Daylight Saving Time vs Standard Time – how does it affect golf?

As I write this article the annual “fall back” time change, when we set our clocks back an hour and return to Standard Time, has just occurred. Since daylight is important to golfers, I thought that I would take a look at the concept and practice of changing our clocks, with an emphasis (of course) on how the practice affects golf.

North vs south

The natural changing of the seasons affects the length of the day (“day” for our purposes meaning the hours of daylight), so changes in the times when the sun rises and sets, and therefore the length of the day, are familiar to all of us. The amount of change which occurs is dependent upon latitude—how far north or south the location is: for example, between the longest days of summer and the shortest days of winter the length of the day changes by anywhere from about six and a quarter hours in northern-tier states like Michigan to three and a quarter hours in south Florida.

Of course, setting our clocks ahead an hour or back an hour doesn’t affect the length of the day—it just changes where within the artificial construct of our 24-hour day the sunlit period falls. There are many reasons why the switch between Standard Time and DST was put in place, but the history behind all that is beyond the scope of this article.

Early to rise – but not too early

Using my location, San José, California, as an example, and looking at a table of sunrise and sunset times downloaded from the U.S. Naval Observatory’s website, I see that on the longest day of the year in 2022—June 21st—we enjoyed 14 hours and 45 minutes of direct sunlight. (Theoretically at least, since the sunrise and sunset times are based on a flat horizon like you would find at sea, or in Kansas, and we have hills both to the east and the west of us.) Thanks to DST, sunrise on June 21st, 2022 was at 5:47 a.m.—pretty early for most folks, but without the clock change that we made earlier in the year, on the 13th of March, sunrise would have been at 4:47 a.m.—which is really early.

This illustrates the biggest selling point of DST for most people: the one-hour shift of the clock positions the daylight hours in a more usable portion of the clock day, eliminating sunlit time that occurs upwards of two hours before most people get out of bed, and giving us more time with sunlight after we come home from work.

For golfers this mostly means more opportunity to play a round, if even only a short one, after work on those long summer days. This is of course an upside for golf course operators, who see a boost in work-week business (as written about in this Golfweek article from last summer: How golf plays a role in the battle for ‘locking the clock’ on Daylight Time.) Also of interest, but not mentioned in that article, is the fact that since tee times start at the first usable light—as much as 30 minutes before sunrise, depending upon your location—DST carries an added bonus for those golf-course employees who have to be at the course well before the first golfers tee off.

One sticking point in the argument for DST is Arizona, certainly a state where golf is a big deal, but the one state in the contiguous 48 states which does not use DST (except for the part of Arizona which comprises the Navajo Nation, which occupies an area equal to about 1/5 of the total area of Arizona, in the northeast corner of the state, where DST is used.) The rationale that is presented for this contrarian position is energy savings – not because of lighting, which is often cited as a pro-DST factor, but because of air conditioning.

Keeping the clock day synchronized with the solar day (within the construct of a time zone which spans some 5.5º degrees of latitude from one side of the state to the other), with the daylight hours positioned earlier in the clock day, is supposed to save energy and money by reducing the use of air conditioning in the harsh Arizona summers. Questions of the effectiveness of this approach aside (color me skeptical—Palm Springs, California, is hot, too…), this skews the operating principle for golfers in the Grand Canyon State toward playing golf early in the morning, before work, in the summer.

East/west matters, too

Even within the same time zone, however, your position east or west makes a difference. Only along a specific line of longitude in each time zone will clock time conform exactly to solar time (when Standard Time is in effect, of course); points east of that line will experience an earlier sunrise (and set), while points west will see later sunrise/set times. For example, in Caliente, Nevada, which lies at roughly the same latitude as my home in San José, CA, but is at the far eastern edge of the Pacific Time Zone, sunrise and sunset occur approximately 30 minutes earlier than they do in San José.

Wintertime is the test

And what about fall and winter? I realize that the part of the year during which Standard Time is in effect is not “golf season” in much of the country, but in twenty of the fifty states in the union (plus southern Utah), golf season, as defined by the USGA’s handicap reporting period, is year-round. DST or no, even with favorable weather, fitting in a round even as far south as the Miami area, where there are around 11 hours of usable daylight in the shortest days of the year, with sunrise at around 7 a.m. and sunset at 5:30 in the evening, can be tough.

Actually, it is this time of the year, during the 127 day period—or about 1/3 of the year—that is roughly centered about the winter solstice, that opponents of year-round DST focus on. In the more northerly states the sun doesn’t rise until nearly 8 a.m. in midwinter, around the solstice, setting at 5 p.m.; if DST were in effect it would mean 9 a.m. sunrises, offset by sunset at around six in the evening. Much of the debate around the concept of year-round DST is focused on this issue, with dire consequences predicted by sleep experts, and some safety professionals (because of kids going to school, and people driving, in the dark.) More information on that aspect of the debate here.

This is a battle that doesn’t affect golfers in most of the country, however, where the sticks are put away for a long winter’s nap, awaiting the return of warmer weather and longer days, no matter how the sunlit hours are distributed around the clock.

Breakthrough Golf Technology extends their reach to the top of the bag

Breakthrough Golf Technology (BGT), the Richardson, Texas, company that introduced a composite-construction putter shaft, the Stability Shaft, in 2018, has jumped to the other end of the golf bag with their latest product, the Brava line of driver shafts.

Breakthrough Golf Technology (BGT) the makers of the multi-material Stability Shaft for putters, has added the Brava line of driver shafts to their product stable. At least they’re not pink…

The new shaft comes in four levels of stiffness – A, R, S and X (“R” for “Regular”, “S” for “Stiff”, “X” for “eXtra stiff”, I guess; I have no idea what “A” stands for, and it is not defined in the online information for the shaft) – for clubhead speeds of 75 mph, 85 mph, 95 mph, and 105 mph. Standard length is 46 inches, and the shafts weight in at 46 grams, 50 grams, 54 grams, and 58 grams, respectively.

The folks at BGT cite something they call “Speedflite NRG™ technology” (no explanation as to its meaning is offered) for the new driver shafts, which are constructed from “premium Toray™ carbon fiber”, which they claim  “translates to less energy needed when swinging” for “an exceptionally stable driver head for more distance and tighter ball dispersion.”

Their ad copy also claims that the Brava shaft is “Designed for maximum ball speed and smash factor because it delivers more center strikes and a better face angle.” Ball speed and smash factor are functions of club head speed and the properties of the club face and the ball, and are affected by the quality of the strike (hitting  the sweet spot matters…); just how a shaft is going to help the golfer hit the center of the club face is not explained; ditto with the face angle claim.

