It's the Son of a Butch podcast. We come to you every Wednesday. This week's guest doctor Sasho McKenzie. He is doing some groundbreaking work in biomechanics. If you're a golf nerd and you're trying to hit the golf ball further, you're going to know who he is. You're going to know his name, and we're going to talk about a lot of really really cool stuff. He's someone that I think is doing roundbreaking work to try and help golfers get better. So very very excited for everyone to be
able to listen to him talk. The work he's done with Matt Fitzpatrick to help him hit the golf ball further is some really really cool stuff. But before we dive in, I want to thank our partners at Rapsodo and share more about their exciting, award winning combine that is launching this month. I'm partnering with them to give away two virtual golf lessons. All you have to do is complete a combine on your mL or the new
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get a first year of premium membership for free. Again, that's code H three at rapsodo dot com for seventy dollars off. And don't forget about their award winning combines. And now let's get to the interview with Sasho McKenzie. My guest is doctor Sasho McKenzie. Sash I'm sure a passive cross, but I mean You're one of the names that in golf instruction in twenty twenty three we hear
a lot. So I'm really really excited to get a chance to talk to you and kind of pick your brain because with all of the the doctor degrees and all of the biomechanics stuff you're you're a hell of a lot smarter than I am, that's for sure.
I'm not sure. I'm not sure what I know an awful lot about very little, That's what I like to say.
I mean, there's there's a lot to unpack. I want to talk about the work you've done with Matt Fitzpatrick and the stack system, biomechanics and all of that, your work with rap Sodo, the comb that you've helped them come up with. But sajhow in twenty twenty three in golf instruction and for all the golfers out there listening, I think it's a very interesting time in instruction and you're on the front lines of it as I am, and I think a lot of people are. I mean,
on the lessons that I give. I feel like a lot of people come in and they're hearing these buzzwords, they're hearing this stuff on social media, and they're trying. I see so many players that I'm the doctor and they've got the broken wrist, and they've got the cast on the wrist. And then you check the wrist and the wrist isn't broken. And they said, well, yeah, but somebody said, if your wrist is broken, you've got to put a cast on it. And you're like, yeah, it's
your wrist isn't broken. So and I think there's so many players and people trying to play that hear all of this information. So science versus sports, science versus art. How do we balance that and how do you view all of that?
Right? Well, I think you know, there are two big, big areas in golf, speed and accuracy, you know, and I believe that science needs to dominate speed. So no one could ever really, in my opinion, maybe this is a bit arrogant, could ever say anything to me about the You know, there's very small wilmen for someone to talk about the art of speed. You know, it's it's hard physics. I know what the body can do to generate speed. It's just physics principles. And then you overlay
some biomechanics concepts on that. Accuracy on the other hand there you even as a scientist, you're mostly forced to listen or you should be listening to the folks that have experienced You know that. That's I I think why golf instruction right now is so interesting and maybe you always will be because you're I say this a lot. I spend a lot of time looking for research that discusses the repeatability of a movement, not just in golf, but could be typing a keyboard, it could be throwing
a dart. And to date, I'm not aware of any study that said this way of moving is more repeatable from a human perspective than this other way of moving. So that means that the instructor on the lesson t who's given two thousand lessons has you know, I should listen to them as a scientist. But at the same time, you know I'm going to likely try to trump them when it comes to maybe what's the best way to increase speed? But you know, there's a whole lot of
middle ground in there. Those are my thoughts on the art and science of it.
I saw a quote that you said that you think there is a natural tendency for people with regards to golf swings not only their own golf swings, but instructors as well for aesthetics that we look towards what looks really, really good. And it's something that you know, when people ask me what my favorite golf swings are, I get
asked that question a lot. I always ask I always ask the question from an esthetics standpoint or from a function standpoint, because from and golf is not an aesthetics contest, right, It's not figure skating, it's not gymnastics, because if it was, people like Adam Scott and Nelly Korda, they'd win every week because they'd get nine eights and nine nines from the judges because the look of their golf swing is very, very beautiful. It's very classic, it's very unencumbered by a
lot of idosyncrasies. But the kid that I'm drawing a blanket is his name that led the Open Championship. After the first day, I'm watching him hit balls like Tuesday, he's six eight, he's got two hundred, he's cruising at two hundred and you can see. And I was talking to Dave Phillips about it over breakfast one morning and he said, you know, the amazing thing is you can see that that golf swing is one hundred percent based
on function. He grew up in South Africa, probably didn't have a lot of access to a lot of modern club fitting like we do here in the States, where you can get club fit everywhere and there's tons of equipment. So if you look at the way he swings the golf club, it looked to me like it was functional. He probably played with golf clubs that were too short growing up. He's six eight, he had to try and get back down to the ball tons of knee drive.
But what I think is really great social in today's age, we know enough through people like yourself, through technology that in the past we would somebody would change that. But now through all the tech, through launch monitor data, through biomechanics data, through three D you can you can quantify if he can repeat it and if it works. And I think we're seeing so many more golf swings like that that are functional and they're not necessarily aesthetically the best, but they work.
