Golf Smarter number three hundred and eighty six, published on May twenty eight, twenty thirteen.
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A fellow teammate of mine recently who in the PGA appear, and he came out to watch a friend of mine play. We're playing for Simmons, and we handed him a Persimmons driver to hit a shot, and he hit it about two hundred and ten yards. I mean, he just couldn't hit it at all. But with the modern driver that's ten ounces or eleven ounces and it's forty six inches long and has a giant titanium head on it, he can just sort of slap at it with his hands and get one hundred and five miles an hour of
club hits. Bee knocked the thing out there two hundred and eighty yards.
And you don't like this.
No, I don't like this. It's dumbing down. The game. The thing that's been eliminated from the game has been having to hit long irons, and that's how golf courses are designed. But they're great architects designed these courses and they said, there's ten par fours on a golf course.
So the golf course is designed to have typically three long par fours meaning two three and four iron for appro chat, and then they're going to have four mid range five six and seven irons for a pro schot and then three short part fours eight nine oher edge. So the reason that they do that is to test the skill set of the professional player, the top amateur player on a professional championship course. The player has to show their ability to play long irons, mid irons, and
short irons. That's golf.
Today's equipment could be hurting your game with John Lagerts of this is.
Golf Smarter, sharing tips and insights from golfers and golf professionals to help lower your score. It's worked for your host.
Welcome to the Golf Smarter podcast.
John, Thanks for having me out.
I appreciate you coming out to a studio here and staring out at uh at the Marine Country Club and talking about taking a little walk on the fairway there.
It's beautiful. It's a beautiful place.
Idiots. You know what I recently discovered. And I've been asking a lot of people and I'm no one's ever done this, And I'll ask you, have you ever walked on a golf course barefooted?
Yes?
Wow?
That was part of my training at one point actually, how so, Yeah, I was working with I had a mental teacher that we were working that side of when I was on tour, and he had never played golf before, but he felt that it was important for me to experience getting more grounded while I was playing. And he was kind of more of a spiritualist in a sense, so interesting, and he would we'd go out t off at six in the morning. He just walk around with me and play barefoot. And he wanted me to.
Oh he wanted you to play barefoot?
Yes, yeah, he wanted me to feel connection to the earth that way as I was walking.
And it was that a valuable lesson for you, because I just found it's like just walking out on the on the on a fairway, it's luxurious. I mean the grass, it's yeah.
I meaning to do this when I was a kid. My dad had nice lawns around the house, so you know, I would walk around barefoot. So it brought that back to me. And yeah, it's it helped me feel something
maybe that I wasn't really tuning into before. And I think later on, when I started getting more technical with my swing and that sort of thing, I started to understand ground pressures and ground forces and and Bradley and I spent a lot of time working on those concepts with the ABS students or Advanced Ball Striking students.
And that is your that's your.
Academy, our website, Yeah.
Advanced ball Striking dot com.
Spall Striking dot com.
Yeah, And I'm fascinated. So you were working with a mental coach during the process or before you got into heavy part of your mechanics. I mean, where did you go first with that?
When I came I came out of as a youth. I was one of the early prodigies of a book called The Golfing Machine.
A lot of people are familiar with that, sure show on that.
And I did that for all through junior golf, college golf, and then my first year as a professional playing on the Australian Tour. But I quickly realized that that technique that I was being taught wasn't going to cut it at that level the guys that were the great players of that time. This was sort of at the end of the personmon age. I got to play against you know, Greg Norman, Nick Faldo, you know, these guys in the late eighties when you were still hitting per Simon.
And and they playing in the Australia.
And yeah, playing in the Australian Open, and you know, the PGA down there, and I was just a young rookie and you know, standing on the driving range and listening to the sound of contact, impact of what these guys were doing compared with the little golf machine swing that I had that was all kind of based on kind of a hand throw centrifugal force, kind of a swinging what we would call a swinging technique, wasn't I
could tell that wasn't really going to cut it. So I had to make some changes if I wanted to win on, you know, at that level. So I just went home and I went back to my teacher and said, I don't think this is going to work. Although I was a pretty good player, I mean I was making cuts and that sort of thing. But I mean I was a long ways away from being able to win, you know, to go that low on those courses down there that were tight long, you know, really tough greens
are super fast. I mean, it was just much more difficult than a lot of the stuff that was going on over here.
