The Golden Bear and yours truly at the grand opening of Nicklaus' Moon Palace Signature course several years ago.

I’ve written a lot over the past two years about why I think Mexico’s Mayan Riviera is such a great golf and tourism destination (click here, here, here, or here), and one of the top resorts there is the upscale all-inclusive Moon Palace (read more here), compete with a 27-hole Nicklaus Signature design that is one of the region’s best.

Ever since I first visited the Moon Palace for the course opening, they have unveiled one improvement after another, adding a third nine, deluxe golf course villas, and now, a Jack Nicklaus Academy of Golf, the first in the entire Caribbean basin. This is especially notable because while Mexico has lots of great golf resorts, it has very few destination academies for instruction, and what could be a better setting for mastering this crazy and infuriating game than in a place that dispenses free margaritas from sunrise until well after sunset?

The academy opens in two weeks, on August 15, 2011 and will be joined by a sibling academy at Palace Resort’s Playacar golf property, down the road in Playa del Carmen, the biggest city and beating heart of the Riviera Maya, in September. Both locations will offer state of the art facilities with Nicklaus Academies Analysis Software and high-speed video for capturing the swing, ball flight monitors, simulated indoor driving ranges, computerized putting lab, custom club and golf ball fitting protocols, plus of course, actual instruction.

There will be 13 different teaching programs tailored to single digit players and, hackers and newbies alike, including Welcome to Golf, Equipment Fitting Sessions, Couples Only Schools and Corporate Programs.

It gets better: until Christmas, all Palace Resorts properties are running a very aggressive special that adds a $1500 resort credit to vacation packages, and this credit can be applied towards the golf academy programs, lessons, and greens fees, and since all the food and booze is already included, there is not much else to spend it on besides the spa. Optionally, guests can forego the credit and instead choose to add unlimited golf to their stays. The travel business is hurting and this is a great incentive to head South of the border before December 23.

To book lessons or get more info, email the Golf Academy directly (golfacademy@palaceresorts.com). Otherwise visit the Moon Palace site or for general reservations or info on other Palace Resorts, visit the main website.

The world's most acclaimed golf instructor is finally taking his act to the New York metro area.

He’s the most famous golf instructor in the history of the game, a one man teaching franchise who now employs over one hundred instructor disciples in his name at a whopping 28 full time academies in 13 different countries. Yet he has never had a presence in the nation’s population and wealth center, the New York tri-state area, home to some 30 million people, lots of Wall Street cash, and scores of the world’s top private clubs.

That is all changing, as David Leadbetter sets up shop at Crystal Springs, the under the radar New Jersey golf resort an hour from the city – a resort that just happens to be the biggest in the Northeast, the second biggest in the nation and one of the largest golf resorts in the world, with seven courses, including Ballyowen, consistently rated the Number One Public in the Garden State.

Pros under his tutelage have won a combined 20 Majors and more than 100 tournaments worldwide in the 30 years since Leadbetter came on the scene, and chances are good that he can help you too. I took a lesson from him once, and he has that great eye the best instructors have where he can not only instantly diagnose your flaws, but also look you over and find a fix within your body’s means, not some textbook generic fix that many instructors still try to superimpose on all types. Anyway, that really doesn’t matter because your chances of actually getting a lesson from Leadbetter at Crystal Springs are about the same as you going on to win his 21st student Major, but he does a good job of promoting consistency in his organization, and there is a reason why golf students worldwide eagerly flock to his 28 academies.

So New Yorkers take note: seven public golf courses, resort accommodations and now David Leadbetter (coming by summer) are all in your backyard!

Crystal Springs is one of the nicest gofl resorts you may not have heard of.

As much as I like Tiger Woods and as much as I am glad to see him back near the top of the pack and in red numbers, even I admit it’s unlikely he will break out and make up the 8 stroke difference between him and the leader to win another Major in the final round of today’s PGA Championship at Whistling Straits. If he did it would be truly incredible, but not the most amazing statistical feat in golf.