Yeah. Absolutely, you know what. I contacted by a lot of mini tour players to emphasize your point, and I initially know nothing about their statistics. That's the first question I want to know, is we'll send me what you know, send me some of your stats. Let's see your strokes gain and you know the four areas. Let's see, you know, a track man session where I can look at your variability. But I don't. They don't send me any of that stuff. They say, well, you know, what do you see in
the swing? I have no idea, you know, you it could be again, all these golf swings are you know, to use your word functional enough. If you've got, you know, to play at the elite level, If you've got one hundred mile an hour clubhead speed with your seven iron and you can hit the ball a certain height in the air, there's a whole world of options for you to swing a golf club. You know. If you're swinging at at eighty six miles an hour, you know your driver club at speeds one oh four, Well then we
definitely have to work on something, you know. But yeah, I just showing me the aesthetics of your swing. That means so little to me without some context. You know. If I also, if I know that you're struggling with a hook or a block or some particular systematic miss, then I might be able to associate that with what I'm seeing aesthetically. But yeah, it's crazy to me that you could even think about fixing a swing without knowing what the you know, the ball flight data is saying.
My dad's youngest brother, my uncle Billy. You know, my dad when he was working with Tiger, and you know, everybody was trying to swing like Tiger, get the club in these beautiful positions, and Adam Scott, you know, did a great job at kind of mimicking and I did that. I mean, I taught a lot of players in the early two thousands to swing the club like Tiger and it worked right, Get the club wider and things like that.
But I remember we were watching Tiger hit balls one day and my uncle Billy was there and he said, you know, the amazing thing is we're all trying to have people swing like Adam Scott and Tiger Woods. Nobody tries to get anybody to swing like Lee Trevino. Nobody tries to get anybody to swing like Hailer when some of these incredibly functional, somewhat idiosyncratic moves on what they did.
You live in the biomechanics world, and I saw a quote that you said biomechanics and sports is about discovering ways to perform a skill that moves our body fast and accurately while preventing injury. Not everybody that's playing golf that is a average golfer, And I always throw everybody that isn't playing competitively on a regular basis as average golfers, right, I mean everybody. The majority of people that play our sport from a golf standpoint are regular everyday golfers. They're
not elite competitors, they're not elite performers. So when the average fifteen to twenty handicapper listens to this podcast and we're talking about biomechanics, I think it sometimes freaks people out because one, they don't know what these terms are. They don't know what it means for you. What's the easiest way for everyone listening to have an understanding and have a better relationship with the term biomechanics. What does it mean to you and how can it help golfers?
Well, biomechanics is essentially physics, but applied to bones and muscles specifically. Yeah, so, but you know, deals with the forces that cause motion, and with a golfer, the forces are originating from the muscles. Those muscles pull on bones to create movement. And then there's a whole bunch of principles, mechanical principles and physical laws, Newton's laws that we can apply to understand better ways to swing a golf club.
I saw also in doing some you know, research for this, two terms that that that you've used, external validity and internal validity. What do those mean? And and and how can we apply them to our own gain?
Sure? So I think they apply specifically to answering a question. You know. So if you want to know, okay, I would say, is anchoring a putter better for improving putting performance? There's a question, okay, you know, so we've got some biomechanics involved in that. If you anchor the putter, will you put better? So if you're going to answer that
using science, you need to conduct an experiment. My philosophy is first to maximize internal validity, so that means that you're sure that whatever you discover in the experiment is due to how you manipulated the experiment. And you would manipulate the experiment by saying, let's have golfers putt normally conventional with a regular you know, thirty four inch putter, and then let's have them putt with a longer putter where they anchor to their chest, or maybe we're comparing
a forearm lock putter, whatever it is. And if I find a difference in performance, then I know it's due to the differences in those putters. The short one versus the anchor or the non anchored versus.
One one works better than the other.
In the conditions for the experiment, I have very high internalbility, so there's no other possible explanation for why this was a difference. So things I would do, I would do it in a lap where we don't have inconsistent greens, we don't have people moving in the background, we don't have differences in temperature, and everything would be very balanced. You know, you'd hit one put with this putter, another put with this putter. You'd hit you know, eighteen with
one putter, eighteen with another putter. Your next participant in it would be the reverse order where they would start with, you know, the anchored versus the standard. But that has low external validity. Someone would say, yeah, but they don't have to read their own putt. They're not they don't have the nerves of trying to sink a pot in
you know, a major championship. So then you'd want to try and once you confirm that if everything's tight tight experiment high internability there is a difference, then you see if that difference is strong enough to exist in the
real world, you want to maximize external validity. Those studies tend to be tougher to do, but you would try and say, Okay, I'm going to try to get twenty tour players to play half the season with an using anchor and then they switch and twenty other ones to do the reverse, and we track the results that would have. You know, it's a tough example to actually recreate, but that would have high external validity. Right, You'd be like, yeah, okay, in the real world, does this show up?