The new driver shaft is claimed to beat two premium driver shafts by up to 10 yards in distance and up to 60% in dispersion, information backed up by a pair of colorful graphs on their website but unaccompanied by any solid data or information about test protocols, etc. If you have read my June 2018 column on the Stability Shaft you may recall the skepticism I expressed at the claims made by BGT for that product and the data presentation they used to back it up. The same holds true for this new product.

The specifications table for the Brava range of shafts offers up data on “torque” for each shaft, a number that is used by shaft manufacturers to represent the torsional stiffness of their products. The term is a misnomer, because torque is a force input that produces rotation or torsion (circumferential stress), not the reaction to that force. That being said, these numbers do give a sense of the relative torsional stiffness of the four grades of the Brava shaft. The numbers that are advertised for this quality of the Brava line of shafts are – from “A” to “X”, respectively – 5.6˚, 4.4˚, 4.3˚, and 3.5˚, but these values cannot necessarily be used to compare this characteristic of the Brava shafts to driver shafts from other manufacturers because there is no uniform industry-wide test standard for obtaining this so-called “torque” measurement.

By the way – comparing the weight of each of the Brava shafts (see above) to the “torque” you can see that the extra 4 grams tacked on for the “S” shaft isn’t buying you much in the way of increased stiffness, by whatever measure is used.

Let’s get some data

My evaluation of the Brava line of driver shafts doesn’t stop at their marketing BUMF; the nice people at BGT (who may not have actually read my review of the Stability Shaft) set me up with an “S” flex Brava shaft for my Ben Hogan GS53 Max driver. (In a case of spectacularly bad timing, the Ben Hogan Golf Equipment Company had just closed its doors when I went to their website looking to buy a hosel for BGT to fit to a Brava shaft so I could swap it for the UST Mamiya Helium F4 shaft I had ordered my driver with. A timely suggestion from a Twitter acquaintance sent me to the OEM suppliers market, where I was able to purchase the needed item.)

I sent my Hogan driver off to BGT, and just a few days later I got it back, along with an S-flex Brava shaft fitted with the Hogan hosel I sent along with the driver (the “X” flex shaft wasn’t available at that time or I would have probably gone with that – the weight is closer to that of my gamer.) After regripping the Brava shaft with my preferred grip, a midsize Golf Pride Tour Velvet, I gathered some preliminary data about the two setups:

Shaft                               All-up shaft wt*    Full club wt    Swing wt

UST Mamiya Helium F4        139.8 gm             333.1 gm            D5

Brava 54G S95                      117.9 gm             311.1 gm**         D4

* (incl. grip and hosel)

** (22-gram difference is about the weight of $1 worth of quarters)

With these numbers and the two shafts, in hand, I went to my local Golf Galaxy to get some comparative performance data on the two shafts. (Shoutout to Steve Kobota, Operations Manager at my local Golf Galaxy store, for setting up and running this testing session for me.)

Numbers don’t lie – but sometimes they’re hard to understand

The first thing to know when evaluating launch-monitor data from shots taken by a 65-year-old 25-handicap who doesn’t play nearly as much golf as he should is that I am not Iron Byron. I am the first to admit that my swing is inconsistent. The launch angle and spin rate numbers that came out of my Trackman session bear that out, and I would not use them to come to any conclusions about the relative qualities of the Brava shaft and the UST Mamiya Helium shaft that I normally game.

As for smash factor and carry yardage, as I stated above, smash factor is more a function of the driver head, the quality of contact, and the ball being used (the hitting bay was not equipped with my usual Titleist pills) than it is of the shaft, and since carry yardage/total yardage is calculated by the Trackman system (it was an indoor session) and is not actual data, I think that the best indicator of the relative qualities of these two shafts to come out of my hour in the hitting bay is club head speed.

The bottom line – What am I getting for $399.99?

The club head speed numbers that I achieved with the two shafts were remarkably similar. I actually achieved my maximum clubhead speed with the UST Mamiya Helium shaft, the heavier setup of the two by 22 grams, which I swung second, when I was already a bit tired. The average club head speed was slightly higher (for a few more swings) with the Brava shaft, but only by a miniscule 2.2%.

Club-Avg-He	Club-Avg-Br
84.8	86.7
Max	Max
90.7	90.5

The shot dispersion patterns were quite similar between the two (but nothing to write home about, courtesy of my intermittent two-way miss—remember, 25 handicap.)

All in all, despite the small—but noticeable—weight advantage of the Brava shaft, in my hands its performance was essentially identical to the standard-option UST Mamiya Helium shaft I normally play, and such similar performance would make it difficult, in my mind, to justify the purchase of the $399.99 Brava shaft. The smart play, if you are interested, is to try the shaft yourself, but that might not prove to be easy to do as the number of brick-and-mortar stores that carry the line of Brava shafts is limited; they are mostly Club Champion locations, according to the BGT website, so if you have one nearby you are in luck.

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† (You may note that my average club head speed numbers indicate that I should be swinging the “R” shaft, but I have always held that the best option for consistent shots is the lightest/stiffest shaft you can handle. My explanation as to why this is true can be found in this post from September 2019.)

Book Review: “The Science of Golf”, by Will Haskett ⭐️☆☆☆☆

On the surface, golf is a simple game. You hit the ball, you find the ball, you hit the ball again—repeating that sequence, each time with the (hopefully) appropriate clubs, until the ball has come to rest in the hole. You count the number of times you hit the ball and write that number down as your score; the lower that number is, the better your score is.

Sports broadcaster Will Haskett cards a double-bogey
with this effort to explain golf technology to the layman.

In practice, however, there are a multitude of physical factors that determine how efficiently—that is, in how many strokes—you accomplish the goal of getting the ball from the tee to the hole. This book, authored by a sports play-by-play announcer and host who plays golf but has little experience as a writer and no technical training or background, is an attempt to explain the technical aspects of the game of golf, in a number of different areas, for the layperson.

The problem with this approach is that filtering technical information through a non-technical person to explain it to non-technical readers inevitably results in a significant loss of fidelity. In my 40+ years as a mechanical engineer I have been called upon many times to explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences; I have even written about the importance of such communication, and how to go about it (Presenting Design Concepts: How Mechanical Engineers Can Sell Slam-Dunk Ideas), and I can say with some authority that the author of this book shows himself to not be up to the task.

The author gives a shout-out to his wife (a “leadership consultant” whom he says is the actual writer in the household) in the Acknowledgements, in which he cites her encouraging declaration: “Will, you’re a good writer”, but reader, he is not. And what’s worse, the book’s editor, whom the author thanks in the first paragraph of the Acknowledgements, is apparently similarly very bad at her job, too.

