Speaker 1: The guys from Ping. They've kind of showed me how
Speaker 1: much the equipment matters. I just love that I can
Speaker 1: hit any shot I kind of want.
Speaker 2: We're gonna be able to tell some fun stories about
Speaker 2: what goes on here to help golfers play better golf.
Speaker 3: Welcome back to the Pink Proving Grounds podcast here at
Speaker 3: the PGA Show. I know this is coming out a
Speaker 3: little bit later than the show, but if you listen
Speaker 3: and you're hearing the acoustics, that's what it is. And
Speaker 3: Marty Jerts and I've been waiting for this one for
Speaker 3: a long time. We got a legend with us today.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is fun.
Speaker 2: One of my favorite people in the golf world, the
Speaker 2: short game master who's touched and helped so many golfers,
Speaker 2: Stan Nutley, with us here today. Stan, I want to
Speaker 2: start with the first question. How many putters do you
Speaker 2: have in the gold putter vault?
Speaker 5: I have four. I'm waiting to get a wedge in
Speaker 5: there too, though.
Speaker 1: And why should there be a wedge in there? Stan?
Speaker 5: I made two bucker shots and had six putts and
Speaker 5: nine holes. I thought I could get my wedge, but.
Speaker 4: In there, I don't.
Speaker 2: Do you think your record So Stan's talking about his
Speaker 2: record Shane for least number of putts and nine holes
Speaker 2: on the PGA.
Speaker 3: Yeah, two thousand and two Aeric Canada Championship. Stan out
Speaker 3: least six putts and nine holes. It's so unfathomable that
Speaker 3: I actually googled to make sure that that's the right number.
Speaker 3: Six putts of night holes. So you had two. So
Speaker 3: so walk us through that round.
Speaker 1: So to night.
Speaker 5: Let's get to the most impressive record that I know
Speaker 5: that I have. Okay, you gotta do some math here.
Speaker 5: I'm certain that I have the most shots ever hit
Speaker 5: from off the green in an underpart score on nine holes.
Speaker 1: What's that number?
Speaker 5: Well, I was good enough to have six putts and
Speaker 5: nine holes and only shot one under. So that's twenty
Speaker 5: nine shots.
Speaker 3: Now, if that's not spoken like a true golfer, Marty
Speaker 3: somehow finding the negative in something positive. But uh yeah,
Speaker 3: we appreciate you taking a little bit of time with us.
Speaker 5: It's a good for the rest of the story comment.
Speaker 3: That's exactly right, uh Stan, When you were playing, I've
Speaker 3: always wondered this about coaching. You're playing, and you're obviously
Speaker 3: playing and having some success, when do you decide to
Speaker 3: make that switch when you decide I'm not going to
Speaker 3: play anymore, I'm going to get into coaching, and how
Speaker 3: do you navigate that new endeavor in your life. Obviously
Speaker 3: with so much focus being on in myself and how I.
Speaker 5: Play, well, there's a couple things that I could tell
Speaker 5: on that story. But my daughter Tatum, sitting over here
Speaker 5: to the side as we shoot this, and my wife
Speaker 5: and my two kids one day when I got back
Speaker 5: in the car, made an announcement. They said, we don't
Speaker 5: mind you teaching that guy on the putting green while
Speaker 5: we're waiting, and we don't mind if you're practicing while
Speaker 5: we're waiting, but if you're teaching him, he's got to
Speaker 5: pay you. And that was really a moment that changed
Speaker 5: the course of my career because prior to being able
Speaker 5: to tell people they had to pay me, because my
Speaker 5: wife said that only my buddies asked for help, and
Speaker 5: when they were okay to pay me, then guys started
Speaker 5: asking for help that weren't my close friends, and that
Speaker 5: was part of the transition. But the real moment, the
Speaker 5: defining moment of my switch over was Jay Hass asked
Speaker 5: me for a punting tip, and prior to social media.
Speaker 5: The only way to become a kind of a notable
Speaker 5: coach was have a tour player say something nice. And
Speaker 5: that moment when he did better and said I helped him,
Speaker 5: it became apparent that I probably needed to move toward
Speaker 5: coaching versus just keep playing.
Speaker 1: What year? What a round year? Do you know what
Speaker 1: that was?
Speaker 5: It was a two thousand and one when he asked
Speaker 5: for a tip, and by two thousand and three I
Speaker 5: was coaching a bunch of teur players. I didn't really
Speaker 5: hang the clubs up until midway through two thousand and five.