Yeah, because I think a lot of times golfers, and specifically golfers that are trying to compete, are practicing almost in a vacuum. Right. They're trying to practice in a very very controlled environment, thinking that Okay, if I practice enough in a very specific controlled environment, that is going
to have some sort of effect on the outcome. But the problem is the game that we're playing from a golf standpoint is so random, it's so all over the place, and I think I see more people practicing, like you said, they're trying to get this internal validity to where if I repeat this movement pattern over and over and over and over again in a very controlled space to where the lies are flat, you know, the block practice versus
random practice. I think most golfers tend to stay in block practice constantly, and the random practice is for them. The random practice is the playing of the game, not random practice. The random practice is okay, well, now I'm gonna I've worked on this for two weeks now. I mean, I, Sasha, I have so many players that come and take lessons, that are trying to compete on many tours and say, okay, so would you suggest what I take, you know, six
months off. I'm like, no, you need to play next week. You have to play. You can't do this in a laboratory. You have to go play. So how how do you balance those two between the internal validities where you're trying to have a controlled environment, and then the external to where you're saying, okay, let me go see if any
of this works. As you said, in the real world, the real world is going and playing golf, putting scores down on a scorecard, which has nothing to do with, as you said, aesthetics or the way things look or
the way you've practiced. How can our listeners balance the two because I feel in the twenty five years that I've been, you know, giving lessons, I think most people stay in the lab and they just want to get back to the lab too, Right, if they play bad, they just said, just get me back to the range, Get me back to the range, get me back to the range.
Well, you know, I think we have there's kind of two related concepts as the research concept of internal external validity, which is important to answer question. But then we've got practicing, like you mentioned block versus random like how much what I would say, contextual interference do you have? And and I think that the more elite you get at as skill, there's a concept called challenge point, which I'm you know, it's kind of a rough guide to how best to
optimize your practice. It's held up pretty well, and the idea is that the better you get at a skill, the more you should be challenged, the more you can randomize that practice. So I was just in the backyard this evening with my ten year old daughter Sienna, kind of new to golf, and we're doing just pet practice and twenty yard pitch shots, you know, trying to make clean contacts. So I'm fluffing up. We got some nice grass in the backyard. I'm fluffing up every single one.
You know, they're and in fact, if she'd go to hit it and it kind of settled down, I'd fluff it up because she's at the point where I she could make what's really what I consider to be nice technique. You know, watch golf better Tuson. I love this chipping stuff. So in pitching, great technique, bad line means it's going to be really tough for her to make good contact, and then she'll think, well, that was a bad swing, but it wasn't. It was just a really tough scenario.
So I think beginning golfers the block practice, the easy condition set the challenge points, so you're succeeding enough where you're reinforcing the good stuff you're doing. But then you get closer to tour players, and I think tour players spend too much time in block. You know, I think do enough to build up some confidence, but just enough. You know, hey, you want to hit four or five footers in a row to make sure that your line is good and check yourself in the mirror and whatever.
That's fine. You should be spending the majority of your time, Like if I was working with a tour player and they're pitching, you know, or practice, you should be just dropping those things, you know, throw them on the ground, whatever lie it ends up in. That's where you play out of you know, and maybe even seeking out harder lies and harder situations, you know. So I think that in general, the more elite you get, the more practice time should be spent kind of more random, more things
that make it that make it challenging, you know. That's that. And if you have even an elite level, if you have someone struggling, you know, maybe someone's getting a little yippie with the chips, then hey, maybe spend a half an hour hitting your pitch shots off tees, right, nothing wrong with that. Or I got no problem with a five inch hole for putting, right, If if you're struggling with that and you need to build some confidence, hitting eight foot putts with a five inch hole is great.
Whereas someone like Aaron Baddeley. He could probably spend a lot of time putting at a three inch hole right to be like, okay, let's make sure I'm really dialed in here, and then he's the added benefit moving to the course and the four and a quarter looks like the Grand Canyons.
Obviously, you've got a lot of you know, accolades, you know, for the work you've done with Matt Fitzpatrick. The stack system, which I'm seeing so many players not only at the tour level using, but so many juniors and so many amateur golfers are coming in with that in their bag. Talk to us about how you met Matt and what the stack system is.
Sure, so I met Matt through his coach, Mike Walker. So they came to the conclusion twenty eighteen that Matt needed more speed. He wanted to be one of the best players in the world. He wants to be the best player in the world. He wants to win majors. And funny enough, Claude, it was at the Masters, playing you know, against guys like DJ DJ in particular whole eleven. Matt's got a four iron in at Augusta, DJ's got
an eight iron. Well, you can't You can't do that over four rounds and expect to beat some like DJ. Like DJ's just as good at putting short game. So in order to have any chance faster, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, you need you need, you need to get the speed up. So they they gave me a call up, you know, spend a few days with Matt. We worked on some mechanics stuff, but really the gains came all the games
came from using the stack system. So it's it's basically a weighted club, so you can you can do overload and overspeed training with it. But the magic's in the app, so it sets up customized programming for you. It tells you exactly what way to load on rest timers pop up. It tracks your records so you know it's program is going to be different than someone else's program. And then when you finish a program, it reanalyzes all the data it's collected and it says, okay, this is the next
program that's best for you. And it also dynamically changes during the program to figure out what your next workout should be. And we put a lot of effort into making the app very motivating and engaging. So I think that that was a real change in the industry. We have thirty thirty options that you commote on there. The
app is fund to interact with it. It's super motivating and you know, we've got about twenty five thousand people using it now, over twelve million swings, and we've got a ton of data that's really just made the app even better. Just we're constantly re evaluating the programming and what it can do. For a guy like Fitzpatrick, he was you know, ball speed was mid one sixties and over the course of twenty twenty one at Pebble, he went from mid one sixties to averaging one hundred and
eighty one at the Tour Championship. That was his average driver speed for all drivers for that tournament. So you know, that's just absolutely game changing. It was the reason why he went, you know, the tipping point for why he won the US Open. He was there was a par four drivable par four on the Sunday last year. He was the only player to drive the green. You know, when eighty one ball speed, it was kind of cold and windy, Rory didn't drive the green. You know that
all those long hitters. He was the guy that put the ball in the green, So it was it was really a tipping point for him to bring his career to the next level.
