Here's another two for Golf Smarter episodes number four hundred thirty two and four hundred thirty three from April fifteen, twenty fourteen.
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Amateur golfers miss way more than fifty percent of their putts on the low side of the hole. The question is why is that. So there's several possible explanations, but one is if you aim at the apex, you will miss low And why is that? Because the apex is the furthest point, or the highest point on this curved path toward the hole. But that usually happens somewhere near the middle of the putt. In order to get the putt to go into the hole, you've got to start
it higher because gravity will immediately start breaking. So if your target is the apex, to hit the apex, you've got to start it higher than the apex because that first half of the putt. It's going to be breaking before it gets there. It's not like this putt goes.
Straight and then it takes a left turn at the apex.
It doesn't do that. It breaks from the instant that you hit it. And that's the physics of it. And that implies that you've got to start the putt higher than the apex in order to hit the line that you're visualizing into the hole.
Putting is overrated. An introduction to golf metrics and professor Mark Brody. This is Golf Smarter. Welcome to the Golf Smarter podcast.
Mark Fred, thanks for having me on.
It's a pleasure, Thank you very much. I just need to know something as we talk about this book, Every Shot Counts? Have you always been a troublemaker?
I don't consider myself a trouble maker, so I'd have to say no to that one.
Well, I have a feeling that you are turning the golf world on its head with this kind of information.
Well, I'm anxious for this book to come out to find out whether that's true or not, because I figure that there's people that will believe it right away, and there's other people that are on the other side and need some convincing and I'm wondering if I'll be able to convince them.
So, as we're recording this, the book will be coming out tomorrow, but as you are listening to it, it has been out a couple weeks. So if you want to pick up this book, actually you need to pick up this book. Every Shot Counts by Mark Brody. Yeah.
I just think that, you know, I've talked to so many different instructors about, you know, the importance of putting, and you know, they we even did one episode of this show called give me ten yards ten feet closer, over ten yards farther every day of the week.
Oh well, that's that's true, but it's it's pretty hard to get to get ten feet closer on your approach shots. Every shot ten feet closer is is going from from a ninety golfer to the PGA tour sometimes.
Yeah.
Well, I mean the guy who that interview was somebody who manufactures wedges, So why do you think he would say that he believes his product will do that? And actually it's a very good product. But it's just that we're going to call this episode and it follows in your book Putting is overrated. Let's talk about this, this concept and what you're introducing here. It's so much I mean, the easiest way to explain it is like moneyball, right,
cyber metrics for baseball. People are understand and what's happened with the Oakland A's and you know the movie came out, But how they Bill James created was it cybermetrics? Ab metrics aabermetrics, right, and it changed the way management approaches baseball, but with a lot of resistance. I see this going in that direction as well.
Well. I hope that's the case.
That one of the things when you look at a tournament on TV or where you play with your friends, you can see the score. That's what golf is about, shooting the lowest score. But it's often not so apparent where those score differences come from. So when one golfer wins a tournament by five shots, you just don't know why,
Where did those five shots come from? And one of the goals of this book is to try and break that down and tease out using data, what separates the best golfers from average golfers, whether it's in the pro ranks or the amateur ranks.
I'd let the audience know that we're going to do this in two parts. The first part I'm going to have you explain how this works in the kind of information that you've gathered and what you've come up with, and the second part will will focus on how do it make it work for me? All right, okay, great, So just elaborate. I'm not going to interrupt much. You
can talk as long as you want on this. Explain how that how you figured out that putting is really only about fifteen percent of what the total score or the importance of the score.
Well, i'd say, you know, fifteen percent refers to how much of the strokes that separate the best PGA Tour players from average PGA Tour players. That difference in score,
about fifteen percent of it comes from putting. And if you're if you're looking over kind of a long period of time, if you look at tournament winners, it turns out that putting is a little bit more important than it explains about thirty five percent of the difference between the winner of a tournament and the field that they're playing against.
Yeah, I mean, because so often, you know, TV needs the drama and you'll see a guy making a putt, or just the other day Paula Kramer made that amazing seventy five foot putt. She needed to make it to win if she two putts, which was fine, she ties, but you know that kind of drama you see, but you don't see how it got to the point where she was struggling or she was behind and had to come from behind, and it wasn't always on the putting green.
Correct Well, certainly if you think a seventy five footer for eagle, you had to have some help by reaching that par five and two. So yeah, right, it's and that's one of the things strokes gain does. It quantifies how much of that good score came from putting versus how much came from the TITA greenshots.
Right, So generally, I know, personally on my scorecard, I'll keep track of fairways, hit greens and regulation and how many putts, But that really doesn't explain to me why I had a ninety four.
That day exactly.
I mean, each one of those traditional stats has fundamental fatal flaws. So if you pop up a drive one hundred yards into the fairway versus you hit another one two hundred and fifty yards in the fairway. You both get a check mark for a fairway hit, but one is a much better shot than the other, So fairways hit doesn't capture the difference between those clearly different shots.
The same way when you count putts, if you sink a two footer, you know you miss the green, you chip the two feet, and you sink the two footter, it's a one put on that green, you say, great, it's a one putt. But on another green where you hit your approach shot to forty five feet and you sink a forty five footer, that's a one putt. Also,
both of those strokes count as one putt. It looks like you're putting is the same, But sinking a forty five footer is a much better putting performance than sinking a two footer. So neither fairways hit nor putting really gives you the true story. And you can say the same thing about greens and regulation that if you have few greens and regulation, was it because you drove the ball poorly, or your iron shots were poor, or your you know, your third shot on a par five was poor.
