Welcome to October and fall golf is here. My game continues to improve with the Oct 1 revision down to 3.9. This is down 3 points from a high of 6.9 on May 15 and 6.1 on July 15. It’s dropped for many reasons, but putting is without a doubt responsible for about 75% of the improvement. Driving the ball longer has helped and the short game is still the big issue from keeping me getting even lower, but I am working on it. I will discuss my game and the improvements in future blogs, plus I still feel this is a work in progress, as the handicap season has another month to go, and the golf season has hopefully another good 2 months to go.
Today I want to discuss what must be a new philosophy in the national media golf instruction. For some reason over the last 6 months or so, I have been receiving both Golf Digest and Golf Magazine for free. I probably bought something that included some perk, that gave me this great honor of receiving these magazines every month at no charge, but I don’t remember it. Since I don’t really like either publication I just skimmed them every month, and every once in awhile I would find an article of interest, like Phil Mickelson’s inside trader story, and barely avoiding going to jail. About 2 months ago, I began to notice something that I did not pick up on when I first started getting these magazines. The high number of instructional articles in each magazine every month, especially Golf Magazine(G). So this past month I counted all the instructional articles in each magazine. G had 17 instructional articles and GD 12. Just to hit an even number of 30 that would be 360 instructional articles a year. Let that sink in for a moment. Granted some articles are only one page long but some are anywhere from 3 to 5 pages long. Your talking about a 400 page magazine year book. Every phase of the game is covered including the mental game and strategy. What’s the philosophy here? Quantity over Quality for sure. Some of the articles even contradict each other. Now granted, this is only one month that I really looked at these articles and critiqued them, and I will follow this a little more closely the next few months. Believe me I will only be able to do this for the next 3 or 4 months tops, because of shear disbelief but I will do my best. I know it is difficult to write for a general populous on trying to give instruction that will be helpful. G does try to become more specific for specific classe of player but they fail miserably at providing any worthwhile content. There were 29 articles in these magazines that covered driving the golf ball, working the golf ball, wedge play, iron play, chipping, putting, bunker play , trouble shots, how to play certain holes and talking to horses to improve ones play. Were all the articles bad? No. But there was a lot of information and showed different ways of going about a certain aspect of golf, and not addressing the fact that there are some other effective ways to deal with the same thing. The one page articles are the worse because they make the reader feel that this method is the gold standard for resolving an issue with your golf swing, when in reality it is not. Three months of reading these articles and I would be running for the tennis courts or the bowling alley and thinking you can never be any good at this game. I will be following this more closely in the future and giving some prime examples of the confusing that these magazines are creating .
Hopefully my game will continue to move forward, as I become a little less confused about this game. Short game look out, here I come.
The Goofy Game of Golf/Life Searching for the Answer 