The Hacker | Peter Corrigan

The day I stopped flailing and went back to school (it was that or the Samaritans)

The Samaritans should consider opening a golf section. Many are the golfers, driven to desperation by the flaws that break out in their game, who would benefit from a calm and kindly voice when they come quivering off the course.

This applies to all classes of players, not just hackers. I've known professionals make transatlantic calls to their coaches after a bad round, and since golf coaches make a fortune out of giving advice, they ought not to complain about being disturbed in the middle of the night by a good customer. However, there is a limit to what remedies they can offer over the phone.

I do know of one coach who watched one of his clients on TV and faxed him a diagram of what he was doing wrong, but the rest of us have to suffer alone until we can get some advice, preferably for nothing. I played in Scotland recently with a woman who was so distraught about her game she ran straight off the course and phoned her club pro. I couldn't understand this – she scored only one point fewer than me, and I was quite happy.

By the time she came into the bar she was smiling sweetly. She didn't say how the pro had reassured her, but he'd booked her in for a lesson immediately on her return. Last week, she told me she had just scored 39 points in a Stableford competition, which is a tremendous improvement.

If I had phoned my local pro, his advice would have had little to do with golf, because I stopped going to him 10 years ago. And that's the problem. We real hackers take our punishment stoically and consider running to the pro as a sign of weakness. But I'm beginning to think we are wrong, and that expert help is the only answer.

On the same visit to Scotland, I was invited to try the Colin Montgomerie Links Golf Academy at Turnberry. I expected the first lesson to be how to keep your head still when you scowl at photographers and the second to show how to position your feet when throwing a tantrum – but it was far more illuminating than that.

After my last lesson some years ago, the pro refused to take my money because he had so thoroughly failed to teach me anything. So I was hardly optimistic.

But Guy Redford, manager of the magnificently equipped academy, took me back to the very basics of grip, alignment, stance and posture.

Anyone familiar with Montgomerie knows that his practising stops long before his hands start bleeding. He is, though, remorseless on getting the basics right.

Once Guy had ironed out the kinks in my stance and the paralysis points in my posture with the help of the video camera, I did start to hit the ball better. However, Guy warned that high-handicappers needed more than one lesson and plenty of practice to eradicate faults built up over the years.

Sure enough, my basics have returned to something quite base. So, more lessons for me as soon as I can get around to it.