It doesn't really explain what's what's going wrong.
So we're going from subjective to objective information exactly. Okay, you know that I frequently say the one the only thing I hate more than a one putt bogie is one putt double bogie. But so let's how did you get to this place? Please give us some background on where it brought you to, how you brought it to the PGA, what they're doing with it, go from that.
So, so it was sort of a a fortunate confluence of events. I'd say that my day job is being an academic at Columbia Business School, where my research is in quantitative finance. But I'm a golfer and I have a passion for golf, and I realized that I could take my academic training and put it together with my golf hobby to try and answer these questions that are at the heart of golf. But it all boils down
to having some data. And so some of the questions that I wanted to answer were where did the ten strokes come from that separate a ninety golfer from an eighty golfer? Or what's the difference between an eighty golfer and a pro where did those strokes come from? Or as you mentioned earlier, what's the value of hitting the ball twenty yards further. And for any of those questions, I didn't know the answer, I didn't know anybody else who knew the answer, and I didn't have the data
to answer it. So first step was trying to get data to then do the analysis. And so I developed a program called golf Metrics that would could be used
to collect and analyze amateur data. And unbeknownst to me, at the same time, the PGA Tour was starting to collect data with their shot Link system, and so they partnered with CDW and since two thousand and three, they've recorded every shot of every pro golfer in every one of the PGA Tour events, and so they have this massive amount of data and they wanted a way to use this data to better understand performance. And they thought their weakest stat was putting. In fact, they had three
putting stats. One was just counting putts. They realized that wasn't so good. So they also had putts per green and regulation, which very few people understood. And they also had had length of putts that were hold. So every time you sink a twenty foot or it adds twenty feet to your length of putts hold. Anyway, none of those three putting stats really gave a good picture of who was the best putter.
And so at the time that I was doing.
This analysis and they very nicely gave me access to the PGA Tour data, they also wanted a better putting stat and this thing, this work led to the strokes gained putting stat that the PGA Tour rolled out in May of twenty eleven.
On the strokes gained putting, you give a great example about Rory McElroy. Did you expand on that for us?
Well, if he was the player of the year in twenty twelve, he won a bunch of tournaments, he had the lowest scoring average, he won, he had almost every tournament he was in he was in in the top ten. So this was just a fantastic year twenty twelve for Rory McElroy. And then you take a look at his stats and he's not in the top fifty in driving, he's not in the top fifteen in greens and regulation, and he wasn't in the top fifty in in strokes
gain putting. So here you have the best player of the year who can't get the ball off the tee. He can't hit the green and he can't putt according to the stats, And there's this complete disconnect between the information provided by the stats and the performance that you're seeing on the course. And if you look at this through this new lens of strokes gain, you can exceed. You can see exactly why Rory McElroy had the twenty twelve that he did.
And I mean it's like, wait a minute, you just disproved yourself that now expand why tell me why that for you? That became heaven to have all this information? But how you can prove that he wasn't the best player, He just had the best year.
So in this measure called strokes gain driving, which measures how well he hit the ball off the tee on par fours and fives, he was ranked second in his approach shots meaning all shots starting outside of one hundred yards excluding driving, he was ranked second. He was ranked thirty fourth in a short game shots inside one hundred yards except for putts, and he was ranked seventy third and putting, so that was, you know, the weakest part
of his game. A short game was a little you know, both his putting and a short game were slightly above tour average, but outside one hundred yards he killed it. He was just phenomenal from outside one hundred yards. So he gained most of his strokes outside one hundred yards and strokes gained and kind of clearly shows where he was getting his advantage on the field.
So the age old addict of drive for show, putt for doe doesn't really hold up, does it.
Well not in this case.
I mean, he gained eighty five percent of his strokes on the field came outside one hundred yards and fifteen percent came from inside one hundred yards. But you know, it's it's it's different for different golfers, and when you average over the top ten twenty thirty forty golfers on tour, you'll find that kind of similar result. But within there, you look at a particular golfer and there's definitely there's definitely variation.
So it's it's true that.
Luke Donald is one, you know, has one of the best putting and one of the best short games in the world, and you can see that. You can see Steve Stricker has one of the best short games in the in the world. So everybody's a little bit different, but more often than not, it's it's the long game that separates the best pros from the average pros.
So the big drives really do make a.
Difference, absolutely.
And uh, you take a look at some of the you know, the best drivers in the game, and they would be like Bubba Watson or Dustin Johnson, and they hit the ball really far and they hit it pretty straight. So when you look at fairways hit, they're certainly down on the list, but they're straighter.
Than than than us, than us by far.
What's you know, I'm hitting the ball two thirty or two forty and I'm hitting you know, fifty percent of my fairways. They're hitting at three twenty and they're hitting sixty percent of their fairwys or something like that.
That's why we hate those guys.
Oh, I think that's why we love to watch them, right.
Right, exactly your example of Jason Day, I think everyone can relate to. And how does that compute?
And please give the example, right, if you pop the ball up and hit one hundred yards in the fairway counts as a fairway hit. You hit it three twenty in the fairway counts as a fairway hit. So they both look they both look the same but when you measure it on strokes gained. I unfortunately picked on Jason Day because it was such an unusual example. When at Kapalua on the I believe it was the eleventh hole. You know, he he hit a fat drive. I think
he was trying to drive the green or something. He swung so hard, but he hit it, hit so fat that it went just over one hundred yards, and in strokes gained, you can see he lost about seven tenths of a stroke on the field with that with that drive. So the key is, in order to compare driving with appro shots, with sand shots, with putting, you need a common scale. You can't measure drives in yards with putts
that are measured in strokes. So what strokes gain does is allow you to put all of these different shots on a common footing, so you can compare not only who's the best driver, but how does driving compare with a pro shots, short game shots and putting.