What was the catalyst for you coming up with the stack system to begin with? I mean, where talk me through the thought process of Okay, obviously you do a ton of research. You're you're not throwing darts at a board and hoping that you hit the target. I mean, there's your your guess. I'm guessing. But with your background, did these aren't you know, uneducated guesses? You're like, okay, here's here's the information. So how did you go about coming up with a way to attack gaining speed?
Sure, so I've got what I call a deterministic model my mind. You know, things that you can do. Here's Claude Harmon, what can we do to increase his club at speed. We've got mechanics, We've got physical training, We've
got you know, maybe just actually your effort level. You know, there's there's certain things that we can do, knobs that we can move to increase your your clubhead speed and physical training is a big knob and overload overspeed is the biggest way to crank that knob, you know, So you can get stronger in the gym, you get more flexible, But the most efficient way to get faster is overload
and overspeed. And I took a fundamentally different approach from what was currently out there, coming from my track and field background. Tracking field is very scientific, and I was a multi event athlete university meeting in track and field,
and we would do overload and overspeed training. If I was running one hundred and eleven seconds hundred meters eleven seconds and my training partner was running a hundred meters in eleven seconds, but he was forty pounds heavier, we would have very different sled weights that we would toe, even though we were trying to run at a certain the same kind of percentage, change in our speed or the tension in a bungee cord that was pulling us
would be different. So when I approached overload and overspeed, I said the same thing. It wasn't you and I are going to swing the same weight. We need to swing a weight that's going to have a swing at a certain percentage of our driver speed. So that's how I approached the research and iteratively went through experiment after experiment over years, saying, Okay, what weight's too heavy? What weight you know, if we have you swinging at only eighty five percent of your clubhead speeds, we got a
lot of weight on there. Do we still see gains?
No?
So we fine tune and to figure okay, well, what percentage of your speed is too slow to see gains? What about at the other end, what percentage of speed is too fast? Before we stop seeing improvements in clubhead speed? Should you mix overload and overspeed in the same program? Maybe she should do three months of overload and then three months of overspeed. Should you do them in the
same session? So we iteratively started ticking these off. How do I know if clubs programs should have more overload in it or should it have more overspeed in it? Right? So the research started getting more fine tuned to eventually the point where I started applying it to tour players. So Potterrick Harrington was one of the first people to do it. I met with him at TPI twenty sixteen, and at that time I was using lead tape on the end of a driver shaft, you know, and maybe
wasn't the safest thing. And then started working with that much of you know, Kevin Duffy used to work with Tommy Fleetwood, longtime trainer of Loui us Days and Lee Westwood. So he started using with his players. He started seeing results. G Mac was another person I thought, you know what, Okay, this is ready to develop into a system. And I have some very good relationship with folks at Ping and Marty Jertsen, who's who's awesome. He was kind of the
final you know, link in the chain. Well even more so than that. It wouldn't have happened without him. But he did some of this overload over speed stuff and he went from one to twelve to mid one twenties and ended up making the cut at beth Page Black when the PGA champions there when Brooks, when Brooks won of it. Yeah, so this, you know, this is an engineer at Ping who's now an elite driver of the golf ball in terms of speed at the PGA Tour level.
So he's like, hey, this really works, and he said, well, you know what do you what do you need? What do you need these design specs to be? So he designed it and yeah, we've we've got this great product and we brought in an awesome app person, the guy that you know did a lot of the track Man app so, yeah, fantastic.
I saw a quote that you said, the problem with the U s g A and the r in A with the distance issue is they can't legislate around the athlete. And I saw Martin Slumbers at the at the Masters this year. He was talking to my dad. My dad was asking about the ball roll back and everything, and I mean, you said that you can't have speed without science, it's not art. But what I don't really think people
realize is hitting the golf ball far. There is a skill to that, and the skill comes from understanding how you do that right. And I've always said, so I'll show that. I think it's I think it's incredibly naive from the governing body standpoint. Everybody says the golf ball goes too far, the golf ball goes too far, the driver goes too far, the driver goes too far. I was with Dustin Johnson h watching him hit balls today.