Take this little tidbit from Chapter 1, for example: “A golfer’s mission is to enact as much force on the golf ball to make it move.” Get past the incorrect verb, “enact”, and you still stumble over the incomplete comparison which is started by the phrase “as much”. As much as what? As much as possible? As much as the other guy?

That example is just a taste; the text of this book is rife with similar instances of poor sentence construction, poor word choice and just plain incorrect grammar, but citing more of them would just be depressing. How they were not caught and corrected by a (presumably) professional editor is beyond comprehension.

Now let’s talk about the technical content. Here is where the combination of commonly promulgated misinformation and the author’s own shortcomings makes itself known.

Again in the opening chapter, the author lists the type of data that is gathered by launch monitors, and includes “sidespin rate” among those data points. Talking about “sidespin” is a common mistake that many lay golfers, and even some golf instructors make. It is a physical impossibility which I mention in my article about the myth of spin in putting (Debunking the Myth of Sidespin in Putting) because a sphere can only spin about a single axis. There is no “backspin” and “sidespin”, there is only spin.

A ball that is struck with perfectly square contact; that is, with the face of the club absolutely perpendicular to the swing path, will have pure backspin (the top surface of the ball moving in the opposite direction to the direction of travel), and it is rotating about an axis, the spin axis, that is horizontal—perpendicular to the Earth’s gravitational force. In the real world, outside of the achievement of hypothetical pure contact, swing path and face angle combine to determine the amount by which the spin axis deviates from the horizontal, and in which direction. The tilt of the spin axis, in concert with the spin rate of the ball and with the factors of air density, ambient air movement (that is, wind speed & direction), the aerodynamic qualities of the ball itself, and ball speed, determines the direction & shape of the ball’s flight.

Spin rate in rpm & spin axis angle in degrees are two of the data points gathered by the $22,000 Trackman 4 launch monitor system which is found in fitting bays and rich guys’ man caves, and set up behind many pro players on the range at Tour events. It is valuable information in the quest to optimize the golf swing, though I find that comparing spin axis angle to the bank angle of the wings of an airplane in flight, as is done in Trackman’s own online teaching series (Spin Axis) and quoted in this book, is a grievous oversimplification of the mechanics of the situation.

Many of the things that I found fault with in this book cannot be laid at the feet of the author; again, as a non-technical person he relied on the often-faulty information he was being fed by people in the golf industry.

Take the chapter on putting, for instance – in fact, to paraphrase the old-time comedian Henny Youngman, “Take that chapter, please.” And throw it away, because much of the information presented there is egregiously incorrect. After opening with a nice bit of exposition on the subject of strokes-gained: putting (it would be difficult to mess up Mark Broadie’s excellent statistical-analysis work on the importance of getting close to the hole), the author relates how Justin Silverstein, the head women’s golf coach at the University of Southern California, found that teaching his players to focus on speed led to a tremendous improvement in their putting stats. (See my column on this subject – “Putting, Part IV – Harvey Penick Was Right”.)

After that strong start, however, the chapter goes downhill rapidly, with references to the need for positive loft on a putter to lift the ball out of the depression it creates in the putting surface (an old wives’ tale), putting “topspin” on the ball (which, incidentally, is geometrically impossible to do with – what? – positive loft, that’s what), and matching path to face angle to prevent the generation of “sidespin” (there’s that word again.) He even trots out that tired old warhorse “muscle memory” when talking about grooving a consistent putting stroke.

Suffice it to say that I had to close the book and look away a number of times before I finished reading the chapter on putting. (By the way, for a reasonable, and fact-based, look at the interaction between putter and ball, I refer the reader—with all due modesty—to my recent article “Why your putts skid, and what you can do about it” at Will o'the Glen on Golf.)

There are many, many more instances of poor writing and incorrect or just poorly presented technical information in the book, but I can’t list them all—it would be too painful for everyone involved.

To sum up: Will Haskett’s book The Science of Golf: The Math, Technology, and Data is generally rather poorly written (which is somewhat forgivable in a draft version), but that poor writing persisted into the published version because it is also quite poorly edited (which is not forgivable.) The author is a layman attempting to explain technical concepts—which he does not himself understand fully—to a non-technical audience, and he fails rather badly.

Bright spots: the chapter on agronomy and the advancements that have been made in the understanding of growing and maintaining turfgrass; also, the chapter on data and decisions—but as I mentioned above, it’s really hard to mess up Mark Broadie’s work in this area. 

Low points: the chapter on putting (as described above) and the chapter on clubs, with such pithy quotes as “In order to get the ball in the air, you’ve got to have spin” and “Anything that has less spin launches higher and, obviously, it’s going to carry further and roll further” (Both quotes, by the way, from that well-known scholar of physics and aerodynamics, Tiger Woods.)

I won’t even mention the chapter on “the mental game”.

I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this book to the reader who wants to learn, even at the lay-person’s level, about the technical factors that drive the game of golf. It is too poorly written and presented (did I mention the several illustrations and charts, all in difficult-to-read low-contrast grayscale?), and too full of either incorrect information or poorly presented information, to be of any real benefit.

The Ben Hogan name disappears—again—from the golf equipment landscape

I have some sad news for fans and aficionados of Ben Hogan golf clubs—the Ben Hogan Golf Equipment Company is no more.

Sometime around the middle of July (I learned of it on the 19th), the Ben Hogan Golf Equipment Company’s website started displaying a banner which stated that they were experiencing problems with their website and were unable to process orders.

The iconic Ben Hogan signature script logo has again
disappeared from the golf equipment landscape.

In the days that followed, the news broke that the company had closed its doors and laid off all of its employees. As it turns out, they had lost their funding partner, a company called ExWorks Capital, LLC, which was the majority shareholder and manager of the board for the Ben Hogan Golf Equipment Company. Risky investments during the pandemic, it is said, led to ExWorks ceasing to provide funding support for Ben Hogan, and in March 2022 ExWorks declared bankruptcy. The BHGEC had been in the process of expanding its offerings, including the return of a Ben Hogan golf ball, but without the funding support of ExWorks—so the story goes—the company didn’t have the capital to weather lean times between surges in equipment sales. After trying and failing to secure funding from another source, the company was shut down.

The Ben Hogan name is actually owned by Perry Ellis International (PEI), an apparel company, and was used by the BHGEC under a license agreement with them. PEI have issued a press release, hosted at the former website of the BHGEC, which states that they are seeking “a new licensee for this golf equipment product category” and that they are “exploring options for a new club manufacturing partner while exploring the current market for future opportunities.”