I need actually for the stats freaks out there, it was the thirteenth hole in twenty eleven.
Oh thank you, Okay.
Not a problem, because I dog eared that page as well. In all this, you know, going in background of all this, the dynamic programming. I thought was really fascinating explanation to help us get there. And as a professor of business, you must love that stuff.
Oh absolutely.
It's you can use this idea of you know, what's the quickest way to get to a goal? And it happens all the time in everyday life. And whenever you get into a car and you want to drive somewhere, you can press a button and it will tell you the shortest route to get to your destination. That's one example of how do you make multiple decisions in a way that satisfies an objective, in this case getting to your destination fast. But there's other examples in you know,
finance and investing. When you want to improve your investing performance so that you have enough money to retire, on what's the best way to invest over time so that you have an adequate amount in your retirement account. And the connection with golf is what's the quickest way to get to the hole? And the way you do that is you measure not in terms of yards or feet,
but you measure in terms of strokes. And the reason for that is one yard more on your drive isn't worth the same as getting a putt three feet closer to the hole, so not all three three foot gains are the same. But if you measure it in terms of strokes, then you can compare drives, approach shots, and puts.
But you need a tremendous amount of data to be able to it would be Is it hard to do it for yourself to figure this out?
No, it's not.
I mean you need a tremendous amount of data to figure out what the benchmark is or what you're comparing against. So in the example of Jason Day where he hit this unusually short te shot for himself, what you need to know is what was the PGA Tour average score on the tee and then what's the PGA Tour average score from his position in the fairway. And it turns out that on that shot he was four strokes away from the hole when he started.
And he was because it was a par four.
It was a it was an.
Average par four, so some par fours it would be more or less than that, but it was an average par four, and at the end of the shot, the PGA to were average from that position would be three point seven strokes. So he took one swing and he only got point three strokes closer to the hole, which meant, you know, he lost point seven And so you might not follow the math. But you know, if a PGA Tour player hits one hundred yard drive, you know, with a driver on a long par four, on a.
Par four, it's not funny. We all do this, we all do that.
So the funny part is Jason Day smiled after this, he laughed. Whereas the guys in my forest and after a shot like that are about to break their club over their knee. He shook it off and ended up up paring the hole. And that's That's one of the things that I'm so impressed with these PGA Tour pros, which is they not only hit better shots, but their mental game is better. They can forget about the bad
shots or laugh them off better. They practice better, they probably eat better, they work out better.
Yeah, but they're constantly traveling, they have to be in a different bed, they have different food all the time. It's not an easy life to be able to perform at that level when you have all these different factors weighing down on you.
Well, I think they do it all all the more impressive what they do. They're playing different courses. I have trouble enough playing you know, the same course over and over again. They're playing a different course every week. It's it's just amazing how how good they are. And those courses that they're playing aren't like our course. The greens are much harder, the rough is much thicker, and of course the holes are much longer.
I kind of get it once you start getting the decimals. I'm like, how did you get that? That's where I get lost. I'm not a math guy ever. I'm a recording engineer, and maybe I should be a math guy by doing that, But that's where I get lost. But that's what I loved about being able to read the book, because you really did give a lot of graphs and images, and you explain like a college professor. You explain it quite well. And that's what I really enjoyed about this book.
Well, well, I appreciate that, But one of the things I hope the readers will find is that this is simple. It's at the heart, it's just subtracting two numbers and to give you, to give you an idea if you knew nothing about strokes gain and I said, if you missed the two footer. How many strokes do you think you low lost? What would your answer be?
Two?
If you if you two putt from two feet, how much do you think you would lose to most of your fellow competitors if you had a two putt from two feet?
Oh to Mike, bet one one.
You would lose one. Right, That's exactly what strokes gain tells you. Oh you lost, you lost a stroke if you missed a two footer.
Okay, that's not that hard. So how about a thing it was for me?
I didn't ask the questions failed, Sorry, professor after class?
Oh, so about how about a thirty footer? So the PGA Tour average from thirty actually thirty three feet is two putts, but.
For us, So.
For us it's a little bit more. But suppose you're a PGA Tour player and you sink a thirty three footer one putt from thirty three feet, how much did you gain versus your competitors?
One?
Exactly what happens If you three putted from thirty three.
Feet one less, you lose, you lose, you lose one. And if you two putt, yeah, zero, Zero's that's all there is to it.
That's not that hard, is it. No?
But the difference is if you one putt from two feet, you gain or lose zero. If you one putt from thirty three feet you gain a stroke. So both are one putts, but one is better than the other. One is gaining on the field, the others staying even with the field.
Now that we've kind of gotten an overview of strokes gain putting strokes gained, how the golf metrics kind of work. But you've got to look at the book to get a full explanation for yourself. I want to figure out how we can make this work for us. And you know, yes there's tons of statistics from the tour, and yes it's fun to watch and see how they're using it. But on a Saturday, for ourselves, that doesn't help much, right, because we really cannot compare ourselves to the pros.
That's right.
You can use the same idea to compare yourself to a scratch golfer, or if your goal is to get from ninety to eighty, you can compare yourself to an eighty golfer. And this way of thinking, the strokes gained approach to measuring golf will will show where you're gaining or losing strokes to any player. So if your goal is to drop ten strokes, it will tell you where you're losing ten strokes to.
