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How TV is Hurting Your Game
Butch Harmon

It's great there's so much tournament golf on television now, and that's not just because I have a part-time job as an analyst for the Sky golf team. The average person gets so much more exposure to golf at the highest level than ever before. You can see every shot - and slow-motion replays and analysis of those shots - right from your couch, almost every week. It's so much easier to be a golf fan now than it was ten years ago.

Even though average fans have seen a lot more of the different players than ever before, I don't think that's necessarily helped those fans as golfers. Many of the amateurs who come to see me think they are experts. They've listened to Johnny Miller or Peter Kostis talk about the swing on television, and they want to show me that they've been paying attention.

That's great, but what usually happens is that I'll videotape their swing, then we'll look at it after a few minutes. They can't believe what they see. "I don't do that, do I?" they always ask. What they've tried to copy from television hasn't turned out the way they expected.
Television tends to over-analyse the action, and terms like "getting wide", "getting good extension" or "staying down through the shot" get thrown around. Some analysts just can't resist showing off how much they know about the swing. It's not that the analysis is wrong. It's just dangerous in the hands of an average player who might not know how to apply it the right way. That advice grows into a 'swing myth'.

Here I'll dispel a few of those myths and show you how to do what the tour players really do -not what it seems like they do.