So it sounds interesting that you're saying that getting to the tour and winning on the tour are different beasts.
Yeah, absolutely, because in college golf, you know, I I won a couple of times at the you know, collegiate levels, and All American that sort of thing. Okay, Yeah, And we had a really good team and Kevin and Kevin Sutherland a lot of people might know that name from the PJ twos on the team with me and his younger brother David who played on the PGA Tour, and Tim loss a lot was another good player, and so myself and another guy named Doug Harper, and that was
we had five All Americans on our team. We went to the NC to a championship, so you know, you don't see that very often.
That's pretty awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, the difference of getting on the tour and succeeding.
And winning on yeah, so being able to win at the college level and being able to win at the pro level. I mean it was a big, you know, big leap. In college, you could shoot maybe three or four under and win a tournament, you know, and on you know, to of course, let's say like Pasa Tiempo or something here would be like a world class per
simon track. You go down to Australia and now you're playing that caliber course like you Alster mckensey layouts and set up for tournament conditions with tight pharaoh's and long ruff or you know, fast, super fast greens, and guys are shooting you know, twelve under or fourteen under on courses that are you know, just feel like they're impossible
to shoot those kind of scores. I remember playing in the Australian Open at Royal Melbourne and you know, Greg Norman shoots back to back sixty six's and I just thought, I thought to myself, I mean, there's not even six birdies out there, you know. If the greens were so fast and it's windy and it was just so hard. I mean I shot up pair of seventy threes or something and played really well. I mean made the cut by,
you know, four or five shots easily. I played really good and I'm and I'm seeing a pair of sixty six is up there, going wow, that's that's another level. That's something that's and what is it? I mean, how yeah, well what you know, so that kind of that kind of golf. You know, Peter Senior another great player that was winning down there, and I mean these guys, it was just a different sound when they struck the ball. But that sound is being created by something, by something
in physics, you know, it's something different is happening. And I had a high speed camera, a ten thousand shutter frame camera at the time, and which was not everybody had those back then, and I would I would set it up in front of myself and then behind me might be a guy like Peter Senior or somebody, and then they didn't know that I was kind of filming them, you know, like see like I'd get out of the way,
like you know, go change clubs or something. And but I I put together some nice footage and also got some great footage of Mo Norman up in Canada when I played up there, and he let me film them.
Yeah, well I read that on the website, and you said that you promised him you'd never show it.
Yeah, and I still have. Like, I mean, I'll show it to people, but I'm I'm not going to post it on YouTube and all that stuff. It's just something special, you know. But anyway, yeah, getting back to that, So I started to study what was going on, and I could see what was happening with the shaftlex and these guys were holding shaft flex all the way to impact. And there's a difference between a guy that's timing the
shaft into impact. They are, in other words, they are trying to time the straightening of the shaft so in other words, it flexes a transition and then it starts to unflex and you're trying to time it so that the shaft ends up straight at impact. And that's what we call swinging technique, and that's what most people do. But they're really great strikers, you know, you're Ben Hogan, people like that that are holding shaft flex all the
way to impact. And again, you can't get confused by looking at power Golf and seing that where the pictures in the nineteen forty eight book, or where the shaft is flexing the wrong direction that we had to do with the camera lenses at that time. There's a distortion of rolling shutter and that sort of thing. It's a that those are not accurate and people are still confused by that to this day. But that actually wasn't happening.
It was actually the shaft was actually flexing the other direction because of the camera, so it would be flexing back, not forward. You couldn't hit the ball of the shaft. But history it was so that book's still there are still confuses people to this day, and I still get
questions on that on the site. But anyway, so yeah, I really realized that that was one of the things that was causing the ball to sound differently because when the energy is held in the shaft and you've got a pre stressed club shaft coming into impact, that's stored energy. In other words, what happens is the club head it doesn't decelerate as much from the forces of impact as it would if the shaft has already lost it. It's stored energy and it's just straight and now it's just
a momentum strike. It's the momentum of the clubhead, of the weight of the clubhead and that's how most people play golf, but there's a different way of doing it that these great strikers have figured out, and that's how to hold shaffles all the way to impact. And that's basically the core direction that the advanced ball striking moves the students towards. We show the students how to do that, and it's a little bit of work.