Your competitor or to your goal.
How is this impacted this information, Haws? This impacted your game?
Well, one of the things that I thought, I'm a thoughtful guy, and I'm doing all this analysis. It should be obvious to me, and it wasn't. So I will keep track of all my shots and enter it into this golf metrics program and I'll get reports out, and you know, I'd play, you know, two or three rounds and I'll remember some good shots and try and forget some bad shots. But at the end, when I get a report, it says I'm two shots worse this month than last month in my short game, and I go, really,
I thought I was paying attention. But when you have a report staring you in the face where you're messing up, I say, okay, I've got to go to the short game area and practice. Or if it's putting or if it's my iron shots, it will tell me. And it's just hard to ignore when you have the facts in front of your face. And so I've gone out and you know one you know, one week, I'll work on my short game because it needs it. The next week or two weeks after that, I'll work on my putting.
And so it really does to help to know where your your individual strengths and weaknesses are because it's hard to remember. It's hard to remember all the shots that you that you hit and they all matter, they all add up, and sometimes a couple of shots that you forgot about can really impact your score.
How do we how are we able to keep track? What's the method you use to keep track of this information so that you can analyze it later? What's the best How would you advise us to do that?
Well, one of the things that you can do is just say, you know, look at the average golfer and where do they gain or lose strokes. So, if, for instance, you want to work on your putting and you're trying to decide should I work on my short puts or should I work on my medium length puts or should I work on my long puts? Of course you should work on everything, but which do you think is the most critical putt distance?
If you had to pick a particular.
Foot four feet, eight feet twelve feet twenty five feet. Where do you think the average golfer loses more strokes to a scratch golfer.
I read the book, I would say that it's the five to ten foot range.
Five to ten feet, Yeah, so for amateur go that's pretty close. For amateur golfers, it's four feet. There's nothing magical about four feet if you want to say three to five feet, three to six or seven or eight feet. But what was surprising to me is how short the putts were that were the most critical, were the ones that most separated average golfers from scratch golfers. And there's two reasons for that. One is pretty simple, which is you have more four footers than you have ten footers.
And the other is that there's a skill difference between good putters and poor putters in the four foot range. So you may have a lot more one footers, but if everybody sinks their one footers, it doesn't matter. But not everybody sinks all their four footers, And so it has these two characteristics.
There's a lot of.
Them, and there's a lot to be gained from becoming better at them.
Yeah, and really, how many how many opportunities do we have to make one footers because most of the time you get one foot inside and people go, you're good, right, yeah, absolutely, So you don't even know. I have a friend that I do I won't I won't let him pick it up, and he's like, come on, i'd let you pick I said, yeah, but you may miss it.
Yeah, it's it's it's the it's the three, four and five footers that you that you pick up that can really give you a warped impression of what what your score really is. So you know, you're playing in a tournament you're not used to playing in a tournament, in a you know, club championship or a weekend match, and all of a sudden, people are taking tens on a hole because they can't pick up after a double bogie, or they can't pick up when they've got five feet.
Left right right. And I'll tell you one of the things that I walked away from this book that I think was very helpful for me is that I've noticed that if I'm having a poor day of putting, if I have multiple three putts in a round, that will affect every shot that I take. It will affect my attitude for the whole I'll just beat myself up. I may be hitting fairways and then greens and regulation I'm stroking the ball well, but my putting game that will impact how I feel during the day.
So I'd say a couple of things. One is that.
It's also true probably if you hit a drive out of bounds, that that's going to affect your attitude.
So it's not just putting.
But one way to look at it that I find helps me a little bit is if I miss innate foot putts, the first reaction is I lost a stroke. It was a birdie putt. I really wanted to get that birdie and I missed it. But when you miss innate footer, you're not losing a stroke. You're only losing about a half a stroke. Because nobody sinks all of their eight footers, and the pros only sink about half
of the eight footers. So in fact, and of course amateur golfer sink sink less than that, So if you miss an eight footer, you're only giving up a fraction miss stroke, and you should think not about, oh, I just missed that eight footer, but over the course of the round, you would hope to sink close to half your eight footers. But you just can't beat yourself up over one missputt. It's counterproductive because first of all, it's
not true. You're not losing a full stroke, and as you said, you don't want that to impact the next shot. Why should you have one missputt then lead to throwing away more strokes after that?
That doesn't make sense. Easier said than done.
Of course, of course, and now I can see that you know that it's my approach shots where I probably lose more stroke in anything.
And that's true for everybody.
It's high handicappers, low handicappers and NPGA tour pros.
And I think one of.
The reasons it's so hard to put your finger on that is that proximity to the hole is measured in feet, and if you could put your average approach shot three feet closer, it just doesn't sound like much. If your proximity is thirty feet and you improve it to twenty seven feet, you say, so what I was going to two putt from thirty feet, I'll two putt from twenty seven feet. It just doesn't sound like it's that big a deal. And that's just the wrong way to think
about it. And what I found in crunching the numbers is that it's the shots that are in the rough, just off the green that three feet closer they're now on the green that matters. The ten footers that become seven footers matter, the five footers that become two footers, they all matter. And so if you put your shots on average three feet closer to the whole, you pick up a lot of strokes on the field or on your competitors, or just on your your own score. So
approach shots are really really important. And so you know, the long term plan is make you know, for amateurs, if you can get better in one hundred to one hundred and fifty yard range, that's the that's the area that's most correlated with amateur scores.
Putting so much of it. You know it is important, it isn't important, but so many shots. It's so obvious that we're missing so many losing so many shots there because you're in this confined area and you're not making a lot of progress. Do most amateurs versus pros come come up short of the hole in their putting and does that have a significant impact?
