Speaker 1: I miss the green.
Speaker 2: For example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball
Speaker 2: in the bunker, I'm really upset.
Speaker 3: And when I find my ball in a frid Egg,
Speaker 3: Friday Egg, the dreaded Friday Egg, Friday Friday Bride Egg, Lie,
Speaker 3: I'm about ready to run off of the course.
Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, Welcome back to another edition of the
Speaker 1: Frida Egg Podcast. I'm your host, Andy Johnson, and today
Speaker 1: I'm joined by Scott Fawcett. Scott is works with a
Speaker 1: number of tour players, about twenty five tour players, a
Speaker 1: great deal of college and high level amateur players on
Speaker 1: kind of course management and strategy and how they navigate,
Speaker 1: you know, these tracks and score.
Speaker 2: The best they possibly can.
Speaker 1: So his decade system has been kind of one of
Speaker 1: these new systems is on the rise, and you know,
Speaker 1: he's getting a lot of buy in and a lot
Speaker 1: of great success from his students. Scott, welcome on.
Speaker 3: Thanks, I appreciate you having me on. Should be some conversation, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: We're excited to hear about how you kind of came
Speaker 1: up with it. So I think it'd be great for
Speaker 1: you know, all of our listeners to hear a little
Speaker 1: bit about your background and how you got into golf.
Speaker 3: Sure. I mean, I'm just your normal Texas kid growing up,
Speaker 3: played all the sports football, basketball, baseball, everything. And I
Speaker 3: wouldn't say suffered a knee injury in seventh grade, but
Speaker 3: I hurt my knee in seventh grade, which kind of
Speaker 3: made me decide to focus on golf because pain is
Speaker 3: not my friend. And you know, so my dad was
Speaker 3: a very good golfer. He was probably a scratcher, a
Speaker 3: plus one or two maybe, and so just getting involved
Speaker 3: in the game through him at a young age and
Speaker 3: then focusing on it. You know, I never really played
Speaker 3: any aggs or anything through high school, just because I
Speaker 3: was kind of a late starter. So I went to
Speaker 3: a smaller school first in Texas, won my freshman year,
Speaker 3: and then transferred to Texas A and M and I
Speaker 3: wound up winning a tournament there and graduated, turn professional
Speaker 3: and kind of played everywhere but the one tour you
Speaker 3: want to play on over the next six years, and
Speaker 3: probably won ten or so different mini tour events on
Speaker 3: the Hooters Tour and other places. And you know, luckily
Speaker 3: for me, I actually was kind of heart again in
Speaker 3: two thousand and two and started an electricity company when
Speaker 3: Texas te regularly electricity market and kind of ran that,
Speaker 3: you know, doing one hundred plus hour weeks for about
Speaker 3: four or five years, and then I actually wanted up
Speaker 3: becoming good friends with Chris Como, playing you know, just
Speaker 3: friendly poker games around town and whatnot. And once I
Speaker 3: actually realized that he was a golf instructor, decided to
Speaker 3: go out and get a lesson from it. And it
Speaker 3: was the first time that I had ever heard modern
Speaker 3: ball flight logs and just everything and completely changed the
Speaker 3: way that I view the game. And so in two
Speaker 3: thousand and eight, I decided that I was going to
Speaker 3: kind of play full time amateur golf, and you know,
Speaker 3: in hopes of winning to the US Midam and actually
Speaker 3: on getting to where I was playing well enough that
Speaker 3: I decided to enter Q school is a thirty five
Speaker 3: year old amateur and got through all four stages, went
Speaker 3: out and kind of floundered around a little bit on
Speaker 3: the webbut CONIR nationwide tour. At the time, the game
Speaker 3: plan was originally for my wife and I had to
Speaker 3: go out and travel, and I was sitting in Phoenix
Speaker 3: for a Monday qualifier. About two months later, my wife
Speaker 3: had gotten pregnant in the interim, so I kept her
Speaker 3: at home and just something going, what am I doing here?
Speaker 3: So I just kind of screwed around for a couple
Speaker 3: of years, and then in twenty thirteen I got my
Speaker 3: amateur statisfac again for the second time. And that was
Speaker 3: right when Mark Brody's book Every Shot Counts was coming
Speaker 3: out with all the new strokes skin statistics and whatnot,
Speaker 3: and I kept a very crude version of Strokes gained
Speaker 3: just on my own game, basically with me making up
Speaker 3: the benchmarks not even realized. And that's what they were
Speaker 3: doing with the new shot Link data, and so I
Speaker 3: was kind of familiar with the idea all right, and
Speaker 3: all of a sudden realized from one of the excers
Speaker 3: where he talked about that Tiger was number one in
Speaker 3: the world because of his proximity from one hundred and
Speaker 3: seventy five yards and a number one twenty five only
Speaker 3: hit it three feet further away. And that's that just
Speaker 3: kind of blew my mind, which I think Mark and
Speaker 3: I would definitely say at this point, that's, you know,
Speaker 3: not entirely like the way I read it originally was
Speaker 3: not entirely the meeting, but it gave me enough of
Speaker 3: an idea with my finance and economics and kind of
Speaker 3: statistics background, a little bit of poker, a little bit
Speaker 3: professional golf, that I could kind of create a giant
Speaker 3: spreadsheet where I introduced the strokes, gained statistics, and then
Speaker 3: the shot pattern of you know, at the time, I
Speaker 3: was probably about a plus six or so handicap, and
Speaker 3: the theory solved course management. So I took about six
Speaker 3: months and did all that, and then the week before
Speaker 3: the Texas Amitur in twenty fourteen, I was going to
Speaker 3: play in it the following week and I got a
Speaker 3: quarters and shot in my right elbow, and the doctor
Speaker 3: caroalyzed my right arm actually for a few days, so
Speaker 3: I wound up. You know, there's a junior golfer at
Speaker 3: my home course named Wills Ala Taurus. I actually wound
Speaker 3: up calling him and saying, hey, I can't play next
Speaker 3: week in the stadium. Can I caddy for you? And
Speaker 3: if you'll do everything I tell you to do, I
Speaker 3: promise you'll win. The kids. Was a phenomenal player, even
Speaker 3: though at the time and he hadn't really done a
Speaker 3: whole lot, but I've watched him play, you know, since
Speaker 3: he was nine years old, and the kid is amazing.
Speaker 3: So go out and caddy for him, and he wins
Speaker 3: by thirty, so it's pretty cool. Definitely, as we were
Speaker 3: going along, I didn't really feel like I was doing anything.
Speaker 3: I mean, I was using the course of management that
Speaker 3: I had put together, but honestly, then the day I
Speaker 3: was like, I don't think this is that much different
Speaker 3: than what I was doing as a professional golfer. Anyways,
Speaker 3: But I was also watching our opponents and just listening
Speaker 3: to some of the stuff that they were saying, like targets,
Speaker 3: and they were, you know, effectively pretty clueless. And then
Speaker 3: I'll also say, like even myself, I don't know that
Speaker 3: I would have been disciplined. I might have known the
Speaker 3: right place to in theory be aiming a golf shop,
Speaker 3: but I wouldn't have actually really been committed to trying
Speaker 3: to put it there. And yet Will was doing a
Speaker 3: very good job of doing that well. A month later,
Speaker 3: the US Junior was down in Houston, so I went
Speaker 3: down and Kelly for him down there also, and he
Speaker 3: wins the US Junior And next thing, I've got a
Speaker 3: couple of college coaches saying, I don't know what the heck,
Speaker 3: you're telling him, but you know, congratulations really fun to watch,
Speaker 3: and it really dawned on me at that point that
Speaker 3: I kind of created, you know, Matt based system that
Speaker 3: actually was going to be pretty easy to teach. Of course,
Speaker 3: you know, basically the course management of a guy like
Speaker 3: Tiger would take that brain and put it into a
Speaker 3: sixteen year old kid. And honestly, just watching the result
Speaker 3: over the last few years as people really put the
Speaker 3: process into play and commit to it, you seeing some
Speaker 3: you know, some pretty cool stuff come about. So you know,
Speaker 3: next thing, you know, because SMUs here in Dallas, I'm
Speaker 3: friends with Chase Mender of the SMU coach, and I
Speaker 3: wound up giving am are there in February twenty fifteen.
Speaker 3: Bryson goes on to win the NCAA's and the US Ameters.
Speaker 3: And obviously I don't really pay attention to where a
Speaker 3: bunch of golfers come from, buttons, I'm from Dallas. I'm
Speaker 3: certainly keenly aware that quite a few great players have
Speaker 3: been coming out of Dallas, amateurs and juniors and whatnot
Speaker 3: over the last few years. And I don't think that's
Speaker 3: a coincidence.
Speaker 2: It's a it's interesting.
Speaker 1: You know, your system kind of speaks to this old
Speaker 1: adage that golf is ninety percent mental and ten percent physical,
Speaker 1: and like, you know, golfers have had that shoved down
Speaker 1: their throats their whole lives, but never any solutions to
Speaker 1: you know, kind of manage that and you know, understand
Speaker 1: what really they should be thinking, where they should be
Speaker 1: aiming in. You know, kind of a cliff nos version.
Speaker 1: Could you give us like a little bit of a
Speaker 1: you know, overview of you know, kind of what what
Speaker 1: your decade system preach it?
Speaker 3: Ye, I mean the sound bite would simply be very
Speaker 3: aggressive off the tee within certain parameters. Like it's not
Speaker 3: just firing driver absolutely everywhere, but if a hole meets
Speaker 3: three or four different criteria, it's driver. There isn't any
Speaker 3: discussing it, and it might be your week, it might
Speaker 3: not be your week. But by hitting a lot more
Speaker 3: drivers off the tee, you're going to see you know,
Speaker 3: intelligent drivers, I should say, you're going to see yourself
Speaker 3: in a much better position to score quite often. And
Speaker 3: then honestly, from the approach shots in, it's more about understanding,
Speaker 3: like we talked about all the time, the shotgun plottern
Speaker 3: you don't really have a specific idea where the ball's going.
Speaker 3: And man, just the difference in having a you know,
Speaker 3: a twenty foot birding cut from the fat side of
Speaker 3: the pen versus an up and down from the short
Speaker 3: side of the pin and the rough or a bunker.
Speaker 3: It's just a it's a huge gain. So you're really
Speaker 3: adding up all these little fractions of shots over the
Speaker 3: course of eighteen holes. I mean again, this was designed
Speaker 3: for elite tournament golfer. We've obviously made it quite generic
Speaker 3: for any golfer to see some benefits and really realizing
Speaker 3: that it's not about just taking a nine iron and
Speaker 3: hitting it to a foot and gaining a full shot.
Speaker 3: It's about taking a nine iron and hitting it to
Speaker 3: twenty five feet and gaining a tenth of a shot,
Speaker 3: and doing that over and over and over again. The
Speaker 3: next thing you know, you've gained you know, a full
Speaker 3: stroke with your irons versus where you normally are. It's
Speaker 3: just up to your putter, you know, which may or
Speaker 3: may not be hot on a given a week. It's funny,
Speaker 3: I've got a tour player who's putting the stats were
Speaker 3: terrible last week. Just going to text, like, hey, if
Speaker 3: you want to roll any cuts or talk about anything,
Speaker 3: let me know. And this was a great answer because
Speaker 3: he was just like, Oh, dude, don't worry, I'm rolling
Speaker 3: it fine. You know, it's just nothing fell this week.
Speaker 3: And that's usually true. I mean, the difference in losing
Speaker 3: three strokes with your putter and gaining two, I mean
Speaker 3: obviously making five more putts, but that's just the way
Speaker 3: the game works. I mean, it's not like if you're
Speaker 3: sitting on a petting green with the one hundred straight
Speaker 3: fifteen footers, you know you would just make one miss
Speaker 3: to make one miss too, you know, you kind of
Speaker 3: make two, three, four in a row, and then you
Speaker 3: missed maybe five sixty seven in a row, and they
Speaker 3: come in these little stretches, and so much of what
Speaker 3: I teach, even though it is, you know, like a
Speaker 3: mass based strategy system, it really winds up helping psychologically
Speaker 3: as much as anything. Because you're like, I mean, it
Speaker 3: didn't look that was fine. I didn't do anything wrong.
