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. Other than a few exceptions, some absolutes apply. Tour players and their wives, of course, also are cloned. That explains why you may have done a double-take when seeing two Curtis Stranges, side by side. And why you have never been able to tell Johnny Miller from Larry Hinson, Mark O'Meara from Mark McCumber, Eddie Pearce from Jim Simons, Billy Mayfair from Billy Glasson, John Mahaffey from Ben Crenshaw or even Mike Reid from Jack Renner.