Oh? Absolutely so.
I think one of the easiest ways for amateurs to improve is to focus more on the distance to the hole rather than the break. And I'm not saying you shouldn't think about the break. What I'm saying is that not all twenty footers are created equal. And even if you're pacing off your putts and you say I have a twenty foot putt, you still want to look at well, is it twenty foot in steeply uphill or is it twenty feet and slightly downhill? That matters a huge amount
in how hard you need to stroke the putt. And what you'll see between the best PGA Tour putters and average PGA Tour putters is the better putters are slightly more aggressive, and of course they have better distance control. And anybody can take a ten footer and make sure that they get it to the hole, But the key is not ramming them eight feet by. So you want to get it to the hole, but but not too
far by. So distance control on putting is one of the easiest ways that amateurs I think can lower their score. But it's not just pacing off your putts. It's also being very aware of how steep the green is.
Yeah, there was something here that kind of blew my mind when I saw and maybe maybe it's an error in the printing or something, but it talked about downhill putts. The steeper, the green, the farther the target should be beyond the hole.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
And I think really because I would think if it's a downhill putt, you want to like aim so it comes up all with short so you can let the hill, let gravity take over.
So that's very surprising, and I think I can I can explain the intuition behind it, which is on on downhill putts, it's harder to control distance. So I talk about shot patterns in the book, and just like you have shot patterns on your t shots your putts, you can imagine a shot pattern for your putts. And so since downhill puts are tougher than uphill putts, the shot pattern is bigger, okay for a downhill putt than an
equivalent distance uphill putt. So if your shot pattern is bigger, that means to get it to the hole, you've got to be a little bit more aggressive. You've got to set the target a little bit further beyond the hole in order to make sure you don't come up short.
Another way to.
Think about it, which maybe is even easier. If you have a ten foot uphill putt, you can be pretty firm with it and it's not going to roll too far by. But on a ten foot downhill putt, to make sure that you get that putt to the hole, you've got to be comfortable in letting it go to two and a half feet by again in order to
give it a chance to go in the hole. And it's much more important on ten footers to give it a chance to go in the hole then to lag it to the hole to make sure you don't three putts. So you know, from a ten foot range, you ought to be thinking how can I make this putt? Not how can I avoid a three putt?
Oh? Absolutely, but aiming past the hole, meaning if I'm aiming past the hole. Maybe I'm unique in this, but if I'm aiming past the hole, I'm going to hit it harder than if I was aiming at the hole.
Well, you want that if you're aiming at the hole, you'd leave fifty percent of your put short and that would be a disaster on time.
I'm talking about downhill. I'm talking about downhill.
Even downhill right, if you aim at the hole, you don't want to leave fifty percent of them short. So I actually don't think about it in terms of how far beyond the hole I'm aiming. I think about it as if I have a ten foot downhill putt, I want to hit this hard enough so at least nine
out of ten get to the hole. I don't want to leave any more than ten percent of those puts short, so I want to be I don't think if you know, as my target won two three feet pet on the whole, I think of I want to get nine out of ten of these putts to the hole and how hard do I have to hit it to make sure that's
the case. And what you'll find with many amateurs, and you know, worse putters more so than good putters, is they can leave thirty forty of their ten foot or short and that's really giving up strokes.
Yeah, and you're familiar with aim point, I am, yeah. And we did a couple episodes on aim point with with Mark Sweeney last year. Is is that what you use is that accurate?
So I don't use am point, but I know what it's about and I.
Know how they come up with the the aim point charts, and I have my own system where I can kind of replicate their their results. What I what I really like about the aim point way of thinking is that it focuses on how much putts break depending on where the putt starts relative to the fall line. So clearly, if you have a straight downhill or straight up hill putt, there's there's no break. Side hill putts break a lot, but downhill side hill putts break a lot more than
uphill side hill putts. And so if you imagine where your putt starts relative to a clock face or relative to the fall line, it really helps you with what line should you should you start this put on.
So I think it's.
Really critical for golfers not to think in terms of just how much does this break, but where's the fall line and where is my putts starting relative to the fall line, because that will ultimately tell you how much break you need to play.
Another version, vector putting putting those.
Angles well, vector victor putting is is basically identical to aim point. There it's it's it's the same and they have the same charts and they use the same Uh, it's actually the same number. So vector putting is actually no different than aame point.
But one of the things that I noticed in your book that blew my mind is that if you're you know, I generally look for the apex, people go, oh, just you know, one cup outside, and I'm like, no, I don't look at the cup. I'm looking at where the break would be and then where it's going to make the turn. But your stats are saying that you've got to aim above the apex there or it's going to fall below the hole.
Yeah, that's uh, blew me away, Absolutely true. And you look at the data and this is not new to this book. It's it's it's been around for a while and it hasn't changed. Amateur golfers miss way more than fifty percent of their putts on the low side of the hole. So the question is why is that. So there's several possible explanations, but one is if you aim at the apex, you will miss low.
And why is that?
Because the apex is where you know, it's the furthest point or the highest point on this curved path toward the hole. But that usually happens in the somewhere near the middle of the putt. In order to get the putt to go into the hole, you've got to start it higher because gravity will immediately start pulling the putt down.
It will immediately start braking. So to hit the if your target is the apex, to hit the apex, you've got to start it higher than the apex because that first half of the putt it's going to be breaking.
Before it gets there.