If it was to me, if it was the technology and the technology alone, and I've been saying this for a while, then I should be able to pick up DJ's driver that he was driving with today, with the shaft that he uses with the ball that he uses and carry it three point fifteen three twenty in the air like he can't. And if I pick up his driver, I'm going to carry it two fifteen two twenty in the air because one, I don't have the body that
he's blessed with. But also I just think if it was technology, if it was just the balls and the drivers, then everybody would hit the golf ball the same distance. Matt Fitzpatrick would have never had to go down the stack system because he should be able to pick up the same ball, the same driver that Rory's using and say, okay, I can get all the same equipment, and if it was just the equipment, it should go the same distance.
Right. Well, there's a whole host of issues with the way the USCA and the RNA approached the concept. Is it even a problem? That's I think fundamentally, what are we fixing? So what I think they should have done to start out was said, let's get specific, show me some golf courses, and show me some holes on golf courses where the ball is going too far, and then you decide, okay, this is a problem. Now what do
we do to address that? Because the vast majority of golfers on the vast majority of courses there clearly isn't an issue because the USGA is also pushing at the same time to get forward right right, So there's a there's a fundamental issue there. And and then once you decide on okay, let's take Saint Andrews, right, I think that would have to be the flag I would assume the flagship. Here's the course where the there's a big problem. You know, well, I don't know the last few times
it's been at San Andrews. I thought we had great tournaments, right, Like if you if you look at Cam Smith's win, We've got Rory hunting him down. We've got Cameron Young hunting him down. It was very exciting in my opinion. Maybe some people thought that the scores were too low. Well, the weather was really very mundane.
Golf is in it's an outdoor sport. So if you give the best players the best condition with not a lot of wind and not a lot of rain, they're going to shoot low scores. And then you look at what happened at the Senior Open Championship over the weekend where you have these catastrophic wind conditions and plus five plays off so and they've still got the same equipment that the USGA and the RNA says goes too far. They say the ball goes too far and the driver
goes too far. And guys are you know, nine over and they're in the top five.
Yes. So my fundamental issue, and I think I could you know, do a good job of proving this point, is that in the USG had a hard time understanding this when I tried to make the point is that the limiting factor is is not club head speed and ball speed factor is how far the ball is going and so, and I tried to make this point in
a few ways. If you look at the average clubhead speed on tour one hundred and fifteen miles per hour, and even look at some of the faster guys swinging in the you know, low to mid twenties, there's a dozen guys at my course in Anigonish, Nova, Scotia that easily have tour level clubhead speed, right and there are thousands and thousands of them everywhere. But you never see that in other professional sports. No one has the physical skills. If you just go randomly to your local softball diamond
or you know, a slow pitcher. No one is throwing ninety five mile an hour pitches. It's just not happening, right, They're throwing eighty seventy five. So where I'm going with this is that at the that we're really not meeting the potential currently at the elite level in golf because of how far the golf ball currently goes. It means that hitting it four hundred yards is not going to be optimal given the dispersion that's going to be associated
with that. So if you said, okay, Rory DJ Matt Fitzpatrick, Tony Finnew will probably be the best example, and you go, okay, here's a ball that if with your current swing speed you're going to lose twenty yards overnight. Tony Finnew is going to go from swing at one eighteen to one twenty four and he's going to carry that ball exactly where he's carrying it now. Rory's going to do the
same thing. Brian Harmon probably can't, right. But eventually then the guy's coming the gord sergeants, the guy's coming up through NCAA. That's who's going to be in there now. Because they're just waiting, they just hope that the average club at speed can move up to one twenty five. It can't right now because of the distance the golf ball does go at those speeds and the dispersion associated
with that. Right. So, so the PGA the USGA was doing this research and making these assumptions based on the current technology, not realizing that, yeah, well, what happens if if we if we actually are now playing with this ball, we'll club head speeds to stay the same. No, they'll increase overnight. It'll be there'll be big jumps because guys have that potential, and.
In order to get a different golf ball that doesn't go as far, they're going to try and hit it further to get it to go further.
Right, all of a sudden, it's still optimal from a dispersion and distance perspective on the way courses are set up to probably be around for most courses where the average distance is right now, right, it may maybe a little bit further, but you know, you you won't see if you made a super hot golf ball right and a crazy hot driver and you said all right, let's go play Harbortown, you wouldn't You wouldn't see driving distance go up and that there's a reason why guys still
pull threewood. You know on eighteen you're not going to see driving distance increase one yard.
No. And the other thing is that I think that some of the governing bodies, I think they're in my opinion, they're very out of touch with modern athletes, right because they're not modern athletes, right, they're country club players. They played the golfer, So I don't think they understand how elite modern golfers that play golf for a living, how good they really are. And again that goes back to my point because if it was just the technology, everybody would hit and if it was just I mean, like
you said, Gordon Sergeant, the kid that was leading. There are players that are playing that have over one twenty, but they're not winning every single tournament. And Brian Harmon still won a major two weeks ago, and he doesn't have one hundred and twenty ball speed. He doesn't, I mean or one eighty five ball speed in one hundred and twenty mile per hoor clubhead speed. He doesn't come
close to that. So do you think that there's a push because the governing bodies are worried about golf courses. Are they worried about the sport. I mean, they always say it's becoming too easy, But I'm on two or thirty weeks a year. The sport doesn't look any easier to me today than it looked twenty five years ago.
