Golf’s Scientific Revolution

et cetera. And it discusses how these innovations have made the modern game what it is, for better or for worse. It's a really, really good read, even for an admitted science idiot like me. Now, in addition to getting Will's book, make sure to check out the Frida Egg Pro shop. It's at proshop dotthfrid Egg dot com. Right now, we have new stuff in our print shop specifically some cool shots of Mierfield in Scotland and sand Hills Golf Club

in Nebraska. You can get prints on metal, on canvas or just on plain old photo paper, all that and more at pro Shop dotthfried egg dot com. All right, Will Haskett, you are a man of many talents. Today we're talking about your book, The Science of Golf, and we'll get to that, but you have just wrapped up doing a broadcast.

But yes, I am predominantly a play by play guy in trade and heart in every single way, shape and form.

not fully remote model. But two guys are still walking in the fairways every week on the PGA to or another guy is sort of your tower announcer, right, somebody who's able to kind of bop around and see different shots. And that could be done from anywhere, whether it's in studio or whatever it might be. And then the pandemic forced pretty much the entire industry into this remote setup.

And so I have colleagues in the industry for two years that we're calling all their basketball games on ESPN from their basements, you know, and they were having the remote kit, so we're still in sort of that same mode. So, yes, there is a component where a third of the guys that are calling golf shots are at home. So it works out to be about a third of my work during the year on PGA Tour Radio is from my

home studio. And as you will obviously recognize as a father of young children, it has super perks, so I'm very much appreciative of it. I'm forty one and I'm still the youngest member of the broadcast team on PGA to a radio in the sport that scus a little bit older. So I do not mind being home a few extra times a year where I can get off the air and go upstairs and have dinner with the kids.

a perfect example, I was in Bermuda last year. I got wind and rain blasted on the weekend by what felt like a tropical storm. And so I know the contours of the greens. I know where the guys are trying to aim it and hit it off the tee. So having that built in makes it way easier. If I'd never seen the footprint or never been to the golf course and I'm calling it from home, it's really really difficult. And so then you keep it so simple that I feel like it's a disservice to the audience.

So I think we have a really good crew with a lot of experienced guys to where those people who are at home in this sort of new world that we live in in this remote model, can still provide all all the same context. And to be honest, sometimes I'm driving around listening to my own peers and I know the schedule Garrett, and I'll be listening. I'm like,

wait a second, who's not the I can't tell. And if I can't tell, then I know the audience can't tell, so I think we're doing a pretty good job of it.

But I often feel like with PGA Tour Radio that the commentary really does bring it a live in a nice way, and so it's a it's a good thing to do to kind of mix up your golf consumption. You know, if people have never listened to a PGA Tour radio broadcast and you like following PGA Tour events, it's it's kind of a way to do it.

shot then requires discussion and conversation. We're in a visual medium, you don't have to necessarily do that, and so you can sort of lose some of the storytelling and contextual elements of broadcasting it, and you can then squeeze in more sponsored elements or whatever it might sort of be. But we're always sort of breaking down lie angle what it's going to take, then reacting to what that is.

And I think that we've also embraced advanced statistics a little bit more in our medium than in other places. So you can say, hey, this guy's ranked wherever this might be, or here's the shot probability of this, depending on who the analyst is that week. Some of our analysts have embraced that. Some of our analysts are little more old school, but some of our younger analysts, you know, guys that are waiting to turn fifty, I think have embraced a lot of those numbers and then allows us

to tell those stories a little bit more. And this is probably a good segue point, But that certainly lights me up a little bit because I'm definitely the stat geek of all the play by play guys that we have calling golf shots on PG two Radio.

really the big accomplishment in that vein. It is a fascinating book to read, and we're going to kind of dive deep into it in this podcast. So, you know, first off, the science in golf is a big, big subject, as I'm sure you discovered when you started to conceptualize this book. So how did you eventually settle on a focus for this book? You know, what, how did you decide what to cover and what not to cover?

who there's a science of Harry Potter. I mean, if we want to go full geeked them, I mean they've had science of books on things that have nothing to do with actual sport, and I love the idea of a science of series in sport, and then especially when it gets to golf. And I even mentioned it in

the book. John McPhee, who's one of the key guys I interviewed he as a professor up in Canada, and he had the nugget that I'd never heard before that, you know, in golf, there are twice as many patents in the world of golf as all other sports combined, not any other sport, like twice as many patents just in golf as in all other sports. And that makes sense me think about all the equipment and different golf balls and things that you would actually have patents on.

