by John Furgurson
A couple summers ago I was assigned a job that I really wasn’t thrilled about: Promoting the services of a visiting Golf Digest Top 50 Instructor.
I was perfectly happy with Andy Heinly’s coaching, and I was skeptical about taking a lesson from anyone else. But if I’m going help promote someone, I need to know what he’s all about.
So I scheduled a lesson and chalked it up to market research. Here’s how it went:
I hit thee balls — count ‘em three — and he went immediately to the video monitor for a side-by-side comparison with Adam Scott.
How do you look compared to this guy?
The instructor did an admirable job of dissecting the footage, piece by piece, and pointing out all the positions in my swing that didn’t match precisely with Adam Scott’s.
I listened patiently, because I was getting paid to. But the whole time I kept thinking, “Yeah, but where’s the ball going?” ”Yeah, but what’s that mean to me?” ”Yeah, but that one went really straight.” ”Yeah but Adam Scott works with Butch Harmon every day.”
The guy was so busy analyzing swing positions and diagramming the angles he didn’t even bother to watch the flight of the ball.
I came away from the experience thinking, “Wow, my swing looks a lot better than I thought it did.” “Oh Yeah!”
A friend of mine had a similar, but opposite, experience: When his instructor was done analyzing the side-by-side footage, he said, “geeze, how’d you ever get to be a 5? You must be a really good putter.”
Nice.
Unfortunately, this seems to be a trend among teaching pros… The “show him how many ways he sucks” school of golf instruction. You can even do it online these days. Just send in a video of your swing and any number of teaching pros will be happy to tear it apart for you and send the pieces back in a Tweet.
Forget-About-It!
This fault and fix mentality sells a lot of magazines, and it might make your swing look prettier, but it does nothing for your scores. You could spend years trying to fix all those positions and never improve one bit. Or worse yet, you get so wrapped up in driving range mechanics your handicap actually goes up.
We have a better approach: Find an instructor who has real coaching experience, then forget about everything else.
A good coach will begin by assessing your overall ability, watching ball flight and listening. Then he’ll say “first things first.” Coaches always start with the fundamentals.
Every year in spring training, major league baseball stars go through the same routine. In football it’s basic blocking and tackling. In golf, it’s grip, aim and stance. Always has been, always will be. Because as Jim Flick once said, ” preparation for the shot — what you do before you ever swing the club — accounts for 80% of the shots effectiveness.”
My friend Andy also coaches girls basketball. He doesn’t start them out shooting three pointers, he starts with layups and free throws. He helps the girls with the fundamentals of shooting, dribbling, passing and defense that helps them win games.And he certainly doesn’t use video to compare his girls side-by-side with Lebron James.
In the “Yeah but” school of basketball instruction, everyone skips right to the three pointer.
I guarantee you, those professional baseball players aren’t saying “yeah but we already did this stuff last spring.” And the golf pros on tour don’t say, “yeah but I already know how to aim, I don’t need to practice that.” They practice those fundamentals all the time. They check and re-check their alignment. They make sure their grip hasn’t changed. They practice chipping! And they hit thousands of three-foot putts.
In the meantime, we’re out there pounding balls at the driving range trying really hard to look a little more like Adam Scott.
