Fried Egg Stories: Bobby Clampett and His Golfing Machine

Welcome back to season two of Frida Egg Stories. This episode on Bobby Klampett and the Golfing Machine is brought to you by Precision Pro Golf Rangefinders. So today's story is about the quest to get better and more precise on the golf course, and that's actually Precision Pros area of expertise. Their rangefinders provide accurate distances that golfers can trust. Frida Egg listeners will receive an extra twenty dollars off any Precision Pro rangefinder by going to precisionprogolf dot com

The Fried Egg requires a different technique.

If you need to do is actually square the face so it'll dig down underneath that bad lie and propel that ball right out onto the green.

Here's the thing.

Playing out of a buried lion of bunker is completely different than playing out of a nice and clean line a greenside bunker. You need to be a risk on any show, weather it's sitting cleanly or at a Friday EG.

Well, we've all played the dreaded Friday.

Not to be beard though, it's actually a pretty easy shot to hit.

All right.

Hello, how's it going, George?

Hey, you can hear me and see me. That's a plus.

That's George Pepper. He used to edit Golf magazine and in July nineteen eighty two he was at Royal Troon in Scotland for the Open Championship. It's a long time ago now, but one particular memory has stuck with him. He was in the clubhouse, like the main room.

I think they probably called it the smoking lounge in those days. It was a big picture window that looked out onto that eighteenth hole, looked right through the green all the way down the fairway.

George was in that room looking out that window on Friday afternoon when the leader of the Open was finishing his second round and he hit.

A good drive and I think he had some sort of short iron into the green.

And it was pretty.

Weird because you stand in that smoking lounge look out through the windows and you see the golfer one hundred and fifty yards down the way, and you see him hit the ball, and then it disappears it's up there because the ceiling of the room.

Blocks your ear, so you have no idea.

You saw it get launched, and I will never forget it just appeared out of the ceiling, so to speak. Plump right down on the green, I think fairly close to the hole, dow and the place went nuts well.

And it was pretty clear to everyone at that point that Bobby Clampett was going to win the nineteen eighty two Open Championship. Clampet was twenty two years old, a Californian with a carefree attitude and a head of blonde curls. Media loved him, and one aspect of the intrigue around him was how he talked about the golf swing. He used this very scientific language and kept referring to a book called The Golfing Machine, which was written by an engineer from Seattle named Homer Kelly.

We were very much aware of Holmer Kelly and the Golfing Machine. I still remember sort of a small, trim sized book, yellow cover and all of these geometric lines on it, and trying to read it unsuccessfully like everybody else.

And at the eighty two Open, Bobby Clampett's play was forcing even the skeptics to take the Golfing Machine seriously. He shot sixty seven sixty six in his first two rounds.

I was just on.

Every part of my game was on. It was pretty remarkable two days where just everything.

Was going right.

That night he slept on a five shot lead. Bobby Klampett had been one of the finest junior in college golfers since Jack Nicholas, but an open victory would have been a moment of validation not just of the player himself, but also of the science he endorsed. Clampett was truly a product of the golfing machine, so whether he wanted to or not, he had become the first important test

And then I saw I can still vividly remember it, I'm pretty sure was the second hole, and I saw this man hitting what would have been his second shot, most likely into that part four, and I remember watching.

The ball and following it up into the big trees, and then it came up and landed on the green, and I just thought, that is the coolest thing ever, hitting a little white ball.

It just captured me.

It wasn't long after that we moved to Monterey and my first experience. I kept bugging my mom, I want to learn to play golf, and she was like, yeah, yeah, one more thing, and I said, no, I really want to learn to play golf. Yeah, you said that about tennis and football and baseball and basketball and blah blah blah.

Skiing, I said, no, I really want to learn to play golf.

What do you think it is about golf that appealed to you so much. You mentioned that you played a number of different sports, but golf obviously took on the status of a near obsession pretty quickly with you at a young age, very quickly. So what was it about it.

I had had some frustrating moments playing team sports, and I can remember times, you know, the kids wouldn't let me play quarterback because the bullying that goes on in the playground, And I knew I could throw harder, better, faster than any of them could, and golf allowed me that access to be away from that.

So I knew very little about the sport right.