Call me paranoid, but to me this smacks of a business maneuver designed to slap down the existing golf equipment company, which had been flourishing under the leadership of Scott White, so that PEI could pull the manufacture of hard goods under the Ben Hogan name beneath their umbrella, and I fear that their “new club manufacturing partner” will be some Chinese knockoff shop whose cheap labor and government-supported facilities maximize profits at the expense of the design excellence and build quality that the Ben Hogan name has always stood for.

I feel lucky, now, that I decided last fall to purchase a set of the Ben Hogan Edge Ex irons that I reviewed around this time last year, and most recently, one of their excellent utility clubs, the 22˚ 4UiHi driving iron, clubs which joined my Ben Hogan GS53 Max driver and classic Sure Out 60˚ lob wedge to make my current bag 64% (9/14) Hogan clubs.

Whether the iconic sunburst and script signature logos ever return to the golf equipment landscape remains to be seen, and if they do I sincerely hope that they do so in a manner, and with equipment, that does justice to the name and legacy of one of the greatest that has ever played the game of golf.

Why your putts skid, and what you can do about it

As I wrote in my previous article, despite the nonsense that you see and read online, or may even get from a teacher in an in-person lesson, you are not missing putts because you are putting spin on the ball. What you are absolutely doing, however, is skidding the ball. In order to understand why the ball skids, and how you can minimize skid and have better control of your putts, we have to take a look at the forces that are acting on the ball when it is struck by the putter, and after.

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There are two main forces acting on a putted ball which determine how the ball moves: the impact force which the putter imposes on the ball (which becomes momentum once the ball leaves the club face) and the friction between the ball and the putting surface*. These two forces are opposing; that is, they act in opposite directions—but more importantly, they act at different points on the ball.

Because the contact between the club face and the ball when putting is so close to the equator, or midline, of the ball, the impact force is very closely aligned to the ball’s center of mass (sometimes referred to as the center of gravity, or CG), so the impact force (and after impact, momentum), acts at the center of the ball, while the friction force, as shown in the illustration below, acts at the periphery, or outer surface, of the ball.

Impact force or momentum, opposed by friction, causes the ball to roll

The force of impact, and then momentum, translates the ball, while the tangential friction, acting at the periphery of the ball much like a hand on the steering wheel of a car, turns the ball around its center, causing it to roll. If a ball were struck while sitting on a hypothetical frictionless surface, without the opposing force of friction acting at its periphery, the ball would simply slide, translating without rolling, so the friction between the ball and the putting surface is an important factor in the launch conditions of a putt.

If impact force or momentum is not opposed by friction the ball will translate without rolling.

It is effectively impossible to achieve instantaneous roll at contact except in a very short, very lightly struck putt—a tap-in, or a steep downhill putt. For a putt of any distance (depending, of course, upon the friction characteristics of the putting surface), where the force of the initial impact is greater than the frictional force between the ball and the surface, the ball skids, slipping on the putting surface until the torque imposed by friction increases the spin rate to match the translational speed of the ball. This happens on nearly every putt, to some extent, and to improve your putting performance you have to understand why it happens, and what you can do to minimize it.

The length of the skid phase depends upon several factors: the delivered loft of the putter face (that is, the vertical angle of the club face at impact with the ball: static loft + dynamic loft); how hard the ball is hit; and the amount of friction between the ball and the putting surface and between the club face and the ball.

The illustration below shows a putter with 2˚ of effective loft at the moment of contact with the ball. The angle of the face places the impact point approximately 30 thousandths of an inch below the equator, or horizontal midline, of the ball (that’s about 1/32 of an inch; you know, those divisions on your scale that you can just about make out without putting on your reading glasses? Or maybe that’s just me.) The red arrows in the illustration depict the impact force vector and its horizontal and vertical components.

The slight positive loft on the putter face tends to lift the ball at impact.

The vertical component of the impact force, though small, is important. Its presence means that the ball is being nudged upwards slightly by the impact of the club face. There are those who will tell you that this upward nudge is necessary to get the ball out of the slight depression it creates in the putting surface by its own weight (including the folks at Scotty Cameron, who cite in-house studies that they say confirm this. Color me skeptical.)

What that upward nudge will do is off-weight the ball slightly at the beginning of its movement—if not lift it entirely free of the surface momentarily. The effect of this reduction in the contact between the ball and the putting surface is a reduction in the frictional force which induces roll, and therefore an increase in initial skidding.

Because positive loft, even in amounts as small as the standard 3.0˚ to 3.5˚ found on most putters, places the point of impact below the ball’s equator, it also adds a small counter-spin rotational force component to the motion of the ball, which works against the friction-induced force that creates forward rotation. The combination of upward nudge and counter-rotational force contributes to the ball’s tendency to skid, and must be reduced to minimize skid and optimize launch conditions.

I wasn’t able to find any studies which examined skidding with regard to control—that is, staying on line, but it has been shown to be important to achieving consistent distance control.

There was an interesting study** done in 2014 by Jeremy Pope, Paul Wood, and Erik Henrikson, of Ping Golf in Phoenix, Arizona, and David James of Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, England, which primarily focused on the effect of skidding distance on distance control. Utilizing putters with loft angles of 5˚, 3˚, 1˚ and –1˚, this study found that the putter with –1˚ loft performed best in terms of minimizing skid distance and producing consistent total putting distance, on both natural and artificial turf surfaces. (Take that, Scotty Cameron.)

I did a quick survey of putter manufacturers as background for this article, and learned (as mentioned above) that the standard loft for off-the-rack putters is around 3.0˚ to 3.5˚, with customization available from some manufacturers of from +3˚ to -2˚ (note that none of these number yield the negative loft which performed best in the 2014 study.)

Setting aside variables like turf type, turf condition, moisture, mow height, etc., one thing that can be stated with certainty is that a too-high delivered loft will increase skid distance, and can even result in a ball that lifts off of the putting surface slightly as it leaves the club face, resulting in a bouncing motion. This is bad for both distance and direction control.

Some studies cited in the book The Science of the Perfect Swing, by Peter Dewhurst—a rather dense little volume that will test your math and physics knowledge, your patience, and your eyesight (8-point type? Really?)—claim results that showed that the skid phase of a putted ball is typically one-seventh of the total distance of the putt, regardless of the length of the putt. Honestly, I find that hard to believe, and I have to wonder at the test conditions and methods that led to such conclusions.