Until a few days ago I wood have said the most amazing statistical feat in golf was to shoot 59, something that only five men and one woman have ever done on the PGA and LPGA Tours, and something about which I have rambled about extensively given that after a decade-plus hiatus, it happened twice already this year.

But even after the duo of 59s I was not prepared for what was about to happen at a Pennsylvania golf resort called Skytop Lodge.

Skytop is an old school grand hotel, the Poconos mountains version of the Greenbrier or Homestead, with a big old fancy hotel, golf, plus assorted outdoor activities like rock climbing, kayaking, mountain biking, canoeing, tennis, fly fishing, shooting, skiing, skating, and the like. It also has a big spa and several restaurants. But the main attraction is the golf course, rated a very impressive 4 ½ stars by Golf Digest’s Places to Play, and the resort is also home to the Brian Boyle School of Golf.

Which brings us back to the incredible incident that just took place – and why you might just want to start taking lessons form one Brian Boyle.

A week ago Thursday, August 5th Boyle was paired with amateur Ed Streisel in the Poconos  Pro-Am Golf Tournament at nearby Whitetail Golf Club when the team came to the ninth hole, a mid-length par-3. Streisel hit 7-iron, bang, bang, slam dunk into the hole for ace. Not to be outdone, Boyle pulled a 6-iron and landed in the cup as well.

That’s right: both playing partners aced the hole for a total team score of 2 –and if they were playing against me, I guarantee you Streisel would be getting a stroke for net one.

The math wizards at Golf Digest, who may or may now t actually know anything about math, have estimated the odds of the feat at 17 million to one.

Arnold Palmer once aced the same hole twice in a four day tournament, and the late Slammer himself, Sam Snead, told me that he had aced the same par-3 at one of his home resort courses half dozen times, but I have ever, ever heard of two guys in the same group, nonetheless the same team, making aces. And I am guessing I never will again.

Kudos on your fine aim gentlemen!

The Ocean Course at Kiawah Island is awesome, a Ryder Cup and soon to be PGA Championship venue. It is also really hard, so why would you want to play tees that are too long for your game?

Picking up where I left off yesterday, I am going to shave strokes off your score this summer by showing you two of  the biggest mistakes in golf.

All you have to do is stop making them.

Playing the Wrong Tees

This is such an endemic problem in golf it almost sounds trite to say. But there are still plenty of amateurs out there who are under the delusion that they are “not getting their money’s worth” if they don’t play “the whole course.” Far more people play form tees that are too long for them than tees that are too short.

In the old days when you had red, white and blue, and they were spaced 15 yards apart, this was not such a big deal. But today on modern courses it is not uncommon for the gap between one set of tees and the next to be 600 yards, or more than 30 per hole, which is a difference of 2-3 clubs on every approach, longer forced carries etc. Since I travel the world playing lots of different courses and am faced with this decision every time, the first thing I do is look is at the total distance of the tees and choose the one best for myself and my partners. If there is doubt, I then check the slope and rating which can clear up the confusion caused by the fact hat it is not distance alone that matters. For example, at Pinehurst Number Two I can get away with playing more course, because it is wide open off the tee. Try the same thing at Kiawah’s hazard flanked Ocean Course, and you can’t bring enough balls.

It is also suppose dot be a fun game, and it’s no fun when you struggle to reach the fairway or have little chance of hitting a par-3. This is perhaps the most extreme example: few amateurs are hitting the green on a 200-yard one shotter, but the same hole is a lot more inviting from 165 out.

When in doubt, start close to the green. It is that simple, You’ll thank me.

When in doubt, follow the arrow to the putting green. It will take strokes of your score.

Skipping the Practice Green

Amateurs love driving ranges but tend to skip the putting practice green. Why? Probably because it’s less fun, and also because they usually don’t think they have kinks to work out of their putting strokes. But watch the pros before a tournament and they spend more time on the green than the range. Or think of it this way: many of the best golf courses on earth do not even have driving ranges, but just about everyone has a practice green. Think that is a coincidence?

