Not Ready for Prime Time : Pro Athletes May Have All the Answers, but There Is No Fast-Forward to Success Among Instructional Sports Videos

Instructional sports videos came out in waves a few years ago. A couple were even about waves, or at least how to ride them while standing on a shiny plank and saying things like “gnarly” and “it crested to the max.” They taught us how to golf and hit a baseball and slam dunk and throw a football and bowl and play goalie on a soccer team and shoot handguns. In England, it might not have been a bad idea to combine the soccer video and the handgun video into one tape called “Block That Shot or I’ll Shoot You.”

Some of the videos have been successful but most have been bombs. A check of several video stores in the Valley showed that most of these tapes serve only one useful purpose: If they didn’t exist, the dust in the stores would settle directly on the shelves. A clerk at The Wherehouse in Encino was shown a stack of instructional sports videos from his store and was asked if they came over the counter very often.

“Geez,” he said, “I haven’t even seen most of those tapes. Where’d you find them?”

The reason, it would seem, for the general lack of appeal of the tapes is that the instructors in them have failed to recognize one important factor in their success: natural talent.

Ex-Dodger Steve Garvey has an instructional video on the market, “Steve Garvey’s Hitting System.” Can’t you just see Garvey trying to explain how we can be as successful at hitting a baseball as he has?

“First of all,” Garvey should begin, “get a pair of forearms so large that people often mistake them for adult harp seals hanging out of your shirt-sleeves. OK, now, after you’ve done that . . . “

“George Brett’s Secrets of Baseball, Volume 1: Hitting” is another fine example. The two-time American League batting champ should open his tape like this: “For starters, let’s all get out there and obtain a set of eyes that can see the stitches on a baseball moving at 95 m.p.h., and then let’s all see if we can’t pick up some reflexes that enable us to reach overhead and snatch a bug out of a hummingbird’s beak as he flies past us, OK?”

Garvey and Brett have not become multimillionaires by hard work alone. They were born with a rare amount of natural ability, ability that no amount of hard work can equal. They ignore this fact in their instructional tapes, and the danger in this is that little Billy is going to get the badly mistaken idea that if he works on the basics and takes 50 practice swings a day in his backyard, he’s a sure bet to start in the 70th major league All-Star Game.

Julius Erving takes a crack at an instructional video in “Dr. J’s Basketball Stuff,” and this tape is maybe even a more vivid example of the Do-What-I-Do syndrome prevalent in these videos. He brushes on a few basics that kids can work on to improve their game, but for the most part Basketball Stuff would be more appropriate if titled, “Things You’ll Never Be Able to Do.”

The jacket of Erving’s tape contains these words: “Kids and their parents can go one-on-one as they learn with Dr. J.”

Sure. Don’t we all cherish the memory of that time our dad came blasting down the driveway on the dribble, left the ground at the foul line and soared with the ball extended in one hand and then slammed it through the hoop, rattling the garage so badly that all of his power tools fell off the work bench?

The tape begins with these words from Dr. J: “I’ll give you some of the secrets I’ve picked up over the years.”

One of his secrets? “Never eat a big meal within three hours of a game.” Erving’s former teammate on the Philadelphia 76ers, 275-pound Charles Barkley, has a similar secret. Barkley believes strongly that a player should never eat a big meal during a game. Halftime is OK, but leave that 12-pound smoked ham on the bench while you’re actually on the court.

Another section of the tape deals with dribbling. In footage of a game against the Golden State Warriors, here comes Dr. J flying down the court. At the top of the key he slams the ball into the palm of his right hand and takes one, two, three, four giant steps before dunking it.

Whoa, Dr. J.! Don’t they call that traveling ?

In his segment on shooting, he advises youngsters to put a lot of arc on the ball and make sure to get it over the front of the rim. “As they say,” says Erving, “never up, never in.”

Whoa, Dr. J! Never up, never in is a golf term. Something about putting. Maybe you’re confusing it with that other famous golf expression, “Yo, Arnie. In your face!”

