In Focus - Golf Magazines: Just as beauty mags make women feel ugly, golf mags have made me a bad golfer, writes Richard Gillis
A friend of mine is a professor of psychology at a university in Britain. He plays off 5. I find this irritating.
In the 20 or so years since we were hacking around the local municipal courses of west London, he has done several degrees, some of them with science in them, got married, had kids, appeared on television talking about the left side of the brain - and maintained a single figure handicap.
I, on the other hand, became a journalist, at a stroke releasing myself of any adult responsibility and leaving my days free to spend tinkering with my golf swing. I play off, on a good day, 15. On a bad day, dogs turn the other way.
How has this happened? Two children with roughly the same quota of natural ability, one turns out to be a happy, well adjusted professional who hits a high fade at will. The other, a tortured husk of a man, with a swing like Zorro on amphetamines.
"You think about it too much, always have done," said my friend recently. This from a psychologist. "And you read those magazines."
This last bit is true. I do read those magazines. And I'm convinced that what I see as my huge under-achievement as a player is down to them. Just as beauty magazines make women feel ugly, golf magazines have made me a bad golfer.
Golf World, Golf Monthly, Golf International, Today's Golfer, Golf Digest, Golf Punk, Bogey - I read them all. They lured me in as a child and I've never been able to kick the habit. They're the lowest of the low, like the no win no fee lawyers who advertise on cable, playing on my weaknesses and exploiting my insecurities.
Go in to Easons on any given day and you'll enter my world. There we stand: diffident, badly-dressed men searching for answers. Each of us desperate to find the one missing part in the 250-piece jigsaw that is our swing, with the ghost of Bobby Clampett hanging over us all.
Bobby Clampett is known for three things. First, he looks like Harpo Marx. Two, he led the 1982 British Open Championship by seven shots until halfway through the third round before blowing up, taking an eight and ultimately finishing 10th behind Tom Watson.
Thirdly, and linked to Two, is that he disappeared. From being the "next great golfer" of his generation, he slid into obscurity and was forced to wrestle with the heartbreak of unfulfilled promise. He would later re-emerge as an on-course analyst on American TV.
But this is not why I love Clampett, why the story of such a marginal figure still resonates 25 years later. I love Bobby Clampett because of an interview he gave shortly after his Open ordeal, where he admitted to having up to 24 separate swing thoughts while standing over the ball at address.
A well-meaning coach had given Clampett The Golfing Machine, by Homer Kelley, a then revolutionary book that explained the swing in terms of physics and geometry, breaking it down into its component parts. Clampett had taken his own, elegantly effective swing and ruined it by thinking too much. In short, if I was a professional golfer, I'd be Bobby Clampett.
Look at what I'm fighting against. This month's Golf Monthly contains 47 individual pieces of advice on the swing. This is 47 things to think about when attempting to hit the ball.
By conservative estimate, I read at least two magazines a month, that makes 1,128 bits of advice a year. I've been doing this since I was 15, and even allowing for the huge amount of duplication in magazine instruction over the years, that's over 20,000 swing thoughts buried in my subconscious, each capable of rising to the surface at any point during a round.
Keep your knee braced on the backswing. Keep your head still. But not too still, Jack used to turn his to the right at takeaway. Imagine the club face is the palm of your hand. To hit a draw think of a top spin forehand in tennis. Practice with your hands separated on the handle. Hit against a firm left side. Feel the ball, then the turf on impact. Follow through like your shaking hands with someone standing in front of you. Maintain your spine angle throughout the swing.
Tiring, isn't it.
And it's not that I don't practice. I practice all the time. Any reflective surface is an opportunity to check my "positions": the changing rooms in Gap; the taxi shelter at Dublin airport; the queue for lamb chops at the Farmers' market, I've used them all. A few years ago, the managing director of a publishing company in London stepped into the lift on the 16 floor to find me checking my weight transference.
As a result of this endless analysis, my swing has evolved into a series of static movements. Hitting the ball is just one of several things I need to accomplish between standing at address and my beautifully manicured finish. Like my friend says, I make Bobby Clampett look focused.
Magazine publishers are not, on the whole, stupid people. They know they are peddling empty promises. And they know the more confused we are the more we'll pay for a solution.
Every magazine follows the same formula. They are funded by subscription sales and advertising. After the retailers and distributors take their cut, the publisher keeps around 55 per cent of the price of each magazine.
The main advertisers are the equipment manufacturers. They represent between a half and two-thirds of ad revenue; the rest comes from golf travel companies and holiday destinations mixed in with some cars and beer companies.
These financial backers shape the format of the magazines, one that remains pretty much unchanged since I started reading them in the 1970s.
The equipment section, where new clubs are "tested", is a tricky area for publishers. It would be a brave/idiotic editor who slags off the new product launch of a major advertiser. The most powerful of these are TaylorMade, Callaway, Ping and Acushnet, the company which owns the Titleist, Cobra, Footjoy and TopFlite brands. As one magazine publisher told me, "Fall out with Mr Acushnet, and the future of your magazine is in serious jeopardy".
Likewise, the course review section of the magazine is hardly Woodward and Bernstein territory. It owes a debt to the freebie rounds enjoyed by the Features Editor at the expense of a particular tourist board or hotel group. This month's Golf World contains 10 pages of editorial on the Algarve in Portugal, detailing the best courses and the 10 best holes across the region. Sitting in the middle of this run of beautifully presented pages is an ad for Villamoura's five championship courses.
