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.
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| 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.
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