And in a segment on his famous finger-roll shot, Erving, after flicking the ball off a hand that is roughly the size of a beach umbrella, advises, “Of course, it helps to have big hands like I do.”

So just exactly what are we supposed to do about that, Julius? Maybe Dad will let us walk around with an anvil dragging from each finger until they stretch out long enough so we can hold a basketball like it’s a nectarine.

Erving means well with his 60-minute video, but he has somehow forgotten that he is one of the most gifted athletes ever to play basketball. It’s like a 1,000-pound man explaining to Bill Shoemaker how to eat an entire elk in one sitting. The theory might sound OK, but practical application is slightly out of reach.

If reverse slam dunks are a bit out of your league, how about bowling? Earl Anthony, the most honored bowler in history, takes you down to the lanes in his 60-minute “Bowl to Win With Earl Anthony.” Anthony begins by showing the four-step approach just before releasing the ball. If you’re not paying close attention here, what you see on the screen is this large man with his back to the pins striding toward the seats, the ball cocked back in the release position.

“NO, Earl, the other way! You’re gonna kill someone,” you feel like shouting. It’s only then that Anthony stops and explains that he was just counting off the correct number of steps. He then turns and faces the pins and says, “This is where you start.” The viewer is relieved.

There is one oddity in the tape that should not go without mention. Anthony is left-handed. But he realizes that the vast majority of people, even bowlers, are right-handed and that all of his hand and foot alignments don’t make much sense to them. So the video producers simply reverse the film, thus showing Anthony as a right-hander.

And in several scenes of Anthony bowling, at the end of the lane on the dead-pin clearing bar appears the bowling equipment manufacturer’s name, BRUNSWICK. And a scene later, with Anthony magically bowling right-handed, you see the name KCIWSNURB where BRUNSWICK used to be.

If bowling doesn’t quite strike you, try golf in your spare time. Golf videos have been slightly more popular in recent years than those in other sports. There are two reasons for this: 1) Golfers tend to have money to spend on silly things, and 2) Golfers will do anything short of playing naked in spiked high-heel shoes if they thought it would shave a few strokes off their score. (They will play naked in spiked high-heel shoes if there’s a bet riding on it.)

“Golf My Way With Jack Nicklaus” is among the most popular of the golf instructional tapes. You can’t rent it yet, but for just $85 you can buy it. It is, in essence, an hour of Nicklaus telling you to put your hands this way and that way, put your feet that way and this way, move your arms this way, your shoulders that way and your hips this way and your head not at all.

If you follow the tape in detail and do everything Nicklaus advises, the next time you swing the club you will fall heavily to the ground and be unable to move for the rest of the afternoon.

Billy Casper, a Masters champion, two-time U.S. Open champion and member of golf’s Hall of Fame, has a video titled “Golf Like a Pro With Billy Casper.” Even hinting that we can play like professional golfers by watching this tape is a cruel joke.

He begins by showing us the grip and stressing its importance.

“First and most important is the grip,” Casper says. “It is the only contact the body has with the club and the golf ball at the same time.”

Wrong. Billy, of course, is overlooking those wonderful moments most of us have when we hit the ball, the ball hits a tree and, while we’re still holding the club, ricochets back, slams against our forehead and knocks us down.

He talks about ball positioning, which he says is where you line up your feet in relation to the ball. Those who play golf as much as twice a month know otherwise, though. Ball positioning to most golfers is the art of being able to swing your foot and kick the ball out of trouble and into the fairway. A good left-foot dig out from under a mulberry shrub and into the middle of the fairway will always bring a sly wink from your partner and the praise, “Hey Freddie, nice ball positioning.”

For 45 minutes, Casper slashes golf balls to within inches of the pin. From 250 yards, from 150 yards, from sand traps, even from a lake . Every shot is perfect, every swing a work of art. Casper’s video should end with these words:

“Now, just remember what I’ve shown you. Go out and practice, let’s say, eight hours a day for the next 30 years and you, too, will be able to play golf like this. For those of you faced with silly little distractions that can sometimes keep you off the practice range, such as a job or a family, tough luck.”