But once you yeah, it sounds like it's a lot of work.
Well, it depends. It depends on the player if it's already a good player.
Yeah.
Like you know, like Brad Hughes, you know, came to me and we had known each other from playing on the tour, but he'd come across some of my thoughts on the game on a website that I'd been involved with, and he contacted me and just said, you know, I want to come up and visit you. And so we just he came up here and we spent a week together and it didn't really take long for him to get him back to striking the ball well again because he had a lot of the the core things there.
We just need to get as muscle strength back up because the lightweight gear that everybody's playing, it's it's like swing cancer. It slowly kills your swing over time because you lose the muscle tone. It's just like going to the gym. If you in the preciminage, guys were swinging you know, fourteen, fifteen, even sixteen ounce drivers, and now everybody's got a ten eleven ounce driver. So right away, oh wow, I hit this really far. It's light and it has a big head, and I don't have to
worry about, you know, missing the ball again. Swing as hard as I want at it, and I get all this speed. I can hit it a mile. But over time, your muscles lose a little bit of their tone because you're not swinging a heavier club. So it's just like going to the gym and working out, and then you don't work out for a year, Well you don't. All of a sudden you're not as strong as you were, so you need to the heavier gear. People don't like it at first, like, oh it's too heavy, it's shafts
are too stiff. But if you practice with it and train with it, it's just like going to the gym. You get stronger. And if you look at the great ball strikers, they're all pretty strong, like certainly in the forums, and you see these big forearms, and it's putting forearm rotation, adding that into the equation in a big way actively, so you're actively striking it with forearm rotation. I mean, Hogan talked about this and five lessons and briefly, but
it's there. But why why do all these great strikers have big forearms if it wasn't necessary, you know, if it's just a passive throw of the hands and the impact like you know most people are teaching, then you wouldn't see that. But I don't think it's a coincidence that you see all these you know Snead and Hogan and Nelson and George Knudsen and you know Moe and Peterson, you know Norman, like all these guys had you know, guns, Tom Watson, right, I mean you had strong forearms, you know,
Nicholas Palmer, you know where do I stop? Right?
Right?
Trevino even right. You don't see too many people with thin, little weak forearms being great ball strikers.
Today. You're seeing guys in phenomenal golf shape or just phenomenal shape. Yeah, Tiger's led the way on that. It seems like he's a completely different body than the old school players.
Yeah, but then you know you have a guy like Cabrera, right, just one of the Masters. There's a guy, doesn't you know, It doesn't look like he walked out of the fitness van. Yeah, so there's something else going on there. And to be honestly, that's the first time, you know, in the last well since I started following golf a little bit again, that's the first time I've seen a guy really hit it good coming down the stretch hmm, you know, and hitting it straight and hitting it stiff and look like he
really had control over it. I mean, this year's Masters, that was really impressive of what Cabrera did, I thought, But he looks like a guy that just walked out of the sixties. Like, yeah, I feel like I can hand him. I could hand him a set of per Simmon and little blades and he just go and wipe everybody out. I mean, I think he'd win a lot more if it was if golf was played back in the old way.
You you come off kind of like a throwback you. I mean, we were talking about sound recording a little while ago before we started this interview, and you're talking about tubes and listening to vinyl, and now you're talking about per Simmons and you're not that old of a guy. I mean, you're much longer than I am. But you seem to have this love of the way it used to be.
Well, it's what I have is a love for quality.
Okay.
So if quality is better now than I love that. I mean I'm not a throwback. I just like quality. I mean, we talked a little bit about music, but you know, I think anyone that knows music understands the vinyl records sound better than digital recording. I mean, you can go on and on about that. That's a whole other com So is.
The quality of golf, And that's a multiple question. Is quality of golf or is it quality of golf equipment? Or is it quality of golflers.
