Nailing the Clubfitting Trade Coffin Shut One Nail at a Time

On the Worrisome Reasonless Xenogolf forum website, a poster with the member name of Noodler pretty much epitomizes how utterly bad forum sites like that can be and why the clubfitting industry remains the embarrassing laughingstock that it is (and rightly so). After initially making a loser type of comment that he would have clicked on a dislike button if there was one available in response to an earlier poster’s legitimate comments regarding golf club swingweighting, Noodler then proceeds to display his incredible ignorance and total lack of knowledge regarding the very same subject with the quote, “Adding weight to the grip end of the club does not reduce the MOI of the club. Adding weight to the grip fools the swingweight scale, but it won’t fool your brain; the swing heft of the club will not be reduced for the golfer (it will actually go up a bit).”

Such totally uninformed and/or inexperienced comments are generally made by golfers (and/or so-called professional clubfitters) whose golfing motions have never matched up well with swingweighting’s 14-inch fulcrum dimension and thus have never been able to personally experience (and explain) how the specification does and is intended to work. As I have noted multiple times previously and while there can be many exceptions, very broadly speaking the 14-inch fulcrum dimension tends to become a better fit for golfers as they play and practice more over a longer period of time, so this may or may not be an indicator of Noodler’s level of actual playing experience that his “expertise” is based on.

At any rate, he is as clueless as a newborn baby regarding what swingweighting is all about. He apparently has no idea where the specification’s 14-inch fulcrum dimension is derived from, its critical significance, and how it functions regarding the development of good fundamental golf swing and/or clubfitting performance. He also clearly believes that MOI golf club matching (best termed Moment of Insanity as a golf club matching concept) is some sort of improvement or advancement of swingweight. And he evidently has no clue whatsoever that technically speaking these two golf club specifications are essentially complete opposites of each other in both theory and practice.

In addition to the original inventor of swingweighting skillfully proving the merits of the measuring device first, (including all of the legitimate and meaningful effects of altered weighting on the grip end of a club), the system then went on to be solidly proven among literally millions and millions of golfers over nearing a century now. But of course all of these people cannot possibly be right. So they must be wrong and Noodler must be right. (Anyone claiming that the original intent of swingweighting was to measure and set a determined value of the specification using only a certain weight grip on a club and that further weight changes on the grip end of the club should be ignored and the specification not reset to its originally determined value, is either completely ignorant of what the specification represents or just a bold-faced liar in order to make the club fitting and/or making process more convenient for himself at the expense of a poor gullible golfer).

It just never ceases to dumbfound me that apparently the most unknowledgeable and/or inexperienced people imaginable (often seemingly accompanied by pretentious attitudes) in the areas of sports performance (if golf can even justifiably be called a sport) and/or related equipment fitting somehow seem to be attracted to the game of golf and the clubfitting trade more than other activities. And Noodler is one that has only posted around 500 times at the time of this particular entry. So he is not quite as bad (yet) as multiple other individuals that have already been spewing out the same kind of nonsense for far longer and have posted more than 15,000 times to date on the same noted forum. I cannot even begin to speculate how many poor golfers (and perhaps other good people who were once in the industry) might have chosen to abandon the game in recent times due in part to some of the posts made by these countless clubfitting clowns and clueless pretenders. And yet no one can seem to figure out why the clubfitting trade in particular is the embarrassing mess that it currently is and potentially on its way to total extinction. (Terrible advice by these so-called experts as a whole generally encompasses numerous different clubfitting [and/or golf swing] topics and not just that exposed here).

I can assure you that most supposed experts publicly posting on such golf forums (many although not all of the self-proclaimed variety) continue to glaringly and conspicuously damage (maybe already beyond the point now of ever being completely repairable) and shame the game of golf as a whole and the clubfitting industry more specifically. Especially since the establishment of online golf forums such as (but not limited to) the Worrisome Reasonless Xenogolf site, the golf club fitting trade in particular (though not necessarily limited to this facet of the game of golf) has more widely and extensively humiliated itself on a more public platform and turned itself into a derided and disgraced laughingstock.

At the present time it seems that even worse things are yet to come for whatever scattered factions and pieces are currently left of this specific industry, as based upon the type of people that frequently seem to be involved with the game of golf I do not really anticipate any expeditious admissions and/or changes from them related to how categorically awful the industry has been for so very long now. I prominently note that Noodler is merely one of countless individuals that are comparably and greatly deficient in their knowledge regarding one or more critical elements in the field of golf club fitting. In this case, if he really wants to genuinely help specific golfers with specific inquires or just the game of golf and/or the clubfitting trade more generally, he might want to very strongly consider seeking out someone capable of explaining the technicalities of golf club swingweighing to himself first before trying to explain the fundamentals of the specification to anyone else. If doing so, he might hopefully prevent himself from publicly posting any more information that moves the game of golf in general and the clubfitting trade more specifically further backward in success and/or reputation.

So one more nail has been driven into the clubfitting trade coffin, from which the trade was already gasping for air for reasons not limited to the developments and implementations of some of the worst theories and practices ever developed related to the fitting of equipment to a performer of an activity. And unless and until this trade is able to extract those nails and rise from its self-inflicted demise by showing some competence at what it is supposed to be doing and achieving, one of the nails continuing to be driven into this self-made coffin might very well be the last one needed to permanently put this trade to rest (and thankfully based upon the deplorable performance record and reputation of this trade to date).