In fact, I knew nothing about the sport when I first got into it. So I can remember I loved riding my bike, and I remember riding to the Thunderbird bookstore there at Mid Valley Carmel and engaging the salesperson there on the discussion of I want to learn to play golf, and what books do you have in the store to recommend to me? And so I came across this book the lady suggested how to Play Golf by

When Bobby was about ten, his mother finally gave way. She let him start taking lessons at the local club in Carmel Valley, California, with a pro named Lee Martin. Three years later, Lee left and a new pro arrived, a pro who would match Bobby's enthusiasm for mastering all the details of the golf swing.

In comes Ben Doyle as the new golf instructor, and I remember in our first meeting, he says, well, let me take a picture of your swing. And he had a polaroid graftcheck camera when it was old cameras with the eight frames, you know, in sequence, and he started taking some pictures of my swing. And then we started talking about and he said, you know, I were you, I'd try to do this. And you know, you ever heard a club ed lag and you ever heard about

I mean it was. The golfing machine was to Ben what the Bible is to a Christian preacher.

So to understand what the golfing machine is and why it inspired such devotion from Ben Doyle and eventually from Bobby Clampett, we have to backtrack a little and tell the story of Homer Kelly.

My name is Scott Gummer, and I am the author of the book Homer Kelly's Golfing Machine, The Curious Quest that Solved Golf.

Let me phrase the question this way. If Homer Kelly's life were a movie, where would that movie start?

I'd probably start on the first day he played golf. It was nineteen thirty nine. He scored one hundred and sixteen and he didn't have much fun, so he quit playing, didn't play again for six months, and then some one asked him to go back out, and he went out and he shot seventy seven, which he could not understand.

What happened that I was able to? What did I do differently?

And he was just a very inquisitive guy by nature, and thus began his quest to figure out golf.

Okay, well, Garrett, I am Joe Daniels. I am the owner of the Golfing Machine copyright, which I purchased from Missus Kelly back in two thousand and two.

When I asked Joe Daniels to give me an idea of what Homer Kelly was like, he tells me two stories. The first is about how Homer installed a basement in the house where he and his wife lived in Seattle. He didn't hire somebody to do it.

He dug it out himself, and in order to support it. What he did was Interstate five was being built through downtown Seattle, and so they probably had to knock down quite a few buildings. And all those buildings were made of bricks. So he went down, put a bunch of bricks in the back of his car, drove them home, took him out, went back, got some more, and those bricks are what he used to support his house when he dug out the basement.

The second story is about how Homer learned to play piano. Not surprisingly, he taught himself.

But it was all built upon the scales.

So he didn't really play songs. He was all about the scales and.

So very mechanical. Right, it has to be like this. So he definitely was a character that relied on his intellect, and his intellect always kind of moved to if you wield golfing machine words, the geometry and physics of things.

And so when he set out to learn everything about the golf swing, he did so in a very Homer kellyish way. His first step was to visit some teaching pros in the Seattle area and ask if they could explain why he shot one sixteen in his first round and seventy seven in his next one. In other words, if they could explain one of the central mysteries of golf, why good players are sometimes bad and bad players are sometimes good. Whatever the prose told him, Homer didn't buy it.

I think golf instruction then was very much like golf instruction is now. That a lot of people talk about the feel of golf, their field golfer, and that was not what Homer.

That didn't compute in his scientific mind.

So Homer just figured gotta do it myself.

I just think the word quest is really appropriate. He just really felt like the other people that.

Were teaching the games. The pros, the swing.

Doctors and things like that didn't lack desire or sincerity.

What Homer said is they lacked information.

And one of the things that he said was all we need is a little definitive information.

I think that's what drove him. It just took a really long time.

Homer started gathering his information in the early forties, and he self published the first edition of his book, The Golfing Machine in nineteen sixty nine. Its subtitle was Geometric Golf, The Computer Age Approach, the Golfing Perfection. If you were to summarize the contents of the Golfing Machine, I mean, essentially, what that book contends and what it contains, what would you say, Actually.

I find that to be a pretty easy question, and the answer is there is no one way. Unlike Jack Nicholas, whose book is called Golf My Way, Homer's book should be called Golf Your Way.