The quality of ball striking, I would say, okay, And here's how you tell. Like, if you take a modern player, Well, you can't dig these guys out of the grave and see how they would do with the modern gear. That's not possible. But you can hand the modern players the old gear and see how they would do, and I would say that they don't do nearly as well as the players in the past, because it's a different game
because it's a different equipment. So if you hand a modern player a set of Persimmon woods and a blot of golf ball that spins at a much higher rate, so it's much more difficult, difficult to control. If you're not playing well, it's easier to access tight pin placements
and that sort of thing. If you're really good and you can control the spin of the ball, you can hit it into the green and spin it left or spin it right, and a lot of this has been a lot as the shot making being able to curve the ball where the golf ball holds its curvature all the way into the green. So basically what's happening now is the ball goes up, it curves to the apex and falls straight down, and you don't have the ball
curving nearly as much as in the Blotta age. So I would say that the players now are not as good because every time I've handed you know, a young player of per Simons, say try and hit this, they can't even hit it at all. I mean, a fellow teammate of mine recently who is a you know in the PGA up here and he came out to watch a friend of mine play. We're playing Per Simmons, and we handed him a personmon driver to hit a shot, and he hit it about two hundred and ten yards.
I mean, he just couldn't hit it at all. But with a modern driver that's ten ounces or eleven ounces and it's forty six inches long and has a giant titanium head on it, can just sort of slap at it with his hands and get one hundred and five miles an hour a club hit speed, knock the thing out there two hundred and eighty yards.
And you don't like this.
But with a persimmon, no, I don't like this because it's dumbing down the game. In other words, if you're if you're a great ball striker, then you should be able to do it the old way. You should be able to do it that way. And now if you if you take the modern gear and add that into it, then then that's a whole nother argument. But I want to see that a guy can still do it the old way. He's not using it as a crutch or as a handicap. When you watch, you know, some of
the old footage. I mean some of those Shells matches are great to watch because you can see what those guys were doing back then. And you know, there's a lot of really impressive stuff. I mean, people have seen the Hogan and Sneed match. Of course, that's great stuff. I mean, you know, but the thing that's been eliminated
from the game has been the long iron play. You know, having to hit long irons, and that's how golf courses were designed, right, So the great architects designed these courses and they said, okay, we're going to have we're going to have there's ten par fours on a golf course, right, typically par seventy two, you know, so the par fours
of the heart of the golf course. So the golf course is designed to have typically three long par fours meaning two three and four iron for approach shot, okay, and then they're going to have four mid range five six and seven irons for approach shot, and then three
short par fours eight nine oer wedge. So the reason that they do that is to test the skill set of the player, of the professional player, the top amateur player on a professional championship course, the player has to show their ability to play long irons, mid irons and short irons.
That's golf, but today it's driver wedge. Well on the.
Tour, yes, of course. You know what's happening now is the players are not being properly tested, so they're hitting I'm seeing guys hit mid irons into.
Par fives right crazy.
So what are they doing on par fours? Well, even the longest par fours they're hitting. I mean, guys are still hitting short irons and even the longest par fours at times a lot of mid irons. But to me, the great thing about the great ball strikers of the past was their ability to play two irons, three irons, one iron from the fairway into a par four and be able to shape a ball into the green and hold it on a green that was designed to accept
that kind of a shot. And when I look at the Masters, which we just saw recently here, and if you look at the AT's say ten and eleven, those are you know the famous holes, Well those were those are long par fours that were meant to accept long iron shots, which means a lower trajectory. So in the old days, the guys were kind of bumping them into that green like they'd hid into the front part of the green. They'd skip, But you didn't see a guy backing the ball up on the green. I mean it
would it would. It would come in and it would land and then it would kick forward. And you were coming into those holes with a lower trajectory shot. Now I'm seeing guys coming in with eight irons that are just throwing it at the flag and stopping the ball on the green, you know, backing them up on the green. That's not how the hole was designed. I mean, Jones and McKenzie would be spinning in their graves if they knew that that was going on. They would not be
happy about that. And it's disrespectful to the game. Wow, it's disrespectful to the game. It's disrespectful to the history of the game. And what it does is it makes the It trivializes the efforts of the great players of the past, you know, and they look back and they say, oh, the old footage or whatever. But the other thing about the masters is those greens were never meant to be that that fast either. I don't think could the undulating
of the slope, undulations of the slope the greens. If you go back and look at the old footage they they were putting like a public course of slow greens or something, and that's how it was designed really to play that way. So it's kind of turned into something else. But what happens when you do that, is it when you change the game, you change the rules or the equipment rules or their requirements for equipment. Then the past is now no longer relevant. Really, it just becomes, you know,
a novelty of the past. And I think that's sad. You know, Geen Saracen knocked his famous forward in from two hundred and thirty four yards or some about two hundred and thirty yards forward, and up until maybe the end of the eighties, guys were still hitting forwards or those that length of a shot into say the fifteenth that Augusta. But now I'm seeing guys hitting mid irons in there, right, you know? So that too that he
made knocking it in the cup with a forwood. I mean, that's he did that in the thirties.
