Golf professional Darren May is part of a very select group, he can tease Jack Nicklaus about his game and get away with it.The Director of Teaching at Nicklaus’ private course The Bear’s Club, May also coaches several players on the PGA Tour, including Australian Robert Allenby.It is no surprise then that when Andrew Brooks, Port Royal’s director of golf, wanted to get a golf academy in Bermuda off the ground he turned to a man he has known for 21-years, and who used to be his assistant in England.May was in Bermuda last week to provide the Island’s professionals with an in-depth look at the TrackMan teaching system which is widely used by the top players and coaches in the game to improve swings and shot making.The Englishman also put several Port Royal members through their paces, and if Brooks has his way the technology will be available to help teach Bermuda’s golfers on a permanent basis.From club fitting, to lesson plans, to ironing out the kinks in a game that can turn a good round into a bad one, the new academy will eventually rule out the need for golfers to fly to the US to get the equipment and coaching they need to get their games in to shape.“The vision is to have an academy at Port Royal, whereby you can come and get your clubs fitted, and go on TrackMan,” said Brooks.“It will be an all encompassing academy experience, that is what we are trying to head towards.“However, that is not going to happen overnight, and the key to it is getting someone trained on it. The idea is to train a Bermudian into that role. Stage one is to get a member of the Bear’s Club staff to come down and run the Jack Nicklaus Performance Centre, which is what we’re going to call it, and do a weekend club fit.“When we do that we’ll get someone to shadow him and learn the ropes.“Effectively we want to have a fully fledged academy at Port Royal, which will allow us to offer the best most up-to-date coaching and club fitting available.”The TrackMan system is a ball-flight monitor that measures where the ball goes, how far it travels, how fast a golfer swings the club, the angle of the club, in fact anything to do with the mechanics involved in getting the ball to go where it is supposed to.It can even be used to find out just how good a golfer someone actually is, with a programme that measures the results of a number of shots from several different distances. The score is then arrived at based on where the ball lands in relation to a target area.Daniel Augustus was put through the ‘combine’ in a private session with May last week, and according to the Englishman the Bermuda golfer’s numbers on a good shot ‘were as good as anyone’s out there’.“The problem is that when he (Augustus) hits a bad shot, it’s bad,” said May, “what you’re trying to do is tighten the gap between the two and getting to the root cause of the problem.”May has been using the system for ten years on golfers of all abilities, and even used it to design a new driver for Nicklaus when the Golden Bear asked to use the TrackMan system one day as May was passing through his club on a tour of the East Coast.“It was very daunting to be asked by Jack Nicklaus if there was anything I could do to help him,” said May. “But if you know what you’re doing, if you’ve got that knowledge, if you’re right, you’re right.“You’ve got to be brave, especially with him, and tell him what would help him. It wasn’t my opinion, we had the numbers to prove it.“It was a nice thing, because it was 2005, and the last major that he played in was with a driver that we made for him.”