Basically, the book breaks down the golf swing into a bunch of different components and variations, and it says, here, choose some of these pieces, assemble your own golfing machine and make sure it sends the ball where you wanted to go.

If you're able to stand behind the golf ball, and he makes a statement, visualize what you want the golf ball to do, and then his words are set up the machine that creates that ball flight, then you can do it. And I think sometimes the golfing machine scares people because it has choices. It doesn't say you have to do this, only says you have to have a flat left wrist, club head lag clubheadlag pressure point, actually have a straight plane link three things. It shouldn't be so hard, should it.

What can be hard is actually reading the book. Could you introduce yourself by name and what your relationship.

Is to me, I'm Michelle Morrison and I am your wife.

I would like you to read starting here four D zero release motions.

This term refers to.

The release of accumulators number two and number three, so is not a pattern.

Homer's writing style was pretty I mean is it is effectively a textbook.

The Golfing Machine book is written just like a text book.

I don't I don't even know that he had an editor, I mean, except maybe his wife.

You have to commit to reading the.

Golf Uncocking four by dash three.

And roll for.

What are what are your reactions?

To what you just read.

It's like a space manual.

I don't know, and yet working through it, I found it to be really satisfying. It's it's a little bit, I mean, it's a little bit, I guess in a weird way, like once you learn to conjugate verbs in a different language, then it kind of just puts you to a place where things start making sense.

And so when someone says, you know, why did mister Kelly write it this way? I say to myself, well, I don't think there's a different way he could. It's how he thinks. And you either can glean from that or you cannot.

But beneath Homer Kelly's dense technical pros and beneath his findings about the geometry and physics of the golf swing, there's a kind of philosophical conviction. And that's this golf is not an art. It's not a grand mystery. There's no spiritual component. There is just the machine, the golf swing. You build it and it either works or it doesn't. And if you shoot one sixteen one day and seventy seven the next, you won't find the reason and feel

Wasn't to me.

Well, The Golfing Machine when it was published, Homer self published it, and he had a handful.

Of books made, and you know, he.

Tried to get people to have a look, have a listen.

Homer even held a ten week class for local teaching pros.

But let's face it, the professionals at the time that came to that class where all guys who basically would say, well, you got to learn how it feels, you got to go out there and hit a bazillion balls, and this is what you've got to do.

So by the end of the class, most of the students were gone. Turns out, it wasn't easy for Homer Kelly to convince people that golf was a science and that science could solve golf.

It's just very thick in terms of trying to process that information. And so really, as the visionary, what Homer needed was someone who could teach it. He needed a disciple, as it were, to take the message out.

And he found that with a local pro named Ben Doyle.

Ben was the head golf professional at Broadmoor in Seattle, And if you've never been to Broadmore, it's a little strange. So the entrance took the Broadboard Golf Club is on

And we're not having this conversation if Homer doesn't connected Ben.

I mean, that's just you know, Homer would have had a booked like a lot.

Of people that self publish their books and that never just quite get elevated. Homer needed Ben to take the message to the masses. But to get to the next level, they needed someone who could actually execute.

It and could do it. And you know that was Bobby Klantman.

Well.

Ben was a very unique individual. First of all, he had a very unique way of delivering information. It was more about sharing with you the principle and then letting you discover it for yourself. We hit it off right away, and he saw me as a very inquisitive little kid that really wanted to learn. And he saw that I was coming out there every single day. It didn't matter rain, shine, snow, after school. I was there seven days a week working on my game.

It's worth noting that Bobby was dealing with some tough things at this time. He was living with his mother and stepfather, and his biological father, Robert Clampett, had been part of his life, but Robert was an older man sixty six when Bobby was born, and in nineteen seventy two he died. Bobby was just twelve years old. It was about a year later that Bobby met Ben and they went into overdrive. On Bobby's golf.

Swing, I'll never forget he wanted to teach me the principle of club ed lag, which is one of the real foremost principles in the golfing machine. They were building houses along the driving range at that time. This has been nineteen seventy three, but the lot next to where Ben was teaching was vacant and there was some very tall grass, probably foot to two feet tall grass. And he said to me, he says, I got a homework assignment for you.

And what's that?