Speaker 2: Yes, Dan, you've touched so many golfers, not only tour
Speaker 2: players and your peers that you've coached, right, but also
Speaker 2: a lot of you know, your everyday golfers, high handicappers, males, females, juniors.
Speaker 5: That's who I teach every day.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, what are some of the big things and short
Speaker 2: game you know from maybe a principal standpoint that you
Speaker 2: like to see, say in general, or a common pattern
Speaker 2: of the high handicapper to help them improve around the greens.
Speaker 5: Well, a couple. I do have to say this. One
Speaker 5: of my sayings I like to throw out is best
Speaker 5: questions wins so we think that that kind of applies
Speaker 5: to all of life. Like, you're in the business asking questions.
Speaker 5: So I asked my students right off the bat, I said,
Speaker 5: if you had somebody come to you that had never
Speaker 5: played golf, how would you tell them to make a
Speaker 5: putting stroke? And all of a sudden, if I can
Speaker 5: get them to answer that question, I get in there
Speaker 5: with their mind and I start to learn what they
Speaker 5: know and think about putting. And like, one truth that
Speaker 5: people I think misinterpret is people think you should accelerate
Speaker 5: through the ball when you hit a putt, and yet
Speaker 5: I see the majority of best putters have short fallities.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, so I don't.
Speaker 5: Think they're speeding up when they hit the ball. They
Speaker 5: speed up early in the downswing. An impact is more
Speaker 5: of a coasting action. One of the things they say
Speaker 5: sometimes is the clips should go straight back and straight through. Well,
Speaker 5: I have to explain that the tool that I used
Speaker 5: to putt with has a stick coming up out of
Speaker 5: it at seventy degree tilt. It's not really designed to
Speaker 5: travel in a straight line.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it might be a pendulum, but the pendulum's on
Speaker 5: a seventy degree tilt or somewhere near that. So that's
Speaker 5: a couple things that I look for right off the
Speaker 5: bat that the majority of bad putters are missing the
Speaker 5: boat on those two aspects.
Speaker 2: That approach of asking your player a question like that,
Speaker 2: was that a skill you learned because you're so good
Speaker 2: at it, You've done it with me, you've done I've
Speaker 2: seen you do with a lot of of players. Or
Speaker 2: is that something you picked up from a mentor or
Speaker 2: teacher of yours.
Speaker 5: Well, I don't know where I came up with it,
Speaker 5: but I really figured it out when I was giving
Speaker 5: a guy instruction and I feel like I had told
Speaker 5: him the same thing for a year. Yeah, And in
Speaker 5: one moment he turned around and said, but I'm gonna
Speaker 5: whiff it. And I realized it wasn't that he was
Speaker 5: terrible or that I was telling him the wrong stuff.
Speaker 5: He truly had a belief that would not let him
Speaker 5: hear my message and try my message.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And when that happened, I realized, I have to understand
Speaker 5: what my student believes sometimes to get through the door
Speaker 5: that they've put up. And they've put up those doors
Speaker 5: consciously as well as subconsciously. They might not even know
Speaker 5: they believe there. And that's where I really got honed
Speaker 5: in on making sure I asked the right question so
Speaker 5: I can figure out what they know and believe.
Speaker 2: It's probably that Wall is probably bigger and stronger in
Speaker 2: the short game space, you know, chipping and putting.
Speaker 5: I think it's true in all aspects of life, Like
Speaker 5: the businessman coaching a new employee. The kid's gone to
Speaker 5: college and learned something that's just absolutely not true. But
Speaker 5: the guy hired him didn't know that he wasn't going
Speaker 5: to do what he said.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Stan, when did you fall in love with the
Speaker 3: short game? What was it like for you growing up?
Speaker 3: And when did you realize you had this kind of
Speaker 3: incredible ability?
Speaker 5: Well, I have to say that my golf came out
Speaker 5: of a failure. I did not make it into the NBA.
Speaker 5: I intended to be a professional basketball player.
Speaker 1: How was your outside range? Was it good?
Speaker 5: Well? My ability to throw it toward the goal was high.
Speaker 5: I don't know about making it, but I was good
Speaker 5: at putting it up.
Speaker 1: You're a high volume shooters, Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 5: What I learned about basketball, though, is if you're not
Speaker 5: fast enough to guard to anybody, you kind of sit
Speaker 5: next to the coach no matter how good you shoot ye.
Speaker 5: But why I would say that is I was just
Speaker 5: sneaky competitive enough in basketball that I learned to shoot
Speaker 5: left handed as a little boy, so I could win
Speaker 5: all the horse games. Because my buddy wouldn't learn to
Speaker 5: shoot a left handed layup and the ability to put
Speaker 5: spin on a basketball and then transition that into ping
Speaker 5: pong and then start playing golf. It didn't dawn on me.
