The State of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am

Golf fans of a certain age, myself included, remember when the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am—aka the Crosby Clambake, the Bing Crosby Pro-Am, etc.—was a glamour event. Back in the days when the list of celebrity amateurs included such names as Clint Eastwood, James Garner, Jack Lemmon, and Phil Harris, and the professional ranks could list multiple members of the Top 20 players list. These days, however, as the amateurs list has moved from the original ratio of roughly four parts professional golfers to one part show business and sports celebrities, to a one-to-one ratio in a field that consists mostly of middle- to lower-tier pros, and CEOs and B- and C-list celebrities, the revered tournament has lost much of its luster.

But what would be required to return this tournament to some semblance of its former glory? On the amateur side of the roster that is a two-pronged question: 1) How to get a better class of celebrities, and 2) how to improve the viewing (and playing) experience while still maintaining the unique pro-am format.

The first part of that question is difficult to answer. The mechanics of who gets invited is a closely held secret, I imagine, known only to the inner circle of the responsible people in the presenting sponsor’s organization and their counterparts in the tournament’s organizing committee. The names of such popular celebrities of recent years as George Lopez and Andy Garcia (who was easily the best-dressed and most dapper amateur in the field in recent times) are now absent from the amateur roster, supplanted by DJs with single names and rap singers with rap sheets. The definition of “celebrity” has become so diluted these days that the glamour associated with the no-s**t-for-real movie stars that walked the fairways of Pebble, Cypress, and MPCC Shore in the “olden days” appears to be lost forever.

When it comes to improving the viewing and playing experience while maintaining the pro-am format, I think that that is an easier question to answer—though the people who mind the purse strings aren’t likely to look favorably on my solution: trim the field. The buy-in for amateur players is—well, it’s a big number; but one that a large number of “high-value individuals” (aka “rich people”) are willing to pay. I guess the cost is worth it for bragging rights at the 19th Hole of their home clubs; to be able to say that they played Pebble (and the other two courses) with a pro. Needless to say, the wealthy non-celebrity amateurs bring a lot cash to the coffers of the Monterey Peninsula Foundation, money that allows the Foundation to do a lot of good things in the way of charitable giving in the area.

Maybe the 4:1 ratio of Bing’s original format is too much to ask for, but cutting the pro-am field to no more than half of the full field is a feasible solution—or perhaps even 1:3, allowing the field to be split such that one course in each of the first three rounds is pro-am teams slogging through six-hour rounds while the pro-only groupings play the other two at a more normal pace.

As for improving the professional field, that is another two-part question. While once upon a time the chance to network and schmooze with the movers and shakers of the business world was a draw for the professional players in the field, in these days of agents, social media, and even the tour’s PIP system, that seems to be less of an attraction—and it is well-known that six-hour rounds with a CEO or hedge fund manager, even on the amazing and scenic courses in the tournament’s rota, are offputting to most of the top pros.

The other factor is money (of course.) While no slouch in the prize money department, with a total purse of $9 million and $1,620,000 to the winner, the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am lags behind the Tour’s new classification of “designated” events with their $20 million purses. In fact, Davis Thompson, who recently carded a career-best second-place finish at The American Express at La Quinta, in Palm Springs, WD’d from this tournament after receiving a sponsor’s exemption into next week’s Waste Management Phoenix Open, a designated event which carries the aforementioned $20M purse. His advertised reason was to get a week of rest after four weeks of play, but one wonders if, given his recent success at desert golf, the $20M purse isn’t an incentive.

Jordan Spieth had something to say about things that could help the tournament, both possible format changes as well as potential elevated status, in his press conference on Wednesday:

“I’m not sure how it could work. Let’s put it this way: I'm not sure exactly how it could work. I think maintaining, at least, if it’s not every year elevated, if it were to rotate or something like that.

You know, you still have the opportunity to have the pro-am portion and you could still work it into an elevated event, I think. It doesn’t really need to change. Or that year you have the pro-am going on on other two courses or — I think there's some options to play around with.”