It's about as scientific as sport as possible. So to not bore the listeners too much on this one. And you were a guest on my previous podcast, The Perfect Number, which is not dead but hasn't been active for a couple of years, and I literally decided to stop doing that podcast, and the day after I decided independently to shut it down, I was approached to write this book, and I just sort of felt like, Okay, this is a sign, like this is definitely the project I need

to take on now. And a lot of people you included were subjects of the podcast that then made their way into this book because I had this four year run of interviewing people and not just the data community, but across the entire spectrum of a lot of things that we covered. So, to answer your question in a long winded way, when they approached me to write this book, I knew I had this stuff. It was really a question of how broad do I want this book to be and how specific do I want this book to be?

And you and I were talking before we hit record as I really thought that I was going to be able to do something and put my stamp on the game, right, like, oh my gosh, like will Haskt discovered this something scientific And then the more I started finding the people I needed to fill all the gaps, I realized how dumb I truly am at understanding the main like all of the little details, Like I understand the main concepts, but

the little details I had no clue about. And so then it really turned into a book of, Okay, what is every single aspect of golf that I think has science in it? And then let's touch them all. And that's really what the book became. And so it's ten chapters, the tenth chapter being really looking forward into the future,

and the other nine really cover it all. And then it was really kind of a I always want to write a narrative type of book, and this is very much a more technical book than I thought the initial book that I would ever write. And so then it was how can I tie all these chapters together? How do I prioritize them? What I think is actually the

proper order, Like what do I lead with? And then anecdotally is really where I went to, is like how can I then use my experience of a decade on the PGA tour and taking a lot of those stories and tying them into the scientific revolution that we've seen over the last quarter century, and.

into those. And so just to give people an idea, you said ten chapters. The last one is on the future. I want to give people a quick overview of what those chapters are about. So Chapter one is about you know, launch monitors. Essentially it's about contact with the golf ball. Chapter two is body in Motion. It's about kind of physiology of the game. Chapter three Powertrain, that's about distance in the game. Six inches is Chapter four that's about

the neuroscience of golf. Chapter five is Data and Decisions, which is essentially about strokes gained statistics. Chapter six, Technology of the Ball, Chapter seven, Technology of clubs, Chapter eight Technology of putting, and chapter nine The Playing Field, which is about the science of agronomy, and I actually didn't expect to happen upon a chapter about the science of agronomy, but I was delighted to because that is obviously a major area that has affected the game, where there have

been significant scientific innovations in recent years that have really changed the way we play golf at all levels in ways that are pretty profound and that are hard sometimes for people to notice. So really cool to see that subject come up. But I wanted to start with the with chapter one with contact, I want to dig into like a couple of particular topics here. We're we're not going to cover the full range of topics. Please buy the book, please, Yeah, exactly, So we're going to We're

not going to give away the whole book here. We want to leave some surprises for people. But there were a couple of subjects that I thought were particularly fascinating to me personally, and the first one would be the advent of the launch monitor. And I think that this is one of the most important stories in golf in this century at least, and one that you know, in order to understand where the modern game is, you really

have to understand the launch monitor. So maybe we could start by just you telling me the story of how the launch monitor was invented, and you know what it did that was different.

I think it is the launch monitor. I think how it is changed, and maybe that's maybe that's more for the professional game, which is probably where I find myself more often, but even I mean, I just think about how the little ways that it's come into my game, where it's meant from a club fitting standpoint, in my own personal game or other people's sort of games. So to answer your question, and that's why I led with it, because I think the launch minor has changed how the

game is taught. It's changed how the game is played, especially at the highest level, and I think it's had this profound impact the idea of ballistic technology and anything that tracks motion in a ballistic way has existed for much longer than TrackMan and flight scope have had the technology. It goes back to really the nineteen eighties, so you're talking about the height of the Cold War. Everybody is

stocking up missiles. We got to figure out how we're going to be tracking those missiles, and so there's a huge technological advancement and all of that stuff, so that effectively the military is contracting with military contractors to build ways to track a missile in flight. And so you're talking about high speed projectile objects and being able to determined to an nth degree how fast they're traveling, where they're going to go, what that trajectory everything sort of means.