No, And that's what I think. One of the reasons why the PGA Tour was like, yeah, we're not going to accept this is because people want to see better. They want to see records. No one, you know, wants to see players that can't play as you know as well as somebody did ten years ago. No one wants to see the basketball neck up to eleven feet, not see any dunks. You know, I would be that wouldn't be entertaining. And at the same time, one of their big their biggest mandate, I think is grow the game.
And if you make it harder, that's not going to grow the game. There's a reason why pickleball, you know, I've said this a few times is taking off because tennis is quite hard relative to pickleball. Pickleball has found the sweet spot where it's like, hey, we can have rallies. You know, I can pick up this game. Figured it out in a couple of days and I can have some rallies and have some fun. Tennis is pretty hard, you know. Now, Is pickleball going to replace tennis at
the league level, No, probably not. But if you're trying to get more people to play golf, don't make it harder. You know, on the home course that I play in any Innish, there's a bunker that's too ten to carry, and probably fifteen percent of our membership can carry it. You know, no one, no one needs hit the ball shorter, and there's no way. That's another flaw with having the change and the model local rule MOTI local rule is it would eventually trickle down to everybody. You know, there's
there's no way for that not to happen. Tour players play the ball wn the NC double players are going to play it. If they're playing it at the you know, the US Amateur, then the guys are gonna want to play it before they go to the US Amateur, which means it's going to be in club championships, which means if it's in NC DOUBLEA, then the kids in high school have to play it, and then then their local junior tours are gonna have to play it. It's just there's no way it stays just at the elite level.
And I listened to, you know, the governing bodies talk about how easy the game is. But when I'm not on the road at tour events, I give lessons eight hours a day. I still give lessons to regular handicapped golfers. I don't see any of these people not coming and taking lessons because the game's just so easy, now, right, I still you know, I've been teaching golf most of my adult life. I still see the average golfer struggle
to get a three wood in the air. I still see the average golfer struggle to take a divot with anything past day nine iron. I still see the average golfer struggle with contact getting the golf ball airborne. Using your tennis and pickleball analogy, I see a lot of golfers that struggle to get from a tennis standpoint, they struggle to get the ball over the net consistently. You know, Novak Djokovic, there's a term in tennis called unforced errors.
If he has a lot of unforced errors, he can't out winner the unforced errors, right, no matter how great he is. And I still see the average golfer, the regular everyday golfer having an enormous amount of unforced errors. And there's I think this perception from the governing bodies that the game is just so so easy and show at the elite level, DJ's irons are unhittable. Wait, he's got the smallest. The best players use the hardest equipment to hit. They're not using the equipment that's going to
help them hit at forty yards further with their irons. Right, most of the guys that are elite elite ball strikers on the PGA tour are using equipment that is you know, it's very difficult for regular people to hit these clubs because the sweet space, the sweet spot is small. The size of the clubs are small. I mean, Ricky Fowler came out with said irons two years ago and they I mean they look like thimbles. They were so hard
to hit. Yeah, I mean, my I've got a set of my grandfather's irons that he played with in the forties and you know, the lofts on these versus the loss on them today are very very different. Where do you see do you where do you see distance in ten years, five years, ten years? I mean, do you think it continues, Because I've talked to Dave Phillips about this, and he's been on the pod before, and he said he thinks there's a rate of diminishing return with clubhead
speed and ball speed at the elite level. To whereas you said, the car is just too fast to keep on the road for the track that they want you to drive it on. It's yeah, it could go three it's a drag racer, but it has no ability to have maneuverability and you can't keep it on the track.
Do you see speed gains continue to go up? And do you see that we're going to get to a plateau to where you're saying, Okay, if you go any higher in speed, clubhead speed, and ball speed, it becomes very difficult to compete and play the sport the way the sport is designed to be played.
Yeah, because the limiting factor right now why club head speed isn't higher is not because the players can't swing faster. It's because of what happens at the distance is associated with those clubhead speeds. The dispersion gets too large. So I I mean, I would tackle this if it is a problem through course design and there's clues all over the place. You just have to if you just did a search through shot link and you'd say, hey, where are some long par fours where the yard where the
distance off the tee is below average? Right? Okay, we got a four hundred and sixty yard part four, you know, a little longer than average. Why is everybody in this been short? Let's go see how this hole is designed, you know, like things things like that, and depending on the whole. I'm no golf course architect guru, but depending on the whole, you have options to to to make. If you're gonna hit it far, you have to be
super skilled. I would you should never be thinking of this from a we want to prevent anybody from trying to hit the ball far, like don't don't put like you know at three hundred yards creaks you know that are forty yards wide across the fairway. No, that that's not the way to do it. I think if somebody can go out there and shoot fifty four and hit the ball three hundred and forty yards on a rope every time, that's awesome. That that good for them. That's what I want to see in golf. That is the
ultimate performance. So what you can do you know some of the lines that Bryson started taking. Right. If you don't want Bryson to go across six at six at BAYHILLI, you know, you do something real easy doesn't ruin the hole at all. You just plant a twenty foot pine tree that's not even in view. It's just off to the left right, just so that it's right. If you're like, hey, I want people to go down this chute, no problem, twenty foot pine tree. It's not near the t box.