Speaker 3: Now my stats look terrible, but I know I was
Speaker 3: better than that. Or sometimes your stats can kind of
Speaker 3: look really good and you also be like, oh, it
Speaker 3: wasn't that good that I got extraordinarily lucky on here,
Speaker 3: here and here, and you know, I think my job
Speaker 3: is to really help educate a player how to get
Speaker 3: to the bottom line of what was or was good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, it brings up something that's interesting.
Speaker 1: You know, in hockey, they have like scoring opportunity stats,
Speaker 1: and I'm surprised that, you know, the PGA Tour hasn't
Speaker 1: come up with like, hey, you know, this player had
Speaker 1: ten you know, great scoring opportunities, you know, whether it
Speaker 1: be a birdie or an eagle, you know, if they
Speaker 1: you know, and having a qualifying of you know, a
Speaker 1: putt inside of this or so on and so forth.
Speaker 3: Well, and there's some other statisticians. I think that that's
Speaker 3: the way Richie Hunt does his stuff here at the
Speaker 3: nice little synopsis at the end of each year where
Speaker 3: he goes through and and talks about stuff like that
Speaker 3: and exactly kind of what you're talking about. There is
Speaker 3: so many of the statistics they're not or say they're
Speaker 3: not fair. But and I'm pulling this out as air,
Speaker 3: but I feel like Grendon Todd last year was maybe
Speaker 3: led the tour in strokes gained around the greens, so
Speaker 3: he was the best shipper. Quote unquote schipper on tour. Well,
Speaker 3: he also was dead last in greens and regulation. So
Speaker 3: if you actually broke it out by strokes game per attempt,
Speaker 3: he's positive, he's fifty ath place on time or something like,
Speaker 3: he's got a nice short game. But when it's a
Speaker 3: cumulus statistic, so much of it can get buried in that, like, yeah,
Speaker 3: you chip it decent, but you only hit forty seven
Speaker 3: percent of your greens, you're going to have the higher
Speaker 3: strokes gained chipping than Jason Day or somebody else who's
Speaker 3: only getting you know, three four or five attempts around.
Speaker 3: They would have to chip in once around in order
Speaker 3: to mount the cumulus amount that Brendan Todd is simply
Speaker 3: because I just pulled it up on the computer right now.
Speaker 3: This year he is, he's losing two shots around in
Speaker 3: his strokes gained approach and he's gaining point three four
Speaker 3: six with his short game. I mean, he was okay,
Speaker 3: So here's fifth last year in total strokes gained shipping
Speaker 3: with gaining point four strokes, he was one hundred and
Speaker 3: eighty fourth and strokes gained approach the greens. So yeah,
Speaker 3: he chips at decent, but he also had more tempts
Speaker 3: than anyone else on tour every single day, so it's
Speaker 3: not exactly fair. Kind of like Jason Day with what
Speaker 3: he did with his putter, well, I mean he gained
Speaker 3: you know, four tenth almost half a stroke more than
Speaker 3: second place in stroke skin putting. Well, he also is
Speaker 3: probably one of the more conservative players on tour, So
Speaker 3: the easiest way to make a bunch of thirty footers
Speaker 3: is to have a bunch of thirty footers, which is
Speaker 3: exactly what he did, and as a result, when he
Speaker 3: has a hot year, it looks like he's the greatest
Speaker 3: putter on earth. If he had just hit some shot
Speaker 3: a little closer, his strokes, skin number putting would have
Speaker 3: actually gone down. These categories sometimes steal from each other.
Speaker 3: So if you're Dustin Johnson and I vombit off the
Speaker 3: t three forty and in the fair way, and that
Speaker 3: removes value, that removes exceptation from my remaining shot. It's
Speaker 3: very hard to be really high in stroke, skin driving
Speaker 3: and really high in strokes game to approach as a result,
Speaker 3: because they kind of take from each.
Speaker 2: Other because you're hitting from an advantage, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean Dustin Johnson's strokes gained approach number is
Speaker 3: just handicapped compared to ten Clark's period. There is nothing
Speaker 3: he can do to possibly put up and say, Tim Clarks,
Speaker 3: who knows if his number is better or not. But
Speaker 3: it's impossible for Dustin Johnson to be able to accumulate
Speaker 3: and lead strokes gained approach simply because of what he
Speaker 3: does with his driver an upper It'd.
Speaker 1: Be like comparing speF and Dustin Johnson. You know where
Speaker 1: Spef's at the top of strokes gained approach, but you know,
Speaker 1: middle of the road in strokes gained.
Speaker 3: Driving well exactly. And that's one thing that I feel
Speaker 3: like Tiger because he hit the driver into so many
Speaker 3: screwy s thoughts while he was best an approach well
Speaker 3: as a result, if you just aren't an idiot from
Speaker 3: some of the places that Tiger put his t shots,
Speaker 3: either into the trees or into the rough for god
Speaker 3: knows where you're almost given a third or a half
Speaker 3: of a stroke around, and strokes can approach simply because
Speaker 3: you're starting with such a higher initial value because of
Speaker 3: being in the trees an extra time or two around,
Speaker 3: and then, like I say, if you just play a
Speaker 3: solid shot from there, like the trees are about the
Speaker 3: only place in golf you can go out and intentionally
Speaker 3: gain roughly a third of a stroke every single time
Speaker 3: you do it. I mean, there's just no other shot
Speaker 3: that's easy. It's just they're giving strokes away. And that's
Speaker 3: mainly because the tour players are so bad at it,
Speaker 3: which obviously has a trickle down back to your listeners
Speaker 3: of ander golfers, they're most likely just as bad. It's
Speaker 3: the easiest place on earth to pick a value against
Speaker 3: against your.
Speaker 2: Competition, so so the same thing would go for like,
Speaker 2: you know, like Aaron Badley.
Speaker 1: Why he's always at the top of strokes game putting
Speaker 1: is because he's a really poor ball striker and leaves
Speaker 1: himself a lot of opportunity. I mean, he's a great putter,
Speaker 1: but he has exponentially more opportunities really then somebody that
Speaker 1: hits it close regularly.
Speaker 3: Potentially. Putting is one of the few of the four
Speaker 3: main stroke scene specifics. Putting, for the most part, can
Speaker 3: run fairly accurate. I mean, you're not going to have
Speaker 3: a guy who's a decent putter that gets the Brendan
Speaker 3: Todd effect and leads stroke scene putting as a result
Speaker 3: just by having more oportuo, everyone has eighteen opportunities dish around.
Speaker 3: So it's but a guy like Jason Day who's playing
Speaker 3: a little bit more conservatively, who winds up with a
Speaker 3: few extra thirty footers around well, and he's also having
Speaker 3: a season where he's making quite a few of them,
Speaker 3: Well that's going to wind up mounting to a huge number.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I mean there is a certain biason there
Speaker 3: certainly that can either help or hurt you. It's not
Speaker 3: quite as bad as the other ones though.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think it's something that you know, I've never really
Speaker 1: thought about with like the approach and driving thing, how
Speaker 1: they steal from each other.
Speaker 2: But it makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely. I mean again, Tim Clark simply cannot do
Speaker 3: with Dustin Johnson can off the tee period. So no
Speaker 3: matter what, obviously Dustin is going to have a higher
Speaker 3: strokes gained driving number. But then the flip side of
Speaker 3: that is, if I have eighteen opportunities, well fourteen, let's
Speaker 3: start out the park three. I have fourteen opportunities as
Speaker 3: Dustin Johnson, what my initial expectation number is going to
Speaker 3: be lower, And you know you have to sit technically
Speaker 3: the same kind of quality of shots. So in theory
Speaker 3: it wouldn't do that, but it simply does just because again,
Speaker 3: the better you drive at the lower your remaining expectation,
Speaker 3: you still have to hit a very quality shot now
Speaker 3: to get it inside of it, and almost of any
Speaker 3: bad shot you get really penalized.
Speaker 1: So I'd be interested, you know, like, in terms of
Speaker 1: stats that you'd like to see more of that aren't
Speaker 1: currently available. Would one of them be like a kind
Speaker 1: of like a strokes gain? Could you create a strokes
Speaker 1: gained driving that's relative to say, Dustin Johnson, So like, hey,
Speaker 1: Dustin Johnson, was you know, a full shot better than
Speaker 1: average his average today?
Speaker 3: You could? But more importantly, like are you talking about
Speaker 3: for the tour or just for us amateurs trying to
Speaker 3: use a stats.
Speaker 1: Portal, I'd say for the tour or you know, either way.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm just kind of curious what stats you'd
Speaker 1: like to see more of, you know, kind of rise
Speaker 1: in the near future.
Speaker 3: You know, It's funny because I feel like from an understanding,
Speaker 3: so from a logic standpoint, I'm as good as anyone
Speaker 3: like Mark Brodie. It's understanding. So once you give me
Speaker 3: the stat I'm certainly as good at computing it and
Speaker 3: or you know, the true a math isn't that hard.
Speaker 3: But the true art of math is how do I
Speaker 3: take this number and give you some actional information? So
Speaker 3: you've given me a stat what could I actually tell
Speaker 3: my player from it? That's the art of statistics, you know,
Speaker 3: how do I change something? But beyond that, a guy
Speaker 3: like Mark Brody what he created a strokes game like,
Speaker 3: I mean, that's just genius, like for me to say
Speaker 3: here's what I would like to see. I mean, honestly,
Speaker 3: I've been so busy that stuff. I haven't even thought
Speaker 3: about what I would like to see. I just take
Speaker 3: what hopefully a smart guy like Mark Creed and be like, okay,
Speaker 3: now what can I do for that? But you know,
Speaker 3: the one thing that I would say that should happen
Speaker 3: is the strokes gained around the green should definitely be
Speaker 3: boiled into per attempt. You could do strokes gained putting
Speaker 3: rather than how they give you know, your may crate
Speaker 3: your averages on you know, every every foot from inside
Speaker 3: ten feet. I mean again that that may creates nice,
Speaker 3: but a strokes gain per attempt for each distance bucket
Speaker 3: and putting would be nice. Same thing strokes gain per
Speaker 3: attempt at various areas in the fairway. But I honestly
Speaker 3: don't even know if the math of that would be
Speaker 3: allowed because the way they actually recomputed on each hole
Speaker 3: on each course to get a different benchmarking baseline. Which
Speaker 3: that's the reason I was asking the question what do
Speaker 3: you mean a second ago, because so there's a couple
Speaker 3: other stats programs out there aside from our decade app
Speaker 3: that offers stroke skain driving, which is it's completely bocused.
Speaker 3: You cannot use a benchmark in order to create stroke
Speaker 3: skain driving, like can you use it in putting? I mean,
Speaker 3: it's flawed, but it's about right, and you're probably going
Speaker 3: to get a nice trend where you can see if
Speaker 3: you're doing better or worse. It's flawed a little bit,
Speaker 3: but it's at least acceptable. But with driving, if you
Speaker 3: and I are both entering our stats into just a
Speaker 3: random staff portal, and your home course is Harbortown and
Speaker 3: my home course is Augusta, and we're using a benchmark,
Speaker 3: so a three hundred yard drive in the fairway gains
Speaker 3: a quarter of a stroke in theory, Well, if I'm
Speaker 3: playing Augusta, I'm going to get to hit a whole
Speaker 3: bunch of three hundred yard drives and never put him
Speaker 3: in the trees. You playing Harbor Town are going to
Speaker 3: get to hit a whole bunch of two hundred and
Speaker 3: twenty yard two irons that are in the trees all
Speaker 3: day long. There's no chance your stroke skin driving is
Speaker 3: not going to look horrific, and you might be a
Speaker 3: much better driver the golf ball than me. And I mean,
Speaker 3: so that's you know, We've got a deal right now
Speaker 3: where the entire PAC twelve is going to come in
Speaker 3: and use our portal next year, and so we'll actually
Speaker 3: be able to create a stroke skiing statistic that is
Speaker 3: correct within a tournament because I'll have you know, six
Speaker 3: teams entering their data, so that is that is possible
Speaker 3: on the same course. We're all on the same day.