Speaker 5: I wasn't supposed to use my golf clubs the same
Speaker 5: way I used my ping pong paddle. So I understood
Speaker 5: English on a golf ball or a basketball or a
Speaker 5: ping pong ball really early in my golf career. And
Speaker 5: I think that, along with the fact that my mentor,
Speaker 5: mister Landing, taught me of basically a perfect golf grip,
Speaker 5: led to being very creative.
Speaker 3: So do you feel like the short game is creative?
Speaker 3: Is that the way you kind of look at it?
Speaker 5: That's how I saw it, because every situation truly is
Speaker 5: different in some aspect. If you thought about it that
Speaker 5: no two lines are identical. They're closed, they're similar, but
Speaker 5: they're not identical, so you have to analyze the situation.
Speaker 5: I can actually see the trajectory the land spot. I
Speaker 5: think I have a tremendous sense of the spin I
Speaker 5: put on the ball. And mister Lanning said, to master
Speaker 5: the short game, you had to master the first bounce.
Speaker 5: So I could make the ball make do in the
Speaker 5: first bounce what I wanted it to do. And I
Speaker 5: always had a knack for it. But there was a
Speaker 5: back end how I got there.
Speaker 1: What's the back end?
Speaker 5: The story about being a basketball was very creative. I
Speaker 5: played a lot of sports. I was the pitcher, I
Speaker 5: was the quarterback, I was the point guard. I think
Speaker 5: it helps to play a diverse amount of sports.
Speaker 4: It's like that book Range I've been reading that.
Speaker 2: You know now that we have kids, and stand's gonna
Speaker 2: be inspirational in that regard what stan Let's transition a
Speaker 2: little bit. We just launched our new S one fifty
Speaker 2: nine wedges a little bit to how you marry finding
Speaker 2: the right grind for your player with their instruction. You know,
Speaker 2: how does course conditions, turf conditions come into play grain.
Speaker 4: You know that's kind of a big question.
Speaker 2: But then also how do you marry getting your player
Speaker 2: into the right grind with their instruction.
Speaker 5: Well, we're still trying to master the answer to that. Question.
Speaker 4: It's a never ending question, I think.
Speaker 5: I think my first response is if it's an experienced
Speaker 5: player that's ever been any good, their hands are already
Speaker 5: accustomed to a certain feel of the club in the dirt.
Speaker 5: So although I probably fit into the S grind best, yeah,
Speaker 5: I play the E grind Yeah, because I've hit countless
Speaker 5: shots with an old I to wedge, So that's an
Speaker 5: easy one for me. And I think guys that are
Speaker 5: fifty years old and older that have played a lot
Speaker 5: of golf, they kind of have a feel in a sense.
Speaker 5: So I'm gonna I'm going to marry them towards what
Speaker 5: they've probably always had. The person that's just really horrible,
Speaker 5: I'm probably gonna lean a little bit toward more bounds
Speaker 5: for them. Yeah, So I'm going to lean toward the
Speaker 5: toward the w or the age, Yeah, a little bit.
Speaker 5: I'm going to give them more more kick off the back.
Speaker 5: There's certain people that like to maybe release the club
Speaker 5: a little earlier. They're going to like the new B groun.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But.
Speaker 5: I don't know that you can really answer that question
Speaker 5: without getting them to hit some shots.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5: My My issue is most people that see me that
Speaker 5: come to see me are broken. So I spent a
Speaker 5: lot of time trying to put them back together before.
Speaker 5: I worry about fitting them a lot. But the thing
Speaker 5: that amazes me is is our wedge is at Peen
Speaker 5: truly managed spin better than anybody in the industry. And
Speaker 5: for no other reason. The young players that are coming
Speaker 5: to me, I'm trying to have them understand that you
Speaker 5: need to be in control of your golf ball when
Speaker 5: the conditions aren't perfect, and that's the one aspect we're
Speaker 5: going to always win.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we put a lot of R and D into
Speaker 2: the friction between the golf ball and the club face.
Speaker 2: That's a mysterious thing.
Speaker 5: When when I was back at the plan and I
Speaker 5: saw the I don't know how many times you blew
Speaker 5: up the face. But what's the answer to that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when we magnifies and look at these basically Shane
Speaker 2: what Stan is talking about. We blast the face, We
Speaker 2: mill it, we blast the face.
Speaker 1: And when you say blast the face.
