The guys from paying.
They've kind of showed me how much the equipment matters. I just love that I can hit any shot I kind of want.
We're gonna be able to tell some fun stories about what goes on here to help golfers play better golf.
Welcome back to the Pining Proving Grounds Podcast. I'm Shane Bacon. That is Marty Jertsen. Marty is escaping the Arizona summer heat, staying in Arizona, but not at the proving grounds right now? Is can we call this like the remote proving grounds when you when you get get away from Phoenix.
Yeah, I mean not joking. If me and a few co workers were playing a little research around at seven five hundred feet this afternoon and we're gonna be testing the impact of altitude and it's windy outside, on on on on ball flight, see what happens.
Do you when you play golf? Can you check away from it? Like I mean, you know, you're you're talking about, you know, thinking about altitude, or it's a windy day, or you have a shot in the rough. Are you able to kind of separate that type of stuff from your brain always thinking and churning out ideas around what could come from this shot or that shot.
Yeah, it's a good question, shit, because as you know, and I think all the all the listeners out there are getting some insight into you know, I can be pretty analytical about my decision making and preparedness. But the framework that I like to have, which is the answer
to your question, is very much. You know, I was a big fan of p and Len and Vision fifty four in their concept and they're amazing ping ambassadors for us now and have really helped us bring in some different thinking when it comes to our club fitting process. They have this concept called the think box in the playbox,
and it's part of your preshot routine. And so I do all my analytical work, my math, my calculations, my flyers, my wind green reading in what I call the what they would refer to and what I kind of think of as the think box, and then in my routine, I have a method of breathing based and all this visualization based where I flip that switch and I go
to what they called the playbox. And so I feel like it's literally I feel like I'm flipping a light switch, like I'm going from analytical mode to athlete mode.
I feel like we need to have them on the pod soon because I'm fascinated by what they do and I kick myself a lot for not maybe taking more advantage of them being out in Arizona when I live there, because what you're talking about that stepping over the line and getting into the golf shot, and it's something I struggle with, Marty. I mean, I have times playing tournament golf or competitive golf where I'm getting into my shot still kind of thinking about how I either want to
play the shot or is this the right shot? When you're over the ball or when you're in the what is it the think box or the playbox, it's like you that's all done, Like we're done with that part. Now it's time to execute the golf shot.
Yeah you're going to reaction mode.
Yeah, we got to have them on because they have some great ways to frame and think about it. Regardless of how much experience you have as a tournament golfer, right, everyone's going to get a little inside out of their methodologies, their research, which are time tested. I mean you just look at the players they've worked with and how good they play. That's the ultimate judge of a coach in my opinion, you know, do they coach players and do
they play good? And they got the ultimate record? They're them and butch, I guess.
Yeah, does that Marry? Are you? Are you benefitting from what we're telling you? Then it's a success and this partnership works. Uh. Interesting topic today because when you think about Ping. Now, if you're an old school Ping you know, fan, or someone that's been involved with the brand for decades, you probably remember the Ping golf balls. We've discussed it a couple of times on the podcast. Not in manufacturing anymore,
the Ping golf balls not a thing. We're going to talk about golf balls today, but more specifically ball fitting. And again, very interesting to talk about that about Ping podcasts because when you think about golf balls, you're going to think about other golf brands out there. How much time do you guys spend on the golf ball, even with Ping not manufacturing golf balls.
Yeah, no, it is a great question, Shane, And a lot of what we do goes back to our founder Carson Soolheim. He had this famous quote that the golf ball is the tuning fork for club design. Okay, right, and man, that statement was very profound and ahead of its time, because as the golf ball has evolved, if we're not in the business of making balls right and selling balls, if we aren't paying attention to what they're doing, we're flying blind into what is optimal in our driver design,
what is optimal in our iron design. So we've always had to test balls. Obviously, back in the days, we used to make balls and do R and D on them, but we've always tested them, and the main motivation is to stay in touch with what is the golf ball kind of on average doing so that we could optimize our clubs. Now, what's been very interesting is over the last like ten years or so, we noticed that golf balls started to have very diverse and unique performance characteristics.
Okay, so is this like brand a brand? I mean, if you're thinking about a Titleist versus a Taylor Made, or is it even within brands, like a prov one X versus a prov one Exactly.
