Full Circle

Zane Scotland’s evolution from battle-scarred tour pro to player-coach makes him a rich resource for youngsters making their way on the MENA Tour

- Kent Gray

The Golfing Machine owns pride of place in Zane Scotland’s golf library. The thing is, as much as he loves Homer Kelley’s classic textbook, he’s loath to recommend it for fear it might fall into impressionable hands. You’ve been warned.

One of the most comprehensive, and some argue complicated, tomes on the golf swing, The Golfing Machine is meant for professional instructors. It has enlightened those with the requisite base knowledge but with it’s “simple geometry and everyday physics” has also confounded just as many well-meaning but unqualified seekers of the secrets to golf for the past 50 years.

“There’s a book from years and years ago [it was fi rst published in 1969], that if you try and read it, it messes with your life, let alone your golf,” says Scotland when pressed for the foundation of his coaching philosophy.

“It’s so confusing because there is so much stuff going on in it but pretty much, most modern coaching is based off of that or versions thereof.

“So for me, from a technical point of view, there’s Mac O‘Grady, what Pete Cowan’s done is fantastic, a guy called Andy Plumber, almost too many to name, to be honest. So it’s The Golfing Machine but on top of that someone who I think does an amazing job is Butch Harmon who almost looks like he wouldn’t even use a camera so much, he just knows the person and can work from there.”

Just as Kelley’s fabled work doesn’t prescribe one particular style of swing, Scotland’s wide-spread coaching influences are a melting pot of the game’s best swing theorists. What’s not clouded is the 37-year-old Englishman’s growing reputation in the field of coaching, a vocation the MENA Tour’s most successful player has fallen into sooner than anticipated.