In watching the Masters, the fourteen year old kid who doesn't have a ton of power but kind of hung on there. Did you is it? Did you?
I'm angry about it?
Tell me? Oh, I love this well.
I mean a fourteen year old kid. I mean you have to remember three years ago he was eleven, right. I mean, golf traditionally has been a game that takes years and years to learn how to play. And when you dumb the game down with a giant headed driver that you know, is like a frying pan or a toaster on a stick, so there's no there's no precision needed to strike an insert on a per simon, for instance.
The game's been dumbed down to the point to we're a fourteen year old that just swings hard at it can hit the ball out there far enough on the tour now to just kind of contend or whatever.
So you're saying, if I can interpret this, that today's equipment is removing a lot of the skill that is required for competitive golf.
Absolutely, absolutely it is, and dumbing it down and making it easier doesn't make the game better. It's just like playing chess or playing checkers. You know, you're playing on the same board, but one has chess pieces that have a very sophisticated game, a very old traditional game. I think the one change they made was the castling move, Like back in the late eighteen hundreds or something, and that was very controversial at the time, but that was like,
that was it. But that game is still being played the same. So if you go to checkers, then that's a different you know, it's just kind of a dumbed down version of a chest in a way, like you just you know, you have black and red checkers right that skip over each other, So you know, it's it's the dumbing the game down. And that's what the mentality has been over the last twenty years. Like I think these the people that are running the game or haters, they hate golf, they're angry.
It's today running the game that you're talking about, the us.
USGA, the RNA, the equipment companies, the people that are that are in control of what happens out there at the club level, at the professional level, these are people that are hackers. They hate golf. It's too difficult for them, and the idea that inventing a club where they can propel the ball farther it's very selfish. They're thinking for themselves and they're not thinking about the implications of what's
happening at the professional level. Now, if you hand these same clubs to the pros that's great for amateurs to be able to hit the ball next to forty yard, it's fine. I have no problem with that. At the club level, people can do what they want. If they want to ride around on tricycles, that's fine, okay, But I don't want to see the crafts. Yeah, I don't
want to see tricycle racing. At the pro level. You know, you got to be on two wheels, you know, go back to persimmon and blades, get back on two wheels again. You know, let's see some skill. You know, everybody's got these crutches, they got this extra you know, long putters and all this stuff going on cavity backs, all this stuff to a ball that flies ten percent farther than
maybe fifteen percent, far farther than it used to. So the classic sixty eight hundred yard course has to be close to eight thousand yards, So the courses aren't long enough and doesn't really make sense to have eight thousand yard golf courses. I mean, I don't think so.
I don't think no, because well, the eight thousand yard golf courses are playing into their hand. I mean, these guys are hitting farther and farther so they make the courses longer to make it look good on television. I get a sense that you may be an advocate for bifurcation.
Absolutely yeah. And because the USGA is not going to change. I mean they're like a it's like an ocean liner out there. That's okay, we need you to make a U turn. It's like it's going to take a long time. You know, it's not there. They're trying to the grooves thing. I mean, that was silly.
You know. It's like the USGA is hiding behind you know, the protect the integrity of the game, but yet the game. You know, there are two different things going on. We got the tour and we've got the rest of us right, and it's like the USGA. I would hope, in trying to grow the game is going to make it more enjoyable for the rest of us. Or should everything be focused around the elite scratch players And when ninety plus percent of the people don't even break one hundred, what
should we do about those rules? And who's it for? Should we let those people?