Speaker 3: So if you hit a three hundred I've hit at
Speaker 3: two to eighty, you're in the fairway. I'm in the fairway.
Speaker 3: Your drive is better than my period, and we can
Speaker 3: kind of actually ferret out some sort of useful information
Speaker 3: from that. But to just take someone's home course and
Speaker 3: compared to the benchmark is extraordinarily flawed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I'm interested you brought up kind of two
Speaker 1: polar opposites that the tour sees every every year, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of how does the strategy that you map up,
Speaker 1: map out for your clients change week to week at
Speaker 1: a tour level.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean so from off the tee. It's funny
Speaker 3: because so initially when I first was catting for Will,
Speaker 3: like at the Texas Ameter, I just did a bunch
Speaker 3: of map on on these holes given options, you know,
Speaker 3: and I took like the remaining expectation that the tour
Speaker 3: would have. So, you know, if you were going to
Speaker 3: hit into a fairway bunker at one hundred and forty yards,
Speaker 3: that fairway bunker at won forty expectation on tours three
Speaker 3: point two to two, And I said, okay, we'll hit
Speaker 3: it in that bunker twenty percent of the time and
Speaker 3: the fairway x percent. And like I just did some
Speaker 3: basic expectation map to choose what club to hit off
Speaker 3: the tee, and from that I came up with you know,
Speaker 3: what I considered originally like these rules of bombs. So
Speaker 3: it was that there are sixty five yards between penalties
Speaker 3: show hazards. You know, you can hit driver fairly, doesn't
Speaker 3: pens it less than forty yards you can hit driver,
Speaker 3: and just a few rules of thumb like that. And
Speaker 3: only after in twenty fifteen looking at every you know,
Speaker 3: I had a couple of tour clients then when I
Speaker 3: first got started, and I looked at every single course
Speaker 3: on tour. And I hate saying, this is a guy
Speaker 3: who's played professional golf for you know, almost twenty years.
Speaker 3: It's kind of a lay person with regards to architecture.
Speaker 3: But I never really realized how formulaic golf courses are designed.
Speaker 3: I don't know if that's something they teach you in
Speaker 3: golf architects school, like, hey, you don't want to have
Speaker 3: two legs that are only fifty five yards apart on
Speaker 3: a four hundred and eighty yard goal. You just don't
Speaker 3: see that combination. And so from there, instead of having
Speaker 3: the rules that I'm just being written like, I could
Speaker 3: actually create like a slow chart, a decision tree, if
Speaker 3: you will, where you're are there sixty five yards between
Speaker 3: penalty hazards, yes, and cool drivers still in play? Is
Speaker 3: this and then you can work yourself through. And that
Speaker 3: was based on a combination of shot patterns, a combination
Speaker 3: of expectation, masks. But then more than anything, just how
Speaker 3: they're designed. You just don't see, you know, a fairway bunker,
Speaker 3: pinch it into fifteen yards very often without giving you
Speaker 3: the option of either carrying it or leaving short of it.
Speaker 3: And there's just so many things like that that I never,
Speaker 3: I certainly never just noticed until doing it, you know,
Speaker 3: like I said, looking at every single course over the
Speaker 3: course of a couple of.
Speaker 1: Weeks, that's interesting, the formulaic aspect of architecture. And you know,
Speaker 1: it makes me wonder, you know, with the majority of
Speaker 1: tour courses being you know, more modern courses that were
Speaker 1: designed from you know, kind of the seventies or sixties
Speaker 1: through the early two thousands, you know, if it it's
Speaker 1: a little different, do you notice anything different when the
Speaker 1: tour goes the like maybe more classical courses like Riviera
Speaker 1: or Colonial or is it pretty much the same across
Speaker 1: the board?
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, so let's I mean, we're talking
Speaker 3: tour courses here, Tour courses buy and larger played on
Speaker 3: the pretty good golf courses. The Nelson. Honestly, actually, this
Speaker 3: is one thing that's funny, is the Nelson. Since I'm
Speaker 3: here in Dallas, I just know that a lot of
Speaker 3: the guys don't come here because the course is kind
Speaker 3: of screwy. And again, now that I look at it
Speaker 3: through a different lens, I'm like, oh, it is weird
Speaker 3: like this one number nine like it doesn't not Number
Speaker 3: nine doesn't give you quite enough room. Number eighteen there's
Speaker 3: a lake on the left that is only thirty yards
Speaker 3: away from the mestiite trees on the right. Well, what
Speaker 3: happened there was there used to be a giant tree
Speaker 3: that they lost in a storm, and so when they
Speaker 3: lost that tree on the left, that's when they decided
Speaker 3: to dig into bunkers afterwards. And my understanding is that
Speaker 3: DA was that the architect was telling the people like, hey,
Speaker 3: you're sticking this this lake in way too close. It's
Speaker 3: going to be stupid. And they said, well, the sponsors
Speaker 3: want and you can see it better on TV. It's beautiful.
Speaker 3: And he's like, that's fine. Can make the whole bag. Yeah,
Speaker 3: spin thing with like number eleven, this driveable par four
Speaker 3: where there's just one silly little bunker. I get the
Speaker 3: bunker in the middle of the fairway thing, but there's
Speaker 3: no there's no option around most of them, and that's
Speaker 3: the same way I'm fifteen the par five. They're like,
Speaker 3: if you want to give them a spot of the
Speaker 3: side of the fair where I can choose to go
Speaker 3: this way. Well, now I can avoid that bunker with skill,
Speaker 3: But that's when it's just a normal thirty five yard
Speaker 3: white fair with the bunker sitting right in the middle
Speaker 3: of it. There is nothing with skill that you can
Speaker 3: do to avoid it. It's basically luck. You know. That's
Speaker 3: that's kind of silly in my opinion. And again it's
Speaker 3: one of those things with people, I guarantee, with not
Speaker 3: even the tour players being able to put their finger
Speaker 3: on it once you sit down explain to them, well,
Speaker 3: this whole stupid, Like, oh my god, it is stupid.
Speaker 3: I never really thought of why. But you just don't
Speaker 3: see that set up very often, if ever. And you
Speaker 3: know that course, it's my home course, I shouldn't rag it,
Speaker 3: or not my home course, my home city course. I
Speaker 3: shouldn't rag on it too hard. But that course has
Speaker 3: three or four things that you just literally never see
Speaker 3: anywhere else.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think like center line bunkers are great, but
Speaker 1: you have to have like at least fifty yard sixty
Speaker 1: yard wide fairways, so that it essentially splits it into
Speaker 1: two small fairways.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean eleven, I think it's eleven at Valero
Speaker 3: is the exact same way. I mean, there's, like I said,
Speaker 3: there's just a few times when you go down and
Speaker 3: you know, Greg Norman is probably the worst diner in
Speaker 3: my opinion, out there. You know, every single one of
Speaker 3: his courses has a bunch of really stupid stuff contend
Speaker 3: with I actually just did this weekend the course they're
Speaker 3: playing the Nashville Golf and Athletic Club on the web
Speaker 3: dot Com tour next week, and the course on the
Speaker 3: Google Images. It's all over Sirtsalla air fights. You can't
Speaker 3: really see anything, but one green is about nine yards wide.
Speaker 3: The whole four thirty seven you kind of need to hit.
Speaker 3: It looks like a three wood off the tee, so
Speaker 3: you're gonna be left with one fifty or sixty. And
Speaker 3: the green between a lake and a bunker is ninety
Speaker 3: yards wide. And that's the width of the back part
Speaker 3: of tennant Riviera, a.
Speaker 2: Three hundred yard far four versus four fifty two.
Speaker 3: Eighties of the front lift. I mean, yeah, I'm like,
Speaker 3: I can't wait to hear if this is actually what
Speaker 3: it is because I've never I've never I've looked at
Speaker 3: I bet I've looked at two hundred golf courses between college,
Speaker 3: USO professionals, junior golf, amateur golf, all the tours. I've
Speaker 3: I've never seen a green as narrow as this one.
Speaker 3: It's actually on like a normal length hole between water
Speaker 3: and a bunker. So I'm anxiously winning the first phone
Speaker 3: calls today the guys play their practice.
Speaker 1: Round something, what was like, I'm curious what your opinion
Speaker 1: of the seventeenth hole at Rich Harvest Farms that where
Speaker 1: they had the NCAA Championship this year is.
Speaker 3: I could pull it up real quick. Hold on one, it's.
Speaker 1: That long part four that everybody was making like triples
Speaker 1: and quadruples on all week.
Speaker 3: Yeah, hold on real quick. Which did they flip the
Speaker 3: nines or do you remember because I remember they're being
Speaker 3: it was.
Speaker 2: Either eight or it would have been eight or seventeen a.
Speaker 3: I believe it was eight.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Is that the one with the lake?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Right? And sure yeah, yeah, well, I mean so I
Speaker 3: had them hitting it sixty five yards wide at three
Speaker 3: hundred from the dead tips and then that's I mean
Speaker 3: a number of the college coaches are like, this screen
Speaker 3: is so narrow, there's just no choice, And I mean,
Speaker 3: you have to respect the water hazard upfront. And this
Speaker 3: is where it gets really interesting sometimes. Is so the
Speaker 3: way decade works is I give you, I give you
Speaker 3: a yard, is that you need to be aiming it
Speaker 3: for starters what we call the baseline from any edge
Speaker 3: of the green, and from there, during your practice rounds,
Speaker 3: I teach you how to rate all of the surrounding
Speaker 3: hazards with what we call our modifiers. And then the
Speaker 3: sum of those two numbers is how far you aim
Speaker 3: at from the edge of the green. So this one
Speaker 3: they need to be aiming. Let's say you have two
Speaker 3: hundred yards left, they got to be aiming about thirteen
Speaker 3: is yards from any edge. Well, that basically had them
Speaker 3: covering it into almost the backfringe. And this is again
Speaker 3: where sometimes it's Man, it's really hard to appreciate this.
Speaker 3: But even in that scenario, in theory the way I've
Speaker 3: talked about aim, that has been a Facebook debate going
Speaker 3: on here. I consider aim just the center of your
Speaker 3: shot pattern, because you might be a wide up in fader,
Speaker 3: I might be a closed hooker. I might be a
Speaker 3: closed fader and you know, some guy at a pole cut.
Speaker 3: In this situation, you have to know where the center
Speaker 3: of your shot pattern is, and then you have to
Speaker 3: trust that if you've done your work, about half the
Speaker 3: time you're still going to land it on the green
Speaker 3: just fine, and about half the time you're going to
Speaker 3: hit it long and probably in a pretty screwy spot.
Speaker 3: And even in that scenario, if you have to go
Speaker 3: with your chip shot, because the chip shot is going
Speaker 3: to for sure land on the green and go across
Speaker 3: in the water, well then you simply have to play
Speaker 3: it more lateral and either towards the front left or
Speaker 3: the front right, depending on where the pin is, but
Speaker 3: get as much green to work with just to get
Speaker 3: it on the green. I do refuse to believe that
Speaker 3: typically just getting it on or around the fringe somewhere
Speaker 3: I'm saying, not even close to the hole is that
Speaker 3: hard and them you're just trying to two put it
Speaker 3: for boge. But like you said, the averagecorn that hole
Speaker 3: is like four point seven. Not the end of the
Speaker 3: world to make a bogey, but making doubles and triples,
Speaker 3: I mean it comes closer to the end of the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was playing with one of the McNeely boys at
Speaker 3: Stanford a couple of weeks excuse me, a couple of
Speaker 3: weeks ago, and there's a par three number four where
Speaker 3: you have to be amy it kind of left center,
Speaker 3: left quartile of the green and you put it in
Speaker 3: the left bunker like it was a fine shot. I mean,
Speaker 3: it wasn't great, but it was just right there in
Speaker 3: the left side of the distribution. And as he was
Speaker 3: getting her, it's like, I don't think he has any
Speaker 3: chance of keeping this on the green and not going
Speaker 3: in the water because of the way that this pill was.