So we already had the technology built in to follow these objects as they're taking off or being shot off wherever they were. All we had to do is just configure that into a sports space. I think baseball got to it a little bit earlier than golf did. Most of the sport ones. You know, they found guys because of pitchers, Right, So how's that ball coming out? They're

measuring spin rate, they're measuring how that ball tracks. So the reason why you probably saw the advent of kzone and everything that you track and see on TV, even before you really saw track Man and tracer and golf world just happens to be that baseball embrace that technology first, and I'll shout out my guy Will Carroll, who has the Science of Baseball out and you can read about it, and I'm sure that you know there's a lot of the same stuff that's in there, and so yeah, eventually

it's like, okay, we can monetize this in the athletic space, and maybe it's teachers first, but then it becomes consumers second. And now you have every single high level, per professional golfer walking around with ten to twenty five thousand dollars worth of equipment and they're lugging them through airports and you'll see him. It's like the mini briefcase, right, I mean, the golfers now on the PGA too, have a briefcase

and it's carrying their launch monitor. And it's completely changed everything because now instead of looking up and trying to figure out what the ball is doing, you can look down and it'll tell you exactly what the ball is doing, and you can tailor everything backwards. So it effectively, and this is what chapter one is about. It reverse engineered the entire process of how we look at causation in the world of golf, and that's why I think it's

the most significant because it's provided absolute data. While in my opinion also Garrett exploding the artistry of golf, I contend that golf can be as artistic as it ever was because we can just prove that what you're doing works with a launch monitor, as opposed to in the past saying you have to build a swing a certain way to make it work this way. And that's kind of where chapter one went with.

that launch monitor are are good. Right, yep, Okay, So why don't we get to first some kind of nuts and bolts of what launch monitors revealed about what the golf ball was doing. What were some of the key insights that launch monitors provided that you know, people weren't aware of before that even experts or instructors weren't aware of before.

And so while a lot of this stuff has sort of been boiled down into we know that now off the driver, we want to have as little spin as possible. We want to have a dialed in amount of spin for our middle irons all the way through the wedges.

It allowed those guys to actually take the windows that they were trying to visualize and really dial it into where maybe some guys were thinking, Okay, if my spin rate can still spin in at this but at a little bit lower trajectory, I can still get the same distance and I can still get the same result, and so it was sort of I guess it was maybe validating some of those windows. So spin rate was a big part of it, and then also kind of the

path relationship. Right, So the book we go into a lot about how there was old laws in terms of how the ball flew based off of the what the we thought was contact or what we thought was the path of the club, and the launch monitors pretty much defined exactly what causes a ball to hook or slice, and so it all has to do with the relationship between the face angle at impact and the path of

that club in relation to the straight target line. And it's universal, so you could technically cast the club way outside. And this is where Garrett someone who's a teacher. I'm not a good swing instructor, so I sometimes get a little bit confused trying to discuss this myself. But effective, what it means is if the ball, the ball will always hook as long as for a right handed golfer, the face is closed in an angle to its path,

if that makes sense. So you could technically have a path that is so far out and cutting across the ball. But if that face is still closed to that path that ball is going to hook. It'll go, it'll go even farther left. You're you're absolutely right, and so and so that was I think a huge part of it is that now a lot of modern instructors are able to look at that data and they and so instead of saying, oh, this guy has a swing that's going to always hit a slice, Well, I mean, what's his

hand doing an impact? Like, what is kind? Where are his contact conditions like with how he strikes the ball, how the hands go through. So those are the two big ones. Is that we really started to optimize what spin looked like on the golf ball because spin is widely important to the game. It's what makes the ball fly in the first place. And so it really locked

in what optimization is of spin. And then it really defined that one hundred percent guarantee of that face to path relationship defining how the ball is going to travel in the air.

if that necessarily is the right contact condition. What I will contend is if you put a guy in a range with a bag full of one hundred ballotas in his persimmon, and a whole bunch of other persimmons, it's going to be way easier for us to figure out the right combination of ball and driver to maximize what that looks like. But I don't know if it's an absolute truth, because again, the technology was creating a completely different relationship. I think we could tune I think we

could definitely dial in a little bit better. I think if you just took only launch monitors. In there words, no equipment and changes whatsoever over the last thirty five years,

forty years. I know many in your audience the ears perk up, Like if we if we rolled the ball back and we rolled the clubs all the way back, but we still had launch monitors, the ball is going to go significantly farther for the guys on tour and even for the average player because we now have this ability to really dial it in with the launch monitors. But I don't know if we get that one hundred percent assuredness, but the combination of it with modern equipment

has made that absolutely clear. And then couple it with advanced statistics telling us that longer is better, like laying up is never, well not never, but laying up is not the right play most of the time, especially for higher handicapped type of players. We live in the send it you know world right now, so I think all of that kind of couples into some of the things

when it comes to distance. So I'm not gonna say it's one hundred percent that that's it with old equipment, but I think that where we are with modern equipment, it has made that Yeah, crystallized from what launch monitors teach us.

