The Golf Cynic

Part one · In public The Golfer Who Couldn’t Get Out of His Own Way

A while back a fellow turned up under one of my posts to set me straight. Knowledgeable bloke. Civil. Deep into the biomechanics - the kind who can tell you what the butt end of the club is doing at the top of the backswing and name three tour players who do it differently. He wanted to argue that the throw is just one option among many. That golf is far more complicated than a bloke telling you to throw the clubhead at the ball.

I didn’t argue back. I asked him one question.

How else can a human move the club?

That’s all. Not a trap, a real question. If there’s another way, I genuinely want to hear it.

What came back was remarkable, and I want you to see it, because it’s the whole lesson. He gave me a catalogue. The club is a flail. There are loading patterns - you can sling it, you can spring it, you can rotate it with no flail at all for the wedges. Eighty-five percent of tour players load it this way, very obvious at this position, this player throws it and that one doesn’t, and he could prove all of it with pictures and video. Screen after screen of it.

And in the middle of all that, without noticing, he agreed with me. “What you’re describing is more of a throwing motion - yes, that’s real.” Then straight back to the catalogue.

Here’s the thing he never saw. He never answered the question. Across thousands of words he never named a second way to move the club. He named players who look different and positions that look different - but looking different isn’t a different method. And his three patterns are all one motion anyway. The throw is a throw. The lag he’s so proud of is just what a throw produces - a footprint, not a thing you do. And the wedge “controlling motion” is a throw turned down. One motion, dialed up or down. One way wearing three outfits.

He had the whole swing broken into a hundred thousand parts and couldn’t tell me the one thing underneath them.

Now - why am I telling you this. I’m telling you because he’s a type, and the type matters, because you might be carrying a bit of him around in your own bag.

He’s the golfer who cannot leave the swing alone. Every answer spawns three new questions. Simple sounds like a trick to him - if it were really that easy, where’s all the technical bit, where are the parts to work on? He trusts complication because complication feels like seriousness, and seriousness feels like it must be working. So he keeps pulling the thing apart on the range, checking the butt of the club, filming himself, hunting the next position - and he wonders why it never quite comes together out on the course.

It never comes together because there’s nothing to come together. He’s assembling a swing out of a hundred thousand loose parts, and a swing was never a hundred thousand parts. It was always one motion. He’s so busy in his own head he can’t get out of his own way long enough to make it.

I meet this golfer constantly. He’s often the smartest bloke at the range. He’s read everything. He can out-talk any teacher on positions and angles. And he plays worse than the fifteen-year-old next to him who has read nothing and just throws the clubhead at the ball, because the kid is doing the one thing while the smart bloke is still deciding which of the hundred thousand things to do first.

If any of that stings a little, good. That’s the useful part. The question isn’t whether you know a lot about the golf swing - plenty of people who know a lot play terrible golf, and that fact alone should tell you knowing and doing are not the same sport. The question is whether all that knowing has ever once helped you hit a better shot. Be honest. For most of the technical crowd the answer is no, and the reason is simple: you cannot assemble a natural movement out of parts. You can only do it, or get in the way of it.

So here’s the test, and it cuts straight through the lot. Every complication you’ve ever been handed - the lag, the plane, the loading, the positions - chase it down to the bottom and it’s a footprint of the one simple thing. The throw makes all of it. None of it makes the throw. A principle builds a catalogue; a catalogue can never build a principle. That one-way street is how you know which one is actually true.

The man with the hundred thousand parts was standing on top of the answer the whole time. He just couldn’t bring himself to believe it could be that small.

Don’t be him. Put the parts down. Throw the clubhead at the ball and let the footprints take care of themselves.

Part two · In private 450 Books Later

When I wouldn’t argue, he deleted his comments and moved to my inbox. That’s where I met the Golf Cynic.

He asked “What is your swing speed and handicap?”

It’s always the first question. Golf’s version of “do you even lift?”

I told him. Plus one or plus two. About 119 miles an hour with the driver. And none of it matters. He said it definitely matters, because you wouldn’t learn to dance from someone who can’t dance.

Fair. So I asked for his.

Plus two, he said. About fifteen miles an hour slower than me.

Same handicap, slower swing. If you ever wanted proof that the numbers don’t settle anything, there it is.

Two good golfers. One of them is having fun.

He’s read 450 books.

One minute he’s the golf police. The next, he’s over the lot of it.

The Golf Cynic vs the Golf Cynic

He doesn’t just argue with me. He argues with himself. Here’s what he said, and what he said next, never more than a day or two apart.

So which is it?

I don’t think he’s a technical golfer at all. I think he’s a cynic.

Which leaves the only question I really wanted to ask him. Why are you so unhappy? If what you’re doing is so good, why are you still searching the internet for more?

That’s not a man who’s found the answer. That’s a man who’s been sold the same answer 450 times.

Most golfers think they’ve tried everything. They haven’t. They’ve tried one thing, 450 times, with different covers. Positions, checkpoints, sequences, a new word for turning every couple of years. More of the same isn’t different. It’s just more.

I asked “Have you read my book?”

He hadn’t. 450 books on the golf swing, and the one he was busy arguing with wasn’t one of them.

“Let me guess you have some sort of paywall?” was the closest he got to an answer.

So he’s telling me I’m wrong about a book he hasn’t read. He saw a post or an ad, decided he knew what was in it, and came to set me straight. That’s commenting from a position of weakness. He actually doesn’t know.

He hasn’t read my f*cking book.

Funny, that.

His big revelation “You don’t get good at basketball with no technical skills.”

Stop the presses. You need skills to play basketball.

Nobody said you don’t. But chances are you didn’t learn basketball with a care factor about your wrist angle or your ground reaction forces. You got good at basketball by playing basketball. Badly, then less badly, for years, until the ball started going in.

Skill is the whole point. The question is where it comes from.

If you see golf as a technical problem, you can never solve it.

A learning problem becomes a totally different game. There’s actually an endgame, which means you get to play golf. Enjoyment. Satisfaction. The things you took it up for.

His verdict on me “You are part of that garbage.”

He’s tired of buying the dream, and from where he’s sitting, my book is just number 451. He’d know better if he’d read it. It’s probably the only one that tells you to put the other 450 down.

I don’t care if he buys it. I gave up on selling to every golfer a long time ago.

But the fact he was arguing with me at all tells me everything. Nobody argues this hard with the 451st copy of the same book.

He wanted to have it out on his ground: swing theory and mechanics. That’s the one argument I won’t have. Arguing about the swing is how you end up with 450 books.

I don’t teach. I coach.

People think that’s a word game. It isn’t.

Teaching is why most of us didn’t like school. Conformity. Sit still, do what you’re told, turn to page 47. Most golf instruction is exactly that, with a launch monitor.

Coaching is deeper and more advanced. A teacher hands you the 451st book. A coach asks why you needed the first 450.