Speaker 3: Sure enough, you hit a decent shot, landed on the
Speaker 3: down flowe world across it into the water, and I
Speaker 3: was like, I mean that was basically to me the
Speaker 3: only thing that was going to happen there. And you know,
Speaker 3: so the thought is like, your only option is just
Speaker 3: played out forward to the front of the green. You
Speaker 3: have a lot more green to work with that way,
Speaker 3: it's flatter, and then two cutters from thirty feet you're
Speaker 3: just giving up and taking bogie. But if you know
Speaker 3: the shot you're about to try is most likely in pop, well,
Speaker 3: then that's the whole reason that the second d of
Speaker 3: decade is disciplined. You have to be disciplined enough to
Speaker 3: be aware of man, I am in a bad spot
Speaker 3: here and adjust accordingly. And that's you know, back whenever
Speaker 3: I say, like with cattying at Will, if the US
Speaker 3: Junior where I would have butchered decade, if it weren't
Speaker 3: for caddying, I would, I mean, I would have. I
Speaker 3: would have completely butchered because if been so many times,
Speaker 3: I would have said I can do better than that,
Speaker 3: you know, get a little bit more addresses. But watching
Speaker 3: Will just pick apart these golf courses and he's a
Speaker 3: great ball striker. Watching him just pick apart these courses
Speaker 3: and then just winning by three like that was so
Speaker 3: simple and all it was was, I mean, him just
Speaker 3: being patient and discipline. And that was mainly because he
Speaker 3: was doing a great job of listening to me, just
Speaker 3: playing like a video game.
Speaker 2: That's yeah, it's a nice one.
Speaker 1: You've got a a first pupil that can hit the
Speaker 1: ball as well as Will can. He's I mean, for
Speaker 1: those of you that are listening that don't know, he's
Speaker 1: he's gonna be a senior this year, right, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: one of the best ball strikers in all of college
Speaker 1: golf and really bright future ahead.
Speaker 2: So I'm kind of curious.
Speaker 1: You see a wide spectrum from junior to college to
Speaker 1: you know, many tour players, to web to PGA tour players.
Speaker 1: What would you say is kind of like the difference
Speaker 1: between the different levels of players.
Speaker 3: I mean, obviously you have the physical skill set, but honestly,
Speaker 3: I really I believe a lot of it is I
Speaker 3: believe a lot of the difference from college to professional
Speaker 3: is understanding course management and just how to get your
Speaker 3: way around the golf course. And and I you know,
Speaker 3: working at work with Maverick nearly for almost two years now,
Speaker 3: and he's obviously been number one in the world, Mamterer
Speaker 3: for quite a while, I guess he just got overtaken
Speaker 3: some guy. Recently. The ask Maverick one day, you know,
Speaker 3: what did Tiger tell you about how he played golf?
Speaker 3: And you know, Mavericks said, a lot of it makes
Speaker 3: more sense now because Tiger, you know, when he asks him,
Speaker 3: why are you the best player ever? Tiger's response was
Speaker 3: because as the best lag putter ever, which isn't accurate,
Speaker 3: well it's not his accuaty is a great lag putter,
Speaker 3: it's not accurate. It's the reason why. But Tiger's reasoning
Speaker 3: was really amazing me because he said, I could just
Speaker 3: kind of hit a twenty or thirty feet out towards
Speaker 3: the fat side of the pen and have a bunch
Speaker 3: of looks, not make stupid bogies, kill the par fives,
Speaker 3: make a pet every now and again, and shoot a
Speaker 3: couple under every day. And if I had to just
Speaker 3: write an elevator a paragraph of proper strategy, that's it. Now.
Speaker 3: The only problem with an amateur hearing that advice and
Speaker 3: trying to apply it as a phistical part required, but
Speaker 3: it's not about for an ameter. This is why in
Speaker 3: our staff portal we finished are tracking what I call
Speaker 3: a decade ratio, which is how often your ball finishes
Speaker 3: on the that side of the whole the long side
Speaker 3: of the whole location. And the status doesn't work as
Speaker 3: often for amateur golf simply because the pins are easier.
Speaker 3: And that's also then the problem that these collegiates have
Speaker 3: when they get out on tours. They're so used to
Speaker 3: just firing at pins, and you know, there's not a
Speaker 3: whole lot of ramification for it, and the difference in
Speaker 3: two or three yards. Not only on your proximity makes
Speaker 3: a difference, but then your resultant chip shot if and
Speaker 3: when you do miss the grain, it's so much easier
Speaker 3: to get yourself in a really screwy spot with a
Speaker 3: pretty good shot. I picked up Bohstler as a player
Speaker 3: at the Colonial this year. I went over there and
Speaker 3: walked a little bit with a practice round, and so
Speaker 3: he kind of tried to implement some ideas that first
Speaker 3: week at Colonial, but so much of it was he
Speaker 3: realized when we talked later on after that week, He's like, man,
Speaker 3: I just realized now how many spots I was getting
Speaker 3: myself into that just an extra couple two or three
Speaker 3: yards on a chip shot. So if you're six yards
Speaker 3: off the green and the pen is only three or
Speaker 3: four yards on the green, I mean, that's effectively a
Speaker 3: flop shot that you're going to need to hit to
Speaker 3: get it close, as opposed to if you had a
Speaker 3: slightly better target and now you would only be two
Speaker 3: or three yards off the green to append it's three
Speaker 3: or four yards on. It's just a chip shot. That's
Speaker 3: that's basically, you know, no big deal. So not only
Speaker 3: you know that the combination of hitting more greens in regulation,
Speaker 3: but it's also having much better looks on your chip shots.
Speaker 3: And that's what was cool we were talking about before
Speaker 3: we came on, was you know, so Bo's first week
Speaker 3: where he was going to go use decade was in Wichital.
Speaker 3: Last week on the web dot com, he had the
Speaker 3: Monday qualify, in which he did He asked me, should
Speaker 3: I play more aggressive in Munday qualifiers? Nope, just go
Speaker 3: play patient golf. And if it's your day, it's your day.
Speaker 3: So in Monday's then and then he finishes second to
Speaker 3: Aaron Wise, whose last year's mc WA champion, who is
Speaker 3: a decade or which. It was just pretty cool watching
Speaker 3: these two guys because most people think that, you know,
Speaker 3: patient conservative ish golf, hate using we're conservative because it's
Speaker 3: such a turnoff. But here's patient conservative golf last week
Speaker 3: in Witchital where scores are super low and my players
Speaker 3: finished first, second, and fourth. Yeah, it's pretty comical, is it.
Speaker 1: You got to make You got to make birdies regardless,
Speaker 1: but you know, if you if you make less bogies,
Speaker 1: it always helps, right.
Speaker 3: Well, if if if a, if a, if a corporate
Speaker 3: turnaround guy comes in to turn around a failing corporation.
Speaker 3: The first thing they don't look to do is see
Speaker 3: how can we drive up revenues? It's how can we
Speaker 3: drive down expenses? Where where are we just wasting money?
Speaker 3: And golf is basically I view my job. I don't
Speaker 3: know if it's because I've got finance and econdagrees the
Speaker 3: same way. But my first thing is where are you
Speaker 3: just wasting shots? Let's look at that and see what
Speaker 3: we can clean up. Because again I've got enough experience
Speaker 3: with this now I know for a fact you just won't.
Speaker 3: You know, you won't go from making four or five
Speaker 3: birdies around to zero. That's not gonna happen. But I
Speaker 3: can almost overnight get your stupid bogie level to go
Speaker 3: down very quickly, and for sure doubles and beyond like
Speaker 3: those should just disappear almost immediately once you understand the
Speaker 3: proper way of going about it.
Speaker 2: It's interesting.
Speaker 1: I an agent, I know told me one time, you know, like,
Speaker 1: I don't look at how you know, the thing I
Speaker 1: look at is how many birdies a guy makes. Because
Speaker 1: you can't you can't teach birdies, but you can coach
Speaker 1: away bogies.
Speaker 3: I mean I would agree with that. I mean I
Speaker 3: I yes, I'm trying to think because it's it doesn't
Speaker 3: sound quite right to me, because I agree, you can't
Speaker 3: make so many people that, yes, that may lead the
Speaker 3: field and birdies, they also lead the field and boges
Speaker 3: levels like it's almost it's not the greatest stat in
Speaker 3: the world to necessarily lead, but coaching away bogies, that
Speaker 3: is a very very good way to put it, because
Speaker 3: that's again I have this discussion Chris Tomo, because we're
Speaker 3: still really good friends. I went up there to the
Speaker 3: US Open a darn Hills and walked around Key and
Speaker 3: love Mark and a bunch of other players, and it's
Speaker 3: it's just interesting how hard it is to convey to
Speaker 3: people sometimes that just avoiding bogies is a very positive thing,
Speaker 3: and you just have to trust birdies will happen almost accidentally.
Speaker 3: I mean, you will birdy one and a half par
Speaker 3: fives on average. You'll make a twenty foot or longer
Speaker 3: put Every other days there's two birdies. You'll have some
Speaker 3: legs and nine rands. We're proper strategy is to almost
Speaker 3: be aiming it at the flag, so you'll get some
Speaker 3: looks and you'll have a seven iron that you might
Speaker 3: be aiming at the dead center of the green that
Speaker 3: you just happen to miss on the whole side of
Speaker 3: your distribution pattern. Again, if you view your shot pattern
Speaker 3: and the shotgun, you will have it spread all over
Speaker 3: the place and sometimes you'll accidentally stup it. And that's
Speaker 3: basically the way you win golf tournaments. I mean, when
Speaker 3: Rory won the twenty fourteen PGA, he almost topped a
Speaker 3: three wood on ten to seven feet, makes it for
Speaker 3: eagle and wins one, wins by one. So there's a
Speaker 3: lot of pretty fad. I didn't see yesterday's tournament. I
Speaker 3: read about it a little bit, and I guess people
Speaker 3: said that he hit a tree or something in the
Speaker 3: playoff and kicked out in the fairway and then put
Speaker 3: it in the front bunker and then obviously holes yep,
Speaker 3: a bunker shot. Like sorry, but that's all pretty convenient
Speaker 3: for winning a golf tournament.
Speaker 1: It's kind of how he won at Colonial the year before.
Speaker 1: On like the seventeenth hole, he hit it into the
Speaker 1: trees which had hit a spectator bounce out. Then he
Speaker 1: hit it into the grand stand over the grain, got
Speaker 1: a free drop and flopped it in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean again, Tally wanted Augusta part of my
Speaker 3: seminar and part of my app. I've got the video
Speaker 3: from his first round of Augusta. On he hits it
Speaker 3: right in the trees and he had a perfect hallway
Speaker 3: like he was swinging, like he was standing in the
Speaker 3: dead center of the fairway in the pine trees. Right
Speaker 3: on seven, you get around to twelve, and an impact,
Speaker 3: he's yelling, get down, get down. It comes up five
Speaker 3: feet short. He thought it was in the back of
Speaker 3: Zalias comes up five feet short. He fans the putt
Speaker 3: is walking at it. An impact and it goes in.
Speaker 3: And then on fourteen he hits it right and hammers
Speaker 3: it like low cutting four and that's they're going to
Speaker 3: be running up to the green. He's yelling, go and
Speaker 3: it hits the pin dead square. Was going over the green,
Speaker 3: which I've never seen anyone wrong. On fourteen he was
Speaker 3: going long on that hole and hits the pin dead
Speaker 3: square and it hit the boot. I mean, I don't
Speaker 3: even want to look at the other fifty four holes
Speaker 3: because that's I mean, there's four shots and he won
Speaker 3: by four. I mean again, was he the best player yet?
Speaker 3: He absolutely is the best player at that time. But
Speaker 3: even still, you've got to get a lot of stuff
Speaker 3: going your way. Just I mean, I made a video
Speaker 3: just this last week on Brooks kept at the US
Speaker 3: Open on seven to par five. You know, he hammered
Speaker 3: that cut all the way around that golf course on
Speaker 3: purpose for seventy two straight holes, and he double crossed
Speaker 3: a few of them, and one of them was on
Speaker 3: seven to par five in the final round. I mean,
Speaker 3: a huge double cross. He hits it so far he's
Speaker 3: left of the festcu, you know, wedges it down back
Speaker 3: into play, knocks down, makes par, moves on. That's a
Speaker 3: huge momentum savior compared to what it could have been
Speaker 3: if it's just right in the middle of the of
Speaker 3: the festcu. He could have made god knows what.
