I was playing golf the other day with my father-in-law and his best friend.
I was helping both of them with their games and the friend started spouting cliches to me and I said to myself, “Oh no, my head is going to explode,” because I didn’t want to rant at this guy.
So I calmly explained about each of the cliches he mentioned and then talked overall feel to him and showed him how that results in the cliches happening automatically.
He got this quizzical look on his face and I thought I was in trouble and would end up offending the guy. To my surprise, he gave me a great diatribe on the golf instruction industry…and it came as a result of me explaining things to him.
He was a supervisor in the tech industry for 30 years. He said implementers had no right way of doing things, they just did it the way it worked. Then he went on to explain that philosophers always had grandiose ideas of perfect concepts and complicated models, but never got anything done.
“I always surrounded myself with as many implementers and as few philosophers as possible.”
His final point was that all of the famous gurus and all of the lessons he had ever taken were philosophers and that I was an implementer.
“Implementers know how to philosophize, but they only use it as a guide.”
I really liked that line of thinking and I feel it fits the situation perfectly.
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That is good! Thanks Monte!
As an implementer, Monte, you showed understanding! It is difficult to change years of habits, good and bad of everyone. I have found when the student golfer is ready, he will learn. I’m glad you didn’t go John Daly on him;)
This is really good, Monte. There are so many swing philosophies and each has very skillful practitioners, but they all look pretty much the same through the impact zone. It takes an implementer to figure out which ideas work the best for each individual. The reason golf handicaps have not improved in the last several decades is that there are too many philosophers and not enough implementers.
By necessity, I’m a philosopher…actually an anti-philosopher.
Nobody every taught me the theory of using an axe, but I can chop down trees and split firewood from sawed-up logs. Nobody ever taught me how to toss a baseball in the air and hit it with a bat.
But, when I set out to learn golf, I first bought some books. Hoo-boy, I’ve been recovering ever since. I had to get a philosophy to wipe out what I “learned.”
My philosophy: Golf is hitting a ball with a stick with predictability.
This is deep.