He says, I want you to take your iron and I want you to go into that lot and I want you to swing in that lot and apply what I've just taught you about club ed light. I want you to swing in the long grass until all the grass is gone. And it's a a half acre lot, so plenty of grass out there. And it took me about two weeks of swinging and I got through all the grass and then he said, now I'm going to take your picture of your swing on the graph check camera.

Bobby was always going to be a tour player, no two ways about it. He is a talented golfer. What the golfing machine was able to do for him was what do they say, separate the wheat from the chaff or whatever it is that they say, right, And so he got the meat of the subject and just left all the other stuff that was irrelevant behind.

Well, there were a lot of principles in there.

I'm just thinking, you know, Law's cause there are no enigmas or mysteries to the game anymore. The ball goes exactly where you hit it every time. So in the game, if you ever hit an errant shot or a shot that didn't go where you wanted it to, you should never have to say, well, why did it go over there? If you ever say why did it go over there, you just don't understand Law's cause, and Ben was of the mindset that there's no mystery here, and he would

Bobby Klampitt was one of the greatest amateur golfers ever. He was jet He was just really, really good.

I think I knew my swing very well, and I knew that if I hit a poor shot, I could immediately diagnose why and fix it right on the spot.

You know.

I think back to nineteen seventy eight in the Western Amateur, and I'd already won the cal State am and I'd already won numerous other.

Amateur tournaments that summer, and I'm in.

The finals of the Western am I'd missed already four fairways or five fairways, four fairways in a row. I was two down after six holes and just won the hard seventh hole with a par to pull one down, and I had the honor on the eight call, and they surprised. I was playing Mark Weeby from San Jose, and they surprised both of us. Moved the tee way forward on this short eighth hold where it was drivable. But it was a tight fairway maybe ten yard opening, and a river to the right and big trees and

He was able to amass the information, filter it down into his procedure as we would call it, and make it work on the golf course in front of everyone. And there's the proof of the pudding right there. And so now all of a sudden, you can learn golf from a book.

It was in the summer of nineteen seventy eight that Bobby clamp It became famous, and so did to a lesser extent, Ben Doyle, Homer Kelly and their system. That August, Golf World magazine ran a cover story called Bobby Clampett and the golfing Machine. Bobby told the reporter, I wouldn't be winning these tournaments if it weren't for that book. Someday, that book is going to change all the theories of swings. It's inevitable. He went on to say, it's the bible

And I hit a perfect three.

Arnd is laying up up the first heat down wind and hit in the middle of the fairway and it.

Kicked forty yards left into the lip of a pop bunker. It's like, what's that all about? That is so weird. It doesn't happen.

But he's able to refocus and on the fifth hole has a forty footer for birdie. The crowd roars, He pumps his fist. Bobby Clampitt has a seven shot lead at the Open and his golfing machine is in full flight on the international stage.

Yeah, and that was kind of fun.

But then it was the very next hole that I got stuck in the pop bunker and couldn't get out.

Fist pump was a little early.

Yeah, okay, well, I mean getting to the sixth hole, right, that was that was the you know, if you're looking back, maybe the turning point, you know, what was the experience of that whole like for you?

I mean, okay, I pulled the T shot maybe twelve yards left of my target. So it wasn't wasn't my best T shot, but it wasn't one that was, you know, off the charts, and nothing was really that bad about it. And I got up there and you know, I can hit sand wedge out of here. I just need to hit the ball up about sixty yards. If I can hit it sixty yards and I can reach the green in three, it was a part five, and if I can reach the green in three, I still might get

Now just hit it out sideways. So I hit it out sideways.

And then I thought, all right, now, now if I really hit a big three wood, I might be able to get it to the front edge. I'm really going to jump on this one, and I duck hooked it over into the gunk that's going left.

Oh deer, oh, deer, Oh deer clatters through the crowd and plump it in all sorts.

Of trumble.

And ended up with a triple bogey.

After Bobby holds out, he turns, looks back at roll Truan's sixth hole and sticks out his tongue.

That's nobody's ever mentioned that, but I do remember doing that, and I would do that sometimes out of battle. I just say, I don't like you anymore. Yeah, onto the next bell.

But the bad shots and the bad bounces keep coming. The tenth hole is especially puzzling. The day before, Bobby hit a perfect three iron to three feet. Today he hits what feels like the same shot with the same club, but this time it comes up short and he makes bogie.