If you are a crappy putter, like me, hitting putts before a round will not solve your problem. But it will show you the speed and graininess, no matter how good or bad a putter you are, and this varies tremendously from one course to the next. Get out on the course, hit a putt and say “wow that was fast!” or “wow that was slow!” and you have just wasted at least one stroke that could have been saved by finding this news out on the practice green.

You don’t even have to aim: just hit putts for distance at the very least, get a feel for the speed, see if the grass has a lot of grain that might affect breaks and head to the tee. You can accomplish all of this in two minutes. Don’t skip it!

One other thing: unfortunately many courses do not maintain their practice greens like the greens on the course, in which case the info might be somewhat irrelevant. The solution? Ask. I always ask the pro or someone how the practice green compares to those on the course, and usually they give you an honest answer.

Now you have all the info you need to play the best – or at least lowest scoring – golf of your life, and you did not have to practice or change your swing. It’s like a too-good-to-believe fad diet.

You are very welcome.

Shiskine is a beautiful links course on Scotland's Isle of Arran - but hit it anywhere near the thick rough and gorse and you'd better tee up a provisional.

Picking up where I left off in an earlier post, I am going to shave strokes off your score this summer by showing you some of the biggest mistakes in golf.

All you have to do is stop making them.

>>  Laying Up Too Close to Hazards.

This is the most demoralizing shot in golf: you finally get smart and decide that instead of the miracle shot you can’t pull off, you will play it safe and lay up, and then you go and hit it in the creek and lose your ball anyway. Or another common example is you hit it in the right hand trees, realize your only chance is to punch it back into the fairway without gaining much yardage, and instead you hit it through into the rough or trees on the other side.

Why does this happen so much?

Because golfers are greedy. Instead of saying: “that cross hazard is 180 yards out, I want to be short of that,” we think “that cross hazard is 180-yards out, I want to get as close to it as I can without going in.” Like everything else in golf, you need to leave room for error and hits strategy does not. Also, amateurs tend to hit the ball much better when they don’t have a scoring target. Approach the green and you tense up, need to hit the perfect shot, but a lay up is like being on the driving range, where we are all heroes. You loosen up because it doesn’t matter if you hit it 180, or 170 or 160, a little left or a little right, and when you swing easy and loose you tend to crush the ball. So you decided to hit a 6-iron which you normally hit 165-170, knowing that leaves you 10 yards of slack to the 180-yard creek, but you explode it and because golf courses often cut the grass real short to encourage balls into hazards, your takes couple of bounces and bids you sayonara. It is totally depressing and can derail your whole round. Fortunately there is a simple solution: when laying up, always calculate your absolutely safe club, then take one less.

>> Not Hitting a Provisional.

It pains me how many times I have seen players hit a tee shot that might be safe, might not be safe, and shrug and say, “We should find it.” There are folks I have played with who I doubt have ever hit a provisional.

The simplest reason to hit a provisional whenever you can is that you need the practice. Excluding par-3s, you are going to hit drivers or fairway woods off 12-14 holes a round. That’s not a lot of shots and it’s easy to get out of sync. A provisional is like a bonus trip to the range.

Secondly, your provisional might end up being a better play than your original ball even if you were to find it, which might make hunting for it a little less “enthusiastic.”

But the biggest reason is that when you don’t find your original ball, and have not hit a provisional, more than 99% percent to the people I have ever played with are going to do the same thing: cheat. They are going to look for their ball, not find it, give up, and drop another one as if the woods or OB was a lateral hazard, which it is not. In real golf, there is only one option at this point, which is to go back to the tee and hit another, but people are lazy, and also it is very embarrassing, especially when there is someone waiting at that tee, and they are going to get mad at you for slow play – and rightly because you should have just hit a provisional. I’m not a rules official, and you can make up your own way to play golf, and people, including myself, knowingly and unknowingly infringe on the game’s complex rules all the time, but this is the worst example. I have played with folks who don’t keep score and that’s fine. But if you do keep score, and you tell people your scores, or tell yourself your scores, and even worse, if you keep a USGA handicap, you just cannot cheat. You lose it, you take a penalty stroke that the rules do not allow for, you keep playing, and you make bogey or double bogey and you put that on your scorecard and later enter it in your handicap and it is all one big fat lie. That’s not your score, that’s not your handicap, and it all could have been prevented by hitting a provisional.