Speaker 2: I mean, so much of golf.
Speaker 1: And you know, I think this is one of the
Speaker 1: reasons that you know, winning you know, you know, it
Speaker 1: gets no matter what it comes down.
Speaker 2: To, wins with these guys.
Speaker 1: But to a certain extent, it's not fair because you
Speaker 1: know a lot of times that it's just a matter
Speaker 1: of getting a couple of great breaks like that.
Speaker 3: Well yeah, I mean, you know, Kevin Chappel is a
Speaker 3: guy that who over the course of his career, should
Speaker 3: definitely win probably two or three percent of your starts.
Speaker 3: I think he won in like this one hundred and
Speaker 3: sixtieth start this year. I mean, mathematically speaking, not having
Speaker 3: a two or three percent of currence happen in one
Speaker 3: hundred and sixty trials is just not that surprising. Just
Speaker 3: like if he had won nine, I'd be surprising, but
Speaker 3: I wouldn't. I also wouldn't say he's a seven percent
Speaker 3: win rate guy. I mean, this will be what's interesting
Speaker 3: to say with see with Jordan as we go through
Speaker 3: his career. I do think the guy's running pretty hot
Speaker 3: out of the blocks here. I don't think he's going
Speaker 3: to be a guy that winds up with fifty plus wins.
Speaker 3: He might, I mean, he's really good golf. I've watched
Speaker 3: that kid play golf since his golf course was closed
Speaker 3: for renovations. He used to come out the ventry where
Speaker 3: Xalators and I play. He used to come out there
Speaker 3: all the time. I've watched that dude play golf since
Speaker 3: he was fourteen years old, and he can play. But
Speaker 3: the win rate that he's on right now is just
Speaker 3: mind boggling in my opinion, And I'll be interested to
Speaker 3: see if that's the kind of thing that is sustainable
Speaker 3: over fifteen or more years, because it's just really hard
Speaker 3: to do.
Speaker 1: So you brought up the US open at Aaron Hills.
Speaker 2: I'm kind of curious.
Speaker 1: Obviously, the you know, kind of story of the week
Speaker 1: beyond Brooks Kupka's win was the course from like a
Speaker 1: strategy side, what did you think of Aaron Hills?
Speaker 2: And you know, you know, how'd you like it?
Speaker 3: And you know, I thought it was great. I mean
Speaker 3: I did. I thought it was perfectly fine. There were
Speaker 3: definitely a couple holes which were four twelve eight and
Speaker 3: maybe one other one. I'm sure thin because there was
Speaker 3: like maybe three there was there's three or four holes
Speaker 3: when I normally looked for like a thing earlier between
Speaker 3: penalty stroke hazards, which is kind of what I would
Speaker 3: call that bescue to a certain extent is about sixty
Speaker 3: five yards and for the most part it's three hundred
Speaker 3: yards off the tee. There was sixty two sixty five
Speaker 3: or so yards between the festuar perfectly fine, and I mean,
Speaker 3: fire driver, these guys should keep it between that all
Speaker 3: the time. And this is what was funny is actually
Speaker 3: the Monday practice rounds. Three of my amateurs that I
Speaker 3: work with were all playing together, which was really nice
Speaker 3: to kill three birds of one stone. But then their
Speaker 3: fourth was Rory, and I personally had never heard anyone
Speaker 3: else refer to how wide the corridors are. I heard
Speaker 3: Shambly talking about it a little bit finally, because that's
Speaker 3: one thing that I feel like I am bringing to
Speaker 3: light is if we do all this track man stuff,
Speaker 3: we can also just look how wider shot pattern. I
Speaker 3: feel like that's becoming a part of the way things
Speaker 3: look at well. For the nine holes that I walked
Speaker 3: with those guys, I mean, Rory's standing right there while
Speaker 3: I'm so there's my players saying, hey, this one's kind
Speaker 3: of there. It's fifty two or three yards. You can
Speaker 3: hit driver though, because the fescu was not a one
Speaker 3: shirt penalty. It was bad, but you could get it
Speaker 3: out of it and you know, advanced towards the hole.
Speaker 3: So and sometimes like left on five, the one of
Speaker 3: the ones they are left on four, one of the
Speaker 3: ones they cut backfession was fine and you could put
Speaker 3: it on the green from the left fest you, I mean,
Speaker 3: could you get a really bad break in game? I
Speaker 3: mean you could, but for the most part, I didn't
Speaker 3: have a full with whatsoever. And like I say, if
Speaker 3: I was kind of cool that here's Rory kind of
Speaker 3: easy dropping in on us, and then the next day
Speaker 3: that was effectively his exact quote was, I mean, we've
Speaker 3: got fifty or sixty yards out there. Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 3: I thought them cutting it back was unfortunate. It was unnecessary,
Speaker 3: you know, and you get guys like Kevin Nah complaining
Speaker 3: about it, like, dude, the fairways were sixty yards wide.
Speaker 3: They were fifty yards wide, and then you'd have you
Speaker 3: know where he's like, yoh, we've only got five yards
Speaker 3: of rough and then fest and you're like, well, we've
Speaker 3: only got five yards are rough. Number two is seventy
Speaker 3: two yards across. Yeah, Ken was seventy five yards across.
Speaker 3: I've never seen fairwies that big in my entire life,
Speaker 3: let alone in the US Open. And it wasn't playing
Speaker 3: that fast. So I thought the course was great. I
Speaker 3: didn't think they should cut the fescu back. The scores
Speaker 3: obviously showed they should not have cut the fescu back.
Speaker 1: You know something that's interesting that Speece said and his
Speaker 1: presser was how cutting it back might not necessarily be
Speaker 1: good because you know, you get you get, you get
Speaker 1: in that rough, and it gives you a false illusion,
Speaker 1: the regular rough, a false illution of you can pull
Speaker 1: off this shot and and that, you know, versus the fescue,
Speaker 1: you're just chipping out and getting it into a good
Speaker 1: position to hopefully get up and down with a wedge
Speaker 1: versus you know, you get into that regular rough and
Speaker 1: you end up you know, your club gets turned down,
Speaker 1: you end up long left, and you know, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden you make a six.
Speaker 3: You're forced to play smart. And so this is where
Speaker 3: I do say this a lot. The front hole locations
Speaker 3: on the PGA tour are quite often the hardest holes.
Speaker 3: That they have the hardest hole locations, and a lot
Speaker 3: of that is because you'll hear the caddy player conversations
Speaker 3: like okay, it's one sixty to the front, one sixty
Speaker 3: to the five, one sixty five of the pen. That
Speaker 3: implies you're trying to land at one sixty two or
Speaker 3: three and hit it close. And the shot link image
Speaker 3: is all support that completely, unless if there's a lake
Speaker 3: on the front, like number nine at Colonial, there's a
Speaker 3: lake on the front, well, they all they're forced to
Speaker 3: not say, okay, I'm trying to land at three yards
Speaker 3: on they all try to land at four or five
Speaker 3: yards past depend As a result, they actually played the
Speaker 3: front hold location there with a lower scoring average than
Speaker 3: some of the other whole locations. And it's, you know,
Speaker 3: in theory, the hardest, the hardest location on the whole.
Speaker 3: That's what I would agree with what he's saying there
Speaker 3: is you just knew you couldn't do anything when the FESSU,
Speaker 3: so you weren't an idiot as opposed to you know,
Speaker 3: you're just kind of handcuffed. This is all I can do,
Speaker 3: as opposed to maybe from the rough you might think
Speaker 3: you can do a little bit more than you do,
Speaker 3: And it doesn't take much to get that hozzle and
Speaker 3: shoot it so far offline and now you're going further
Speaker 3: into the junk. Yeah, I mean, I think that's actually
Speaker 3: an interesting point that I hadn't heard or even thought about.
Speaker 3: But they, you know, effectively were forced to play more
Speaker 3: intelligently from it. And yeah, I think again you're making bogey.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's like the trees that we were talking
Speaker 3: about earlier, Like on the PGA tour, they're making bogie
Speaker 3: eighty or ninety percent of the time from the trees.
Speaker 3: From one hundred differents in the trees, the average making
Speaker 3: bogie eighty percent of the time from two twenty in
Speaker 3: the trees, the average making bogie, you know, ninety twoish
Speaker 3: percent of the time. I mean, you're making bogie. Just
Speaker 3: don't make a double. And that was the exact advice,
Speaker 3: Like Camperon Champ who you know, I worked with A
Speaker 3: and M. Cameron Champ is we're walking around with LORI.
Speaker 3: That's like, I want you to hit driver everywhere. You
Speaker 3: can't put this asset down. But when you get it
Speaker 3: in the fescue, just don't do something stupid. Get it
Speaker 3: out the fairies again. This is the other thing, like
Speaker 3: where you you know, you think of normal us opens
Speaker 3: with twenty two yard white farries that are firm. You
Speaker 3: can very easily just trying to pitch it out, start
Speaker 3: pitching it back and forth. I mean this thing, these
Speaker 3: ferries are so big and so soft. You couldn't not
Speaker 3: get it out if you wanted to back in to
Speaker 3: the fairway. I mean it would be almost impossible in
Speaker 3: this fairway with with a pitch out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's It's interesting, you know with like USGA champion.
Speaker 1: You know, I played in the midam this last year
Speaker 1: and one of my buddies, who's a who's a really
Speaker 1: great mid am player. He he told me, like, the
Speaker 1: biggest thing you got to do in this thing is
Speaker 1: just make a ton of pars, you know. And you know,
Speaker 1: I was playing really well, and then on my back
Speaker 1: nine in my second round, I stopped making pars, and
Speaker 1: sure enough, like that's when it all goes goes as ship.
Speaker 1: But it's you know, it really is avoiding big numbers
Speaker 1: and and keeping yourself in the in the game, especially
Speaker 1: at the higher level championships, in avoiding the stop.
Speaker 3: Did you stop making bogies or stop making pars because
Speaker 3: of a strategic shift that you did, like or just
Speaker 3: a nerve or anything like that. So I maybe you
Speaker 3: just played bad golf, like bad golf is bad golf
Speaker 3: that I don't care. But was there something that shifted
Speaker 3: that wound up creating the So.
Speaker 1: I made a double on like probably the easiest hole
Speaker 1: on the golf course, and then all of a sudden
Speaker 1: and then like I felt like I was to get
Speaker 1: it back, yeah, exactly, And then all of a sudden
Speaker 1: you know, you make more bogies than you make some
Speaker 1: make another double and it's and it's gone.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I mean so doctor, doctor Bret McCabe is
Speaker 3: is a good friend. That's you know, refers a lot
Speaker 3: of his tour players to me. And a rookie named
Speaker 3: Sebastian Munios was in. He was leading through thirty six
Speaker 3: at Memphis and I saw doctor McCabe on the range
Speaker 3: at Aaron Hills. He's like, David, you look at what
Speaker 3: he did on the last nine and telling if you
Speaker 3: could see anything that he could do different, and it
Speaker 3: just very quickly was very clear the errors that were made.
Speaker 3: And so he set us up in Sebastian I met
Speaker 3: at Whole Foods here in Dallas last weekend and went
Speaker 3: through all this stuff for about two hours, and we
Speaker 3: started off. I was like, let's just go through, you know,
Speaker 3: through this through this round at at st at FedEx,
Speaker 3: and I don't want you to tell me what you
Speaker 3: did or what you thought. I'm going to tell you
Speaker 3: how this played out. And he's like okay, and so
Speaker 3: I just basically rattled right through every single shot where
Speaker 3: he was probably trying to hit it. How he started
Speaker 3: freaking out how this air compounded this air and this one.
