There's no happy ending to this story, I'm afraid. The struggles and travails will continue. But I accept them with courage, I hope.

And let me state this for the record: once I master the full swing, there's always the short game to tackle.

The work never ends...