This is also the reason why people don’t hit provisionals: after they do, they know they are laying three, hitting four, but they know that if they don’t find it and cheat, they will be, at least in their own mind, laying two and hitting three and that sounds like a better deal. Why not just make up your score before you play and save the effort of hitting shots?

The grand finale tomorrow…

The famous 17th at the TPC Sawgrass is a good example of why the safe play on approach is to the middle of the green - regardless of where the pin is. However, this should be the case for almost every green, island or not, par-3 or not. Play at the middle and both good shots and misses wil be rewarded with putts for par and birdie instead of bunker shots and penalty strokes.

Picking up where I left off yesterday, I am going to shave strokes off your score this summer by showing you the ten biggest mistakes in golf.

All you have to do is stop making them.

4. Hitting Driver Automatically on Every Par-4.

This one is so predictable, and seems to happen more when people take carts. We pull up to the stairs to the tee box, the guy in the other cart looks at the scorecard, sees that it is a par-4, jumps out, grabs driver and heads to the tee, with no idea what the hole looks like or how long it is. Tour pros hit 3 wood, 5 wood, rescue club and long irons off these holes all the time, and they have a lot further to go. This goes back to my rule yesterday about the second shots on par 5s: ideally you want to hit the least club you need to, because every club you go down, your accuracy and consistency increases. For most amateurs, the driver is the toughest club to hit off the tee.

Here’s what I do. First, I ask, “can I drive this green?” That situation might, if you are lucky, present itself once a round. If I can, the wind is right, the elevation is right, the front of the green is unprotected, then I will try. Hey, I’m stupid too and I want to putt for eagle. So I might hit driver on a hole as long as 325 under the right circumstances if I think I can get it there, or close enough to putt. But I will almost never hit driver on a 340 yard hole under any circumstances. Why? If you can’t reach it, why take the risk of hitting driver in the first place, especially when the best possible outcome is leaving yourself a tricky half wedge in? Again, go back to the par-5 example: like Tour pros, you should have a consistent comfort distance with a full swing, a distance that is your most reliable. For me, again, it’s 105-130. So on the 340 yard hole, I only want to go about 210-225, so I will probably hit 5 wood or 3 wood. If it’s a 320 hole but I don’t think I can get there, or there is a big hazard in front of the green, I will probably hit my rescue, equivalent to a 3-iron, or maybe as little a 5-iron. Bang, it’s out there in the fairway, with a good lie, you have a pitching wedge or 8 iron in, end of story, no hunting in the woods, like when you hit driver.

Of course, some days you are just in the slot, hitting great drives, and on those days, I believe in dancing with the one you brought, so stick to it, but most of the time there are only two times you hit driver: short holes and long holes. Short as in you can reach, and long as in you need all you can get off the tee to give you a reasonable second shot. So let’s assume the course is flat and there’s no wind. A big hitter might take driver on par-4s 300 and under, and 390 and over, but in between should be hitting less club.

5. Hitting Driver Automatically on Every Par-5

Same logic, but even more subtle. All par-5s are long, relative to par-3s and par-4s, so it is very tempting to assume you need driver. Wrong. You don’t. You hit driver off the tee on a par-5 that you might have a chance of reaching in two, and the crazy long hole that you might struggle to reach in three, but otherwise, why would you?

Here’s the scenario. If I get on the tee and a par-5 is 520 and there is no trouble in the landing area, I might think, well, if I really bust one it might go 280, and I will have 240 in, and that’s just  the end of my 3-wood range, so let’s give it a try. Maybe not smart, but plausible. But let’s say the hole is 540. Same logic, a great drive will leave me 260 in, which I just don’t have. Needing to hit my two very best shots is low percentage, especially when it still doesn’t get me there. I’d rather be 110-130 on my approach hitting a full wedge. Subtracting 130 from 540, I have to cover at least 410 yards in two shots, so I’ll probably hit 3 wood, 5-iron and play it safe off the tee. Hell, on a short par-5 that I know I can’t reach in two, (water in front of green), I’ve hit as little as 5-iron off the tee and made par.