Speaker 2: Like like like a media uh that's engineered to maximize
Speaker 2: the stick between the cover of the ball and the face.
Speaker 4: Okay, and we scan it with this special scanner.
Speaker 2: We blow it up and we three D printed and
Speaker 2: it looks like the sharper than the Himalayas.
Speaker 4: Really, that's what's grabbing.
Speaker 5: It's unbelievable. If you're not playing a ping wed, you're
Speaker 5: cheating yourself out of control.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, super sharp, and that's what's grabbing the ball.
Speaker 2: That's what's grabbing the ball. Now we've done some videos
Speaker 2: with Stan he's talking about the conditions not being perfect
Speaker 2: where he's chipping out at the proving grounds on a nice, beautiful,
Speaker 2: dry summer day. It looks it looks dry. We zoom
Speaker 2: the camera in and what's getting squeezed? Uh, when when
Speaker 2: you're landing the club on the ground before it hits
Speaker 2: the ball.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's it's it's amazing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, water getting squeezed out of the ground.
Speaker 3: So that's something you told me when we first started
Speaker 3: doing this podcast, was there's in theory, there isn't ideal
Speaker 3: conditions because even ideal conditions, some debris or something's gonna
Speaker 3: be between the face and the ball. It's one of
Speaker 3: the reasons it's so important to be playing a wedge
Speaker 3: that you can be as confident as stands talking about.
Speaker 2: It unless you're unless you're hitting off a tee or
Speaker 2: maybe some very nice Zoysia, you know, but.
Speaker 5: I've played a couple of courses. I thought we should
Speaker 5: have played Matt Golf, but they don't let you do that.
Speaker 4: Exactly off of Matt.
Speaker 5: Maybe you could get it to spend Stan.
Speaker 2: What do you think? What do you think is the
Speaker 2: role of bounce? I mean, I've heard you describe it
Speaker 2: as the skid play some kick off the back. What
Speaker 2: do you how do you think about the timing of
Speaker 2: that turf interaction?
Speaker 5: And I really think about it as I go back
Speaker 5: and I talk about Gene Sarazen. Did he mean for
Speaker 5: the club de land steeper, shallow relative to the front
Speaker 5: end to the club or the trail edge of the club.
Speaker 5: And when a plane lands, I want that plane coming
Speaker 5: in kind of shallow, landing on the back tires. And
Speaker 5: if it does that, it might bounce a couple times,
Speaker 5: but it stays close to the ground. And I think
Speaker 5: people misinterpret steep and shallow like today it's a big buzzword.
Speaker 5: Do we need to be steeper? Oh, the body needs
Speaker 5: to be steep, but the club. I don't want my
Speaker 5: club coming in with the shaft so much forward that
Speaker 5: I land the fleet edge very often because the front
Speaker 5: edge has almost no forgiveness.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but if.
Speaker 5: I can get the clubhead, the club head releases shallower
Speaker 5: at the bottom. I steep an impact at the bottom
Speaker 5: with my pivot, my body, my upper torso. But if
Speaker 5: I can land the trail edge and keep the lead
Speaker 5: edge up it just a little bit one or two
Speaker 5: or three degrees, then I get a glide effect and
Speaker 5: I have a lot more room for air through impact.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I can.
Speaker 5: Hit perfect, or I can hit a little fat and
Speaker 5: still have the ball react very similar. Yeah, And I'm
Speaker 5: looking for grace. I don't want to have to be perfect.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well put, yeah, well put.
Speaker 5: And depending on the guy's swing, like the guy that's
Speaker 5: really steep, he might need a little more of that
Speaker 5: grace closer to the lead edge. Like for me, I
Speaker 5: don't know if this is right to say, but like
Speaker 5: the w wedge doesn't fit my land, yeah, because it's
Speaker 5: rounded and I'm used to the bottom being flat and
Speaker 5: getting the kick out of the back edge.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So everybody's got a little different feel in the bottom.
Speaker 5: But I'm excited about the new S one F nine
Speaker 5: because we have five different options. They can find it now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, five and the E so six total total.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's amazing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Stan, you mentioned that a lot of the people
Speaker 3: that come to you are broken when they come to
Speaker 3: you in terms of their golf game. You famously worked
Speaker 3: with Charles Barkley, who I would say probably fits the
Speaker 3: mold of a broken golfer when he came to you.
Speaker 3: How was that experience and how did that come together?
Speaker 5: Why? I once have to say God is good because
Speaker 5: what's the chance of a short game coach kind of
Speaker 5: helping the worst swing and go.