My own home-grown testing, on a firm industrial carpet surface that stimps at about 13 to 14 (at a guess), using my stable of four putters which are all bent to a loft of approximately –1˚, showed mostly pure skid for the first two to four inches from contact, as shown on slow-motion video, with full rolling contact occurring at between six and eight inches on eight-foot putts.

As is always the case in putting there are a number of variables that affect the results, and the friction characteristics of the artificial putting surface I practice on is certainly one of them, but scientific studies and my own on-course experience have convinced me of the effectiveness of a slight negative loft.

(No brag, just fact: At the media preview for the 2019 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, I managed four one-putt greens and eleven two-putts† in near-U.S. Open conditions with my mongrelized Tight Lies Anser-clone putter, counter-weighted and bent to a –1˚ loft. )

If warranted by on-course conditions, such as a soft, slow putting surface due to mow height or moisture, it is always possible to increase dynamic loft by moving the ball forward in your stance, thus increasing delivered loft.

Because there’s such a thing as too much of a good thing, reducing loft too much, for example by using excessive forward shaft lean or moving the ball back in your stance, tends to cause the ball to bounce because it is being driven into the putting surface at contact. This is also an undesirable result, because it starts the ball on its path in an unstable mode.

The Bottom Line

Of the factors other than impact force that affect the launch condition of a putted ball—delivered loft and the friction conditions of the putting surface—the one that the golfer can control is delivered loft. Based on proven studies, and my own personal experience, the first step is to reduce the loft on your putter (you can experiment with it, but –1˚ is a good starting point) and you can make adjustments, as conditions warrant, by varying the placement of the ball with respect to the vertical arc of your swing.

I started this article series with the intention of discussing why, like crying in baseball, there is no spin in putting—and why that spinning ball video clip on Instagram was a pointless demonstration based on misconception and ignorance. The scope of the article grew as I wrote, and then it split into two, despite my having held back a great deal of detail that I could have included.

I hope that I have been able to educate the reader a bit about the realities of an important aspect of putting—how the ball transitions from a static position to forward roll—and also in how you can go about maximizing the roll quality of your putts for more consistent distance control. (The importance of speed—and therefore distance control—was the subject of another putting article that I wrote about four years ago. My how time flies.)

Maybe if I get ambitious at some point in the future, I will take on the subject of the break.

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* As I mentioned, briefly, in the previous article, gravity affects the ball when the putting surface is slanted, but that is a subject for another discussion.

** Jeremy Pope, David James, Paul Wood, and Erik Henrikson, The effect of skid distance on distance control in golf putting (The 2014 Conference of the International Sports Engineering Association)

† I see you counting on your fingers, and yes, that’s only fifteen greens. The other three holes, including my nemesis, #6, are better not spoken of.

Debunking the myth of spin in putting

A while back I saw an Instagram post which consisted of a short video clip of a bi-colored golf ball spinning, top-like, around its vertical axis, on an artificial putting surface—but not otherwise moving. The text accompanying the clip says, “This ball has side spin and yet it stays on the spot... but I thought side spin makes the ball go off line. 🙂”

The post, by a UK-based putting coach named James Jankowski, was obviously trying to make some sort of point, in an amusing way, about the movement of a putted ball, but the video clip was both pointless and useless from the standpoint of presenting useful information. “Why?”, you ask—well, the spinning motion couldn’t make the ball go off line because there was no “line”—the ball was not moving along the putting surface. Since the ball was just rotating in place about its vertical axis, the frictional and inertial forces generated by this motion were balanced and did not produce a resultant force that would displace the ball from its position.

A certain amount of back-and-forth discussion ensued when I commented on the pointlessness of the video and its accompanying narration; in this discussion there was talk of skidding and sidespin as the ball comes off of the club face—which was not mentioned or demonstrated by the original video clip—and an unfortunate descent into the ridiculous notion of “rifle spin”. I decided, then, that it was pointless to argue, or even attempt to discuss the complexities of the motion of a putted golf ball on Instagram, especially with a self-defined expert who has obviously had no education or training in the physics of objects in motion. What I decided to do, instead, was to take the matter long form, as it deserves, and write an article about it.

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Before we get into a discussion about the movement of a putted golf ball, there are some important terms which we must define: rotation, translation, rolling, spin, and skid.

The first three terms are very closely related. Roll occurs when the ball is moving across the surface, or translating, and frictional contact causes the ball to rotate about an axis that is parallel to that surface. When a ball is rolling the translational and circumferential speeds are equal; that is, the ball is moving across the surface with a one-to-one relationship of surface contact to forward motion. A rolling ball travels a distance equal to its circumference—about 5.28 inches—for every full turn.

A ball that is both rotating—with one-to-one contact with the surface—and translating, is rolling.

Spin, on the other hand, means that the circumferential speed is higher than the translational speed; there is slipping, rather than one-to-one contact at the point where the ball touches the putting surface. If a ball is spinning while in contact with a surface it travels a shorter distance along the surface than the length that the circumference of the ball has turned.

Skidding is the opposite of spinning; the translational ball speed is higher than the circumferential speed. When the ball is skidding it travels farther along the surface than the length that the circumference of the ball has turned.

In short:

• Roll – the ball rotates at the same speed at which it translates.
• Spin – the ball rotates faster than it translates.
• Skid – the ball translates faster than it rotates.

Be aware that many of the coaches and self-appointed “golf gurus” whose lessons you will find online use the term “spin” incorrectly when talking about putting. They refer to putting “topspin” on the ball—that is, hitting the ball such that the top of the ball is moving forward in the same direction in which the ball itself is moving. What they are referring to is roll, and as I will explain in the next article in this series, it is not an action by the golfer that induces the forward rotation that constitutes roll.

The truth is that referring to spin at all when talking about putting is misleading and incorrect. For spin to occur when a ball is putted, with the ball in contact with the putting surface, the tangential force applied to the ball by the club face—the force that would cause the ball to rotate—must be greater than the frictional force applied to the ball by the putting surface in the opposite direction. Even if the ball leaves the surface momentarily, whether because of a high-lofted putter or a poor stroke (with backwards shaft lean adding loft to the club face), the near-vertical attitude of the club face and the generally low force applied to the ball (compared to full-swing shots) will not produce spin; i.e., rotational speed that is higher than translational speed.

Think of an approach shot to the green with a well-hit wedge, then compare, in your mind, the club head speed of that shot, and the loft of the wedge, to the speed and loft of the putter—and consider that the approach shot is traveling through the air, and not dealing with the friction of the ball-to-turf interface.

Trust me, you are NOT spinning the ball when you putt.

