27 Apr Best teachers have a way with words

It’s been interesting for me to analyze how golf teaching has developed over the years. It was a small group of Scottish professional caddies that organized themselves, around 113 years ago, into the British Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) and therefore were able to put together ‘slowly but surely’ a schedule of tournaments they could play in.

Teaching boiled down in those early days to typical ‘Scottish’ brashness of just ‘hit the bloody thing’!—then came the likes in the UK of those who saw golf teaching as a business. John Jacobs was perhaps the first followed by Patrick ‘Teach’ Tallack, who surrounded himself with beautiful shapely female assistants, which was to become the benchmark of ‘effective marketing’. In America teachers such as Harvey Penick, Jim Fleck & Bob Toski sprung up with Hank Haney, Butch Harmon and David Leadbetter taking over with new ideas and practice methods.

I’ve personally found that there’s one common ingredient with all good teachers; and that’s that their all really good communicators. They make their students feel immediately at ease with a few simple, well chosen, words—vice versa—whether their teaching a certain president, member of Royalty or superstar celebrity,  their extremely confident & comfortable in their own skin & ability to conduct a great lesson. This extreme confidence has been slowly developed over the many years of experience gained and the thousands of lessons given.

Out of Bounds: Many readers have sent in some lovely sayings written on gravestones by golfers who obviously had a sense of humour—here’s another one—‘Joke’s over, let me out now or I’ll be late for my tee time’…