But in order for you to get a driver up twenty feet over the course of twenty yards, good luck. Right, But it doesn't ruin the aesthetics of the hole. There's lots of holes like that at you know, Augusta right where you're forced to go down a chute or hey, hey, if you're playing like a link style and the you know, there's plenty of awesome links holes examples of this where you don't want to have random pine trees. You fire some gorse bushes, you know between two ninety and three
forty and a couple of pop bunkers. Hey, you want to take the risk of going driver and if you can put it down the fairway and avoid the gorse and the bunkers. Good for you, but and you should be rewarded for that skill. So I think there's there's more intelligent ways to do it than if you perceive there to be a problem than by just trying to slow the ball down, which I don't think will solve the problem at all. You would have to slow it
down a ridiculous amount. Not twenty yards, you'd have to slow it down like fifty yards, and then you would never see Brian Harmon, a guy like Brian Harmon when the Open. You would basically say you can only play this sport if you've got one thirty club at speed, and there will be enough of those guys can who can play golf with one thirty clubhead speed and hit the ball three hundred yards with one hundred and thirty
mile hour clubs. That's the way it would eventually go, which is not there they you know, USG and rn A certainly doesn't want that to happen.
I don't think we talked about practice. You partnered with Rapsoda with their new Launch monitor come up with their version of the Combine twenty four shots. You know, talk me through when you when a company says to you, Okay, we want you to come up with this. Do you approach it in the same way that we've talked about from the speed standpoint? How did you come up with what was what you felt was going to be really advantageous for players to work on? From a combined standpoint?
I mean, there's other launch monitors out there that have their version, but how did you come up with your idea on Okay, how can we challenge people in a combine environment with a launch monitor to help them perform and get the most out of their practice and the most out of their game.
Yeah. So I was really excited to do this because I have the ways that I think are best to practice,
and I like practice too. There was a lot of constraints in that I want practice to also be insightful from an analytics standpoint, So not only are you maximizing your improvement, but then the results you get you can learn a lot about your game, and I want it to be You know, if you look at the market that Rep. Soto is targeting, there's going to be some elite golfers, but the majority of them like, who's gonna and they've got this the MLM two Pro has got
an awesome price point, so anybody who's serious about their game, you know, on a budget, can go out and get it and they can use it at their rings. That's what I was thinking about. Okay, if you go to the the people grinding it out at all the ranges across you know, the United States, North Meyrioa, all over the place that you go go get a typical bag of balls. There's forty balls in there, okay, and you probably got forty minutes max. So you do some warm up,
so I wanted the combine to be thirty shots. There's six balls of warm up right to get the cobwebs out, and then you've got three targets. Two of them are iron targets, so you can, you know, set the distance somewhere between fifty yards and whatever your furthest iron goes. You pick two targets, and then you always have a
driving target, so it's a very well rounded experience. You hit two shots, you're hit in blocks of two, so you go two shots to the short target first, right, because you could go completely random and go one one, one, but you don't want to be switching clubs all the time. That's annoying, and everybody wants, at least, especially in practice, can I get just let me hit one more, Let me hit one right, I got hit one more. So you hit them blocks of two. But then you go
through four rounds. You get eight shots at each at each target, and that's really critical. Some people will say, well, why not add more targets, Well, only three targets. You need a certain number of shots at a target to get meaningful statistics, So eight shots. With the variability of someone who might be up to a twenty handicap, you need at least eight to start to get insights on. Okay, well,
what is your average carry distance? What is your dispersion, and we relate those to a handicap, So put a lot of effort into being like, okay, this is your dispersion at this particular distance. Then this is your handicap level. So you can start say, well, I'm you know, you know what your handicap is. In the course, I'm a ten, but shoot to a six year target, I'm eighteen. Okay,
I got to work on that. And and then you know, everybody wants to hit driver, so you've also got that driving target where you could pick your driver or three wood could be a hybrid, could be a driving iron
for that round. And what's cool is then you can start to you know, there's the intelligence built into the combine where if you pick out your first target, you know your first combines fifty yards, one hundred yards, and your driver, well that is going to say, hey, Claude, you know what, we noticed that you hit these clubs to those targets. We're going to suggest these different targets. So we start to even out your bag. Hey, you know what, you haven't hit any six irons yet, and
then we start to get information on gapping. Okay, now that you know you've done five or six combines, but now we know what your average distances with all these clubs, so we could recommend, hey, you know what looks like maybe you want to decrease the loft on your fifty four because you've got a big gap between your fifty
four and your fifty eight as an example. And there's all sorts of cool insights, so it's we're maximizing performance but also getting a lot of insights in a tight little combine that the majority of people could benefit from. Tour player hitting twenty four balls in this combine is going to learn a lot so well the high handicapper. Yeah.