It's not like this putt goes straight and then it takes a left turn at the apex. It doesn't do that. It breaks from the instant that you hit it. And that's the physics of it. And that implies that you've got to start the putt higher than the apex in order to hit the line that you visualizing into the hole.
That's what made Paula Kramer's seventy five foot are so amazing because the amount of break that that thing had was just remarkable.
And it had some speed going into the hole.
Oh yeah, I mean the hole a fairly got it to the top of the hill there and then you saw it turn and just take off.
If the hole hadn't been there, that would have been ten feet by and there's probably nothing she could have done about it. But that's also an example where you don't want to lag that one up to the hole. She gave it a chance to go in, and sure enough, it was really an exciting, an exciting end too.
That tournament amazing, it was so amazing. Let's talk about strategy and how we can be more strategic in our game by using this information.
So one, we already talked about strategy in putting in terms of how conservative or aggressive you want to be, and it turns out that amateur golfers tend to be too conservative in their in their putting, but when you move off the green, it's generally the opposite. That amateurs tend to be too aggressive in their in their shot selection. And by that I mean that they don't they don't pay enough heed to the to the hazards that are
out there. You've got to give the hazards, uh plenty of respect, and most amateurs.
Don't give me an example.
So the example that I have in the book, and there's other examples, but the example I have in the book is where you have out of bounds on one side of a hole and the other side is just rough or not as as much of a penalty, and so you know if you hit the ball out of bounds, your strokes gained is minus two, right, because you're going to tee it up hitting three from the same spot, So you basically have used two shots and you haven't made any progress to the hole, so out of bounds
you will lose two shots.
That's a huge penalty.
If you hit it in the rough, you have somewhere between a tenth and a quarter of a shot penalty for hitting the ball in the rough rather than the fairway, So you're trading off a huge penalty for going out of bounds with a small penalty for hitting in the rough.
What does that tell.
You you should do, which is you should shade the t shot your target toward the rough and away from this huge hazard which is out of bounds.
And most golfers realize that.
Intuitively, but they don't take into an account nearly enough, and they hit way more balls out of bounds than they should. So even with the same swing, I don't have to change anything about your swing. You don't have to go to a pro for a lesson. If you just take a more conservative, conservative line off the tee when there's these hazards in play, you can shave a lot of strokes off.
Your score, and when can we be aggressive off the tee versus being more conservative?
Well, if you're if you're too conservative. So I've heard this strategy of you know, it's a long part four, let's instead of hitting a driver, let's take a five iron. Then you hit another five iron, then you'll be one hundred yards away and then take a wedge from there
and you're going to do it worse to bogie. So that's an example of being way too conservative because you can look at the data and do the analysis and you find out that on a long part four, if you give up that many yards with a five iron, you'll be losing a ton of strokes. It's just not worth giving up fifty sixty yards by hitting an iron instead of a driver. And amateurs often aren't that much more accurate with the shorter clubs than they are with
the longer clubs. So you know, the expression goes, it's better to be long and crooked than short and crooked.
Yeah, all right, So here's something that I do strategically, and maybe you can clarify if I'm doing this the right way or if there's a better way to do it. Let's say, so on a par five, what I try to do is, you know, on a part four, I'm just going to drive the ball either with my driver
or my my three wood. But on a par five, what I'm going to try to do is get my second shot into a space where I'm the most comfortable, which is probably either one hundred or one hundred and twenty five yards, okay, or ninety or one hundred and twenty five yards. So let's say so, let's say that one hundred and twenty five yards is my nine iron, okay. So so to me, it's like that's the club I'm
most confident with. That's the club that I'm the most comfortable and feel that I can, you know, give myself a great opportunity to get close to the pin. So if my drive leaves me two hundred and fifty out and my playing partner his ball lands right next to me, my playing partner will take his three wood and hit it as hard and far as he can and lay and comes up thirty yards short. And he's not that good at thirty yards in, so he'll get from thirty yards and then he'll take two more shots to get
onto the green. And then he may have to do you know, we'll just say he gets two putts, so he bogies the hole. Where for me, at twoin fifty, I'll take my nine iron and hit it twice because I know I cannot reach the green at two hundred and fifty yards away, so I'll hit one hundred and twenty five yards, and if all goes well, I'll take out the rangefinder and say, oh perfect, I'm one hundred
and twenty five yards to the pin. And then I hit that third shot and I'm within let's call it the ten foot range, and I'm a very happy guy, and hopefully I can get that birdie. Is that statistically? Is that the way to approach that?
So if.
You are this anomalous golfer that is better from one hundred and twenty yards than thirty yards, you should follow your strategy. What I found and looking at amateur data, is there are very few golfers that are better from one hundred or one hundred and twenty yards than they are from thirty. Almost everybody would be better off hitting the ball closer. I didn't say everybody, I said almost everybody. So if you have the chip yips, if you hit a thirty yard shot fat one time and you scull
it over the green the next time. Then that tells me two things. One is, yeah, you don't want to hit to thirty yards. You want to lay back to where you've got a full swing or you've got a comfortable swing. And the second thing it tells me is you ought to get a lesson because you should be much better from thirty yards than one hundred or one hundred and twenty yards. Every tour pro is better from thirty yards than one and one hundred and twenty yards.
Almost every amateur that I look at is better or from thirty yards than they are from one hundred to one hundred and twenty yards. The data is crystal clear when you took when you talk about averages, if you
talk about most ninety golfers or most eighty golfers. But there there are exceptions, and if you're if you're the exception, then that that points out that you're losing a ton of strokes by not improving your short game, and you've got to go take a lesson and work on it and get better, because that would be an easy way for you to drop strokes off your score.
