Recreational golfers are unlike any other recreational sportsman. I know of no other sport where the recreational participants are as wrapped up in the technique as golfers. Visit any driving range and you are certain to see the majority of the golfers fiddling with their swing.

My guess is that technique preoccupies the minds of golfers more so than technique does in all other recreational sports combined. Visit a basketball court and watch a player miss a shot. Does that player stop and look at his feet or check the angle of his shoulders? Go to a baseball batting cage… Do you see anyone look behind themselves to check the position of the bat? Go fishing and ask your buddy if he has ever checked his wrist angle in order to improve his casting. Be careful with that one, you may get thrown out of the boat!

Modern golf has produced a recreational participant that is too often more involved in the golf swing than they are in watching the golf shot. Watch how seldom golfers hit their shot and watch it fly, land and come to a stop. More times than not, golfers will be seen checking a position or making a practice swing while their golf shot is still in the air. I refer to this type of golfer as a “swing junkie.”

The origins of the swing junkie can be traced back to a wonderful and historic book, Ben Hogan’s “Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf.” This book and the Hogan myth that grew out of this book have done more to create a modern recreational golfer that thinks more about how to swing the golf club than he does about how to play the game. The swing junkie defends his approach to golf by believing that Hogan himself was a swing junkie.

While Hogan continues to be the hero and go-to swing for most swing junkies, others too have caught the attention of the swing junkie. The 1970s brought into popularity Homer Kelley’s book “The Golfing Machine.” The first authorized instructor of the Golfing Machine was Ben Doyle, and his passion for teaching the system was a perfect match for the swing junkies. Golfing Machine swing junkies were seldom seen without their stack of graphs to check sequence photos. For you youngsters, the graph check sequence photos camera took eight still photographs and could be timed for the length of a golf swing. The Polaroid film used with the graph check allowed instant review of the swing. The result was that swing junkies could now spend more time analyzing their swing than watching the ball fly through the air.

In the 1980s, Jimmy Ballard caught the imagination of the swing junkies. Commonly known as the “Pioneer of Connection,” Ballard had success with golfers as different as Gary Player and Sandy Lyle. Connection resonated well with the swing junkies. After all, on page 82 of Hogan’s “Five Lessons,” Hogan states that “the elbows remain tightly glued to the sides.” Unfortunately for Ballard, swing junkies have a short attention span and the age of connection was short lived.

David Leadbetter’s student Nick Faldo was the perfect golfer for the swing junkie to copy. Faldo seemed to have an endless number of swing drills. In Faldo, the swing junkies found their hero, a golfer who made more practice swings than he hit balls. While the swing junkie was busy trying to keep up with all of Faldo’s drills, the golf swing theory landscape was changing.

The success and popularity of Leadbetter brought into fashion the swing guru, and with that the swing junkie would now and for ever more enjoy technique and method overload. Leadbetter’s “Distance Through Resistance” would soon share the stage with Hank Haney’s concept of swinging the club on plane.

Jim McLean’s X-Factor had swing junkies twisting their torsos to the max. The No. 1 golf instructor was Butch Harmon Jr., but he was never a favorite of the swing junkie. Too much of his instruction was on how to hit golf shots and the swing junkies focus was always to make a better swing.

Today, entirely new ways of dissecting the golf swing are being developed to spark the imagination of the swing junkies. FlightScope and Trackman systems work with 3D Doppler radar tracking technology. Up to 26 individual data points are collected from every golf swing and shot. Data speak like “if you zero the swing plane with that degree of downward angle you will hit a draw” is now replacing the age old image of Ben Hogan’s downswing plane being a little under the backswing plane.

Will 3D radar data be the next step in the long evolution of swing junkie? Like something out of the movie The Matrix, will swing junkies become so focused on the data stream that they don’t even know what their swing looks like? Or will there be a split among the swing junkies? What will happen to the old guard that depends and protects the “good old way, the tried and true” use of video and pictures in their quest to find the perfect swing. What about the new breed of “techno swing junkie” who is always searching for new data points in order to build their perfect swing?

Whatever the future, swing junkies have their own special passion for the game and their own philosophy as to how to get the most enjoyment out of the game. Truth be known, every golfer who enjoys the game has some degree of swing junkie inside. Just keep in mind that the goal of this game is to get the ball in the hole as fast as possible.