that we're still learning. I mean, we're still kind of behind in even having scientific studies proving that what the modern trainers are doing right now this very day, but we know it's better than it was fifteen twenty years ago. And so that's a huge, another huge difference where I mean, who knows if we had obsolete equipment, but these guys were training with the speed that they are and how

they're using their bodies, how different it would be. So again, all of this stuff and Tiger influenced that, Like Tiger made working out cool in golf and necessary, and it's it's wild. It all happened at the same time and boom, here we are.

monitor enhanced the artistry of the golf swing. I mean, I hear that argument like that any number of golf swings can end up producing these ideal numbers, and that's that's a truth, right, That's something that instructors are emphasizing less now is kind of the aesthetics of the golf swing and having things proper, right, they're just looking at what the ball is doing, and that frees certain players up to be eccentric in a way, and that is

I find that really welcome. But I wonder if you have ever felt nostalgic like I do for a time when players had to battle more with doubt when it came to their swings, right, Because back in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, one huge fact of a professional golfer's life was just trying to dig it out of the dirt, was trying to find some kind of magical solution to

what was ailing them in their golf swing. And there was a lot of kind of you know, psychological struggle, and there were even like these mystical elements to how players would try to find what would cure them. Right, there's this, I think of Ben Hogan's secret, Right, It almost took on this kind of mythical status over time. He found the secret to his golf swing. Turns out it was something pretty technical about his grip and his

you know, club path and stuff like that. And I'm sure you could boil it down to science now, but for a long time golfers had to deal in that kind of ambiguous realm of doubt about their golf swings. And that was something that I found interesting about the game, found fun to think about, found fun to write about. It attracted kind of these neurotic characters to the game

who were who were fun to follow. Now, it seems like with the launch monitor that young players have a lot more confidence in what they're doing and have this kind of serene sense of comfort that you know, what they're doing is the right thing, and if they get off track, then they kind of know how to solve it. How would you respond to that?

So again, like all of this stuff was kind of right before it for me, and I was experiencing this, you know, as it came to be, and I wish I was ten years younger and seeing what my game would have been like if this was just sort of

the commonplace of it all. But what I will say about what I've seen from modern players and a lot of the college golf that I've covered, and then seeing these young guys have such success at the professional ranks and where I still think I have what you're looking for, is that they get it's so good so quickly because of all of this that then when the first little thing goes wrong, that to me becomes the fascinating part.

So to where it's like guys were grinding and struggling and going through the agony and the misery of finding that swing, finding the swing that when they eventually get it and they're in their thirties and they finally can put together what they think is perfect golf. Instead it's guys who actually haven't found all of the secrets yet but are good enough because of all of this stuff who then have to go through that lean discovery the

put stop going in. You know, you're Colin Morikawa and you have two months where all of a sudden, the ball just doesn't fade, Like why is it not fading?

who are teaching a certain type of swing. And when I say I think that there, the launch monitor allows more artistry to be the game what I mean, But

I think we're still forcing it back in. I think the Matthew Wolf's of the world, like that's the up and coming because we now have a younger generation of instructors who have only instructed with all of this technology that has flipped and reverse engineered the teaching process to where a lot of that old school I'm going to teach a guy to grip it one way, to swing it one way, to get it to a certain sort of place. We now have a lot of younger teachers,

so I think it's actually going to take time. But you know, I'm in Vegas a couple of weeks ago, and I forget the kid's name from Oklahoma who plays with the reverse grip, like the left hand low, right handed golfer, And it's like, could you imagine that being a thing? Like, there's no way there was an instructor thirty years ago. It's gonna let that kid get to the highest levels of college golf playing with left hand,

low full swinging shots. But if it's working and that ball's coming off with optimized numbers, they're gonna let it sort of go. And so, you know, I think we could go back and nitpick Garrett and say that you know what, artists were always the outliers, right, Like for every Lee Trevino, there was five other guys that were on tour that were swinging it beautifully and in tempo and upright, because let's be honest, like, there's probably one

way that's the best for getting those optimized numbers. I just like the fact or I believe that we have the technology now that keeps a young Lee Trevino, a young Matthew Wolf, a young Babba Watson even more engaged with what he is doing and feeling comfortable than maybe

we did twenty thirty years ago. But that's that's my opinion out of it, and I tried not to write that into the book as much as it was just, Hey, a lot of instructors are recognizing we can now teach from contact backwards instead of swing forwards, which is where the which is where instruction has gone.