Speaker 3: He's just looking at me like, holy shit, dude, can
Speaker 3: you read my mind? Or that's really strange. I'm like, dude, again,
Speaker 3: I'm just telling you that because I'm forty three and
Speaker 3: I've done that seventy five thousand times. I know exactly
Speaker 3: what you did. But having the ability to kind of
Speaker 3: call someone out on that and then explain to him
Speaker 3: here's how we could go about it better than next
Speaker 3: time you're in that position, I mean, just gives it
Speaker 3: so much more validity of Yeah, this dude knows what
Speaker 3: I'm talking about. I mean, I had made a couple
Speaker 3: bogies and now I had a fifteen or sixteen footer
Speaker 3: for par that I jammed five and a half feet
Speaker 3: by because I was trying to make it because anyone,
Speaker 3: like another one missed it coming back, and now I
Speaker 3: have made a double and then the whole wheels you're
Speaker 3: just chasing your tail all for the duration of the round.
Speaker 3: I mean again, we just we've all done it enough times.
Speaker 2: You know, it's it's I've done it. It's it's it's
Speaker 2: maddening too.
Speaker 1: And in a lot of times, you know, they get
Speaker 1: blamed like oh, like he wasn't ready for that moment,
Speaker 1: but really and like, it's not like, you know, I
Speaker 1: tried to explain it to some people. I was like,
Speaker 1: it's not like I was playing bad or hitting like
Speaker 1: significantly worse shots. But I would just wasn't, you know,
Speaker 1: like you're not executing and and things just start to
Speaker 1: go the wrong way, you know, And yeah.
Speaker 3: And then there the gets there, just compounding downward spiral mistakes.
Speaker 3: And I played in the U S midam and twenty
Speaker 3: fifteen down in Florida and had my wife down there
Speaker 3: with the pushguard catting for me, and I was like
Speaker 3: the seven or eight seed, I think through qualifying and
Speaker 3: I'm playing some fifty year old dude from Chicago in
Speaker 3: the first round and he put it into absolute jail.
Speaker 3: On one I just shipped the wedge into the middle
Speaker 3: of the green. Had twenty feet for Bertie. I mean,
Speaker 3: he would be lucky to get the shot up and
Speaker 3: down one in ten that he had, and he holds it.
Speaker 3: Not only is he not even supposed to get it
Speaker 3: up and down. I'm supposed to be too putting for
Speaker 3: the wind. He holes that I'm in second hole. I've
Speaker 3: got a very good line in the rough. Penns cut
Speaker 3: just over a bunker to the right on the right side,
Speaker 3: and I've got like one oh five and he's already
Speaker 3: put it into the green about twenty feet and I
Speaker 3: took what I knew was about a three yard two
Speaker 3: aggressive line, but I was letting the prior holes annoyings
Speaker 3: like I was trying to get that back quickly, and
Speaker 3: I came up a foot short in the front bunker
Speaker 3: and make boguing As I was walking off, I'm laughing
Speaker 3: in my wife, like what's the funny. I'm like, I'm
Speaker 3: the dude that teaches this, Like I am, in theory,
Speaker 3: the best in the world at teaching this. I knew
Speaker 3: that was wrong, and yet I still didn't have the
Speaker 3: discipline and patience to not do it. And it's just
Speaker 3: kind of comical because again I get so many parents
Speaker 3: calling me, like my son still to have done this
Speaker 3: that dumbness. Well he's going to That's that's the way
Speaker 3: it works. Unfortunately, it's a hard game to you know,
Speaker 3: quote unquote perfect, but man if and can you if
Speaker 3: you do? It's just it's just so simple.
Speaker 2: So did you play Blake Johnson.
Speaker 3: With that?
Speaker 2: Is that it was I think if he.
Speaker 1: Makes putts from all over the place, I playing him
Speaker 1: in match play is maddening.
Speaker 3: If it's him, I honestly don't know if it's him
Speaker 3: or not. But he chipped in on one. I lose two.
Speaker 3: I three putted three from about fifty feets on three
Speaker 3: down and I went a hole or two come back
Speaker 3: around and I've got like twenty feet for birdie. On nine,
Speaker 3: he's got like sixty That an impact. I was like,
Speaker 3: that's not even saying on the dream it's the back
Speaker 3: of the cup goes in twelve. I mean, this is
Speaker 3: I hope it's him. I hope you don't. But so
Speaker 3: on twelve he hits it long left and again is seriously,
Speaker 3: he would ever get this ball up and down pitches
Speaker 3: it in. And then on fourteen I hit it on
Speaker 3: the green from two sixty to two. So I've got
Speaker 3: about twenty five thirty feet per eagle. He's out there
Speaker 3: forty yards in the fairway into and I'm like, just
Speaker 3: don't get it up and down. You know, I'm probably
Speaker 3: two ish down, maybe three downs, and he just chunks it.
Speaker 3: He moves it five feet. I mean, he could not
Speaker 3: have laid the sod over it any harder holds the
Speaker 3: next one from thirty five yards, like only shit, this
Speaker 3: is actually happening. It was so rudal because you know,
Speaker 3: I'm like you, I'm sure I don't get to play
Speaker 3: that many golf tournaments. That is certainly the only one
Speaker 3: I care about all year. This guy chipped in on
Speaker 3: me four times and made a bomb.
Speaker 1: It was It's crazy, that's I mean. Match play is unbelievable.
Speaker 3: I mean, I had it, really is.
Speaker 1: I had a guy I played last year in a tournament,
Speaker 1: who you know, he's an older.
Speaker 2: Guy, an old grinder.
Speaker 1: You know he's been he's had an illustrious amateur career,
Speaker 1: but he's he's at the tail end of it. And
Speaker 1: on the first hole he was hitting his fourth shot
Speaker 1: from one point fifty. I'm on the green in two
Speaker 1: and we walk off all square because you know, I
Speaker 1: three putt from twenty five feet.
Speaker 2: He rolls in a twenty footer and then you know,
Speaker 2: it keep going down the road.
Speaker 1: He hasn't hit a good shot all day, and then
Speaker 1: you know he sculls one on like the fifth hole,
Speaker 1: out of a bunker. It hits the flag and pops
Speaker 1: it down to like a foot you know, it's like
Speaker 1: I walk off that green, I'm like, how are we
Speaker 1: all square?
Speaker 2: Still? Like yeah, but that does the strategy change it
Speaker 2: all from match play?
Speaker 3: No, I don't think so. I mean, again, this is
Speaker 3: where I have, you know, about half the Walker Cup
Speaker 3: team or clients of mine, and we go through these
Speaker 3: scenarios all the time. And the problem is that rarely
Speaker 3: engulf do you have perfect information. I mean, you just
Speaker 3: it just never happens. And so when people were giving
Speaker 3: like Ricky Fowler a hard time for hitting that driver
Speaker 3: into the water long on seventeen at Scottsdale a couple
Speaker 3: of years ago, he didn't have perfect information he thought
Speaker 3: that he needed. He's just playing golf. Obviously, got a
Speaker 3: bad break of planning on downslow. But just very rarely
Speaker 3: do you have perfect information of what your opponents made,
Speaker 3: what the scores are, and you can make an actual
Speaker 3: calculated decision. So I don't think so, in my opinion,
Speaker 3: you just keep plugging along. And you know, I would
Speaker 3: say in match play when I'm catting for Will, we've
Speaker 3: got a really good record. Obviously, he won the US
Speaker 3: Junior He made it to the round of sixteen that year.
Speaker 3: He won two matches. The following year he lost to Donkey.
Speaker 3: He was last year, you know, in the in the
Speaker 3: first round. So I mean, I know, I don't think
Speaker 3: so again, that's there. There are some games theory implications
Speaker 3: you could theory try, but I just don't believe it's
Speaker 3: worth it. I just, you know, like a perfect information.
Speaker 3: That is, if we'red of playing the final table the
Speaker 3: World Series of Poker and one guy has two million ships,
Speaker 3: one guy has a million chips, and I have one
Speaker 3: ship left, and those two push all in right out
Speaker 3: of the blox, and I look down and I've got
Speaker 3: Poppa dass. I should sold that hand because the odds
Speaker 3: are the one of those two guys, you know, the
Speaker 3: one guy potentially got to get knocked out. So my
Speaker 3: one ship is now worth one million ships. Technically in
Speaker 3: that scenario, that's perfect information. You just don't ever get
Speaker 3: that for the most part in golf. And again the
Speaker 3: more importantly is so let's say we're out there in
Speaker 3: the seventy second hole and I know I need Bertie,
Speaker 3: so I'm going to get more aggressive. Well, you're actually
Speaker 3: going to wind up. So instead of with a five
Speaker 3: yards off the left, let's say your proper target should
Speaker 3: maybe be four or five yards towards the middle degree. Yes,
Speaker 3: you might have a few more kickings by firing it
Speaker 3: directly at it. I'm not going to dispute that, like
Speaker 3: one or two, maybe three percent more out of you know,
Speaker 3: a million iterations of the shot, but you're also going
Speaker 3: to miss the green and regulation twenty percent more time.
Speaker 3: So the game that you make and value by aiming
Speaker 3: right at it, you lose by having fewer attempts. So, yes,
Speaker 3: and my birdie putt is slightly longer on average, but
Speaker 3: I have more of them. You wind up making the
Speaker 3: same amount of birdies with proper strategy. And that's the
Speaker 3: kind of thing that you've really got to sit down
Speaker 3: to a few of the visuals like that. I've gotten
Speaker 3: the decade apt to kind of illustrate that idea. But
Speaker 3: I don't think so. I mean, I shouldn't say. I
Speaker 3: don't think so. I know you shouldn't, but it's kind
Speaker 3: of hard to convince you. I mean, again, that's what
Speaker 3: a guy like film meslist and just can't get through
Speaker 3: his head from a gambling standpoint, like he just wants
Speaker 3: to go at it, and and mathematically it's just not correct.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 1: I could I imagine he's one that you would love
Speaker 1: to get your hands out like one student. If you
Speaker 1: could go back to the prime of his career, I
Speaker 1: imagine he'd win a lot more with like if you
Speaker 1: could get some sort of semblance of strategy.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, it's funny because and I agree with this,
Speaker 3: like you know Como and I Chris Como is my
Speaker 3: devil's advocate so much so that we almost get you know,
Speaker 3: get him fist bits about ninety percent of the time
Speaker 3: we taught golf. But the argument for Michelson, I mean,
Speaker 3: here's a guy that wants forty two times. I mean,
Speaker 3: we would never change that, anyone would take it. But
Speaker 3: I do believe in my research, I do believe Phil
Speaker 3: for the most part, played pretty smart for about sixty
Speaker 3: three holes. Would he occasionally do something pretty stupid? I
Speaker 3: mean sure, but I think that last nine holes he
Speaker 3: would always just switch into this other gear of trying
Speaker 3: to floorce things. And that's just the you know again,
Speaker 3: you take a proper strategy and you just go with it.
Speaker 3: And if it's my week, it's my week. That's Jordan Speed.
Speaker 3: This year, however, many shots he was back through fifty
Speaker 3: four holes at the Masters. He goes into his you know,
Speaker 3: his press conference, and he's saying, you know, I'm a
Speaker 3: guy like me. It doesn't matter if I finished fit
Speaker 3: their tenth. Like you're already being defensive. He already knew
Speaker 3: what he was about to say was wrong. He's like, so,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna go out tomorrow and I'm just going to
Speaker 3: fire at pins and I'm just gonna make it happen
Speaker 3: out of texted people. Right then, I'm like, he's shooting
Speaker 3: seventy five tomorrow guaranteed. Now, I didn't think he'd have
Speaker 3: to burny three of the last four to shoot seventy five.
Speaker 3: There's just I mean, sure, it's conceivable it could work out,
Speaker 3: just like it's more conceivable just playing correct. We'll have
Speaker 3: a chance. At the end of the day. He needed
Speaker 3: to shoot sixty seven, well, that was round of the day.
Speaker 3: There was about a three to five percent chance he
Speaker 3: might do that. He had about three to five percent
Speaker 3: equity in that golf turn with eighteen holes to go. Period.
Speaker 3: There's nothing you can do to intentionally raise your equity.