Yeah, So you got a you know, I think that's a good example. You got the pro v one X, which now they kind of reverse the X and the V one and the V one there. But now the pro v one X is the highest flying then you got the V one and the AVX that are low flying. Then you got the left dash in the middle right. So uh, the question for the everyday golfer is, you know, what is the right ball for them? And what are these things do?
Uh?
And for us on the equipment side, and I started taking a look at this scenario seeing how much golf balls varied in performance. And then again Shane under that on that that kind of motivation that we want to pass tools that are available for the tour player to the everyday golfer. That's kind of like our motivation. We saw our tour players when we were fitting and this kind of started for me. That aha moment was when we were working with Tony fe Now on the G
four hundred Max driver and he loved this driver. Everything was perfect, but it was spinning a couple hundred RPMs too much and his ball speed. That's a big deal because for sure we got our optimal launching spin chart. He's a couple hundred. He's like two hundred and fifty three hundred RPMs too high. He sees it kind of having that little rise in the flight that he doesn't like if it gets wind he's gonna make him nervous, right.
And Marty, real quick, when you're talking to somebody like Tony fen now and you're talking two hundred RPMs different, what is that equate to in terms of maybe distance for him, even outside of it spinning or the look of it. What's that distance loss for somebody like Tony with that minimal variation.
If there's no wind, it could only be like five yards on the driver. Oka, But I think it's really when you for him, when you get that puff a wind, right, you get that breeze, you get that cross wind, you want the flight to be stable, and it could affect not only your distance, but also then your dispersion. Right, Let's say you got that little rise in your flight that crossed when then it starts to bleed offline a little bit in that pain we've all kind of seen
and felt in our ball flight. So what Tony did, working with our tour reps was he didn't. He was like, okay, let's not change the driver. And one of our tour reps went in and got this new ball. You know, it goes lower at might work, and he pulled out the pro V one left dot ball. He hit that thing and actually we looked this was the most interesting part Shaine. He hit it and he was like, WHOA, that's amazing. And it flew lower, it took the rise
out of the fly. He's like, this thing's perfect. Then he worked it around the greens. It spun a lot around the greens, which he liked, so he wanted that combination. But on the track man, the spin rate of that ball was almost identical to what he'd been playing. I think he might have been playing the Ax at the time, and so we're like, why is that, Like the spin
is the same, but they're flying different. And then we started diving into some other test data that we did on our ping man robot, and we found that balls could have very similar initial spin but fly aero dynamically very different. And there was actually another ball in the market that was coming out, and this is kind of when tour players are all popping the fore side down yep and measuring everything, as we've seen on TV. As
we've seen on tour, they're measuring every shot. And another ball came out that was super high spin, but they go play it on the course and it fly really really low, and that really confused the tour players. They start to ask us about it, and we go, holy moly, the aerodynamics is a really big deal. It's not just the initial spin. So I think as golfers we all say, and as fitters we all say, oh, this ball spins a lot, This ball spins a little spin, drives height.
That's kind of okay to say in slang. But that's only half the equation. There's the initial what's happening. Then there's the down range aero dynamics, and that is a really big deal. So this whole Tony fen Now thing, you know, we we were kind of perplexed, like.
What should we do? What? What?
What ball should we design our clubs for? And we kind of turned that question on its head and said, hey, let's instead figure out how to deliver club fitting like Tony got with club ball, fitting synergistically to the everyday golfer. And that's that was kind of the you know, the genesiss of where we got this idea to to to turn our ball testing that we do into a product and being able to fit club and ball together synergistically.
Marty, I'm starting to get the sense that you like solutions in golf I'm starting to kind of feel like that's one of your favorite things. I almost feel like when a problem pops up like something like this with Tony, you're going, oh, yeah, no, I'm in on this project. Oh yeah, So is this is this Ballnamic? Is this where ball Namic started at Ping?
Yeah?
