By Mike Purkey – Global Golf Post

It’s “Teaching Tuesday” on Inside The Ropes and Ron in California is on the line. He’s a 3.1 handicap index and like everyone else it seems, he is looking for more distance. He wants to know if he should fire the right side or the left side.

“It depends on what feels better to you and what your body does,” says Dennis Paulson, a former PGA Tour player and co-host of the show. “If you don’t have five or six different ways to say something that’s going to trigger your brain, you need to find somebody else. If that one guy is saying the same thing over and over and it’s not clicking, he’s not that good a teacher.

“He’s gotta have more ways to say the same thing, to get a feel for you and what you’re trying to do in your golf swing. Try to get more lateral. Stay closed with the lower body longer and see if that helps. Try to drive through to the left side and don’t get to your heel. See if that works.”

Whether it works for Ron, it’s working for Carl and Dennis Paulson, who started the talk show on SiriusXM Radio two years ago and are rapidly growing a loyal following. The Paulsons are not related but both played the PGA Tour for more than 10 years each. Dennis, 53, won the 2000 Buick Classic at Westchester, beating David Duval in a playoff. Carl, 45, won twice on the 1999 Nike Tour and was that tour’s leading money winner that year.

Inside The Ropes is a staple of the satellite network’s PGA Tour Radio channel, which includes broadcasting live golf at nearly every PGA Tour stop.

Which leads to the question: How does golf translate to the radio?

“I’d fall asleep watching golf on television,” Dennis said, tongue in cheek, after being approached to do live golf on the radio. “If I do this to someone who’s in their car, I don’t want to be responsible for someone having a wreck.”

But, says Dennis, who has been doing up 25 events a year of live golf for the past nine years, “We have people who tell us they turn the sound off on the television and listen to us.”

In the meantime, PGA Tour Radio features talk shows that include hosts Matt Adams, Hank Haney, Brian Katrek, John Maginnes, John Feinstein, Lou Holtz and Mark Carnevale. Taylor Zarzour does two golf shows, one of which is The Starter with regular guest Ron Green Jr. of Global Golf Post. Zarzour is one of the hardest-working men in satellite radio. In addition to his regular golf gigs, he does assorted pregame and postgame shows for live golf broadcasts. And this time of year, he also does two college football shows.

Both Paulsons ended their playing careers due to injury – Dennis after shoulder surgery, in which the rehab led to a bad back, and Carl due to back surgery. They were looking at life after golf.

“What now?” Carl wondered.

The Paulsons were urged by Maginnes, also a former Tour player, to take a shot at doing a talk show.

“We put a couple of mics in front of us and we went from there,” Carl said. “No one told us anything or explained how to do it. They just said, ‘Go.’ It’s been an absolute blast. The advantage we have is that you have two guys who played the Tour for 15 years each. We were taught the game completely differently. But we don’t have any professional broadcasting experience.”

Republished with permission by Global Golf Post