The strange science of cloning probably was conceived not in a geneticist's laboratory but in a golf administrator's office, maybe ex-commissioner Joe Dey's. This, of course, is the sport that has spent the last three decades trying to create the Next Nicklaus. No one copies like golf does, save maybe stock-car racing. The whole game is Xeroxed. Someone gets a decent original idea, and within weeks everybody else has duplicated it.
Golf does it with mirrors.
Everybody now tees off using a 13-foot graphite pole with a titanium frying pan at the end. Course marshals are ex-prison guards, military pensioners or, worse, retired laborers who love bossing people around after 40 employed years of getting dumped on. It's mandatory that houses on golf courses have screened-in patios and pools out back, near the gas grill. Instructors turn their practice ranges into swing-cloning factories. The PGA Tour, as you probably know, is a cloning leader.