Yeah, I'm We've We've always done a lot of testing on balls. We even built this, you know, you've seen it there at the proving grounds. We have ping Man. Then we have another machine. We call it sling Man. Yes, yes, and we built that machine to sling golf balls out at any combination of ball speed, launch, and spin. We can send out knuckleballs but no spin at two hundred and fifty miles an hour if we wanted to. We don't do that, but that allowed us in My colleague,
doctor Paul Wood, who is literally a solar physicist. He's the VP of Engineering at Ping, who went to the University of Saint Andrews and as a solar physicist. His first job when we hired him from Saint Andrews was to develop a ball model which is hey be able to predict the flight using you know, lift and drag coefficients. And they done a bunch of research on bounce and roll,
and the physics of that is quite tough. So that was his kind of first project, and we've continued to evolve and make that better and better and leverage our test data that we've done on golf balls.
You mentioned ping Man, I just want to tell people, and hopeful we have video we can lay over this, but there's literally like a sprit seen mechanism now that can sprits the golf ball with water if you guys want, obviously the ball to react like that. To see those processes through the technology, to see how much available variability there is in terms of just simply testing a golf
ball or a swing or wind. What time you guys go out there and test balls, I mean normally it's in the middle of the night, which is just so wild. I think it's like two or three in the morning, because obviously that's the least amount of a variable in terms of wind or temperature or whatever. It is so wild to see. Can you dive a little deeper in
how balnamic works in terms of a player like myself? Right, I played the Provy one X. I've played it basically since the Provy one X became a golf ball I mean, I remember I was in I was in high school. I would play and you'll probably appreciate this. I either played the professional from titleist or I would dabble occasionally in the Royal MAXFI. Do you remember that same Royal Same No way, that golf ball is so cool. We found them at Sam's once and talked our and talked
our coaching to buy at them. But I was always like more of a titleist golf ball guy. And when the prov one popped up and then obviously moved into the X, I've been an ex guy. So I come to you, Marty, and I say, this is the golf ball I typically play. How does this golf ball work for the pink clubs that I'm being fit for? Or is it the other way around?
Yeah?
I think the way we look at golf ball is we we want to do it synergistically with your club fitting. So if you've already had your clubs kind of dialed, you can go into Balnamic and the process flow for Balnamic A. It has this underlying database of our ball testing, which we kind of touched on. This is where we test in the middle of the night. We use a
radar that can measure lift and drag. We do things like sprits them with water because balls can have very big differences in being more prone to flyers, so if that's important for you, we can take that into consideration. We test them on short wedges, full wedges, putting feel. You know, balls can fly high on the driver and low on the irons and vice versa, so we take
all that into consideration. So that's kind of the underlying database or engine that drives Balnamic, and then the process when you go through Balnamic, which is at ballfitting dot com, we created a kind of an interview in a fitting flow that we literally modeled after the way tour players think about golf ball. So it's an educational experience if nothing else. Go through it and you'll be educated on things you as a golfer should probably be thinking about
in your golf ball performance. And you can weigh in on the results and say, ah, that's really not that important to me. This is kind of overkill for me. That's totally fine, but that's kind of the process flow. So Shane, when you get started through Balnamic, you can tell it which golf ball you're currently using if you want, or a lot of folks out there are like whatever my wife got me for Father's Day, Christmas, right, whatever
whatever I find on the course. So you don't have to put that in, but if you do, you'll get comparisons on your best football to your current ball. And then what we do is we have you go in and you talk about your driver, what you want or need on your driver, and it's really cool. You can either put in your launch monitor numbers, but you don't have to. So if you just got a fitting or if we're using it live in a fitting environment, we
put in your ball speed, launch and spin. And here's where that Tony going back to that Tony Feno example comes in when we put his launch condition numbers in there and he was spinning his driver at twenty eight hundred rpm, and we could put that into the app. And we have a button that says, well, figure out for me if I should be playing a ball that flies higher lower, and you click that and it's like you should be playing a ball that flies lower, and
that's what he would get recommended. Right, So it's reverse engineered what the tour player can already do, right, And being able to do those things. So you kind of go through the driver. Is performance in the wind important to you or not? Do you need to hit it kind of high? Medium, low? And then you tell the same thing with your irons. And so this is where it gets really cool to marry club fitting and ball fitting together. So it kind of talked about on the driver.