So before you know when I shoot seventy eight six over that day and the next day it was more of the same kind of stuff. I was just a little bit off, not quite as sharp, tee to Green and Boki buttter, and this thing's not going my way.

He finishes in a tie for tenth, four shots behind the winner, Tom Watson. The way Bobby tells it, he pouts for a bit then moves on. A month later, he wins his first PGA Tour event, the Southern Open, and by all indications, his career is moving in the right direction. But his experience at the eighty two Open does plant a seed of doubt about his game. Obviously, his weekend performance wasn't great. But he also keeps thinking about the practice rounds He played it true.

Tuesday, I shot sixty five in a practice room playing with Gary Player and Johnny Miller, and then Wednesday I went out and shut seventy five. And I was going through a period where my game was more inconsistent, more it's like just a little something off, and man, it could be ten shots from one day to the next, and it was driving me crazy because it was like, it's just not that far off. How can it be? What's going on there?

So Bobby finds himself struggling with the same problem, the same mystery that started Homer Kelly on his quest forty years earlier, how can I play so well on Tuesday and so poorly on Wednesday?

So it led me down some more roads to discovery of how can I find a swing that isn't quite so temperamental? Maybe?

And I think that started, unfortunately kind of a rabbit hole for me.

Nineteen eighty three ended up being a low point, not just for Bobby Klampett, but for the whole golfing machine enterprise, and it really was an enterprise. At that point. Ben Doyle had a growing stable of students. Homer Kelly had set up a process for educating and authorizing instructors, but in eighty three, Homer Kelly, who was seventy five years old by then, had a falling out with Ben Doyle. Joe Daniels isn't totally sure why.

The first and utmost honest thing to say is I wasn't there, and I need to make that completely clear. So I really am not aware of exactly what created that issue. There was one. I think it unfortunate, Ben being angry with Homer, Homer being disappointed in Ben. Just both sides lost. There was no winner in that.

And then in the middle of a seminar with the Georgia PGA, Homer Kelly collapsed and died of a heart attack. Bobby couldn't go to his funeral because he had to be in Australia, where he was battling with his suddenly defective golf swing. In the eighty three season, Bobby didn't finish in the top ten once and ultimately he decided to part ways with Ben Doyle.

I became influenced and was led to believe that if I totally changed my swing, I wouldn't have some of these temperamental issues.

With my swing, so to speak.

And I went to four different coaches, all big name coaches, and they're all great and wanting to work with me. But the thing that they all said, well, basically, your swing sucks.

And we got to make some major changes.

And I had one say to me, I have more moving parts in an erector set, and another one say to me, you better forget about anything you've ever learned about the game and start all over.

One of these coaches, in fact, the one who made the erector set comment, was Jimmy Ballard. Hey, Garret, Hi, Joe, how are you sorry? Jimmy, how are you doing? I was just talking to it, Joe, my bad. I do that all the time, so forgive me. Jimmy has worked with, among others, how Sutton, Curtis Strange, Sandy Lyle, Sabby Biasteros, and for one day, Bobby Clamping.

I got a phone call from Bobby's mother and stepfather. He was coming to play at Derryle and they told me that they would like for me to take a look at him and work with you.

It was tournament week at Dral, so a bunch of Jimmy's players were out there.

I was working with one of the players at the time, and I told him go ahead and get Bobby filmed and I'll be ready in about fifteen or twenty minutes. Well, I waited a little while. After I'd finished, they still didn't come into the viewing room, so I sent for him, and they came on in. And the reason they were so long, my assistant told me. He said, the reason we was so long, He said, he topped the first five or six god balls, just topped them with a five iron.

The conversation between Jimmy and Bobby quickly turned to the golfing machine.

So I said, well, what is it you think is right about? And he starts telling me all this stuff, and finally I just said, look, Bobby, wait a minute. If you're right and all this you're telling me is correct, why did you top five or six fire irons out there well ago, well before you hit one in the air. And there was no answer.

Eventually, as Jimmy remembers it, Bobby walked out and they never worked together again.

Yeah, And you know, here's the thing about the golfing machine. The proofs in the eating of the pie of the golf machine that's been around for a long time. How many majors have been one with anybody said I'm working on the golf machine.