what a strokes gain system looks like. And that's why now today you have baselines for every handicap and data tracking places like RCOs or any other the number ones can actually do have millions of data points now to where you can have strokes gained data for yourself or you can compare yourself to other five, ten, fifteen, twenty handicappers. But the idea of strokes gained is really just where in your game are you average, above average, below average

in comparison to what your score is. And so golf is this tapestry of a million things that happen that lead to a score. And yet somehow if you and I are playing a match and we're going head to head in strokes and you and I both shoot seventy seven, and we're like, oh, well, we have the exact same day to day. Well, we know that's not true. You know, I don't know if there's any other sport where you can have as different of a path to the final

outcome of two competitors than anything. I mean, I guess a basketball game or one team the Warriors reign twenty five threes against a team that posts up and shoots fifty free throws and doesn't hit a three. I mean, I guess there's multiple ways to a score in basketball

or in football or any other sort of sport. But in golf, like I could miss every fairway and scramble my butt off, and you could just be an absolute Fred Funk driving machine and two put every green or something like that, and we arrive at the same sort of place. And so what strokes gain has done is it obviously boils it down to where are you efficient or deficient in all of those areas tee to green.

And it really started with measuring from a baseline of putting and kind of working backwards and then using those base that's well, actually it starts, excuse me, from average score in a hole. So if you play the first hole at your club ten times, your average score is never going to be a round number mostly you know it's gonna be if it's a par four, maybe your average score there is four point three over that. Well, if that's your baseline and you make four, that's a

good hole right over the course of ten rounds. So then putting that into perspective and then diving into that number even deeper and understanding how did you arrive at those four shots where you more efficient off the tee or not, And then looking for trends, and then obviously what I do on a more weekly basis is then using those incredible data trends for PGA Tour players and comparison and comparing their strengths and weaknesses across the field

to where you can talk about, you know, Rory McElroy's rise again to the top player in the game, and he was a top twenty putter last year on the PGA Tour, a top twenty five putter on the PGA Tour. Like no one talk We always talk about driving, but the dude gained five tenths of a shot on the field every round with his putter. I mean, if Rory is a half shot around guy on the greens, it's ballgame.

I mean, I mean, it's oh, I mean, that's an incredible number for him, and we now understand why that's important for somebody who's always going to gain a shot per round off the tee because of how good he is with the driver in his bag. And so those a little ways that I think it's revolutionized. And I'm sorry that was a really long winded answer to that question.

But now that strokes gained exists, we can kind of look at these different scale areas and help ourselves tell a story about inaccurate story about what happened the season, and sometimes we find out, you know, surprising things like

he had a great putting season. We don't necessarily think of Roy McElroy as an elite putter, but if he's top twenty Strokes gained putting, then we know that he was operating at a very very high level on the greens this season, and so you know that is what Strokes Gained has essentially done for us, and it's been

a big deal. Now, in your chapter Data and Decisions on Strokes Gained, you identified three big learnings from this new area of analytics, and I'd like to kind of go over those because I find each of them pretty interesting. So the first is that distance off the tee matters more than we previously thought, right, yes, And so how did Strokes Gained reveal that?

play out over the course of time. Now it depends what the shot is. Is that forty yard shot off a downslope over water to a front hole location, then maybe that changes the strategy. Again, every single decision needs to be viewed within the context of it, but in

the broader sort of scheme of things. This idea that distance was the supreme thing is is has been proven out in all levels of golf, and it really just boils down to if you're fifteen yards longer than the guy next to you over the course of a round, and that means that if every hole is the exact same length, that means that I'm hitting eight iron in and you're hitting, you know, a hard seven or maybe even having abut of six every single approach shot, like

I would like my chances against you hitting eight iron over six iron fourteen times around or whatever many times ends up being that way. Now, the counter to that is, okay, well, what if you're laying back because you want to value fairways And that's where it gets a little bit murkier in in I guess proving it, but for the most part, you aren't significantly more accurate with whoever that layup club

is compared to the driver. And so what the math showed is from a strokes gained off the t standpoint. So let's say for every time I hit driver to your three wood, I'm gaining a tenth of a shot strokes gained off the tee right for the fairway, Say I miss one more fairway than you do by playing that, because that's typically what you'll see on the PGA Tour.