6. Playing at the Pin.

Amateurs lack accuracy. It is as simple as that. Without lying to yourself, ask how many times a round you hit a full approach shot into a green and find yourself left with a putt inside of five feet? Once? Twice? That’s about it for me. We are simply not good enough to attack the pin (I’m talking full shots, not pitches or chips). So think of every iron shot as a circle. The middle of the circle, the bull’s eye, is where you aim. The circle is where the ball will probably land, including every type of miss: long, short, right and left. Of course, some of us miss more to one side consistently, in my case left, so you can adjust the circle accordingly. If you make the bull’s eye the center of the green, you will hit a lot more greens, and be putting for par and birdie more often, but the catch is that the pin is rarely in the center. If the pin is front right, and you aim at it, half your circle, every miss right or short, is now off the green, reducing your chances of having a putt by 50%. You played for birdie and now you probably won’t make par. Most players attribute these “near misses” to bad luck: “I just barely missed the right edge, and now it’s deep in the greenside pot bunker. Tough break.” But you missed because you were playing at the pin, on the right, rather than the middle. Look at it this way: the reason to attack the pin is to make birdie, but if you are consistently putting for birdie from the middle of the green, even though it might be 30 feet, you are going to make some of those sooner or later, and a lot more often than you will hole the bunker shot you left yourself with by getting greedy. And along the way you will make a lot more pars. In fact, if you go out right now and play 18 and aim at the middle of every green, ignoring the flags, you might save 4-5 strokes right there.

Part 3 tomorrow…

The par-4 Ninth at Shadow Creek in Las Vegas is one of many beautiful but potentially hazardous holes on the course. It plays 409-yards from the tips, putting players from several tees within range of this penal cross hazard. Hit your drive into the creek, and you have probably made one of the most common mistakes in golf (see #3 below): forgetting about roll.

With July 4th in the rearview window, the heart of summer, and real golf season, starts today. Let’s make 2010 the year you get it right.

So to help you avoid the usual pitfalls, I have compiled a list of the then biggest mistakes most golfers make. Avoid these and I guarantee you will score better.

Here’s the deal: I don’t know you, and you might well be a better golfer than me, but I know more about golf than all but a handful of people in this country, and I have played with hundreds of different players of all abilities, from numerous PGA Tour pros and Major winners to scratch amateurs to first timers, single digit players and hackers, and there are some mistakes that a good swing just won’t overcome. So if you are anywhere in the realm of the “average” golfer, I can take between 2 and 6 strokes per round off your score today, without having to see you. How? Read on.

First a Disclaimer: These are not actually tips. If you want tips, go to a teaching professional. They are the ten biggest mistakes in golf. The tip is to stop doing them.

1. Hitting Too Much Club on the Second Shot of a Par-5.

This is the Numero Uno, King Daddy of stupid things golfers of all abilities do on a regular basis, but the good news is it easy to fix once you know why you are a moron for doing it. For some reason golfers are programmed to swing for the fences on the second host of a par-5 whether they can reach the green or not, and for many, pulling a fairway wood or long iron is an automatic, thoughtless reflex. It’s no coincidence that these are also the most difficult clubs to hit, with the highest potential for really bad things to happen to your score. So as you approach your tee shot on a par-5, there is only one question you need to ask: “can I reach the green from here?” If the answer is yeas, you have another question to ask, “Is it a good idea to try?” If the shot is at the very limit of your range, say 245 yards out, which is what you hit your 3-wood on your birthday, and there is water in front and it is a small target, the answer should be no. But forget about the scenario where you can reach in two, because most of the time you can’t or we would all be putting for eagle every round. Let’s say you can’t reach it, it’s 265 out and your best shot will go 230. Most people play for the 230 shot anyway. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It might go 230 straight, still leaving you with a feel wedge in, under the best outcome. But it might go 230 sliced, OB and lost. It might be topped, popped up or any other manner of shots that happen all too frequently when we try to bust a fairways wood and go 40 yards, leaving you screwed again.