Those are a few good examples, like let's say you really like the MAX driver like Tony did, or the opposite scenario where you really like the LST driver, right, like what I'm playing, right, you really like the LST driver, but maybe the spins a little low. Actually, right, you can pick a ball that actually spins a little bit more, Shane, I know you like to hit that little cut, like you want to see that ball move a little bit
off the tee. You can say, you know, I want to see a little bit of that with a little bit more height, and you'll get a ball recommendation specifically for you. So we kind of have the driver side. Then you progress to irons. What do you need in the irons, And again you can either put in your launch num or just kind of describe how you hit them, say hey, I hit them this far launch it kind of high spin, it kind of low. Now that's really important in the modern day because irons have such big
differences to how much they spin. You know, both us and you know the rest of the market. There's low spinning irons, there's high spinning irons. This gets really cool on irons when you can marry ball together because we have this iron landing angle chart when we talk about iron fitting. Hey, I really like the I five twenty five irons. Everything about them. I like them.
I'm hitting them far, but I'm not quite landing.
Him steep enough. Maybe you don't even change the irons, you can switch. Golf Ball is your final little lever to kind of tune in your overall performance.
It feels like the kind of balnamic golf ball portion of this is like the dessert to an amazing dinner, right where perfect you know you've got, you know you're you're fitting if you will is probably the apps. And then you start to get your clubs and you're set built for you, and that's the entree. And in the back end of it, you say, Okay, what's the final tweak to make sure all of this stuff plays together?
Because again, like for you Marty, you go to your boss or you start to look up, you know, funding for ball Namic and some of these you know, some of these tools you're working on, and somebody might say to you, we don't even sell ball as a ping and you're going, yeah, but this is helpful for our equipment because it makes the average golfer's entire experience better because now we're making that dessert, that final portion of the dinner fit and kind of it's almost like going
to the French laundry, right, like the yeah thing is going to march together, so you know that what you're tasting after this is meant to taste like this versus what you just had that was maybe a little bit more salty, or maybe it was it was not as sweet.
Oh Man, Shane.
That's the perfect analogy, and that's how our fitters at the proving grounds do it. So when they do their club fitting for a player, they're aware of the golf ball changes, but they're not necessarily recommending it live in real time, right right, we do that at the end.
It is like the dessert, and in fact, we go into that cool locker room where you change and shoes, relaxing, getting in from the heat a little bit, using the massage gun if you need to, and on the big screen, well, well, the fit our fitters at the proving grounds, our master fitters will have ball namic and walk you through it while you're cooling down. Absolutely, like the dessert of the fitting.
Just amazing. You know, It's been interesting to kind of watch the golf ball landscape change over the last few years because I feel like there were three or four brands that were always the major golf ball brands, and there's a lot more brands popping up even over the last year or two.
Yeah.
Are you guys always introducing the new balls and even kind of the random companies that make golf balls into what you guys are doing, so you're aware of everything on the market.
Yeah.
Absolutely, We have a criteria. It's all documented when you go to ball fitting. I't com a witch balls. We test okay, so they're the premium kind of eurethane balls over twenty dollars and that's a lot. We have to do a lot of testing to make sure the database is up to date. We update the database at least twice a year, but in practice we do it about four times a year. The tricky part, Shane is getting a zero wind weather conditions that actually is quite challenging
for us. It's the hardest part of doing our ball testing. So yeah, we are, we are. I think one of the funnest things about balnamic and a lot of people ask that question, well, hey, how often should I go through it? I think anytime you do a new club fitting would be a good time to go through ball namic. So you get a new driver, get new irons, it's a good time, or and or just like once a year beginning of the playing season. Okay, I got my
playing season coming up. Because balls change a ton, So one thing I think is very important for the listener is that just because you always played one model your whole life for the last generation, that next time it comes out, the performance can totally change. It can change in an area you might not even be aware of.
Like one year the model could be very low spin around the greens, and then the next generation that toggle goes and whatever the designers did and the manufacturers did, it's very.
High spin around the greens. That may or may not be good for you.
You might be a bump and run type of player and having that extra spin might be bad, and that's one of the questions that we ask in ball namic. So aerodynamically things change, green side spin change, how it feels off the putter can all change a year over year. So I think a good kind of habit and best practice would be either go through it when you're getting a club fitting, or at least once a year at the beginning of your playing season.
It's so interesting to talk about the iterations of a singular golf ball because kind of going back to the prov one X, you know, they're tour players that are playing like the twenty eighteen version and the twenty nineteen version. You know, there are certain yeared balls that they still play because again that one works the best for their equipment and the way they like to hit the golf ball.