I think at the club level, I mean I have no problem with the frying pan drivers and all that people want to hit that stuff. I mean, at the club level, I don't think it should be banned, long putters, whatever, it's a whatever they want to do. But at the pro lem because I'm a professional played on the tour speaking from that perspective, and the thing is that most people they watched the pros because they derive inspiration from that from the professionals. They watch professional they go, wow,
that's really great. I want to be like that, or they relate to this player or that player. You know, in the era that I played, you had you know, Greg Norman. They could drive a person in three hundred yards, and then you had Corey Paven they could drive a person in about two hundred and twenty five yards. But yet Corey Paven could just maneuver the ball around the golf course on a good a good week and beat a guy like Greg Norman, which is really impressive. And see,
we don't have that kind of diversity anymore. Maybe there might be a short hitter that can do well on a couple courses, you know, but for the most part, the tour doesn't play tight golf courses anymore. And in the US Open, they don't really have US Open roff anymore. I mean I played in you know, a few USGA events where the rough was like over your ankles and if you hit it, if you hit it into the rough, you just wedged out basically, and it was it was
about a half a shot penalty. And you know, when Rory won the US Open, I mean, that was great golf that he played, sure, but there was just a typical PGA Tour event set up. You know, there was no rough to spe a little bit of rough, but I was watching him spin the ball back from the rough, and we know they say that the course was wet and you know, and then they had a lot of rain and this sort of thing. But the course definitely what they should have done is grown the rough really long,
and they can always cut it right. They can always cut it back if they need to. But to me, that was a disgrace to see seventeen under as the US Open record, because eight under par was the record for what how many thirty years or Hogan and Nicholas and Hogan set the record, then Nicholas came along and then Tiger, you know, played some of the greatest golf ever right at Pebble Beach and then broke the records at twelve under. And now you have a guy that
comes along, she's seventeen under. But the course wasn't set up like a US Open. It's not fair. If you look at the footage from when Hogan wanted Olympic Club, when he won Olympic Club, but when he lost at Olympic Club, I would say, yeah, but he you know that the rough was like almost to his knees. I mean, he's like pitching out with a wedge on eighteen. He hooked it in the left rough, foot slipped or whatever,
and you hit in the left rough. And if you look at the photos of that, I mean that stuff's like, you know, way up over his ankles, right right, you know you see that bushes. Yeah, you don't see that anymore. So the tour and the US g and all, they want the guys to shoot low. They want the scores to be low. They think, you know, people are impressed by that, But I'm impressed by seeing the golf course.
Like I like to stick up for the course itself, you know, And I want to stick up for the golfer, stick up for the course itself, and and I like to stick up for the ball strikers, the guys that can hit it straight. So how can you be if you're a straight hitter of the golf, Well, how can you be rewarded if there's no penalty for guys that hit a crookeet right?
Well, for I need to uh wrap this up for for this episode. Could you stick around because I want to continue because you know the reason you and I are doing this is I got an email from Golf Smarter listener John Pappus and he said that you and your Aussie partner Bradley Hughes are both big on learning the swing from impact backwards and I want to spend a lot of time talking about that, what that means and how we can institute that in our lives, how
you approach it. Also, he says you have very unique perspective on today's light equipment and huge driver heads, which we've touched on. Yeah, and then and again he says from two thousand that he says that you've said that from two thousand onward that the pro swings who deteriorated number of fairways hit has gotten worse and lighter equipment is hurt.
So they handed Brent Sedeker, Per Simmon and Blades. Okay, he's top three in the world.
Now.
A few years ago, handed per Simon and Blade sent him out to Hilton and he shot eighty So what does that say. It says something. I mean, yeah, I mean, had he worked with them a little bit, obviously would shoot eighty. He might shoot seventy two or three. But I don't think he's just going to necessarily go out there and shoot sixty six. That's what those things.
There's a difference, all right, So we can pursue this further on the next episode. You stick around, Thank you. I appreciate that, and I appreciate you coming out.
Yeah, thank you.