Speaker 3: All you can do is to hope other people like
Speaker 3: how Jack and Tiger say, we're just kind of hanging
Speaker 3: around the lead and see if people will die force
Speaker 3: on Sunday you're there then giving you their equity. But
Speaker 3: he went out and tried to force his equity from
Speaker 3: what three or five percent to six that's it's just
Speaker 3: not going to work. And again he'll you know, he'll
Speaker 3: learn that. And you know, you can see his thought processes.
Speaker 3: He actually gives good interviews. You can see and hear
Speaker 3: his thought processes and a lot of times figure out
Speaker 3: how he's gonna do. I mean, if you go back
Speaker 3: to the twenty sixteen Masters the Tuesday before, I've got
Speaker 3: a video up on YouTube just in my free channel
Speaker 3: where it's just called Jordan Speed and Expectations where he's
Speaker 3: talking about all the right things. You know, I know
Speaker 3: this golf course, I know not to get short setup
Speaker 3: and nowhere to leave it. I know not to force birdies.
Speaker 3: I know not to do all these things. And I
Speaker 3: told my wife at then, I'm like, that's perfect. This
Speaker 3: guy's he's gonna be in the hunt. He's thinking very
Speaker 3: clear right there, and it was just so amazing to
Speaker 3: watch what he did on twelve with I don't know
Speaker 3: what happened. I just got over the ball and tried
Speaker 3: to aim it four or five yards further right than
Speaker 3: I should have. And I mean, it's just so bizarre
Speaker 3: to have a guy who was saying that just shows
Speaker 3: you how hard it is guy saying all the right
Speaker 3: things on Tuesday and then you put him, you know,
Speaker 3: with a four shot lead and seven holes ago and
Speaker 3: just could not have made a sillier, worse mental mistake
Speaker 3: than he did.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: It's I mean, that's the crazy, that's the beautiful thing
Speaker 1: about golf.
Speaker 2: So why we keep coming back to it?
Speaker 3: Mm hm. So I almost any sport too, though, I
Speaker 3: mean I refused to believe that it's not you know,
Speaker 3: it's its own pervasiveness and whatever sport you have work.
Speaker 3: But golf really lent itself to individual implosion unfortunately. But
Speaker 3: you know, I'm sure that's just any sort of peak
Speaker 3: performance is always you know, quelling, you know, quieting as
Speaker 3: there's beamon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, the only thing I can come up
Speaker 1: with that's that similar is pitching, because it's the only
Speaker 1: thing that's not reactionary. It's like where you know, golfers
Speaker 1: and pitchers have time to get in their own way.
Speaker 3: When I sat next to HEIMI Garcia or Garcia, Yeah,
Speaker 3: iimy gar See. I sat next him on a flight
Speaker 3: to LA earlier this year, and you know, I don't
Speaker 3: watch baseball at all, but I'm sitting next to this
Speaker 3: guy who's you know, late twenties, and he was going
Speaker 3: to work with Tom House. I was gonna have to
Speaker 3: work with us. See, he's going to work with Tom
Speaker 3: House also, and we'll just start talking about you know,
Speaker 3: psychology and golf and pitching and you know, all this
Speaker 3: Stuffcause I'm like, hey, I've never pitched, and he's like,
Speaker 3: I've never played golf. Perfect, but the thoughts were just identical.
Speaker 3: It's one of those things where I've always thought that, man,
Speaker 3: if you've never played golf at the highest level, it's
Speaker 3: gonna be really hard for you to understand some of
Speaker 3: the thoughts, just like I would say, me working with
Speaker 3: a pitcher. I don't know what you're thinking out there, dude,
Speaker 3: I don't know the first thing about it, but just
Speaker 3: hearing how common the thoughts were. And he told me
Speaker 3: this book The Mental Agency is pitching, but if you
Speaker 3: were just to rewrite it with the golf club, it's
Speaker 3: the exact same book. I mean, it's no difference. And
Speaker 3: here's the guy who at the time had suffered quite
Speaker 3: a few injuries, and you know, it was definitely struggling.
Speaker 3: And yeah, it's just crazy to listen to a young
Speaker 3: guy who's making twelve million dollars a year basically sound
Speaker 3: pretty beat down, Like, you know, I will not to
Speaker 3: be down because he's super positive. Guys should say that,
Speaker 3: but just man, I'm really out here working hard, trying
Speaker 3: to get better. I'm my own dying going to see
Speaker 3: this guy and it was was pretty cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's that. I pictures that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like the worst thing you could say to
Speaker 1: them is just throw strikes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like, well, yeah, I'm trying to do that.
Speaker 2: It's the same thing with golf, like just hit the fairway.
Speaker 3: Well, and that's it's funny because then, so that's so
Speaker 3: much of what I teach. I really believe the best
Speaker 3: thing I teach at the expectation bang them. I truly do,
Speaker 3: Like I understand I teach strategy well, but honestly, my
Speaker 3: totally blunt. And this is because I was a lunatic
Speaker 3: when I was playing professionally. I had no clue. But
Speaker 3: if you look, if you think about an eight foot
Speaker 3: put on the PGA Tour is fifty to fifty. That
Speaker 3: means if I had, you know, the hole is four
Speaker 3: and a quarter inches wide, it seems hard to make
Speaker 3: that putt. But if all of a sudden you just
Speaker 3: put a te two inches on either side of the
Speaker 3: hole and you tell someone just roll it between those
Speaker 3: two teams, well, I'm going to do that every single time.
Speaker 3: Like that's very, very very simple to do. Well. If
Speaker 3: you can do that, the hole is going to get
Speaker 3: in the way of about half of them. You put
Speaker 3: good feed on it, you're going to keep the whole
Speaker 3: the appropriate size. In my opinion, seed is the only
Speaker 3: thing that matters in putting. Now, again, you do have
Speaker 3: to be able to start it on some semblenth of
Speaker 3: the line, but it is a lot low threshold than
Speaker 3: what you think. I mean, I think that's why game
Speaker 3: point is so good. I mean, is it dead on correct?
Speaker 3: I mean no, it's pretty good. It's in the right vicinity.
Speaker 3: It's within an inch or two on a six to
Speaker 3: ten foot putt. And if I only need to be
Speaker 3: able to roll it through an eight and a half
Speaker 3: or nine inch wide gate, I don't have to put
Speaker 3: a perfect read on it, and so much of it
Speaker 3: is just you know, taking a kid like Bryson Dave Chambeau,
Speaker 3: who is obviously a little Kaipei perfectionist, and when you
Speaker 3: tell him you can be perfect and he thinks he can,
Speaker 3: when he's gonna run with it, I tell him, dude,
Speaker 3: you're not even close to being perfect, and in fact,
Speaker 3: you kind of stuck compared to other professional athletes. If
Speaker 3: John McEnroe, you know, does a serve and he's going
Speaker 3: to argue with a person who's got a laser and
Speaker 3: tell them, no, that was in and he's always right.
Speaker 3: It's a totally different game than golf, Like just the
Speaker 3: shot patterns are so huge, there's so many bounds of
Speaker 3: so many bumps, win grained. I mean, trying to be
Speaker 3: perfect in this game is It's not fun, and it
Speaker 3: is the exact opposite way that you should think about it.
Speaker 3: In my opinion.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's uh, as soon as you got to let
Speaker 1: go of expectations and I think I'll say, I don't know,
Speaker 1: everybody's different though, it's a but trying to be perfect
Speaker 1: is impossible.
Speaker 3: Again, Yes, so you know, anecdotally, back to the conversation
Speaker 3: with Maverick, it's it's with Tiger. When I first start
Speaker 3: working with a tour player, I'll kind of work my
Speaker 3: way into hinting around with like, you know, what are
Speaker 3: you trying to shoot every day? And they all one
Speaker 3: hundred percent of them say somewhere between six under and
Speaker 3: sixty three. I mean this is literally out of thirty
Speaker 3: ish tour players on all the tours that I work with,
Speaker 3: they're all like, sixty three. How many times you've done
Speaker 3: that twice? Is that really a good goal? Is that
Speaker 3: going to set you up for a positive mindset? The
Speaker 3: only one that I've even heard anecdotally Fanily, I was
Speaker 3: just trying to shoot a couple under, which would always
Speaker 3: keep me in the hunt. If I happen to shoot
Speaker 3: seven one week one day, I'm winning, and if someone
Speaker 3: else just wants to give it to me, I'm winning.
Speaker 3: That's exactly correct. And you know, my home course here
Speaker 3: in Dallas is a seventy five point five rating on
Speaker 3: a par seventy one. And since I've basically stopped playing
Speaker 3: golf in the last few years, I just got to
Speaker 3: try to shoot the round car maybe one or two under,
Speaker 3: and I always do. It's just not that hard to
Speaker 3: go out and try to shoot a little bit below
Speaker 3: your actual average as opposed that most people are trying
Speaker 3: to you know, you know, their goal is two standard
Speaker 3: deviations below their average, and that's just silly.
Speaker 1: I completely agree. It's like you said, expectation management is
Speaker 1: a valuable thing in golf. Hey, you know you've been
Speaker 1: more than generous with our time, and I know you
Speaker 1: need to need to get out of here. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna end you with our tradition of overrated underrated.
Speaker 2: So we're going to list off a couple.
Speaker 1: Of things and just you know, quick boy, quick overrated, underrated,
Speaker 1: you know, uh huh Harbortown.
Speaker 3: Overrated.
Speaker 2: I figured you'd say that not.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'd literally tell my players not to go
Speaker 3: there if they don't have to. I'm sure it's a
Speaker 3: great place, but it just doesn't fit the modern game.
Speaker 3: So overrated. But again, I bet it's really cool for
Speaker 3: the guys who hit a two forty and can just
Speaker 3: go out there and have fun on the trees.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it diminishes the driving ability for sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it doesn't be like fun to me.
Speaker 2: Augusta National.
Speaker 3: Man, I'd say underrated. I played there in November for
Speaker 3: the first time and unfortunately the the rye hadn't set
Speaker 3: in yet, and so the fairways were a little long,
Speaker 3: and so all it did was instilling me more than
Speaker 3: I have to go back and play it again in
Speaker 3: the spring sometime, because again, this it was the most
Speaker 3: amazing experience experience getting to be out there on the greens,
Speaker 3: and but I've got to see a closer to tournament
Speaker 3: condition now. But it was it's it's a ridiculously awesome,
Speaker 3: amazing place. So I would say underrated, even if that's possible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, hey, it's uh, that's definitely understandable. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I need to start asking that one more often.
Speaker 2: See where it falls. The PGA Championship.
Speaker 3: Underrated. I mean it's a major, it's a great you know,
Speaker 3: it's always in a great venue. I mean, I would
Speaker 3: say underrated, and people try to disparage it. You know,
Speaker 3: so much of this stuff is just writers trying to
Speaker 3: find something to write about. Yeah, I guarantee you, Jimmy Walker.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's pretty satisfied with the TG Championship right now.
Speaker 3: Any player they're showing up, not because like we got
Speaker 3: to go play the PGA. This was like that's more
Speaker 3: of a manufacturer. So I would say underrated.
Speaker 2: It's the best field of any major.
Speaker 3: Also, you know, I mean, yeah, it's a great, great,
Speaker 3: great golf turn of it. Yeah, you gotta have something
Speaker 3: right about I know.
Speaker 1: I just feel like that's a that's a the PGA
Speaker 1: needs to change. Is like just a manufactured storyline, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what about strokes gainst stats, I'd say rated correctly.