This is not a criticism. Publishing is a business and the knowledge of where the money comes from doesn't prevent me from reading the magazine. I don't care because I don't read them to exercise my mind, or to think. I read them to avoid thinking. I've been reading the same article for the whole of my adult life.
There is a cosiness within golf mags. The real world doesn't intrude, it's a place where my Olympian levels of self-absorption are pandered to, and I don't feel silly about my obsession. It reminds me I am not alone, and that there are so many of us that I'm part of a movement.
You see, for 20 or so years, the editors of Golfs World, Monthly and Digest have targeted me specifically as a fully paid up member of Generation X.
To qualify, you have to have been roughly 20 years of age in 1984. Your memory of the sport starts around the time of Seve Ballesteros' Open Championship win at St Andrews. And it begins to close with Nick Faldo's third Masters green jacket in 1996, when he shot 67 to Greg Norman's 76 in the final round. Every Major since '96 serves to remind you of how things have changed. You still love the Masters, and you stay up on Sunday night to see the finish every year, but it doesn't grip you like it did.
Now you're coming up 40 or looking at it in the rear view mirror. The magazines suddenly find you less interesting and they've gone off in pursuit of a younger model, The prize for today's publishers are the Tiger Boomers, with their snake-hipped flares, Tommy Hilfiger shades and child-less spending habits. They worship at the altar of Woods and take their style pointers from Poulter and Dougherty.
And among them there will doubtless be one or two anoraks looking for clues to the perfect swing.
C'Mon, Punk, make my play: Golf magazine with attitude takes off
Golf Punk is a bit different. It's a peculiar mix of Bunker Babes and PG Wodehouse references, a place where the famously tetchy Nick Faldo is happy to be interviewed sitting in a tree and readers' on and off course problems are dealt with firmly by the Golf Nurse.
It's the brainchild of former Loaded editor Tim Southwell, a man who knows a zeitgeist when he sees one. "We just have a more fun take on the game of golf than the other magazines," says Southwell, "and if we make golf into a sexier sport than it was before that has to be in everyone's interest".
Loaded was the first "lads' mag". And in its original incarnation, in the early 90s, it talked to a generation of 20-something men, bored rigid by the pomposity of the style press, with its pictorials of £1,000 Italian suits and endless ads for face cream.
The problem was it started a trend. It was copied and diluted to the extent that "lads' mag" is now a shorthand for witless, vapid dross fronted by D-list celebrities in their pants.
Golf Punk attempts to take the gonzo element of Loaded and apply it to a sport not known for its willingness to embrace youth culture. "The idea was to create a magazine based on instinct rather than science," says Southwell, who says the big publishing houses are over-reliant on focus groups, and lack the flair required to create something genuinely new.
"The guys running them would be quite happy working on any magazines in the company's stable, it's a career thing. As a result the magazines lack passion. They try to pickpocket a niche in the market, but the great magazines have always created their own market or galvanised an existing one in a way no one else has thought of before".
Southwell's first taste of the sport was at the age of 20, but was put off by the stuffiness he encountered. "I didn't play again for six years because I thought that golf was a boring, staid game played by boring, staid people obsessed by rules and regulations, particularly if you were a junior or, Heaven forbid, a woman. I found that whole side to golf abhorrent."
The magazines available, he says reflected this atmosphere. "They were safe reading for boring people".
Whilst working on Loaded Southwell went to interview Phil Babb and Jason McAteer, fresh from their adventures in the 1994 World Cup. They got on well, and Southwell kept in touch. So much so that when the time came to launch Golf Punk, Babb was his first port of call.
"Phil was at Sunderland at the time, so we did a presentation to him and several other players, including McAteer, Stephen Wright, Thomas Sorenson and Michael Gray, who each took an initial stake in the company," says Southwell. "Since then we have had to raise a significant amount of money from more orthodox channels. But last year Phil bought a bigger stake in the company, making him the largest single shareholder in the KYN Publishing, the company that makes Golf Punk."
The next step for Southwell is to sell the concept of Golf Punk abroad, a process that has begun by selling licences in countries including Italy, Germany and Indonesia. And although the magazine is available in Ireland, he is keen to increase the magazine's circulation here over the next year.
"We want to create magazines with global potential which become brands in their own right," he says. "Golf Punk is probably a more powerful brand than it is a magazine. We punch above our weight."
It is an approach that has captured the imagination of many of the top golfers, who have been happy to submit themselves to interviews and photo shoots that may be a bit left-field.
"We do things differently. When we do an interview the players think it is not more of the same. Let's face it, we are in awe of these people really. Our approach makes the situation a bit more democratic. Some of them can be defensive because it sounds aggressive or unconventional. But once they have got to know us they realise it is in our interests to make them look as good as possible. We are glamorising them and emphasising that they are more interesting people than they appear to be in the media. Who wouldn't like it?"
Many of these relationships have been forged in the Golf Punk Bar, when the magazine takes over a local bar close to the British Open venue each year. At St Andrews, Michael Campbell, Colin Montgomerie, Sam Torrance, Paul Casey and Ian Poulter among others all hung out and had a drink.
"What we really need is for Tiger to come in and have a pint of Boddingtons," says Southwell. Don't bet against it. ...
-Richard Gillis