But as an amateur who doesn't get a tremendous amount of time to practice, I find that taking full strokes, I have more confidence with my full strokes than I do taking you know, short strokes, as a thirty yard shot would be versus pulling out a wedge from sixty five yards solo sewage.
So let's let's change your example slightly. Unless you take it a par four and you hit a drive, and you hit your second shot, and you come up thirty yards short in the fairway, and I give you this free option, you can pick up the ball, walk sixty yards back and now you have a ninety or one hundred yard shot from the fairway. Would you do that if I allowed you to do that for free?
Yes?
Okay, then I think, yeah, I actually, I actually I've been working a lot on my short game lately, but I think that, Yeah, I think that I'd like do you thank you?
I think I would do that.
Okay, Well, you again, you are not a typical amateur golfer.
Because no, I'm not. I don't think I am.
So if you take a look at how often golfers hit the green, amateur golfers hit the green from one hundred yards or so it's typically much less than.
Fifty percent, say, whereas.
From thirty yards it's a lot more than fifty percent. And I think, you know, many people have in their mind, Oh, I'm one hundred yards away, it's just a wedge or a nine iron, I'll put it on the green. Nine out of ten times, amateur golfers from one hundred yards put the ball on the green less than half the time. And so you also got to tell me that from thirty yards they must put the ball on the green
less than half the time. Also, otherwise it's not it's not worth it, or it would be worth it to walk the uh to walk back you know, pick up your ball and walk walk backwards. And I just don't see that in the data.
Thirty yards is a little chip shot.
You can you can if there's no bunker in between, you could take out a putter.
All right, let's call it forty yards. Then thirty yards maybe would be the right example. But I can't. I can remember so many times going, oh my god, it took me two shots to get yeah, four hundred and fifty yards, and it took me four shots to get the next forty You know.
That's right.
So if again, if that's the case, one of the things that this strokes Gained analysis would show is that you're incredibly weak and you're throwing away strokes from forty yards. You better go practice that area of your game because it shouldn't be that hard.
It's not that hard of a shot.
And for most people, even most amateurs, it's not that hard of a shot, meaning it's not harder from forty yards than it is from one hundred yards. So again, I know people that are like that, but they're in the minority. And like I said, that's the If that's true of you, then it's an easy place.
To focus on what I need to practice.
Yeah, to improve your game? Yeah, to lower your score.
You weren't really laughing at me, were you, Mark, Yes, you are, Okay, I'm curious.
Maybe that's not the right way to say it.
It's it's it's then obvious that that's where you should work on, right, right, Right, that's probably a better way to say it.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, And this is and to me, that's the point of this book is to figure out what do I need to work on to drop those ten strokes?
Where?
Where are those ten strokes? Going, are they where they coming from exactly? And it's and statistically is it mostly approach shots?
It's mostly shots outside of one hundred yards And if you want to break that down even more, it's mostly the approach shots, so full swinging iron shots for most people, or if you're short hit or sometimes one hundred and fifty yards shot is a hybrid or a seven wood or a five wood, and.
Those you know, getting the.
Where of those balls on the green, getting those balls that are on the green a little bit of the hole is where you can you can save a lot of shots.
I think the thing that when when you know, when I talked about someone, we're two hundred and fifty yards out and they're just going to hit it as hard and far as they can. I don't think that they necessarily take into account all the trouble that they could get into, you know, how aggressive they should be. Do I really need to hit the ball as far as I can here because I'm I'm opening the door for problems.
Yeah, Well, you want to hit the ball as far as you can, taking into account the hazards. So you don't want to hit the ball, you know, three hundred yards if that's where the fairway gets the narrowest, that brings fairway bunkers into player, that brings water out of bounds into play for sure. So it's not just you know, bomb and gouge or grip it and rip it. You've got to pay attention to the hazards. And you know, going back again to the you know, the forty yard
fat shot. You know, one of the things that I recommend amateurs do is take a look at their awful shots. So in around you'll have one of those where you hit it fat, you skull it, you know, the ball goes nowhere, or you miss a two footter. You can identify those shots that really lose a lot to your score and then see whether that's better or worse than the average golfer for your handicap level, for your average score, and then identify those areas where you need to improve.
And many golfers if they got out of a bunker in one shot, if when they're in the hay or in the woods, they get out of trouble in one shot, rather than trying to pull off the miraculous rescue and then hitting it out of bounds, you know, falling up a bad shot with a worse shot. Reducing the number of awful shots is another kind of easy way to shave strokes off your game, or at least give you an idea of what you need to practice.
One of my all time favorite lines that I continue to tell myself never follow a bad shot with a stupid shot.
I like that. That's great.
I thought you're going to say, bad shot with the bad shot, but that's very good. Never follow a bad shot with a stupid shot is great advice.
Put in the book and talk about golf smarter. Don't care about me. Talk about two ingredients to making your decision. Things are the factors? What are the main things statistically speaking, what are the main things we should be thinking about when we're trying to decide which club to hit?
So which club to hit? The first thing is you want to know your club distances? And yeah, it's absolutely critical. And if that also means when you're sixty yards away, what is my sixty yard swing if it's not a full swing? What is my forty yard swing if it's not a full swing. And it's also you know not only your club distances, but it's your carry distance. So depending on where you play, if you get a lot
of roller or not. Then a two hundred yard shot may be one hundred and ninety yards of carry, or it may be one hundred and seventy yards of carry. You know, one with ten yards of roll, the other with thirty yards a roll. And if you have a hazard to clear and it's two hundred yards away, a lot of amateurs will say, oh, I'll take out my two ten club, But that may not be right because you need to keep track of not only your club distances, but what are your carry distances.