Now that we have (hopefully) put the idea of spinning a putted ball behind us, let us now address the concept of “side spin”. While it is physically impossible to spin a putted ball, this term is also used to describe the movement of a ball hit through the air—but it is a misnomer.

The proponents of “side spin” would have you believe that the golf ball is simultaneously spinning backwards, about a horizontal axis, and either clockwise or counter-clockwise, about a vertical axis (like the spinning ball in the Instagram video.). The truth is that a sphere can only rotate about one axis. (If you don’t believe me, read up on Euler’s Rotation Theorem and argue with Leonhard about it – (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_rotation_theorem.) The golf ball cannot simultaneously have back spin, which all balls hit with a lofted club have, to some extent, and “side spin”. Even if a way could be contrived to simultaneously induce spin in these two different modes, the inertial forces acting on the ball would resolve themselves into rotation about one axis that is neither purely horizontal nor purely vertical.

What has happened when an airborne ball does not have ideal, pure back spin (as in the case of that slinging banana hook that just took your Pro-V1 on a one-way trip to O-B Land) is that the characteristics of the contact between the club face and the ball—a combination of club head path and face angle relative to path—has produced spin about a single axis that is tilted with respect to the horizontal. When that happens, the Magnus Effect, an aerodynamic phenomenon that produces an imbalance in the forces acting on a ball in flight, will cause it to curve to the left or the right, depending upon the direction of the tilt of the rotational axis.

On the other hand, a ball that is in rolling contact with the putting surface is rotating about an axis that is parallel to that surface. It will react to the angle of tilt of that surface (the break), if any, by moving right or left, but that movement is not induced by spin; it is a combination of the effects of momentum and gravity that makes a rolling ball “take the break”. Depending upon the loft angle and the force of the strike when the putter contacts the ball, and the relative frictional characteristics of the club-to-ball and the ball-to-putting-surface interfaces, the ball will skid for some distance before settling into rolling contact, but that is not only not spin, it is the opposite of spin—it is skid.

Since I have already gone on for well over 1,000 words debunking spin in putting, I will break here so you can catch your breath before we move on to the next subject—and the real bugaboo of putting—skid.

Fortinet Championship kicks off FedEx Cup chase again in 2022, but what comes next?

The 2021 Fortinet Championship (the event previously known as the Safeway Championship) was a successful tournament, and Fortinet, the Silicon Valley online-security company, did an admirable job of stepping up and taking over as presenting sponsor when Safeway stepped away from the role after the 2020 event. Back for 2022, with a few minor changes in the entertainment and hospitality aspects of the event, the Fortinet Championship is set, once again, to open the 2022-2023 PGA Tour season and the race to the FedEx Cup—but what about the future?

This event is no stranger to change. First staged in 2007 as the Fry’s Electronics Open at the Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Arizona, it was renamed the Frys.com Open in 2008, was moved to the CordeValle Golf Club in San Martin, California in 2010, and moved again, to its current location at the Silverado Resort and Spa, in October 2014. In 2016 Safeway Inc. took over the event, which was played as the Safeway Open through 2020, and in 2021 Fortinet took up the mantle.

Starting in 2024 the PGA Tour is going back to a calendar-year schedule, ending the nine-year run, starting in 2013, of the oddball wraparound season that elevated the then-Frys.com Open from the first event of the post-Tour Championship fall schedule to the opening gun in the race for FedEx Cup points. The coming change in schedule means that the 2023 Fortinet Championship may once again be relegated to a position as the first event in a second-tier fall schedule that will lack the presence of the big guns of the PGA Tour, who are  likely to be resting up after the money chase of the FedEx Cup finals.

Back in the days before the 2013 advent of the wrap-around PGA Tour season, the late-season Fall Series tournament consisted of four events played after the conclusion of the FedEx Cup Tour Championship series. That “Fall Series” was definitely the low season for the PGA Tour; it mostly drew players from near the bottom of the money list—both veterans and newbies—who were looking to bolster their dollar count and strengthen their position for the next season.

Under the PGA Tour’s coming new calendar-year schedule, those players who are outside of the FedEx-Cup-eligible top-70 at the end of the regular season will compete in a “compelling, consequential final stretch” of fall events that will determine their status for the following season, while the top 50 players will be eligible for a new Fall Series of up to three international events played after the Tour Championship. These new, limited-field, no-cut (AKA “money-grab”) events will represent a chance for the top players to pad their bank accounts some more, if they so desire, and still have the “off season” that so many of the already-pampered stars of the game are complaining that they lack.

The old pre-wraparound Fall Series may have lacked the star power and tension of the race for the FedEx Cup, but it carried some drama because of the make-or-break storylines that it engendered. At least, that’s the way many people saw it, myself included—but after I asked Jim Overbeck, Fortinet’s Senior Vice President of Marketing for North America, about the company’s reaction to the scheduling change, I got the feeling that the folks at Fortinet don’t feel the same way.

The talk from the dais at the 2022 Fortinet Championship Media Day press conference on July 14th was almost all about the business-networking opportunities that the tournament represents, giving the distinct impression that the golf tournament was viewed as a jolly good excuse to get together and talk network security against a backdrop of beautiful Napa Valley scenery, amongst rolling, vine-covered hills, while enjoying world-class wine and food.

Overbeck’s initial response to my question was, “If there’s one question I saw coming, that was the question.”

He continued, saying “We made a six-year commitment to the PGA Tour as a partner to have the Fortinet Championship, and the concept was we would be the first event of the season, and kick off the FedEx Cup points. That’s changed.”

The return to a calendar-year season means “our product changes a little bit.” Citing his relationship with the PGA Tour, Overbeck went on to say, “We’re working very tightly with them—they know our preference. They know what we’re willing to do and it has a lot to do with Napa. I told them as the music’s playing, when it stops we don’t want to be in a worse chair than when we started. They’ve been a great partner with us, and they’re working to move some roadblocks to make sure that we’re in a really good spot.”

I’ll be honest—I don’t know exactly what all of that means, but that one sentence—“I told them as the music’s playing, when it stops we don’t want to be in a worse chair than when we started.”—leads me to think that the Fortinet folks really like Napa, but don’t relish the thought of losing the cachet of being the event that kicks off the PGA Tour’s big show—the FedEx Cup race.

Does this mean that a change in the Fortinet Championship’s spot in the PGA Tour schedule is in the works once the calendar-year season returns? We will have to wait and see, and maybe not as long as we might think, because while the new schedule begins in January 2024, the change really comes in August 2023 after the Tour Championship, when the new fall schedule picks up as a lead-in to the return of the calendar-year season.

