Roger Collier

Y ouTube sensations often come pint-sized and precocious. A six-year-old singer with popstar pipes. A seven-year-old guitar player whose fingers spider over frets with piston-like precision. Here's who you don't expect to gain Internet fame: a Niagara Falls insurance salesman in his mid-40s hitting golf balls into a lake. Yet it happened. And this guy's story is an inspiration to talented adults who think they're too old to pursue their passions.

I'm a YouTube junkie. Typically, I venture onto the site for a good reason. Last week, for instance, I had to install a new kitchen faucet and was looking for a how-to video. It doesn't take long, however, for me to spiral into a link-clicking bender. An hour after starting, now blearyeyed and brain-dead, I awake from a daze to find myself watching some guy juggle fruit while belching Portugal's national anthem.

It was during one of these time-eating black holes that I stumbled upon a bunch of videos from someone who went by the moniker Sevam1. In them, a chatty guy with an encyclopedic knowledge of golfswing mechanics talks to an unseen cameraman while hitting balls out of tall grass into Lake Ontario. A dog runs around in the foreground. This is folksy, grassroots stuff.

I found the videos charming and entertaining. After digging around the Internet, I discovered that his name was Mike Maves and that his ideas had created much debate among hardcore golfers. I discovered that a famous professional golfer had seen the videos, which have been viewed more than a million times, and was so impressed he invited Maves to New York to help him prepare for a tournament. I discovered that Maves and the pro had started a social network for golfers, called Secret in the Dirt, which has 20,000 members.

I also learned that Maves lives a mere half-hour drive from my inlaws' home. There are two great things about being a freelance writer. One, you get to meet interesting people. Two, setting up an interview gives you an excuse to bail for a few hours no matter where you are.This was a classic two-bird, one-stone scenario.

So during a recent family gathering, I swung by Maves' place and, over a glass of Niagara wine, he told me his story. He played a lot of golf as a kid, 36 holes some days, but gave up the game as an adult when he had kids of his own. "I quit golf like people quit cigarettes," says Maves. "I closed the book on golf."

A decade later, while working for an insurance company, a client asked Maves for some help with his swing. "He came into my office," Maves recalls, "and said, 'I heard you used to hit a golf ball pretty good.'" The client recorded the lessons and posted them online. I won't get into the nitty-gritty details of the golf wisdom that caused the videos to become so popular. Let's just say it deals mostly with how the legs should work in the golf swing.

"Most people spend their time learning golf standing on spaghetti legs," says Maves. "But it's more like a house. To build a sturdy home you need a great foundation. I focused on the legs because nobody ever talks about them.

Golfers on a popular online forum started discussing the videos, which lead to a thread that lasted many months and hundreds of posts. Maves joined in and answered all questions fired his way. He eventually laid out all his ideas in an e-book, which he posted online for $20 in December of 2008.

"That day at 3 p.m., I had to go pick up my kids. Just before, I put a single 'buy button' on my blog," says Maves. "We get back to the house 40 minutes later, I look at my Pay-Pal account, and there is $500 in it."

aves has since sold more than 2,000 copies of his e-book. While we were chatting in his kitchen, I heard a ding come from a laptop on the counter. "Did you hear that?" says Maves with a laugh. "That's another sale."

And that, in short, is how an Ontario man went from being an insurance salesman to being an Internet golf guru/author/swing coach/ social network entrepreneur. It all began with a short YouTube clip: 26 seconds that changed a life. Who knows? Perhaps the same could happen to you. All you need is a video camera, a computer and a world-class talent. And you can get at least two of those things at Future Shop.