Speaker 1: That's a great point, right Like.
Speaker 5: And it was funny when I ran into him at
Speaker 5: Tom Layman's charity event in Phoenix. We had crossed paths
Speaker 5: a couple times, but I didn't really know Charles, and
Speaker 5: I said, look, I'd really like to have you hit
Speaker 5: some balls. I want to watch it. He's like, man,
Speaker 5: I've worked with everybody. I'm like, I hadn't watched it.
Speaker 5: So he rambled out to Greyhawk. A few days later,
Speaker 5: my son Jake and I watched him hit some balls,
Speaker 5: and I kind of already knew what I was going
Speaker 5: to tell him, but I asked him the questions about
Speaker 5: what he was thinking, how he got to where he
Speaker 5: got to. He was so confused.
Speaker 1: He didn't know too much information.
Speaker 5: He didn't know, he didn't know how he became broken,
Speaker 5: because at one time he was pretty good. Yeah, and
Speaker 5: I think he didn't like getting beat, so he tried
Speaker 5: to get better and he misinterpreted information or he got
Speaker 5: bad information, one or the other. But honestly, I gave
Speaker 5: him one tip. It took about forty minutes for him
Speaker 5: to spit the tip back at me. But he said,
Speaker 5: everybody knows he pulled down on the handle. And you
Speaker 5: probably know, Michael Jacobs. Yep, he said something to me
Speaker 5: a couple of years ago that kind of related to this.
Speaker 5: He said, golf clubs have balance points, and the physics
Speaker 5: makes the club kind of teeter taughter around the balance points.
Speaker 5: So if I influenced the grip, it has an influence
Speaker 5: on the head. Well, if you think about it, Charles
Speaker 5: pulled the grip down so hard that the head kept
Speaker 5: going up on the downswing. That's why he got stuck. Interesting,
Speaker 5: so there's a point where the head needs to go
Speaker 5: down and the grip needs to go up, and I
Speaker 5: helped him feel the head go down instead of just
Speaker 5: the grip go down. And I did that by having
Speaker 5: him use his wrist and basically throw the clubhead backwards.
Speaker 5: Some people get worried about when I tell them to
Speaker 5: use their wrist to throw the clubhead backwards. But the
Speaker 5: way I get them to do that, it actually puts
Speaker 5: pressure on the shaft. It creates proper lag on the club,
Speaker 5: but it gets the club head moving away away in
Speaker 5: the See in the end of the backswing, the clubheads
Speaker 5: going toward the target. If you want the clubhead to circle,
Speaker 5: it's got to go away from the target on the
Speaker 5: downswing first.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's counterintuitive though, right, So it's.
Speaker 3: Going away from the down it's going away from the
Speaker 3: target on the downswing.
Speaker 5: It's the start of the downswing. All of us go
Speaker 5: forward with our hands too early. Often it's just human nature.
Speaker 5: Our mind's over there. We ain't supposed to go over
Speaker 5: there first in the downs. So he turned around and
Speaker 5: looked at me, and he said, you want me to
Speaker 5: use my wrist to throw the clubhead back toward the trees.
Speaker 5: We're on the back of the range at Greyhawk. He's
Speaker 5: gotten better every day since then. One tip I've always
Speaker 5: I've only I've only seen him maybe five times in
Speaker 5: five years. We do not hang out, but he does
Speaker 5: practice hard, and that was the one message he needed
Speaker 5: and then he really went and dug it out of
Speaker 5: the dirt.
Speaker 3: So we go from Charles Barkley, who was a relative
Speaker 3: broken golfer. You're somebody that studied golf for a long
Speaker 3: long time. I know you mentioned Jean Says and earlier.
Speaker 3: Who is on your mount rushmore of great short games?
Speaker 3: If you had to put together a list of those
Speaker 3: four names, I know I'm put you on the.
Speaker 5: Spot here, that is, but I would think of savvy Okay.
Speaker 4: Yeah, uh.
Speaker 5: I think one of the prettiest short game players of
Speaker 5: late maybe going back a few years, would be Ricky Fowler.
Speaker 5: I think of Let me think who Jeff Ogilvie.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah.
Speaker 5: If you talk about pitching the golf ball, the pitch
Speaker 5: he had to win the Open was amazing. Like I
Speaker 5: think of it in terms of someone who free swings
Speaker 5: ahead and doesn't accelerate the grip very much, Corey Paven
Speaker 5: would be amazing. Corey Paven came for a putting lesson
Speaker 5: one time, and so I'm asking him questions and I
Speaker 5: figure out, Corey Paven, it doesn't matter how he grips
Speaker 5: it or how he stands he's a full on wrist putter.