Book Review: “Swing, Walk, Repeat”, by Jay Revell ⭐️⭐️☆☆☆

I might as well get this out of the way right off the bat: this review won’t make me any friends—in fact, it might even make me some enemies.

“Why is that?,” you ask.

Well, I’ll tell you. It’s because if you are a member of the mystical-guru school of golf enthusiasts—a big fan of Michael Murphy’s Golf in the Kingdom, maybe even a member of the Shivas Irons Society, the type of golfer who sees (or is looking for) transcendent meaning in every dew-sweeping round, every linksy sunrise, every made (or missed) putt, chip, or drive—I am about to rain all over your parade.

As a golf writer I sometimes receive copies of golf-related books, for free, to read and review. Sometimes I solicit a copy of a new golf book that I have heard of, sending a polite letter to the publicity department of the publishing house citing my bonafides and inquiring as to the availability of advance reading copies (ARCs, in publishing parlance); sometimes they are sent to me out of the blue. As often as not, though, I just buy them. I love the game of golf, and I love books—so I feel that I should support those folks who expend the time and energy to add to the literature of the game (and for the record, I purchased my copy of the book being reviewed here.)

Of these books there are some that I like, some that I love, and, sadly, there are some—a few—that I really, really, can’t bring myself to like very much at all. I do my best to give every book I read an honest evaluation, but I am picky, and I will find—and point out—errors of fact, I will deflate ego-balloons, and I am especially hard on “mental-game self-help books (see my review of the most recent one from “Dr Bob” Rotella – Make Your Next Shot Your Best Shot: Latest from Bob Rotella is more of the same: blah-blah-blah, rah-rah-rah ☹ ☹ ☹ ☹ ☹) and twee little volumes that lean too hard on the mystical-golf point of view.

The book I am reviewing here, Swing, Walk, Repeat, by Jay Revell, is, I am sorry to tell you, of the second variety. Not to rub it in at all, but for me this book strays too far toward a twee, off-with-the-fairies outlook on the game.

Do you feel the raindrops yet?

Swing, Walk, Repeat started out as a series of Instagram posts, a sort of daily golf journal that Jay Revell started in 2020 about the way that the game shapes his life. He managed over 250 of those daily observations, a pretty good tally by any measure, of which 225 (by my count) make up this book. 

Don’t get me wrong—I love the game of golf. And I love it for many of the same reasons that Jay Revell does, and the same reasons as do the other people out there who lean hard on the mystic-guru button when it comes to golf—I like being out amid the green (or tawny brown, these days, in drought-stricken California) environs of a golf course; I enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes from a well-struck golf shot, from aiming at a spot in a fairway or on a green,  hitting the shot that I envisioned would put the ball there and seeing the ball actually end up on (or near) that spot. But I don’t get too sentimental about it.

For me Swing, Walk, Repeat leans too far in the direction of the meditations-and-deep-thoughts school of golf writing. Maybe my viewpoint is shaped by the fact that I didn’t grow up with the game, like Jay Revell and so many other small-ball writers did. I never played golf with my dad—I’m not sure that my father ever laid eyes on a golf club, let alone picked up or swung one—and I didn’t actually take up the game until I was in my early 40s. I have approached golf more as a challenging physical skill—like longbow archery, another avocation of mine—than as a meditative pastime or a bonding experience, and books like this one wear me out with their pastel-colors, Bob-Ross-happy-little-trees outlook. With chapter titles like “Golf Prayer”, “The Course is Calling”, “Dreaming of the Course”, “The Endless Search”, and “Longing for Golf”, when I was reading it I felt like I should be reading aloud in an awe-tinged whisper, with soft music playing in the background—angelic choirs, maybe, or slow, very soft bagpipe music.

Another thing: I noticed that there is no credit to or even mention of an editor having worked on the book, a fact which is apparent (or was to me) from early on. Meditation and feelings are great, but get your facts straight and make sure that your grammar is correct.

For example: In the introduction, page 4, fourth paragraph, first sentence, the word “grinded” is used. I see and hear this much too often in the context of golf, and it grinds on my ear like a misbehaving putter dragged down a cart path as punishment for a four-putt triple-bogey. The past tense of “grind” is “ground”, and if that word doesn’t fit the flow of the sentence you planned, find another way to phrase it.

Another, and I daresay more offending, error shows up on page nine, in the chapter entitled “Persimmon”—and I quote: “(Y)ou remember persimmon woods, don’t you? For generations this soft lumber was artfully crafted into club heads…”

My scanning eyes skidded to a disbelieving halt before they reached the end of that line. If you are going to wax lyrical about persimmon golf clubs, get your facts straight. Persimmon, the only North American member of the ebony family, is an extremely strong and hard wood—which seems obvious given the application. It is more than 1-1/2 times as hard as the hard maple that is used for flooring; of the North American hardwoods only hickory, used for axe handles and such, is stronger and harder. If you are writing about golf and you get a basic fact like this so very wrong, how am I supposed to trust what you write about anything else?

I won’t list any more errors, but suffice it to say that I read the remainder of the book with a pad of brightly colored sticky notes and a red pencil close at hand, and I admit that I was skimming briskly before I got to the middle of the volume, because I just couldn’t take it any more.

In summation: If your copy of Michael Murphy’s Golf in the Kingdom is dog-eared and worn (Murphy wrote a back-cover blurb for this book—no surprise), you will probably love this book and hate my review of it. That’s fine; really, because there is room for all sorts of folks in this game, and if there is one thing that golf teaches all but the most obtuse who venture out onto the course, it is how to get along with all kinds of people.

The new TW757 hybrids are part of a line of affordable offerings from Honma

Honma may not be a name that springs to mind for American golfers when considering a golf club purchase, and while you may have heard of their eye-wateringly expensive Beres line (which includes a $4500 driver) the more affordable offerings in the new TW757 line—driver, fairways, hybrids, and irons—from this premium club maker are worth a look if you are looking to update your WITB lineup.

The thing that stood out for me when I started learning about Honma clubs is that they are built 100% in-house at their manufacturing facility in Sakata, Japan. The benefit in this approach lies in the high level of quality control that is achieved. In my day job I am a mechanical engineer in a large manufacturing facility (not in the golf industry), and believe me, it is much easier to keep an eye on process and product quality when it is happening at your home base and you are not dealing with suppliers.

CONSTRUCTION

The TW757 family of hybrids utilize full stainless-steel construction in the club head, with a 455 Maraging steel face and a Japanese spec SUS630 body. Without going into too much materials science detail, the face material is a high-strength stainless steel that is easily workable in its annealed state before undergoing a single-stage aging treatment to develop the strength and repeatable flexibility required for consistent long-term performance under the impact forces encountered in ball strikes. The body is formed from another type of stainless steel which is subjected to a three-stage annealing-quenching-aging process to develop the high strength and toughness that is needed to support the club face.