And I think one of the great things, and one of the reasons why I've partnered and do stuff with the Rapsoda as well, is so much in golf the tech has been at a price point that is, I see these sixteen year old kids that you know, show up for a golf lesson and they've got a track man all and my dad got me a track man
for Christmas. I'm like, he basically just brought you a thirty thousand dollars car, right, I mean just I mean the price point for a lot of the tech has been so prohibited that only the elite of the elite. I mean. I teach a girl on the LPG, Marina Alex And Marina is one on the LPGA. She played on the Solheim Cup. And when I first started working with her, we got some launch monitor, you know. I put her on a launch monitor just to see what she was doing. I was like, do you have your
own track man? She's like, I can't afford a track man, right, She's a professional athlete that was saying, listen, the price
point is just too prohibitive. So I think it's great that we're starting to see some of the tech in golf that the best players in the world are using start to come down so that everyday golfers who don't have twenty thirty, fifteen thousand dollars to invest, there's ways that they can use the same technology in the same information that they see the best players in the world using.
And like you said, what I really like about the combine is it's almost got some AI in it to where it's it's helping you as the player learn as you go along based off of what it's seeing you do. And like you said, if you put enough data in, it's going to start to see trends and kind of
see what you're doing. And I think that is just so so important for a fifteen handicapper saying, listen, maybe you don't need to improve based maybe you don't have the time to massively improve, but if you can just have a better understanding as to what you do and do what you do all the time, right, Okay, this is how far you hit your nine iron. Rather than try to hit your nine iron further, maybe you try and make sure that you can hit your nine iron
at this baseline number all the time. And that's where I think information for a lot of people listening is power, because if you can just know what you do and not try and fundamentally change what you do and say, okay, listen, I'm never going to be Rory McElroy. I'm never going to be Scotti Scheffler. I am who I am, and I'm a fifteen handicapper. Yeah I want to put better, Yeah I want to hit better. But if I can get a really good understanding is to what I do
and how far I hit the golf ball. I mean, DJ was hitting balls today. He was going back and forth between trying out a different wedge, and you know, I don't think people listening realize. I mean, he can tell you within a yard of how far it went without looking at the launch monitor. He can be within one hundred RPMs of the spin it'll go. Yeah, that one was a little bit off the toe, so that's
gonna go. And I think if the regular everyday golfer just knew what they did, it would help them tremendously and they wouldn't have to make as many massive changes as they think. If they could just have a better relationship with the truth of what they do.
Well. Yeah, I think that it provides eye opening information to most people when you realize that your nine iron distance is not that one nine iron you flushed off the tee downwind. Yeah, where you're like, yeah, I can hit my I can't hit my nine iron one point fifty. But in the rhapsodal Combine is telling me that I'm one forty two. Right, So if I've got if I've got water to carry at one, I don't want fifty percent of my shots any in the way I've been
a bullet iron, right. And it sets expectations too in terms of dispersions. So you know, people think, Okay, I've got eighty yards, I should have a birdie putt. But you look at your eighty r target on Rapsodo and all of a sudden you go, wait, my average my average proximity is twenty five feet. Well that means I've got a whole lot over twenty five feet. Yeah, I've
got a few in there that are birdie putts. So I think I think it can help people enjoy the game because it maybe sets their expectations at a reasonable level.
Well, listen, I think you know at the elite level, but also at the every day golfer lessel level that that the majority of the people listening to this or are are at. Just managing your expectations and having a better understanding is to what you do, you know, I think is huge. We could sit Sasho. I mean, there are so many things I didn't get to. I've got another list. So we're gonna get you back on because I mean I read all the stuff that you're doing.
I've got so many questions. We will get you back on the pod, you know, at a later date to talk more about it, because I think the work you're doing is amazing and to see and and I think you've been lucky enough to see it. When when I saw Matt after he won the US Open, I said to him, it's a couple of weeks later. I think it was at the British Or. I saw him at St. Andrews last year. I said, listen, I've been around golf pretty much my whole life, and you won't find someone
that works harder than that kid. If there's if there's a stone that he can turn over, he's going to turn it over to try and get better. And I think the work that you've done with him has been fun to watch. So congrats not only to him, but congrats to you as well, and for everyone listening. If you want to hit the golf ball further, or put some money in Doc's pocket and go get the Stack
System because it will definitely help you. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us, and we will definitely get you back on the pod again soon.
Okay, thanks Bob, my pleasure.
So that was Sasha McKenzie. And listen, if you want to try and hit the golf ball further, I think he's got some data and some info that can help you do it. He's got a product that'll help you do it. So the Stack System. Some of the best players in the world they're using it, And if you want to hit the golf ball further, give it a try. I don't think you will be disappointed. So we've got a lot of great guests coming up, but we've got a lot of great guests that have been on the pod,
So if you're new, go back, take a look. We've got some great interviews. Everything's designed to try and help your game get better, maybe teach some things you didn't know. But Ultimately, the whole goal of this pod is to try and have everybody enjoy their golf more so, I can't thank everybody enough for listening, rate, review, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Son of a Butcher comes to you every Wednesday. We will see you next week.