The difference between the most accurate guy in the PGA Tour and number one hundred is effectively one fairway around, and it kind of works that way through all of golf. So if you're two twenty handicappers and you both only hit four or five fairways around, why are you laying up? Like, let's try and get those four or five that you are going to hit in the fairway hit with a driver.

So back to my analogy there, If I'm gaining a tenth of a shot on you every single time because I'm playing from closer in, then my penalty when I missed that one fairway to yours is maybe three tenths of a shot. Over the course of that round, I'm still gaining on you. And so that's what the data has played out in all of this, is that the farther you get it, the short of the club. In the short of the club, you have the better chance

of success. You're maximizing the opportunity to get it close. Now, if you hit your three wood straight every time and you spray your driver forty yards and every direction and you're counting a million penalty strokes, then this doesn't apply to you, and you need to go get fit for a better driver, Like I'm dead serious, Like there's no reason why that driver should be getting sprayed and the

three wood is dead straight. Figure out why that three wood is optimized for your swing and why the driver isn't, and let's figure out how to get that driver pounding down there. But that's where the data has sort of showed it is that you're just putting yourself in an advantageous position. Now, I'll tell you anecdotally from my own game. I'm forty one. I've lost some speed on my fastball. I really grind it on my game this summer, and

I did start valuing accuracy. I'm not swinging out of my shoes except on holes where I know I've got a little bit more wiggle room, Like fairways are still important, but I'm also hitting driver as often as I possibly can because I know I can miss I can miss fairways with my three wood, I can miss fair with my four iron. I just did it yesterday. I missed a fairway with my four iron trying to lay up. So I think that's I don't like it when people think that the data has said grip it and rip

it everywhere. No, what we're just saying is, if there's room out there, hit the driver instead of the three would even if it's a little bit more narrow because that length over time, if you play the long game with the data, is going to pay out for you.

to be aggressive off the tee. What are some other things or you know what is just the kind of even the general philosophy now that Strokes Gained has allowed people to adopt when it comes to deciding on a strategy on a particular hole.

of penalty shots. You know, I mean obviously the occasional duff or top or something like that, but if you can avoid penalty strokes at all costs, and so a lot of that has to do with aiming. And I know that sounds really simple, but Garrett, how many times do you play around a golf and you just have a boneheaded I just aimed at the flag and I

wasn't even thinking. It happens every single time. And that's what really blows my mind about how good these guys are at the highest level, is that they're so focused on the process every time, about what their target is.

And so I think what strokes Gain has really done is it's validated a lot of one of the lot of the smart course management already existed, you know, the Jack Nicholas's of the world who would say, like, I'd aim at the middle of the green and if it was a right hole, I'd you know, I'd try and cut it in there. If it was a left hole, if it turned over fine, even though I like to play. You know, a lot of these guys kind of had that.

But what Strokes Gains has done in making the careers out of a lot of course managers, and like Scott Fawcett features predominantly in this book too because of his system, which is heavily marketed, but it's not that complex, I think in a lot of respects, because it's just drilled down to that data of finding that correct line to where you're maximizing or i should say, minimizing your failures right and he calls it a shotgun pattern or your

cone or whatever it might sort of be. And that number or working backwards of where you're going to make the least amount of mistakes has really driven a lot of those decisions in terms of course management. But off the t it's definitely said, look, if there's not if there's if you can't lose a penalty stroke in both directions right, if there's not if it's out of bounds left and out of bounds right, okay, this is a hard hole. Let's figure out how to keep it in

between the goalposts. But if it's just a lateral hazard left and there's no trouble, right, we're going to aim that sucker a little bit right of center of the fairway and we're going to swing hard and try and get it close to the green. That's where I think it's changed a lot of the course management stuff.

single system that has come out of this. And one particular area of disagreement that you identified was how aggressive players should be in an elite competitive setting where they need to make birdies in order to win, right, Because the question of how can you minimize your risks the most and score the lowest over many, many rounds is a slightly different question from how can you try to win this tournament?