And they're not always upgrading to the brand new golf ball because again things are changing and it's incremental and maybe the fifteen handicap it's not going to totally change who they are on the golf course, but for Tony Finow or Justin Thomas, it is, and they want to be playing the one that they feel like is the most comfortable for the equipment, they're playing. You made a joke earlier about the guy saying, I play the golf ball my wife got me for Christmas or Father's Day.
What do you say to that fifteen handicap that says, Ah, the golf ball doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter which ball I play, as long as I'm playing a high end golf ball. They're all the same, right.
Yeah, no, it could totally matter. I think.
For example, you can go into Balnamic and put in that you need the driver. The biggest thing that the high handicappers do is they curve the ball more, not on purpose, they curve the ball more right, and we see this when you're trying to hit a stock trajectory shot. They just have a lot more curve. You can go into Balnamic as a high handicap golfer and put in that you need low flying on your drive, and you'll
get a ball that literally flies straighter. If a ball flies lower, it's also going to fly straighter, okay because the lift and drag components, so that can straighten out your dispersion. That's like a ball fitting hack right there for the high handicap golfer. So if you do that and then you also say one of the big things high handicappers struggle with, oh, how do you spin it around the greens? Well, they're not playing a ball that
can generate the spin around the greens. So those two things alone are very low hanging fruit that can really have an impact. You know, your on your high hand for your high handicap player.
Marty, it's so crazy to play with golfers in that let's say ten to twenty handicap range that play two or three times a week and they get the new driver every year. Maybe they upgrade their irons every couple of years, but they don't have any grooves left on their wedges, or they don't clean the faces of their wedges that often. And to your point, they're never paying attention to what golf ball works for them, what golf ball should be playing. Maybe they need to regrip their
golf clubs. There are little things to every golfer. Again, I say this to my friends all the time about fitting, and it's been a big part of what we talked about on this podcast. But golf is something you're invested in, not just financially, but obviously it's your hobby. You know, if you're listening to this podcast, there's a very good chance that golf is your number one thing you think about outside of work in your family. Yet you're not
willing to put in the time. And it's not a lot of time needed to make sure all of your equipment matches who you are on the golf course. And this is just another step. It's another one of those throwaway steps. Like if I called my dad and I said, what golf ball are you playing right now? He'd be like, oh, I got four in my bag that are different. But if he spent an hour on this, it would benefit his golf game and it would improve the scoring, which is what everybody's looking to do anyway.
Yeah, exactly, Shane, That's what I think. Again.
What makes Bollnamic very exciting is that, you know, the testing that we have no golfer can practically go out. You know, we have like sixty balls in the database, okay, and we've hit hundreds of shots on the The most repeatable thing of.
All time was zero wind.
I mean, imagine how much we've actually run the math on this. For like, let's say Victor Hoblin Tony Feenow to be able to hit ball, hit all the balls in Balnamic and test them and measure the differences like we would with ping Man. Ping Man is so repeatable. To measure those golf balls, they would have to hit like a hundred balls to ping Man's five. Okay, right, because ping Mia can hit it delivered exactly the same.
And so we've kind of built that.
Going back to your point there with your dad, he can go through Balnamic and it only takes like five minutes, okay. But the fact that it's kind of short doesn't mean it's not valuable and detailed. It just means we've packed a lot of intelligence and we have a lot of good underlying data that's driving everything. And then you you kind of mentioned earlier, well what about you know, price point in all the different array of balls on the market, you can actually go to that results page and filter
by one, two, or three dollars signs gotcha. So if you're in there, you're like, Okay, I'm gonna try all these premium balls. What does it get me if I drag this down some lower price point options? And when you get to that results page, Shane, you can you can kind of play around and compare things and I think a really good way to use Balnamic's Balnamic is we don't give you just one ball. We give you
we give you four or five rank ordered options. And on that results page you can see, Okay, this ball goes further off the driver. So that's really important to me. Even though it's the number two match, that's really important to me. I'm gonna try that one first, or go out and by a dozen of each of the top three, go compare and contrast them yourself.
It helps you kind of.
Narrow the focus from the sea of confusion that exists and in the golf ball.
World only growing, by the way, only growing exactly.
Marty.
