Stop flapping

• Monday, 1 March 2010
• Phil Churchill
• 0 Comments

A bag of perfectly- crafted irons

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Despite being an eclectic bunch - from plumbers to brain surgeons - it seems the average golfer has uniform disregard for engineers.

You may never have thought about it, but when you chip-and-pin away £500 on a new set of golf clubs, you are leaving with advanced pieces of engineering. Every curve and groove has been put through computer analysis to ensure ultimate performance. The shafts have put been perfected for weight, length, torque and flex.

In our hands we hold a perfectly calibrated instrument that comes into contact with the ball for just 450 millionths of a second before exploding off the face at up to 6000 RPM.

And yet, despite all the science we still obviously don't believe the engineers have a clue. For instead of letting the instrument purr through the air, we try to smack the living daylights out of the ball. Primeval instinct kicks in - the 5-iron is swung like a caveman's club and it is all we can do to refrain from screaming.

Do you think that people held the same disdain for the designers of aeroplanes? Imagine people on the flight craning their necks forward as they decide the engineers are charlatans before thrusting out their arms and flapping wildly to get that bird off the ground?

Now, having discovered the untrusting golfers' cynicism for techies, I had a real eureka moment. For years I've stood within irritating earshot of people yelling down their mobile phones. Why had man pushed human endeavour to create a network of satellites 36,000 kilometres up in the celestial heavens?

People clearly don't believe it and shout instead. They are convinced that is why the person can hear them; never the science, never the engineer. So next time I hear someone shouting into their handset, instead of getting irate I'll just smile and wonder what their golf swing is like....

Where next?

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