I mean how many?

I have over fifteen major winners. If you doubt the TPC and it worked, I'll be I found my players. I give them one and maybe two thoughts, and the one thought would back the backsling in a finish. But you can't give them two backswing thoughts.

How could you do that?

You can't take that quick. It's when the club one hundred miles an hour, So you can't go out there with all these I'm going to do this and this and this and doctor as across the piece. That's what did appear to me the golf machine made clamp it du and that's when he got mechanical, and that's when he could He couldn't get through the ball at all.

What would you say to people who at this time were blaming the golfing machine for your struggles?

Yeah, I guess that's that would be like you're in journalism now, so you write articles, right, Yeah, that would be like somebody saying you're two into the alphabet.

You're so Bobby ended up coming back to Homer Kelly's ideas, and while he was never again a consistent factor on the PGA Tour. He did have some good seasons on the senior circuit. Today, he's a teacher himself, and he has a book called The Impact Zone, which takes a lot of inspiration from the golfing machine. Bobby's writing is clearer than Homer's, but the principles are basically the same. You can do it in a bunch of different ways. Impact is what matters, and there's no mystery in the

I mean, the hindsight was there's kind of an old adage, if it's not broke, don't try to fix it. And probably would never have been a number one in the world player with my old game and old swing, but I would have won a lot more than one tournament on the PGA Tour.

I'm convinced to that.

It would have been great for Bobby, and it would have been great for the golfing machine, and it would have been great for Homer.

And Ben either. If Bobby had gone on to the kind.

Of career that was expected, or if there were others along the way in that time. I mean, if there have been four or five people that were golfing machine advocates, that'd have been different. But there was Bobby and it didn't work out. You know, we're not robots.

And therein lies the thing that.

Would always fail with the golfing machine or with any golf instruction method, is that at some point an infallible way of doing things is being executed by the most flawed or as it were.

It's just, you know, we're.

Human and science like this can be perfect in theory.

And we don't live in theory. We live in fractics.

As Bobby Klampitt's playing her waned, so did the reputation of Homer Kelly's work. But the golfing machine always had its advocates, including Steve Elkington, a major champion who won ten times on the PGA Tour. In these days, more and more golfers and golf instructors seem to have Homer Kelly's name on the tip of their tongues. Rice in Deshambo says the golfing machine changed his life I mean, he says a lot of things, but that's one of them.

Came out in May of twenty twenty on Simon and Schuster.

And the big question for many of us is what to take from both sides, what to learn from science and what to set aside for art.

It's kind of a question that is inside golf as well as outside. I mean, the world in general is kind of going through this revolution of information and data that's at our fingertips, and.

How do we deal with it all?

How do we reconcile it with the world that we live in and use it for our betterment. As kind of a really big question, and it's one that's playing out in golf and rather dramatic terms.

Just consider the job of a twenty first century golf instructor. Be right for this professional to ignore the recent science of the golf swing. As Ben Doyle like to say, truth is truth.

They say the numbers don't lie, right, these are indisputable, But how do you create those numbers?

How do you do it?

How do you change a complex motor pattern? And the more we've learned about learning, the more neuroscience has come in and explained how we create new memories and how we change our patterns, it's really not through explicit information. So whereas the golfing machine is, here is the most it is the most explicit book possible because it is nothing but facts and information and numbers. But the way our brain works, the way we learn as human beings,

And if you map your brain.

Maybe you can explain the pathways that enable you to move, but you don't know how you just started that process. So, I mean, once you really think about it, it's very difficult to change something that you don't quite understand.

In other words, how do we do what the science tells us to do? There might be some mystery in that, maybe some small space for art. And Brett tells me that this is the problem that a golf instructor and named Mike Hebron ran up against. Hebron is a big golfing machine guy, and he was eager to impart all of Homer Kelly's information to his students, and.

Then he ran into students who weren't getting better. Like this happens to every Almost every teacher I talked to had the same experience where they were teaching. They thought they knew all, they thought they knew everything, and then some students weren't getting better, and the ones that really care said why.

So Hebron began to take classes about how people learn. He remained a science driven instructor, but he struck a deal with the art of teaching.

Now when he teaches, he has all of the background of the golfing machine. He knows that stuff as well as anybody on the planet, and he never mentions it to a student.