I mentioned that I'm a prov one X golf ball guy, and I've been for a long time. I'm interested in what golf ball you play. But I heard a story that recently you you switched multiple times throughout a round the different golf balls. This is one of the question I asked to start about your brain always churning. Can you tell the story about you winning? Did you win a golf tournament changing balls?
Yeah, I won a little Southwest section event here at It was at Los Sende's. Okay and at last send it. There's not a lot of the lost send to get out there though, Classic Target Desert golf course. But yeah, I found out actually during the PGA Championship, I think it was Phil Nicholson had switched balls during the round and then I asked. I was like, whoa what They're not playing the one ball roll? He made like a
random comment on on Twitter or something. So I asked our our tournament director at the Southwest Section, Uh, hey, are we playing by the one ball roll? Because I didn't read the fine print in our in our rule sheet there, and he's like, oh, yeah, we were not playing. I was like, oh, this is amazing because we've I've done a lot of stuff on win Because we have this engine, Baldnamic engine, we can do a lot of things with wind. How does wind affect your ball flight?
I've made some people have seen these really cool sheets that say, Okay, if the wind's hurting fifteen miles an hour, it's going to play twenty yards further and things of that nature. That's specific to me, my location, my golf ball. So I know that if you change balls, it would have a real it would have a really big impact on your performance in the wind. Right, that's kind of that's one of the lowest level things that I was like, I'd always want to do if I could in a tournament.
I've done it in practice, Like downwind, I'm gonna hit a ball that flies high into the wind, I'm gonna play a ball that flies low, and it makes an enormous difference. So I was like, I'm doing this in a tournament, So this is a fresh thing for me. Is now I'm gonna play like probably between three to five balls and switch them, switch them right there in real time in the tournament. So I did that in
Los Aendas won the tournament. So into the wind holes, I play the AVX titlis AVX flies very low and the new version still spins a good bin on wedges and around the greens, so it wasn't like I was sacrificing a lot there. Right then I'd get down wind and I'd play the Tour BX or the prov one X, depending on where the pin was and how from the greens are, because the BX spins a little bit more on the wedges and flies low.
So I mean this is like if it's a front pin, you're literally changing complete brand of a golf ball. If it's front pin versus a backpin, backpin, you're playing the pro v and the front pin you're playing the.
What is it the bridge the Tour BX.
Yeah, Tour BX very high spin, so fly signed the driver, but it's super high spin on the wedges.
Okay, right, I'm like, well that I need that downwind. That's my perfect down wind ball.
And then on and then if it was like a medium hole, I'd played my normal ball prov one left dot. Now, the thing I haven't done yet but I want to get into is that in our testing, we see balls fly a little bit shorter or further on your irons. So let's say I'm between clubs on a par three. There's a hard skill for me as a working player, Like the tweener yardages are hard, right for me because I'm not playing a lot of golf or playing a
lot like golf. It be easy, but I'm gonna switch a ball that either goes further or shorter when I'm in between clubs on the par three. So I'm still kind of dialing that in. But I think the every I mean, I think what I'm doing is a ne excellent level of nuance. The everyday golfer might not need
to play like three to five. But think about this, Shane, going back to your high handicapper, they should be playing a ball that flies straighter and goes far on par fours and fives because distance off the tee is at a premium. And then they should play a ball that spins more land steeper on par three's. They should definitely have a par four part five ball and then a par three ball. I think that would be super helpful for your everyday player, Marty.
There's a scene in Rounders. I don't know if you've seen the movie Rounders before. There's a scene where Matt Damon's character goes into the I think it's like the Lawyers or whatever's poker game, and he basically calls everybody's hand and they're like, you're officially never allowed to play in this game. Before. I feel like this with you about playing for money. If you've got five different balls in your bag, I'm assuming you're not carrying this bag. If you're playing with five.
We're playing cards. It's one hundred degrees.
Five or six sleeves in the bag. You're going, hey, han me the sleeve that those sleeves are in the left side of the bag. This is I mean, my mind is blown right now thinking about all this.
It was really funny walking up to the tee and and being and I'd have multiple clubs and multiple balls on some t shots okay, and then having to tell you're playing partners. I'm switching to a AVX two on this whole. Next all, I'm switching to a you know, a left dot four.