Tour pros dissect the course backwards and figure out where they want to be hitting their approaches from, and play to that spot from the tee. Amateurs hit the ball and hope, then play the approach shot they are dealt. Be more like the pros. What is you favorite, absolutely most reliable shot? For most of us it is a full swing, not a finesse shot. I know I am better off hitting a full wedge than a half. My comfort zone for approaches is 105-130, the range for my full wedges, so if I am 265 out, I am going to hit a 145 shot, right in the middle of that range, to account for plus and minus misses. That’s right, I am going to hit an 8-iron on the second shot of a par-5, whereas most folks would hit 3-wood, a difference of about 7 clubs. My shot success percentage is much higher, and also much less likely to get me in any trouble, and even if I miss it badly, I still have a play to the green, but most of the time I will be simply be hitting a sand or pitching wedge from the short grass, an ideal situation.’

RULE: Just do not hit all you can on the second shot of a par-5 when you cannot reach the green. The only exception might be if you are great with your fairway woods and long irons, there is absolutely no trouble in front, and you love chipping and pitching from 30-80 yards out.

2. Not Believing an Unplayable Lie is Unplayable.

A couple of months ago, on the 18th hole at Royal Portrush, in Northern Ireland, during the best driving round of my entire life, I needed to make par for a friendly tournament I was playing, so of course, I swung hard on the tee and missed my first fairway of the day, hitting my drive into the first cut of right hand rough. When I got there my ball was sitting in a rabbit hole, a pit about ten inches in diameter and six inches deep, and there was, in retrospect, no physical way to hit it out of there. Taking an unplayable lie would have left me with only one chance at par, getting up and down from 190 yards out. Hitting a miracle shot out of the rabbit hole would have given me, well what exactly? I couldn’t get the ball to the green, Tiger Woods couldn’t, so even if I advanced it fifty yards, which I would be very lucky to do, I’d still need to get up and down from 140. Anyway, most of the time we don’t need to make par, we need to shoot lower scores, so the question is, do I take my medicine now, or do I take it after three failed attempts to extricate the ball, which is exactly what I did, leaving myself lying five and still in the same hole, then dropping. Needless to say I not only didn’t make par, I didn’t make 9. Most often I see this happen in thick rough. The ball is found at the bottom of a clump of knee high grass, and the player decides they can get it out, and takes a big hack and either goes under it leaving it in the same place, or succeeds in burying it into a truly unplayable lie. The question you need to ask is not whether you can get it out, but “what will you gain if you do?” In many of these cases, you’d be lucky to simply get it out, and then be next to the rabbit hole, or in the fairway ten feet from the rough, whereas in the worst case, or most cases, you are still in the trouble spot with a wasted shot facing the same decision. So why not just take the unplayable lie, and give yourself a chance to actually hit a shot and advance the ball. Too many hackers turn hero when faced with a virtually unplayable lie. Think how many times you have tried to play the dramatic shot from behind the tree only to end you further from the green, and still with no shot. One shot penalties are easy to live with, so don’t let them become three shots penalties.

RULE: In wilderness emergencies, rescuers say it is rarely the initial problem (getting lost, breaking a leg, etc) that results in a tragic end, it is the panicked response. Same for golf: everyone hits bad shots. Don’t make the bad shot worse by wasting several others trying to pretend it didn’t happen. You hit it in the deep rough, now you have to take it out.