Speaker 5: He had added shoulders, so I don't really teach people
Speaker 5: to be all risty, but like Corey Paven just he
Speaker 5: just tapped it. I said, they should have banned his
Speaker 5: stroke because they banned anchoring. He anchors the top of
Speaker 5: the grip at the top of his hands. He doesn't
Speaker 5: have to put it on his belly. He just uses
Speaker 5: his wrist and it's beautiful.
Speaker 2: Stan, it's been awesome having you is engineering research brand ambassador.
Speaker 2: Tell the listeners a little bit about about your role
Speaker 2: some of the fun things we've worked on in terms
Speaker 2: of research. I mean, one of one of the things
Speaker 2: for me has been that you've come in and you
Speaker 2: asked us such good questions.
Speaker 4: Shane, We've talked about this.
Speaker 5: They usually don't like my questions.
Speaker 4: Well, no, I asked you.
Speaker 2: The best questions are the ones where you you you
Speaker 2: you guys stump us right. I mean we're frustrated, but
Speaker 2: then we're like, ask God, that's a great question.
Speaker 5: But the truth is all of us that teach golf,
Speaker 5: we're looking for the right answer.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and a guy like me who was really a player,
Speaker 5: I feel like I use my intuition about what I
Speaker 5: thought happened and what I thought I was doing. For
Speaker 5: a long time, I would say my gift as a
Speaker 5: golf coach really is my eyes sees the sequence of
Speaker 5: the movement. That's a gift. But I've tried to learn
Speaker 5: the engineering and the wise. So because of your team,
Speaker 5: you guys are always measuring. Like one of my favorite
Speaker 5: questions I asked was, if I swung the driver clubhead
Speaker 5: one hundred miles an hour to impact, how fast is
Speaker 5: the top of the grip going. Because I see my
Speaker 5: student the sequence of his swing. The top of the
Speaker 5: grip's going so fast. There's no way he can get
Speaker 5: the clubhead to speed up past the grip handle fast. Now,
Speaker 5: the long drive guys are studying deceleration. Yeah, if you
Speaker 5: can't put the brakes on something above the clubhead, you
Speaker 5: can't get the clubhead to go fast.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we know that the handspeed max is out about
Speaker 2: when the arms parallel to the.
Speaker 5: Ground, it starts slowing down stars. The average person doesn't
Speaker 5: know that, and everybody that sucks at chipping is not
Speaker 5: slowing the grip down soon enough, the grip's going fast,
Speaker 5: you know. I like to ask questions about path and
Speaker 5: face like you guys put me on a really fast camera.
Speaker 5: I wanted to know which direction was the club going in,
Speaker 5: which direction was my face pointed on a low shot,
Speaker 5: And I believe what the data said was my face
Speaker 5: was nine degrees close to my path, So that's nine
Speaker 5: degrees aloft. I took off of the club before I
Speaker 5: leaned the shaft.
Speaker 4: Forward to square it right.
Speaker 5: And that's what allows me to be still shallow at
Speaker 5: the bottom and hit a load chip and run. I
Speaker 5: don't have to have the shaft twenty degrees forward to
Speaker 5: make it come out low and run.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but I didn't know.
Speaker 5: I just I knew I did it, but I didn't
Speaker 5: really know the math.
Speaker 1: You knew you could do it. You'm not exactly sure
Speaker 1: why it was happening. Yeah, yeah, I was. I was
Speaker 1: gonna ask you.
Speaker 3: We talked a little bit about the average player. People
Speaker 3: come in that are broken, and I know it's player
Speaker 3: to players circumstantial, but you know, we talk about the
Speaker 3: chipper a lot on this podcast because it's been such
Speaker 3: a great addition to the golf back for so many players.
Speaker 3: What's a mistake players do even before they make a
Speaker 3: move on a chip shot or a pitch shot around
Speaker 3: the green. Maybe the club they pull out, or the
Speaker 3: decisions they're making in terms of the shot they're attempting
Speaker 3: to pull off that might not be the right shot.
Speaker 5: Well, the first thing is it really helps to be
Speaker 5: able to make solid contact. So that's really what I
Speaker 5: try to teach.
Speaker 3: Now, can you teach solid contact? Is that something you
Speaker 3: can teach?
Speaker 5: That's a skill? Okay, gaw never forget golf is a
Speaker 5: skill sport. Yeah, people way over emphasize the mental aspects
Speaker 5: of it. Barnard took a lot of grief recently because
Speaker 5: he said golf wasn't that mental. His point was, you
Speaker 5: will never beat him if you're just because you're stronger
Speaker 5: than him.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: I could not agree more with that.