You did you ever have a hole where you were kind of going up in the fairway going which one did I play? What was the way I'm playing? I'm assuming you mark all of them the same, like the same sharpie mark on whatever the ball, But I would get confused in a heartbeat, I I I have a hard time remember what hole we're playing when I'm looking at the whole location sheet and you've got seven golf balls in place. Amazing stuff, but it is fun.
So we've ran some on what would your optimal launch condition We have that beautiful fitting chart, but it's based on no wind for driver fitting okay, to maximize distance. Now we've run the numbers on Okay, what would your launch conditions need to be for like twenty miles an hour down wind, and you need to launch it like two to three degrees higher with four or five hundred rpm more spin into the wind, you want to launch it at a degree or two lower and bring your
spin down another four or five hundred. So the spin difference for to maximize distance for into the wind and downwind at twenty miles an hours like a thousand RPMs of spin. Now, golf ball, just switching ball can cover about six hundred RPMs of that difference without having to play two drivers or change your swing or hit way up or do something crazy. So that shows how much of an impact switching ball can be into the wind and downwind.
You gave a tip to the everyday average golfer out there about the two golf balls, the par four par five ball and par three ball. How best for them to figure out which one the par four par five ball and when which one's the par three ball when they're when they're using balnamic.
Yeah, So a good way to go through balnamic is if you if you buy it once, you get five fittings in there and you can go tweak things. So that's definitely the thing to do. So, go in there and put that you want low flight and maximize driver distance. Uh, you can put your irons stopping powers kind of medium and go get results and that can be your par
four part five ball. Then go back through and put in there that you want your irons to land steeper, your wedge is to spin more, and and use that to kind of help pick out your your par three ball.
This feels in a way kind of hold school. And when I say that, I mean and you'll appreciate this. If if the younger listeners are jumping in, they probably aren't going to understand this, but forty fifty and older golfers will understand this. There was a time where you would kind of use like a pinnacle off the tee and you there's a blata kind of like what you're saying.
It was almost like you'd use the softball on the par threes around the greens, and you might use back then a harder, firmer golf ball for like longer t shots, especially if you're playing in something like a scramble. It almost feels like a more advanced version of what used to be relatively standard for players. Was you kind of had the which ball is going to go far and which ball's going to land soft around the greens?
Yeah, absolutely, Shane.
I think it's interesting now we're talking about obviously some of the rules talk about golf ball and that type of thing. Just the value of knowing what you know if your tournaments, and it could be high level like our section stuff, which the tournaments are adopting different modified local rules. You know, it's not that many tournaments are adopting the forty six inch rule and the driver for example, Right,
it's not till you get to a certain levels. So now this one ball rule is it's a whole new new area of performance. So now that's getting it. That's getting pretty nuanced there. I think the biggest takeaway on balls is fit your ball to the club synergistically. You can't really fit balls that well indoors, Sadly, I wish you, I wish we could. I wish launch monitors could. The way to do it is to take your launch conditions from indoors and feed them into Balnamic and that'll simulate
your down range flight. So that's another value out of Balnamic is being able to get visibility as to what would happen outdoors when you're getting numbers and use it on a launch monitor indoors.
Marty, what's your yardage book look like when you play tournament golf?
Like?
How many pieces do you have it with you right now?
Man?
I don't well, I mean, I'm just wondering, like how many sheets are in there? How much information do you have? I think I have a note I wrote five years ago. They're like, it's like, have fun, good temper. I'm assuming yours might be a little more advanced.
Yeah, I'll post on social media that win try to make is pretty cool.
It's okay.
It's kind of like aim point for wind, so it's kind of has uh when the winds and if.
I travel, it's super valuable.
I think, for sample, when I've played the Colorado Open, I always knew anecdotally experientially that the ball curved less and it flew a little bit, or the wind affected the ball a little bit less. And then I go play a tournament at man TPC Harding Park, PGA Championship
or black Horse Bayonet. We play big tournament there and the wind really affects your ball flight, and so we have these calculations that we can run and generate how much for those conditions and how I hit the ball and the ball I'm using the wind affects the ball flight. So I have this really cool sheet and people think, oh, man, you're on the tee doing taking a lot of time, slowing down pace of play. You can do the calculations really quick. Okay, you know, so it doesn't really. In fact,
it saves me time. I think, you know, kind of like if you know what you're doing with a point, it really doesn't slow people down.