And plus they think they have a two to ten club and it really is one hundred and eighty five.
Yeah, there's so many people that you know, how far did I hit that drive? It must have been two fifty two sixty And when you look at it and you know plot it, it's you know, to ten. And so many people hit the ball shorter than they think they do for a number of reasons. So knowing your club distances is certainly a good place to start. But when it's a question of strategy, I think of, you know, the main ingredients are what does your shot pattern look like?
By that, I mean not how well does my best shot go? But if I hit ten or twenty or fifty shots. What would that distribution of shots look like if I plotted it on this particular hole. And you need to think about your target as moving around your shot pattern, and so one ingredient is what your shot pattern, what is your likely miss going to be? The other ingredient is what are the features of the hole and
where are the hazards? You know, how wide is the fair way, where are the bunkers, where's the water, where's the of bounds? And you want to put those two ingredients together, your shot pattern with the features of the hole in order to decide how aggressive or how conservative you should be. And clearly, if it's a long part four and it's wide open, you can grip it and
rip it. But on other holes you need to be more more conservative to make sure you don't have one of those awful shots that go out of bounds.
I'm sure that you're you've been witnessed to this, You've a thousand times because we all have. And I'm curious to what your reaction to it is. Maybe not verbally to yourself, but you may say something when you walk up to a t box and your partner says, I hit it in the water here every time.
Right, Yeah, when when when that happens, you got to say you got to step back and say, well, what can I do differently to to avoid that?
And and they pull out the same club that they always use in.
The right there's there's there's another manifestation of that. That's one of the you the fun things that I've gotten to do playing with some club pros and some PGA tour pros, and you can see them from one hundred and fifty yards and sometimes they'll hit a club that's two or three clubs different than they did on the last shot from one hundred and fifty yards, whereas most of my friends that I play with one hundred and
fifty yards is a seven iron. It could be downhill, it could be uphill, it could be downwind into the wind, and they might change from a seven iron maybe to a six or maybe to an eight, but they wouldn't think about changing more than that. And the good players know how to adjust, you know more, and they typically take all those factors into account and they're willing to move, you know, one, two or three clubs away from their normal club from that distance.
Yeah, I played band in Dunes last year, and luckily we had caddies because there were shots where it was a four club win right in our face. So you know, it's like usually i'd hit a nine iron here, pull out your you know, your three wood, you may reach it.
And if you didn't have that county there, you'd say, ah, nine iron, there's a lot of win in my face.
Maybe you go to a seven right.
Maybe maybe exactly, and it's uphill and it's uphill right?
What is? What is the This to me is interesting because I live next to a country club that I'm not a member of, and I like playing different courses a lot. But country club players, I think that their handicap may be not representative of their game because they get so comfortable with this course, so confident they just know what to do. But if you take them out to another course that they're not familiar with, their game changes.
Oh absolutely.
I think it takes you know, at least two rounds and maybe more in order to learn a course. And one of the fun things I've I've gotten to do is go out with the PGA Tour pros on the uh, you know, the Monday or Tuesday of a tournament where they're preparing for the tournament, and they and their caddies will map out the course, see what's changed from last year, and they really develop a strategy to attack the course.
Whereas I remember.
It, you know, playing at Bend and Dune's, you know, with with the caddy and I didn't know where to hit it or what club to hit. And he goes, ah, you know, just stame there, which so I did, and you know, I took out you know, he saw I had a driver in my hand, and I hit it exactly where he said and it went into the trees. Because he looked at me and said, oh, he's not going to hit the ball more than two hundred and thirty yards. And I hit it two hundred and fifty
yards into the trees. And I was so mad because they hit a perfect shot and now I'm in the woods. And that's a case of just not knowing the course and that can really add up two three four shots easily. So having a yardage book, mapping out the course pros do it because it's their livelihood if you're just playing another course for fun. That's why when I go to a place like Banded Nun's, I would much rather play the same course five times than to play five different courses.
Yeah, I sometimes I find it to be an advantage of you know, just tell me my target line here. I've never played this course. Just tell me which direction you know, and and you know, if I don't want to go all the way, I don't want to be too aggressive. That I don't have these preconceived notions of what has happened in the past, so I can just relax a little more.
Oh absolutely, I think that's that's the goal, which is you you approach each shot with what's my target?
What do I need to do?
And you just get up and that's your entire focus is hitting the shot you know in that in that direction, with with that club, and having having a good caddy, which you can get at a lot of courses, is really helpful when you're playing, you know, a new course that you're not you're not familiar with.
Well, Mark, this has been a graduate level education. I truly appreciate your time. The book. This is Mark Brody. It's b R O A d I E. The website is every Shot Counts dot com. Just give you a little more about the book and the book. Every Shot Counts using the revolutionary strokes gained approach to improve your golf performance and strategy. It's available, and it is an important book to have in your library because it's going
to change the way you think about your game. And it's a necessary change in your thought process because they're doing it on the tour too. And if we if we buy balls, if they play in the tour, if we buy equipment they play in the tour, then you should be thinking like tour players.
Do you agree? Oh? Absolutely agree that.
As I mentioned, the PGA's war players not only hit better shots, but they but they think better. And I hope that this book gives you a little bit of a clue or insight into into how they think.
And uh, it's it's meant for the average golfer. It's not meant for the graduate student of golf.
So I think anybody can can read this and get a little bit of value and hopefully a little bit of fun and a couple of good stories out of it.