Speaker 5: Stam Now, it doesn't mean it's not a mental contest
Speaker 5: if you have all the skills, but you can't beat
Speaker 5: the guy with the skill with your mind.
Speaker 1: Don't matter how strong your mind is.
Speaker 3: There's some brilliant people in the world that are terrible
Speaker 3: golfers terrible.
Speaker 5: Now back to the question. The next piece of it,
Speaker 5: besides hitting it solid, is you need to assess the situation.
Speaker 5: So part of the situation is your skill set. So
Speaker 5: the person that doesn't have the skill set to pitch
Speaker 5: it with a lob wedge like I do. But they
Speaker 5: could take the chipper and pitch it and run it
Speaker 5: most of the way. They're gonna shoot lower with the chipper.
Speaker 5: I still want to teach them the skill to pitch it. Yeah,
Speaker 5: But just because you give them the chipper doesn't mean
Speaker 5: they have that skill either, because I would give them
Speaker 5: the better technique to chip with the chipper by swinging
Speaker 5: the head of it versus pulling the grip half. The
Speaker 5: people can't use the chipper if they got one. If
Speaker 5: they're making the grip in go faster than the clubhead
Speaker 5: in an impact I love people say I decelerate on it.
Speaker 5: The only way to decelerate the head is to over
Speaker 5: accelerate the grip and impact.
Speaker 1: The club.
Speaker 3: Doesn'self golfer say that wrong?
Speaker 1: Is what you're saying?
Speaker 5: Well, I'm not sure that clubhead isn't decelerating, but it's
Speaker 5: not decelerating for the reason they think it is interesting,
Speaker 5: it's a it's a different reason.
Speaker 2: Is that a similarity standing in your in your coaching,
Speaker 2: in in pitching and also putting? Where do those two
Speaker 2: differentiate a little bit? In terms of maybe how.
Speaker 5: You it's less than you think in my world, and
Speaker 5: I realize there's lots of ways to accomplish a good putter,
Speaker 5: a good chip. People putt good differently. But I like
Speaker 5: to say, if I was just looking at how to
Speaker 5: make it look most mathematically correct, I want to swing
Speaker 5: the club on plane. If you swing on a seventy
Speaker 5: degree plane or a little steeper, the bottom is going
Speaker 5: to arc. I want the face to go square to
Speaker 5: the arc, and I want things to move in the
Speaker 5: right sequence. Sequence means from the bottom up, things move
Speaker 5: less if you truly swung a pendulum. I love to
Speaker 5: ask this question, what is the rate of acceleration at
Speaker 5: the bottom of a pendulum? Don't mess this up?
Speaker 4: Zero?
Speaker 1: What would you say, Well, I mean I would just follows.
Speaker 5: Most people would say maximum.
Speaker 4: What do you mean? The engineering scholer was zero acceleration.
Speaker 5: So but but see my student heard accelerate through the ball.
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 5: And then the next question I asked him is, so,
Speaker 5: let's let's say this putney at four miles an hour
Speaker 5: club at speed. If you really needed to hit the
Speaker 5: ball at four miles an hour, would you rather be
Speaker 5: coasting or changing from one to six at a moment.
Speaker 4: Of impact, yeah, with no margin of error.
Speaker 5: So what happens is I think the person that comes
Speaker 5: up short and says that hescelerated, they just hit the
Speaker 5: ball about an eighth of a inch too soon and
Speaker 5: they were only going two instead of four. Yeah, because
Speaker 5: the same stroke, if you hit the ball in eighth
Speaker 5: of and inch too late, goes way back because you're
Speaker 5: running six.
Speaker 4: Now, your ball position has to be perfect.
Speaker 5: But the great putters, you know, the factions, the ben Crenshaws,
Speaker 5: they speed up early in the coast, so their touch
Speaker 5: at impact is incredible. And when you're coasting. It's funny
Speaker 5: when I'm giving clinics and getting people to do this,
Speaker 5: they all say it feels so solid. Well, it's easier
Speaker 5: to hit it solid if you're not surging.
Speaker 4: M yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5: And this is a question I gave you guys one time.
Speaker 5: I said, does the ball leave the face faster if
Speaker 5: it's coasting or speeding up? You guys didn't want to
Speaker 5: answer that question. But when I can get them to
Speaker 5: say the answer, it actually leaves the face quicker on
Speaker 5: a coast than it does on a surge, because a surge,
Speaker 5: you're sticking the ball in the face.