The new Honma TW757 hybrids offer advanced design in a classic-looking package.

Equally as important as the materials that comprise the club head, of course, are the shape and configuration of those materials. The TW757 hybrids are designed with a low center of mass (commonly referred to as “center of gravity”, or CG), which is a key characteristic that contributes to the club’s ability to get the ball up into the air for both distance and green-holding ability. The Honma hybrids also incorporate a sole slot behind the face which is said to increase ball speed while boosting launch angle.

Connected to that well-built club head is the Honma Vizard graphite composite shaft, hand-rolled in their Sakata facility, and available in a full range of flex specs.

PERFORMANCE

My hands-on introduction to Honma came in the form of the sleek black beauty of a TW757 4 Hybrid: 40 inches long, 21˚ of loft, weighing in at 357 grams on my scale, with an advertised swing weight of D2.

I will be the first to admit that my 25.2 GHIN handicap may not inspire confidence in my ability to evaluate a golf club’s performance, and I can’t deliver the launch monitor ball-flight data that the full-time equipment sites do since my evaluation of club performance is done the old-fashioned, low-tech way—I take them to a nearby golf course and smack balls down range—but I can certainly judge the feel of impact and the look of the ball flight.

That being said, my relationship with my current hybrids has been problematic, on and off, a situation which I have attempted to treat with grip changes and counterweighting, with moderate success. Comparing my current 4H, a somewhat dated Taylormade product, to the Honma 4-hydrid I found that I was definitely getting more consistently acceptable shots with the Honma. I can’t say that the Honma TW757 turned me into a sharpshooter on long approach shots—it’s not a magic wand, after all—but it inspired a level of confidence that has earned it a spot in my bag, displacing the not-so-trusty Burner Superfast.

At $350 suggested retail the Honma TW757 slots in near the upper end of the price range for hybrid clubs, at or a bit above the price of the premium offerings from domestic manufacturers such as Callaway, Titleist, and Ping—which in my book, makes them worth a tryout at your local clubfitter.

Alan Shipnuck pulls back the curtain on Phil Mickelson with unauthorized biography – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Phil, Alan Shipnuck’s “rip-roaring (and unauthorized)” biography of Phil Mickelson is easily the most anticipated golf-related book of recent years, and I am completely confident in saying that readers will not be disappointed. Whether they are Phil fans (or not, as in my case), there is much for the reader to learn about the man who has recently found himself at the center of one of the biggest controversies to ever engulf the world of professional golf—a result, by the way, of the early drop of an excerpt from this very book.

Far from being a hatchet-job or a tell-all, the book is actually a well-balanced look at a very complex character. Philip Alfred Mickelson is a man of contrasts, and the book covers the full range of his complexities. There is a lengthy accounting of the many acts of philanthropy that Mickelson and his wife, Amy, have undertaken, both on their own and through their foundation, and on the other hand, no shrinking back from mentions of the less salutary aspects of his character and behavior. These range from the sophomoric trash-talking and pranking that he engages in, to a gambling habit that may be putting him in serious financial trouble, and borderline illegal financial dealings—some of which appear to be linked to his gambling activities.

The picture of Phil Mickelson that I take away from reading this book is that he is a smart, hardworking, physically talented man with an ego that drives him to constantly prove himself, always trying to show that he is the smartest person in any room that he walks into. While many people, among them his legion of fans, seem to buy into his act, the anecdotes in the book make him come across to me as a fast-talking BS artist who is, on balance, a hard person to like. To me he is the personification of the archetypal entitled rich man—he’s got his nugget and he wants to keep as much of it as possible (“my number one, two, three, four, and five issues are taxes”), all the while denying the contributions of others (e.g., the PGA Tour) to his success.

Alan Shipnuck has spent years working on this book—decades, actually, if you count the entirety of the time he has spent covering PGA tour golf, dating from 1994, Phil Mickelson’s second full year on tour, and interacting with Mickelson along the way. Curiously enough, the pandemic lockdown of 2020 was a boost to the effort. With pro golf, like so many activities, on hiatus during the early, highly restricted months of the pandemic lockdown, Shipnuck was able to engage his legion of sources, closeted at their homes and bored, via telephone, gathering anecdotes and impressions.

I got the impression that this book could have been longer if Shipnuck had been able to include the off-the-record material that he gathered along the way—and speaking of “off-the-record”, the golf world was treated to a bombshell last February when he dropped a revealing excerpt from the book.

In a phone conversation with Shipnuck which Mickelson later claimed was not for publication or attribution, he revealed that his courting of the Saudi backers who are bankrolling the LIV Golf league, which Greg Norman has been stumping for these past several months, was a calculated move to gain leverage against the PGA Tour for concessions regarding rights to players’ media content. His admission that the Saudi government has a terrible record on human rights, that they are “scary motherf--ers to get involved with” who he was nevertheless willing to snuggle up to for the sake of a big paycheck, had a cascading effect on his perception in the eyes of fans as well as the corporate sponsors who are the largest contributors to his income.

Several sponsors dropped Mickelson outright, and his biggest, Callaway Golf—who have a lifetime contract (as long as he is playing professionally) with Phil—pressed “Pause” on their contractual relationship with him. He subsequently stepped away from tournament golf and dropped out of the public eye, supposedly to “work on being the man (he wants) to be.” This self-imposed (or not, as far as playing PGA Tour events goes) exile even extended as far as his withdrawal from the 2022 PGA Championship, passing on defending the title which is arguably his most outstanding professional accomplishment, winning the 2021 event to become the oldest winner of a men’s professional major championship.

“A grownup version of Shipnuck’s first book, 2001’s Bud, Sweat, and Tees”

Even without the early excerpt and the ripple-effect consequences of that bit of breaking news, Phil – The Rip-Roaring (and Unauthorized) Biography of Golf’s Most Colorful Superstar is a groundbreaking work, a grownup version of Shipnuck’s first book, 2001’s Bud, Sweat, and Tees, which was a peek behind the scenes of the wild side of life on the PGA Tour as lived by the hard-living and -playing Rich Beem and his equally colorful caddie Steve Duplantis.

While Beem, despite his 2002 PGA Championship victory, has been little more than a flash in the pan in the world of professional golf, Mickelson is one of the defining characters in late-20th/early-21st century professional golf, and this book will go down as an important chronicle of his life and impact on the game.