3. Forgetting About Roll.

Ask most amateurs how far they usually drive the ball and you will get a white lie, or maybe more of an ego induced exaggeration. But let’s say you are completely honest and the answer is 245. Now you are on the tee, and there is a cross hazard, a creek, that is 230 yards out. You can either lay up safely or try to bust one over it. Maybe it’s a bunker, maybe it’s a short par-4 and you want to drive the green, the situation does not matter but the principle is the same: whatever distance you “normally” drive it includes roll, a lot of roll, a time where the ball is on the ground. Amateurs get it in their heads that like with a pitching wedge, they are going to fly their driver to a spot like throwing a lawn dart. So yes, you are capable of hitting a 245 yard drive, and you do just that, and you still end up in the creek, pissed off and with a penalty. Why? Because your 245 yard drive flies something like 220 and rolls the rest of the way, except in this case, there is a creek in your roll out zone. From today on, every time you consider flying a hazard, think about it that way: flying it. I see this happen all the time to players, especially big hitters, trying to carry the inside bunker on a dogleg, which can give you a tremendous advantage if you succeed, but players are always shocked not to carry. “That’s crazy, it’s only 220 to clear that bunker and I hit it 250. How did that happen?” That happened because the bunker stopped your roll.

Part 2 will follow tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Both the Reynolds Planatation golf courses and the setting of the entire resort, on the shores of Lake Oconee, are stunning. Throw in one of the very best instructors in the world and now you know where to go for lessons!

If you are first learning to play golf, it absolutely pays to take lessons. It also does not really matter who you take them from, as any certified PGA instructor will be able to get you started on the basics.

The big problem is the rest of us: those that already play golf, meaning those of us that already have bad habits. For us it is tool late to start from scratch. For us, the choice of instructor is very, very important. That is where Charlie King comes in.

Ever since Ben Hogan wrote the seminal “Fundamentals of Golf,” instructors across the globe have been trying to get students to swing like Hogan. The only problem with this is we can’t do it. In its annual PGA Teaching Summit, even the PGA recently recognized that what most of the golf teaching world has been doing for decades is dead wrong. When it comes to golfers, it seems you really can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

I’ve seen countless instructors try to take someone with a bad ingrained swing, and instead of tweaking it to work, they try to break the student down and rebuild them in the classic Hogan model – and it never works. Maybe Tiger Woods can make wholesale swig changes but most of us are not only going to never play on the PAG Tour, we’re never going to break 980. What most amateur golfers need is a serviceable and somewhat consistent swing so they can enjoy golf. Thee reason golfers develop odd swings is because they are comfortable and fit their bodies, flexibility and abilities. For most of us, the Hogan model does not. It does not feel comfortable and it does not work.

What the instructional business has finally accepted is that its fine to be Jim Furyk and have an unusual or even abnormal swing – as long as you square the clubface at impact. Very little else matters.

Enter Charlie King. King is regularly ranked among the nation’s top instructors. He is also the author of the ironically named “New Rules of Golf Instruction,” an e-book that preaches a new philosophy of what instructors should have always known – to work within the student’s own swing and limits rather than some theoretical ideal.

King runs the golf academy, now renamed the New Rules Golf School, at Reynolds Plantation in Georgia. For those of you unfamiliar with the place, and I would guess that’s most of you, Reynolds Plantation is the best golf resort in the country that many golfers have never heard of. It sits on Lake Oconee, the second largest in the state, has 116-holes of excellent golf by Nicklaus, Rees Jones, Fazio, Jim Engh, Bob Cupp and a Pete Dye course under construction. It is also home to one of the nicest Ritz Carlton hotels – easily their best golf property - and has both the excellent golf school and the headquarters of the Taylor Made Tour Experience, where visitors can go through a high tech tour quality custom club fitting experience – the same ones Taylor Made tour pros like Sergio Garcia use to select their equipment. Reynolds has the full complement of resort offerings, restaurants, spa, tennis, watersports, and is an incredibly beautiful place. It’s also easy to get to, an hour from Atlanta’s Hartsfield, the nation’s busiest airport.

Why more people don’t go is beyond me, but now there is one more reason: Charlie King.

By the way, I don’t endorse King lightly. I have been to the man myself, shortly after another instructor insisted I change the way I cock my wrist and downswing in order to produce bigger divots. When I told King this he said, “forget that, you’ve been playing too long to make that kind of change,” and proceeded to give me some advice that paid off instantly. If those are the kind of results you want, go to Reynolds Plantation, see Charlie King, get custom fitted for clubs, and then play the excellent golf courses they have. You really can’t have that combination of quality experiences anyplace else.