Speaker 1: Interesting.
Speaker 5: It might be a little bit, but a little bit matters.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I know a little bit matters of golf, Sam,
Speaker 4: no doubt about it.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 3: So as we're wrap it up, one thing I've taken
Speaker 3: from this interview is we're gonna have to get one
Speaker 3: of your wedges in the vault.
Speaker 1: That's number one. And b is I don't.
Speaker 5: Field leaning for that for a while, so good luck.
Speaker 3: We talked to some people already knows some people at
Speaker 3: ping I've heard. And the second is I feel like
Speaker 3: I don't know as much about the short game as
Speaker 3: maybe I thought I did to start me neither.
Speaker 1: But I mean you seem like you still love it.
Speaker 1: I mean you still up teaching.
Speaker 3: Yesterday I saw you do two hundred plus lessons.
Speaker 5: I went to do clinics hardy this morning. I learned
Speaker 5: stuff from David Orr about putting this wall go.
Speaker 1: I mean, you you can never you can never want
Speaker 1: to never learning.
Speaker 5: You can never quit learning. That's what's so great about golf.
Speaker 3: Seeing I know recently you've come out and you've been
Speaker 3: vocal about, you know, battling Parkinson's. How has that been,
Speaker 3: When do you find out and what have you been
Speaker 3: doing as of late to you know, try to hold
Speaker 3: it back as long as possible.
Speaker 5: Well, it wasn't something I talked about in the moment,
Speaker 5: but in the early twenty nineteen I was diagnosed with
Speaker 5: non Hopkins lymphoma after going through four rounds of a
Speaker 5: big chemo one. I'm happy to say I sit here
Speaker 5: today cancer free.
Speaker 4: Yeah, beautiful.
Speaker 5: But the neurologist said the trauma from the chemo kicked
Speaker 5: in Parkinson's earlier than it might. It might have surfaced
Speaker 5: later in life, but it kind of kicked it in.
Speaker 5: And so it's just now to the point where I
Speaker 5: take meds that managed the shake. But as we sit
Speaker 5: here and did this interview, in my left hand shaken.
Speaker 5: Sometimes I I feel a little conscious about it. I'm
Speaker 5: not worried about it, but I don't mind people realizing
Speaker 5: why shake now? Because it is a public thing and
Speaker 5: I'm in the public eye. It doesn't really hurt my
Speaker 5: day to day life. I still made four birdies on Friday.
Speaker 4: There we go.
Speaker 5: The cool thing is it only shakes when I'm still.
Speaker 5: It doesn't shake when I'm swinging or hitting the putt.
Speaker 1: So golf is good.
Speaker 5: It's not hurting.
Speaker 1: Golf still can pitch it like he used to.
Speaker 5: Well, no, I can't do that, but it's it's not terrible.
Speaker 4: Stan.
Speaker 2: We were chipping at the proving grounds. I never told you,
Speaker 2: just you help me. You give me a few tips.
Speaker 2: I was super steep. You help me get a shallower,
Speaker 2: changed my body movements. I played that weekend. It was
Speaker 2: cold in Phoenix, and I missed six screens. I got
Speaker 2: every ball.
Speaker 4: Up and down.
Speaker 2: It was just so big cont so that reminds me
Speaker 2: of hosting it in there.
Speaker 5: I learned two things the first day, I say with
Speaker 5: a sports psychologist. He was a track coach of Missouri,
Speaker 5: my friend Rick Maguire. He said, there's there's one main
Speaker 5: difference between winning and losing, scheduling.
Speaker 4: Scheduling.
Speaker 5: And he said, there's one way to be a great
Speaker 5: track coach coach fast kids. I was coaching a fast kid.
Speaker 1: You had the quickest.
Speaker 5: He was already the quickest guy in the room. It
Speaker 5: was easy.
Speaker 3: He might have got five out of six up and
Speaker 3: down if he hadn't had the conversion for you the
Speaker 3: next day.
Speaker 1: But he's six out of six.
Speaker 2: Ja.
Speaker 5: I still like. I'm still like hearing the stories.
Speaker 4: It felt good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well stand we appreciate the time.
Speaker 3: Always interesting to hear you kind of talk about short
Speaker 3: game and diving into it and obviously from great player
Speaker 3: to great coach, one of the great that's ever done it.
Speaker 1: So thanks for taking the time with us.
Speaker 5: It's a pleasure.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. That's stand out. This is the
Speaker 1: Proving Grounds Podcast.