Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?

"A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice" by Dmitri Tymoczko.

I think you're missing a few key points:

1. It helps to get started out right with no bad habits to unlearn. For example, I started playing disc golf and I got on a forum and everyone said "Start with a putter and nothing else." Two years later I have what might be called a fairway driver(innova Gazelle) as my fastest disc in the bag. I can play against guys that are throwing discs 2x or even 3x faster than I am and I compete against them pretty well. My shots aren't as far, but they are better shaped and more accurate. I can also putt much better than them. If you start out how he did learning how to putt first and working backwards you will have a very solid game. Did you do this?

2 You need dedicated practice, not just any practice. The time you dick around with friends, try trick shots, go out and drink some beer don't count. Most people spend a large part of their 'practice' doing this. I was putting 1,000+ times a night to improve my putting game and that was deliberate, dedicated practice.

3.I would agree with you if you would have said, "This guy has no history of sticking with anything." The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. It's going to take a lot to change his behavior and stick with it. But the fact that he hasn't touched a golf club isn't going to hold him back.

I believe this guy is adding significantly to the sport of golf, human behavior research, and just doing awesome experiments. Congrats to him, and I wish him the best!

Exactly - look at TV shows like MTV's 'Made' and similar, where people 'focus' (in the case of 'Made', not even very hard) and get to a respectable level, just by having a coach and putting in some time. There are other TV shows where people actually take 10 weeks or so to do something full time - things that the 'pros' say of that it's so hard to learn (like dancing, or hairdressing, or whatever). They usually compete with serious amateurs or pros at the end, and often cannot be picked out as the 'amateurs'.

People want to believe that what they do is so hard that it requires many years of practice, but in reality it's often just not true.

The thing about golf is that practicing six hours doesn't mean you got six hours of practice- you need to play rounds, which take several hours but are only really ~30 minutes of "golf practice" at most...golf is interesting because the athletic prerequisites are minimal compared to most other sports, but this doesn't mean that 10,000 hours is sufficient. I don't doubt that he'll be near-pro level after the 10,000 hours, but I do doubt that he will be good enough that it will be really worth the complete dedication of these six years. He'll be scratch+ for sure, but until you get close to that level, it isn't easy to predict who will have the ability to step up to the true professional level, and who will lose a ton of money traveling on minitours with little chance at ever reaching a PGA/Nationwide tour level (i.e. what most mean when they say "pro").

My perspective on this is based on my experience in playing tennis for 10,000+ hours (not apples-to-apples, obviously, but still relatively close) and becoming good enough to know that there would be absolutely no point in trying to play full-time professionally, because I was too slow to ever reach a level where I could make money while touring. There's a lot more money in golf, but it also is a lot more expensive (many golf mini-tours pay prize money out of the sizable entry fees they charge...$1k/tourney entry fee is common for small pro golf tourneys) and there's a lot more marginal pro-level players around for the golf tournaments since there aren't nearly as many physical factors in golf as there are in tennis.