better over the course of time. I mean, that's just fundamentally probably true, right, I Mean it's should we aim in a couple of pints, maybe, but the reality is if we can just maximize getting in on greens and two putting and avoiding three putts, we're always going to

score better. Now we go to the other end of the spectrum where I'm covering it, and I get in this debate all the time with a lot of guys that feature in this book too, because I've had too many conversations most of which off the record, sadly that I couldn't put in this book of talking to the best players in the world who are like, yeah, if I get in a playoff with somebody, I throw all of that strategy out the window. Or I'm a top twenty player in the world and I'm not worried about

losing my card. I go out and I play a little bit different than the guy who's already knows showing up to the golf course in the PGA Tour, or these maybe two shots worse than Rory McElroy when they

tee off, like could he win that week? Yeah? Maybe, But if his primary objective is feeding his family and maximizing his earnings and his FedEx Cup points every single week, then he's playing a much more strategic game than the guys who were like I'm out here for blood, Like I'm out here to win, and to that point, that's why,

and you and I have had this conversation offline. The most fascinating thing to me right now is psychology, Like, honestly, because this stuff, to me, it's not black and white. We're humans, Like, we're humans playing a sport. And so while you're right over the long term, some of this stuff can happen and be really good, and there's great

examples of it. I think Keith Mitchell this past year really started taking his course management into into his repertoire and he had his probably best season from a consistency standpoint. He's really focused on the process, but he was just like a happy, go lucky guy that was out there swinging shots with natural god given talent. And now he's honed it a little bit and he's found areas of consistency.

Will he win multiple times? I don't know, Like when he gets to the final nine holes, what's gonna happen? I always joke on the PGA Tour there's sixty three holes and then there's nine holes. We play sixty three holes of all right, figure it out, and then nine holes of all right, you want to win this thing, let's go, let's go, let's go. Time right now, and crazy things happen on those final nine holes, and that's where I think there's no data for that. That's just

dudes hitting shots. And that's where I think the sport gets really fun. And I'm not saying you throw it out the window. They're still aiming in certain places. But no, some of those guys they've got the cajons. They just say, damn these numbers, like I'm going at that flog, give me the number to that flagstick. I'm going at it. Let's go.

Is that Do you think that's something that just is always going to remain a mysterious, intangible sort of quality.

that he's supposed to say. I believe him to a point, but was twenty twenty two the first real nudge that mature Rory McElroy has had that brought out or has inspired some of his best golf. Can't measure that, and that's what makes sports so much fun watch.

out firing? Right? He was firing at pins and also Cameron Smith was making big long putts. I don't know. There were a lot of things going on on that day at St. Andrews that seemed to be psychological or spiritual rather than things that data could necessarily touch. I wonder if you agree with that.

fifty make rate is from eight feet on putting. So you have to be spectacular just to give yourself a better than average chance of making the put in the first place, and forget the consequence or forget the yeah, the consequences of having ten thousand people pulling along and all that stuff. Was there more pressure on Roy to win that tournament than Cameron Smith? Absolutely there was more pressure. So from a psychological standpoint, how does that weigh on him?

I thought he played a really good round of golf and he got beat by a spectacular around a golf And I think I wish I had my log book back,

because I did. I watched the final round again, and I think there were only two shots total in the entire day, Garrett where I was really like ooh, like that was one where it was a substandard shot or he played too conservatively, like two that I really fully questioned, like everything else was pretty technical and pretty If you make one or two putts, then we're talking about this

a little bit differently. But when it was sort of anybody's game, but you just got to mean Cam Smith man up and I mean come on the up and down on seventeen. Like these are the little things where it's like cam Smith won that tournament, Roy didn't lose it, And to go back and litigate, Okay, did Rory do something that he shouldn't have done, I think is a bit unfair. There's plenty of rounds where that has happened, but maybe one or two things changes it a little bit.

But Cam Smith is manned up, and he's always been the more aggressive of the two of them. As a player like Cam Smith, he's almost recklessly aggressive. And his iron game went to another level this year strokes game data again to where now he had this full complete package to kind of recover from the fact that he's not that great of a driver of the golf ball. And he had an amazing season and I wish we could see him more head to head. We'll see what

twenty twenty three has. It's kind of crazy, but I wonder if that was our ceiling and did we see the you know, that may have been peek Cameron Smith. I don't even know. It's a different podcast for a different time. But no, I don't reflect on that and

say that modern analytics cost Rory that open. I think that a better player just beat him on that particular day and there's a lot of intangibles that went into that, and that's the stuff that's the most fascinating to me, and I admire I like covering sports because I still like the stuff that we can't answer with the formula.

a huge impact on scores. But Strokes Gain tells us something different about the role that putting actually plays across the course of a player's career, I suppose, and what.

about their craft. But it sort of showed that there was so much volatility in it, and it was so much more attainable to have good putting rounds or good putting tournaments that it really sort of showed us that it's it's drive for do It's not drive for dough. It's ball strike. I'm trying to I used to. I coined my own expression once. I'm trying to remember what I called it.