Speaker 3: I mean there, they are way better than what we've
Speaker 3: ever had. Are they perfect? Absolutely not. But again this
Speaker 3: is where, like I deferred to a guy like Brody,
Speaker 3: I'm like, hey, dude, this doesn't work. And here's why
Speaker 3: I have no clue how to make it better. I mean,
Speaker 3: I guess maybe I could if I sat down and
Speaker 3: thought about it. I'm just way too busy with everything
Speaker 3: else in life. But the easiest clean ups would be
Speaker 3: breaking the chipping into per attempt, breaking the putting into
Speaker 3: buy buckets, stroke skin off the tee, and approach like
Speaker 3: those should just be They shouldn't be summed into one category,
Speaker 3: but it just needs to be more widely understood. Like
Speaker 3: what I do is saying, you know that you can't
Speaker 3: be the top in both. So I do a program
Speaker 3: that I put together each week where I sum those
Speaker 3: two categories, and it's like mathematically flawed to some two
Speaker 3: categories like stroke scare total driving is you know they
Speaker 3: sum your distance rank, push your accuracy rate. Well, those
Speaker 3: two things are you know, they're not mutually exclusively, they're
Speaker 3: not dependent on each other, so you can you can
Speaker 3: be number one in both of them. In theory, in
Speaker 3: strokes gained approach and strokes gain off the tee, you
Speaker 3: really can't be number one in both. So I sum
Speaker 3: those two categories each week, and the average winner on
Speaker 3: the PGA Tour this year, the average is a sum
Speaker 3: of thirty, so it's safe way. Brendan Steel's right off
Speaker 3: the tee was twentieth, his rank and approach was eight,
Speaker 3: so he was twenty eight total. You just don't get
Speaker 3: very often that sum under ten, and those are the
Speaker 3: weak should look at. Like Justin Thomas and at Sony
Speaker 3: he was first in driving and fourth and approach. That's ridiculous.
Speaker 3: John Brahm smaller fields at WGC, but he was first
Speaker 3: in driving, fourth and approach. Decky in Phoenix ninth and
Speaker 3: driving first in approach, like those things. It's the normal
Speaker 3: winner is like Dustin Johnson was first in driving Riviera
Speaker 3: and twentieth in approach. That's where you know, Branda Schamblie
Speaker 3: is like, oh, his driving carried in this week and
Speaker 3: he didn't hit his irons that well. No, he hit
Speaker 3: his irons pretty good. He just had such smaller expectation
Speaker 3: from there. He just couldn't mount a big number. And
Speaker 3: that sounds so that's usually what you find.
Speaker 1: What I never understand is why they lump. Okay, so
Speaker 1: they have strokes gained tee to green and they put
Speaker 1: around the green in with a approach in driving.
Speaker 3: You know, I don't understand that either. I mean, that's
Speaker 3: definitely I mean that's basically when I say I've sun
Speaker 3: those two categories, I'm just taking out the chipping in
Speaker 3: order to look at those things in isolation.
Speaker 4: On ball striking is important, but it's completely This year,
Speaker 4: your average, your average chipper has gained two strokes, your
Speaker 4: average winter rider has gained two strokes with his shipping,
Speaker 4: he's gained five and a half with his approach, he
Speaker 4: has gained two point six with his driving, and with
Speaker 4: his cutting he has gained just under five. I mean,
Speaker 4: so shipping, you know, again it matters, but I'm not much.
Speaker 4: But again this is where it gets really complicated because
Speaker 4: John Graham kind of lit me up for saying a
Speaker 4: few things about driving recently, like shipping really matters, like
Speaker 4: saying you're an average chipper on tours, like saying you're
Speaker 4: one of the best chippers in the world.
Speaker 3: This is where I think some people lose some of
Speaker 3: the driving stuffe They're like, eh, he's not that good
Speaker 3: of a driver. Like everyone on the tour can drive
Speaker 3: it good. If you can't drive it good, you are
Speaker 3: not keeping your card.
Speaker 1: So that's kind of what I'm saying that would you
Speaker 1: say that bass striking is becoming a commodity almost.
Speaker 3: Well? And again this is back to where like Como
Speaker 3: and I sometimes debate things like you know, hey, I'm
Speaker 3: starting a little business here, so I kind of have
Speaker 3: jokingly it's a hard thing for me to do, try
Speaker 3: to not necessarily take credit. But hey, guess what, three
Speaker 3: out of the last five winners on the web dot
Speaker 3: Com Tour we're students of mine. The last week in
Speaker 3: witch Shall they finished first, second, and fourth. Like that's
Speaker 3: pretty impressive. I only had six people in the field.
Speaker 3: They finished first, second, and fourth. It's hard for me
Speaker 3: to claim that stuff, but you kind of have to.
Speaker 3: But a lot of that is just about teaching people
Speaker 3: how to use that bass sriking. So where I was
Speaker 3: in that is I assume you can hit it. If
Speaker 3: you can't hit it well, I can make you shoot lower.
Speaker 3: But if making you shoot seventy two instead of seventy fours,
Speaker 3: not gon do a whole lot for you on this
Speaker 3: tour you need. I am just assuming you're really good.
Speaker 3: And that's where guys like Tomo and Mark Blackburn and
Speaker 3: you know, Scott Hamilton, these instructors with a big stables
Speaker 3: send me their players because they're like, man, my job
Speaker 3: is to get these guys striking it. Your job is
Speaker 3: to tell them how to get it in the hole perfect.
Speaker 3: That is a marriage made in heaven because I'm really
Speaker 3: good at doing that, and y'all are really good at
Speaker 3: doing good at what you're doing. Your guy could win
Speaker 3: without me, for sure. I'm just going to help them
Speaker 3: win more consistently. And that's really what it's all about.
Speaker 1: It's I agree. I think it's you know, the smarter
Speaker 1: you think, the better you play. And I think that
Speaker 1: what you're doing is makes a ton of sense in
Speaker 1: terms of you know, just looking at dispersion and managing
Speaker 1: how how bad of shots you can hit. You know,
Speaker 1: if you can't hit that batter shots, then you're not
Speaker 1: gonna shoot that bad oft scores well.
Speaker 3: And again that's kind of like what I say when
Speaker 3: I don't play that much, go up anymore. And I
Speaker 3: definitely just realized I can kind of take a three
Speaker 3: iron and kind of flared out towards the green and
Speaker 3: hit it really often. There's a two hundred and twenty
Speaker 3: three yard Part three in my home course that I've
Speaker 3: been saying this for a while, but I haven't missed
Speaker 3: that green in three years now. And again, granted I
Speaker 3: don't play that much anymore, but it's I've got thirty
Speaker 3: or so attempts, and you know, an average scorn of
Speaker 3: PGA two or Part three that length is three and
Speaker 3: a quarter is three to two, and I can just
Speaker 3: kind of take a three ron and just flared under
Speaker 3: the green. That's how Brooks hit that shot on seventeen
Speaker 3: in the final round. Was just such a wipey flay
Speaker 3: three wood or a chuby driver because he knows exactly
Speaker 3: what side of the path face is on and you
Speaker 3: can just i mean, keep it out there and that's
Speaker 3: you know. I was fortunate enough that one of my
Speaker 3: duke players played a practice around the Brooks last Monday,
Speaker 3: and so I walked three or four holes with Brooks
Speaker 3: and Claude and my and claud came over to me
Speaker 3: and Claude Harmon and was asking me some questions because
Speaker 3: I think he saw my little decade logo and the
Speaker 3: pamphlet that I had, and he and are speaking at
Speaker 3: James Rigard Steal together during the Verse open, and I'm
Speaker 3: more than telling him what I do. I just wanted
Speaker 3: to ask him because I've always respected what Butch Harmon
Speaker 3: does as a teacher, Like the guy teaches people how
Speaker 3: to play the game so well, in my opinion, and
Speaker 3: so I just kind of wanted to hear how they
Speaker 3: view these things. And it was just everything that he
Speaker 3: was saying. And this is Monday before. That guy that
Speaker 3: we're watching is about the one that Turman. He's like,
Speaker 3: can just watch this Guy's huge, he's strong, he's lined
Speaker 3: up down the left here, he's just gonna hammer it.
Speaker 3: Cut it feels weird. He holds onto it a little bit,
Speaker 3: flares it out there, and that's kind of what he
Speaker 3: did all day in the final round and it's just
Speaker 3: so beautiful anytime eighteen, anytime, the hole didn't make sense
Speaker 3: for that shot. It wasn't take my driver and turn it.
Speaker 3: It was go to my three wood and try to
Speaker 3: hit it straight. Like that's exactly correct. That takes patients,
Speaker 3: So that takes so much discipline. On number one, the
Speaker 3: wind was twenty miles an hour off the right, he
Speaker 3: hammered a cut. On number four, it plays diagonal in
Speaker 3: the other directions, so slightly northwest, the wind is coming
Speaker 3: in and off the left, he hammered a cut. Like
Speaker 3: that's correct golf, assuming you can do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's uh.
Speaker 1: He he won because he was the best player you
Speaker 1: know that week, and he yeah, he hit it better
Speaker 1: than everybody and stuck to his game.
Speaker 3: Plan Struck's v plane and his game plan was correct.
Speaker 3: I mean, that was one thing that was a little disappointing.
Speaker 3: Love Mark. We stepped up there on four and I'm like, dude,
Speaker 3: this is driver and he was like, just doesn't fit
Speaker 3: my eye on to hit two iron. I'm like, you're
Speaker 3: just giving up a tenth of a stroke. I mean,
Speaker 3: you just are. And what was interesting is he still
Speaker 3: hit his turn in that situation into the rough that day,
Speaker 3: like the turn endo the rush. You're not getting it
Speaker 3: on the green from one ninety. That may as well
Speaker 3: be the driver into the fescue. You're laying him both up.
Speaker 3: And it was so much wider where the driver was.
Speaker 3: He actually was going to hit the two iron into
Speaker 3: the rough as often as he was going to hit
Speaker 3: the driver into the fescue, And in my opinion, they
Speaker 3: were the exact same results. Some sort of a way
Speaker 3: up and it is. I mean, he hit a few drivers,
Speaker 3: but he also hit a few irons that I don't
Speaker 3: think he should have. And like I say, this is
Speaker 3: more just to let any kids or parents that are listening,
Speaker 3: here's a guy that's one of the best players in
Speaker 3: the world and still can't get comfortable. Again, I'm not
Speaker 3: telling him what he did was wrong, but I'm telling him, dude,
Speaker 3: we need to at least take a few minutes and
Speaker 3: see if you can get comfortable the driver, because it
Speaker 3: is a better play, as Brooks evidence. I mean, is
Speaker 3: there a chance it would have worked out? I mean absolutely,
Speaker 3: But again, if you just never play correctly, the odds
Speaker 3: are less than if you Hey, if I play correctly
Speaker 3: every time, it might work out once or twice a year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean that's kind of what the PGA
Speaker 1: Tour is about now, is you know, you can miss
Speaker 1: as many cuss, but if you play well on four
Speaker 1: or five given weeks a year, your your gold.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I mean that's like costly last week in
Speaker 3: witch Da here the guy goes at thirty, hit it nicely,
Speaker 3: played it nicely. It's very convenient that he finished second
Speaker 3: as a non member, gets his conditional status or his
Speaker 3: temporary status for the rest of the year. Now he's got, however,
Speaker 3: many six or seven starts left to, you know, to
Speaker 3: get into and stay in that top twenty five and congratulations.
Speaker 3: That's yeah. But that's because his first week of trying
Speaker 3: full decade. Again, I say this a lot, but people
Speaker 3: really do really well very quickly sometimes and then maybe
Speaker 3: falter back. He got a little bit lucky that the
Speaker 3: very first week that he's out there just trying to
Speaker 3: do this, he also played good. I mean I could
Speaker 3: if he played poorly. I mean I had two guys
Speaker 3: that's to cut. Yeah, I can't help bad golf. But
Speaker 3: if you play good, this is how you do it,
Speaker 3: and you have to do it every single week, just
Speaker 3: in case you play good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's uh, it's true.
Speaker 1: You know, you can play well and not not you know,
Speaker 1: play good, you know in terms of strategically. So, uh hey,
Speaker 1: I want to thank you for your time, and uh,
Speaker 1: we'll have to do this again. I feel like I
Speaker 1: we got got through about a quarter of the questions
Speaker 1: that I wanted to ask, but uh, we'll do it again,
Speaker 1: maybe later in the year. And for all those interested
Speaker 1: in Scott, he's on Twitter, It's at Scott Fawcett. And
Speaker 1: then uh be sure to check out his website and
Speaker 1: his app. His websites playing lesson dot com and his
Speaker 1: app is the Decade App. And Scott look forward to
Speaker 1: meeting you in the near future. And uh, have a
Speaker 1: great rest of your week.
Speaker 3: You gotta thank you, thanks your time.