Free Fore! Play by Bill Giest Page B

clubs now, canya?” Nosir.
    The salesman says ClubOut prevents club loss. It’s a bunch of tubes you place your clubs in and when you remove them a red
     gizmo pops up to alert you that the club is out and probably still lying next to the green where you left it, stupid.
    Can’t play with your clubs
stolen
either, now, canya? More than 800,000 golf clubs worth about $100 million were stolen last year—so maybe golfers are not
     a nicer class of people after all, eh? Either that or the good folks at the Club Alert booth are trying to scare us. They
     insert a transmitter into each club, which emits a light and sound alert when the club and bag are separated by more than
     sixty feet.
    It remains to be seen if this new product will become as thoroughly obnoxious and universally despised as car alarms, but
     here in this last bastion of serenity, the golf course, it certainly has a decent chance.
    Club Alarms: +1 stroke

    There’s an almost infinite variety of training aids on display here, most of them really odd-looking contraptions you strap
     to your body to remind you that you’re doing many things horribly wrong. Would that you could wear all these while you play!
     You’d look like a B-movie Martian but you’d never make a mistake.
    The Alignment Plus looks like a car antenna that you strap horizontally across your chest—undoubtedly causing immense pain
     and suffering to women golfers—but: aligning feet and body; promoting “proper take-away” and shoulder turn; keeping you “parallel”
     to your target; and improving your “alignment.”
    There are golf training devices you strap to your legs, arms, and wrists. There’s the muscle memory Pivot-maker board you
     strap to your feet like a snowboard; the Mad Jack Swing Machine training system, a huge tubular contraption that’s a “slice
     breaker/swing builder” and may or may not fit in the house; and the Kneeknocker, which “uses the proven biofeedback technique”
     to train you to keep the right knee flexed during the backswing. That is: If your knee straightens, the sensor beeps.
    There are lots of items employing big rubber bands—aka “golf tension bands”—offering muscle building through resistance for
     greater clubhead speed. And there is a Swingometer and the Excel-A-Rater to measure it.
    And there’s a kinky bondage variety that appears to be borrowed from the S&M industry or from restraints used in the transport
     of dangerous prisoners. One of these straps your arms together to restrict arm separation, another one straps your legs together
     to inhibit lateral sway, and then there are, well, handcuffs that remind you to keep your hands together.
    All this to turn you into the perfect golf machine.
    Training Devices: -15 combined strokes

    It is unclear to me if the Perfect Grip is a training device or something you can permanently attach to the top of your club
     shaft. It is pro golfer Mark O’Meara’s grip, something that looks as though the golfer had gripped a wad of clay, then had
     it molded in plastic. You just put your hands where his were and presumably play just like him.
    Also, there is offered at the show a bronze sculpture of Moe (not Greg) Norman’s golf grip—his two hands gripping the top
     of a golf club—for study and reflection and to beautify any home. We put our hands behind our backs and admired it. To a golfer,
     a thing of beauty, one would guess, provided of course that Moe Norman is or was a golfer. We just don’t know.
    Getting a Grip: -3 strokes

    There is a disturbing amount of emphasis at the show on pain relief. Most of it focuses on physical pain, however, when clearly
     what is needed is help with the emotional and psychological varieties.
    The emphasis ranges from Advil, here to tout its sponsorship of the senior tour, to perhaps twenty booths offering copper
     or magnetic wristbands that claim to cure arthritis and (most) other maladies.
    “The Tour Power copper-magnetic wristbands provide