far more. I mean, Colin Morikawa has won two majors and five times in a young career and up into I think when he won that second major, it was something ridiculous, like he had gained strokes, gained putting in six or seven professional starts, and five of them were wins. So I mean just, I mean, it just it blows my mind, like he's not a good putter, but he

figures it out when it matters the most. And then conversely, you look at the top putters in the game, and granted there's some great examples of world class Hall of Fame players who were probably top ten, top twenty putters. You know, Jason Day begin number one in the world by being the best putter in the world for one year, But that's a fleeting stat it's going to eventually go away. You're going to have to have something else to sort

of lean on. And that's what we've kind of discovered through the years, is that there's just way more volatility and putting and you can't rely on that to be your number one stroke gainer each round, each week, and then over the course of a season.

and you're gonna get that. Now, there's a little bit of a statistical side to it too. Like Denny McCarthy's also gaining a lot on strokes gain putty because he lags a lot of forty and fifty foot He hasn't hit it close very often either, and so there's opportunities to gain. He's not missing a lot of putts inside of ten feet, and so he's got to scramble a lot. He probably gives himself more opportunities to have put gaining opportunities, But I don't really buy into some of that aspect

of it. He's that's his one skill, and that skill has carried him to the highest level of golf, and he knows that he has to work on the other areas. He knows that he's got to maximize opportunities, that he's got to get a little bit tidier and turn some of his thirty five footers into twenty footers, you know, per round to do that. He's talked openly about that process of trying to get just incrementally better in those other areas. It's nice having a superpower. I'll say that

on the PJ Tour. If you can have one superpower, you'll stay out there for a while. And his superpower is still really damn good. But he hasn't won yet, and I mean you should point that out, like, he hasn't won and he's still the best, And he's been the best plutter on the PJA Tour for four or five years running literally twice, was the numberumber one putter and has been a top ten guy and hasn't won. If you're the number one iron player on tour for

five years running, you're gonna win. Yes, You're gonna win.

So that just I think that's a yeah. Corey Connors is a great example, not not necessarily a top ten player, but a guy who certainly, if he has a few good weeks, could suddenly be a top ten player. And Denny McCarthy just has a longer way to go than Corey Connors.

more opportunities to the course of the season. So he's going to have fewer opportunities you would think statistically probability over time to be able to win because of that. But again, like that's what he's done, That's that's who he is. He has to embrace that. Also, that's not that's not a scarlet letter on his chest by in search of imagination. It should be a badge of honor for him, and he does wear it that way. But it's I think even he knows it's difficult.

the game. Now, I kind of go back and forth and how I think about this myself, But I wonder how you address that kind of skeptical argument about the impact of science on golf.

can compete with an eighteen year old. We have handicaps, we have different teas, we have different ways of being out there together and playing the game together, and that in and of itself is beautiful and yet also creates as much friction sometimes in the game as anything because there's so many different philosophies and how to view the game. I wrote a book on the science of golf. I use science in talking about and covering the sport on the professional level. I rarely use it in my own game.

Like I've been fit, I get on a launch monitor from time to time. I don't track my own stats. I like to dig it out of the dirt. I like my shirt untucked. I like music on the golf course.

Where I don't feel I hope that there isn't that golf is less interesting now at the highest levels of professional golf, where there are multi millions of dollars on the table this year, multi billions of dollars on the table. Thank you out there, players, managers, agents are going to unearth every single advantage they possibly can for another one percent more here or one percent more there to get to the best. I don't think we can get the cat back in the box or the toothpaste back in

the tube when it comes to the highest levels. But I think at the lower levels, the recreational levels, we can enjoy golf however we want to enjoy golf, And I don't really know if it's changed that much, Garrett. I think you always had your pack of guys in the locker room that you liked playing with, and the guys in the locker room you didn't like playing with, And even before the revolution that we're in right now in terms of science, you probably were still aligned with

how it sort of viewed. So I guess that would be how I would view it, and that I kind of am living a hypocritical life, and that I know all of this stuff when I use it as a broadcaster, but I don't really I'm not all in on it myself as an actual player, And I think that is maybe the answer right there, Like I'm a perfect example of it, Like I use this to help broaden my understanding of the professional game, but when it comes to me teeing it up and trying to get the best

out of my game and having fun with my friends. I have my own sort of comfort level, and I think that golf still has plenty of space out there for everybody.

in my biased opinion, it's going really well. So go to the Friday dot com and click subscribe. Thanks for listening.