With priace speeds people up a little bit.
Where is your brain in terms of what is next? Because every time we have these conversations, Barty, I'm just floored by the way you are thinking about the game, not just personally but obviously for everybody that's thinking about it, wanting to play it, wanting to get better. I mean, that's basically been kind of your life goal is to make golf easier and more fun for people out there. Where is your brain in terms of what's next or where where you want to focus your attention on next?
Are you always six months ahead, a year ahead of what you're thinking about rolling out or where your focus is right now?
Yeah?
I think Shane one kind of model for that, and I'll give an analogy to another industry, is like what the you know in other industries, like what the very wealthy people have now everybody will have access to in ten years. This would be like a right. You know, a fluent person would take a limo to the airport. Now you and I take an uber, Right, everyone does. Right, It's the same thing. So I think if you back
up ten years in golf. Ten years ago in golf, you know, only the early adopters of tour players had trackmen and launch monitors. Now now now the everyday person could get a mevo plus or a garment or another launch monitored habit at their house, you know. So okay, what is the next thing? The tour players have access to on course stats, on course play data that they're
feeding into their practice, training, fitting, equipment strategy. I think we're going that direction for the everyday player, which is, let's take their on course play data and give them some really cool insights about their game and take that custom fitting level to the next level, which is looking at their on course play. So that's kind of a fun way to think about where we're going with technology and tools you're.
Telling me in twenty twenty six you're gonna have Shane bacon Stross game putting available for a year, that that's that's a possibility. Maybe maybe a few maybe twenty twenty eight.
And we'll push you a little nudge that, hey, you might want to tweak your putter based on what we're seeing out there.
Listen, the putter has been awesome lately. Yeah, I know, I will say this, Marty. The golf game, I it's it's so funny how the mind is basically the driver of your golf game. Right if your mind's in a good place, goll feels very easy and right now to me. And I mean I'm not jinxed in anything because you know, I've got some qualifiers and stuff coming up, but I feel very at peace on the golf course, especially in tournament conditions. I feel very at peace on the greens.
And I listen, I know this is a PING podcast, and I know I'm a PING ambassador, but there's a level of comfort I've felt with my equipment right now that I'm not sure I've ever felt because everything's kind of you know, you know, synergistically set, yeah, and put together. And I know all of it's so right for what I'm trying to do. I love the putter. I've just been such a fan of this driver. I'm in it far and it's kind of behaving the way I want
it to. And when you feel comfortable with your equipment, and I mean this is any equipment out there. I mean, obviously we want you to play ping, but it's an equipment out there. If you feel comfortable with it, and you feel comfortable with your ball and you're at on the golf course, it makes the game feel very simple. And that's a nice place to be because I know inevitably I'll get to a place where it's not feeling
like this. Yeah, So to kind of enjoy my time in this space has been a lot of fun.
Yeah, that's awesome to hear, Shane. I mean, I know it's it's especially the driver and the putter. I mean, those are the two most important clubs when you know you can lean on them and they're going to be able to you know, you know, accommodate what's going on with your mechanics your own course. Play golf is hard enough.
You don't want to be making adaptations to your equipment, right and I think that's one of the biggest things we talked about, that ven diagram, like, like you know, the design of the clubs, the fitting of the clubs. If you could take care of that part. Golf's hard enough to go out there and handle the emotions and all the other preparedness and and all the other skills you need to have to play good tournament golf. That's awesome to hear keep that momentum going.
Yeah, not everybody has the Marty sheets in their yardage book, but we can listen to Marty and take all of this information and apply it to our golf game. Very interesting stuff, I am. I'm fascinated every time I get a chance to chat with you on these things that I A didn't quite understand headed in and B feel like I have a new appreciation for on the back end of this. So thank you for that. Thank you for the time. Enjoy not being in the Phoenix heat for at least a few more days, and enjoy a
little altitude. Golf always nice. When the ball goes what fifteen twenty percent longer.
Yeah, it's going to go longer and straighter. The ball also goes straighter up here.
See that we're gonna get it, by the way, we're gonna get into wind and altitude and water on the face in future episodes. So a big thanks to everybody for listening and subscribing, and we'll be back next week.