IT doesn’t matter if you are five or 85, if there is one game where the eternal quest for improvement always lingers in the mind of the player, then it is golf. Just last week, I met an old acquaintance at the club. Here is a man who has played golf for over five decades and the first thing he did when he saw me was contort his body in an ungainly manner and ask me whether his hip was moving too far out to be called a copybook swing. I didn’t quite know what to make of his predicament but it sure wasn’t something that was going to get his social stocks soaring high.

The best part about golf is that there is nothing like a golfer’s imagination. Right from the moment the golfer sends his first ball soaring into the distance, seeds of brilliance get planted in the head. Pretty much everyone thinks that a little more effort and they would be the next Tiger Woods. And mind you, once the bug catches on, they’d be willing to go any distance to make the changes in their game to become invincible. Unfortunately, that is one thing most players fail to achieve but what it does is ensure a thriving teaching business.

This is, perhaps, a phenomenon that can be easily noticed in some of the major sporting centres out here in India. Not many years back, young kids used to make a beeline to coaching classes for cricket or tennis or maybe even the after-school basketball classes. But all that seems to be on the wane and golf coaching is suddenly the in-thing. Why else would parents be shuttling kids right from school to coaching centres.

I think it would be fair to say that the indications were visible even a couple of years back but now there is no scope for doubt. My experience with the Srixon Golf Academy at the Oxford Golf Club in Pune has been quite a significant learning experience. With TaylorMade opening a golf academy out here under the tutelage of Romit Bose, the queries that are already coming our way for a relatively new course in the form of Karma Lakelands clearly shows that golf coaching is definitely on a high.

But the surge in interest also brings with it new complications. There used to be only a handful of internationally-renowned coaches in the country and that is probably still true. However, the number of people who have sprung up as “ranked coaches” and “rated coaches” beats the mind and quite a few are falling into that trap.

The Indian Golf union must come out with guidelines to regulate the coaches and although there are various programmes to bracket the coaches into different categories, the implementation and the message sent out to the various clubs must definitely be understood in no unclear terms.

The more the merrier is certainly not something that would be apt in this scenario. So, if you want to go out there and get yourself a coach, be careful and if you are a little wary, there is absolutely no harm. Just go out there and enjoy your game and the results will be visible. The trick, after all, lies in the mind and not the inter-galactic movements made by the hip!

Brandon de Souza is MD and CEO, Tiger Sports Marketing