You’ve come home from work dead tired. You grab
mail on your way in and notice your new copy of your favorite golfing magazine is in pile. It puts a slight smile on your face as a picture of you on a couch with an adult beverage suddenly pops into your mind. After getting into your evening uniform (sweats and slippers) you make your way to your favorite reclining device with that drink and a snack in hand to make that vision on couch a reality. You get all settled with TV on for background and you finally enter “Jell Zone” to enjoy that golf magazine and your well-deserved relaxation period. You go straight to table of contents to see what is most interesting article and there it is, swing advice from winner of last major tournament. “This is just what I need,” you say to yourself as you flip to correct page knowing that your club tournament is 2 months away.
The article has one of those swing-sequence photo frames. It has some quotes from other pros. It has a sidebar from “Top instructor of all time” with his ideas of perfect swing. The second page of article is dwarfed by an advertisement for greatest swing gadget ever created by a human and endorsed by sixteen instruction schools in five countries. The author talks about how he “remade” his swing prior to winning that major but that his best buddy on tour is struggling using same method and swing guru. The captions on each of swing-sequence photos point out minute details of where parts of body of pro are at 10 different positions during swing and which of those are “technically not correct”.
You don’t want to give up on article, since you really do need swing advice, so you go to your dressing room mirror and check a couple of your body parts with some of pictures in article while attempting to freeze your swing at same points as stop-action photos. “I got it!” you tell yourself when you match a couple of these positions and then practice them outside with your real club. You congratulate yourself and then sit back down in your easy chair to get back to business of relaxing.
A little later in evening, you flip to Golf Channel and instead of usual tournament from 1994 there is a lesson program from a pro instructor. Lo and behold, he teaches that move you worked so hard on an hour ago was prevailing instruction of 1980’s and has since been proven to be “unreliable in competition”.
You jump out of your chair to go check your favorite golf sites about this guy on show and it seems that he is everywhere when you do a search for him. A couple of articles you land on say he has best golf instruction this side of border and a couple more take pride in picking him apart. The instructor’s own website is loaded with testimonials from his students on how well his program worked for them so you keep surfing for further info.
This leads you to golf discussion boards, blogs, ezines, and untold numbers of websites that say that they have secret to how to swing correctly. 3 hours later, you wake up from your golf web-surfing trance, realize you missed your bedtime an hour ago, and are now more confused than you were when before you opened that magazine in mail. You found more advice than your mind can process on a weekend day let alone a day that you had 3 meetings, your best employee quit, and your boss said something like: “…if you can’t (blah blah blah)…. we’ll find someone who will”.