Ever.

He has them playing games because he understands that that's how you learn.

Essentially, Mike Hebron found his own way of living peacefully within golf's holy war. Bobby Clampett has a story he likes to tell that I think encompasses a lot of what we're talking about here. It was nineteen seventy nine and Bobby, at the height of his amateur career, had qualified for his first Masters and the aspiring golf scientist was paired with one of golf's great artists, sixty eight year old Sam Snead.

Pretty cool for an eighteen year old kid to get paired with the man who in the first golf book I picked up was how to Play Golf by Sam Snead, And so now I get to play with him.

On Friday, they get three holes into their second.

Round and we had a thunderstorm came in at Augusta National and we had to all go back to the clubhouse and he said, kid, come with me. So we went into the dining room and we sat down for four hours just the two of us and talked. It was like one of the its, like he was becoming my grandfather. We just sat there and talked and had a great time. Then they called us back out on the course after a four hour delay. We went back out and we get to the fifteenth hole and it's

So we get to the sixteenth hole and it's really dark. At sixteen.

You can barely make out the flag stick, almost a little reflection on the water, but it's dark. I played sixteen and we're heading to seventeen and I said, mister Sneed, really, I mean, I've never played in this kind.

Of darkness before. He said, keep on playing, son.

They finished seventeen, and finally some AUGUSTA members come get them.

It's too dark to play here at the Masters. We're going to call play for the day and said, no kidding, So play Ruzoom at eight am tomorrow morning.

So I spend the night thinking about the eighteenth hole, and I figure that I have to par eighteen to make the cut. The cut's already been determined. I'm the last group. Everybody knows the cut's going to be at one over, and I'm one over.

Bobby comes up with a plan for how he's going to play the eighteenth hole. He'll hit three wood off the tee, six iron into the green. So in the morning, on the driving range, all he practices are three woods and six irons. But then as he's walking down the hill towards the eighteenth tee, he sees someone in the distance.

As I'm walking down and watching him, I suddenly realized. And why I didn't think about this before? I don't know that every time I had hit three with off the tee and the practice runs, I bogied the hole. And so I asked my caddy, I said, what do you think?

He says, I don't know.

What do you feel like I thought about it for a moment and I got down there on the tee and I said, give me the driver, and I hit this little perfect butter cut up with the driver between the bunkers and an A and air at about fifteen feet and made it for Birdie to make the cut in my first Master.

So that was pretty fun.

Today we might say that driver is the statistically correct play, that the data supports it right, and it probably does. But for Bobby, in that moment, it seems like it was an intuitive choice, unlocked by something about Sam Sneed's golf swing, maybe something to do with feeling and memory, maybe something that science can't really explain. When I run this by Brett Sergallis, he's reminded of another golf instructor.

And the way he explained it to me was, there are some things that can't be broken down into sequences. So the golf swing is not a sequence of photos. There's something intrinsic about the motion that can't be stopped. It's like stopping a stream. He said, yeah, And so you can pick it apart in pieces and show where things are. But that piece doesn't exist without the piece

Right.

You know, it's like watching an artist at work. It's like, could you imagine like watching Michelangelo paint. You see it happening, and it's so much more than each line, each brushstroke of Michelangelo's right, it's the whole. It's what's happening at that moment. And there's something fluid about that. There's something stream like about it where you can't stop it. It's just the beauty is in its completeness.

This episode of Friday Stories was produced and hosted by me Garrett Morrison. It was mixed and engineered by Cameron Hurtis and we had transcript help from Meg Atkins. Lots of books mentioned in this episode. We have Golf's Holy War by Brent Sergallis, The Impact Zone by Bobby Klampett, and Homer Kelly's Golfing Machine by Scott Dummer, and of course the Golfing Machine itself by Homer Kelly himself. Thanks as well to Joe Daniels, Jimmy Ballard, and George Pepper.

Yeah, I think if you go back and look at the history of the game, particularly at the highest levels, many of the best players can be pretty well classified as either mechanics or magicians. And if you look back as far back as Harry Varden, he was very much mechanic. He wrote this book, invented Varden grip. He had very precise ways of very precise ball striker. A few years later, the main one of the main players is Walter Hagen.

I don't know.