Tip
Everyone welcomes a good tip, solicited or not. It is the hope of better things to come. How to lose weight, how to increase your income, how to bake better cakes - the list goes on and on. In fact, any advice that is prefaced with 'How To' is sure to gain an attentive ear. Weekend hackers are the prime candidates for the quick fix. They hunger for anything that can remedy a serious lack of talent, especially if it comes with the guarantee of success and an offer of no work on their part. The more beneficial recommendation of lessons combined with purposeful practice seems a poor second to the promise of instant gratification.  Like drowning swimmers they clutch eagerly at any advice that frequents the airwaves. Behold the miracle of 'Never three-putt again' and believe, for you have come to the right place. Professional golfers are more circumspect, and are less likely to accept the dubious wisdom of others without routing the information through their coach. However, golf is not an amateur's job and a trip to the local professional seems like an unnecessary expense. Golf magazines stay in business because they sell hope to a large accepting audience. Every month there is a steady stream of tips from leading professionals and experts extolling the virtues of some magic move or other. Observant readers may detect a hint of cynicism from the author. Besides the 'Better by Saturday' words of promise, there is also the marketing hype to entice you to buy the best and latest golf equipment that is guaranteed to add yards to your drives, keep your ball from finding the rough, and make putting child’s play.
The real problem with all neatly packaged instruction is that it is in the 'one size fits all' category. There is only a modest attempt by magazine editors to separate golfers by handicap groups, but that is where it pretty much ends. There is an underlying assumption that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. You are just another sucker on the assembly line of golfers in despair. The magazine is your here-and-now cure - your game-improving path to redemption on the fairways and greens. When someone like Tiger Woods explains how to swing the club, readers enter a make-belief world - a golfer's fantasy land, the equal of Disney Studios. Probably less than two percent of amateurs have any hope of successfully modelling their swing on Tiger’s. Golfers who try will soon be seeking their next tip on how to fix a bad back.
Tips are like aspirins. They may lessen the pain for a while, but they seldom address the root cause of the problem. Their solution is to fix one error by adding another so that the two errors balance each other out. Slicing? Strengthen your grip, close your stance, hood your club and so on. The worst golden nugget of advice you can offer a struggling golfer is to suggest that he or she work on learning good fundamentals - fundamentals such as how to swing on plane and how to set up to the ball. Of course, this all sounds like too much hard work and is likely to be rejected politely out-of-hand. So maybe the best tip of all when your golf partner's or friend's golf goes pear-shaped is the one that Sam Snead offered to a hapless student – "Lay off for three weeks … and then quit for good".
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