If you have been reading my coverage over the years, you know that I am a big fan of this tournament, however it goes – but I think that in order to regain its former prestige, some changes will have to be made. I will be here for it, whatever happens.

Starting my second decade at the Crosby

Once again, my favorite week of the year has rolled around. No, it’s not Spring Break, or even Christmas vacation – it’s Crosby Week.

The poster for the first “Crosby” hints at the
fun-loving nature of the event in the early days.

For those in my audience who are below the age of, say, 50, “the Crosby” (officially the “Bing Crosby Pro-Amateur Golf Championship”, aka “the “Crosby Clambake”) is what the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am was called before AT&T brought a bucket of money to the table and started a decades-long run as presenting sponsor of the tournament. Started in the 1930s by crooner Bing Crosby (you youngsters can Google him) as a weekend get-together  for a bunch of his showbiz friends at Old Brockway Golf Course on Lake Tahoe’s North Shore, the tournament was later moved to Rancho Santa Fe, just north of San Diego, where the event’s pro-am format began. Bing would pair touring pros with amateur players drawn from the ranks of his show-business friends and the member of the Lakeside Golf Club in Hollywood, where he was a member (and five-time club champion).

The event came back from a 1942 wartime postponement with a move to the Monterey Peninsula in 1947, where it was played at Pebble Beach Golf Links and a rotating cast of supporting courses such as Cypress Point, the Monterey Peninsula Country Club’s Shore Course, Poppy Hills (home of the NCGA) and Spyglass Hill, over the years. In 1986 the people at AT&T bought out Bing’s widow, Katherine Crosby, changed the name of the tournament, and have been carrying on the tradition ever since.

My own history with this tournament started with watching it on TV as a kid growing up in nearby Salinas. I didn’t play golf, nor did any of my friends or their fathers, but everyone we knew watched the tournament. When I finally got interested in golf, many years later (thanks to the golf writing of Dan Jenkins…) and started playing and then writing about golf, I was lucky enough to get a foot in the door of the golf media world as a part-time freelancer, and get the privilege of entry to the media center at Pebble Beach for this event.

I actually wrote about this event for the first time in 2011, the year that saw long-time celebrity entrant Bill Murray and his then-new pro partner D.A. Points score the historic double, their team taking the pro-am trophy while Points won the pro event. I wrote that article (Cinderella Story) based on watching the event on TV at home, but two years later I was walking into the media center in the conference rooms above the Pebble Beach Gallery shops, a 50-something semi-rookie (I had started my official golf media career the previous year at the 2012 U.S. Open at the Olympic Club), rubbing elbows with the men and women who do this for a living.

I have covered the event every year since (though physically absent during the lockdown year of 2021), so the 2023 tournament marks my eleventh go-round, and the first year of my second decade as more than just a fan of the event.

In that time I have made friends amongst the ranks of the people who cover sports for a living. I kept my ears open and my mouth shut (for the most part), learning what I could from the pros in what used to be called the “press room”, and have enjoyed enlightening conversations with the likes of Bay Area sports writing legend Art Spander; the San Francisco Chronicle’s Ron Kroichick; and Mark Purdy, the now-retired sports maven for the San José Mercury News. When my first media affiliation, with the Examiner.com website, ended with the site’s demise in 2016, the connection I had made with the NCGA through my fellow Salinas homeboy and now NCGA Communications Director, Jerry Stewart, has kept me “in with the in-crowd” (PGA Tour press credentials are not available to freelancers without an affiliation with an acknowledged media outlet.)

It has been a privilege to walk the cart paths of Pebble Beach and the affiliated courses over the past decade, and to write about the events that transpire over these four days. I have seen a varied cast of characters leading and even winning this event, from big names like Phil Mickelson (twice) to no-names like Ted Potter, Jr. (sorry, Ted), and the storied venue and its companions in the rota haves never failed to provide drama and excitement – not to mention the best scenery on the PGA Tour. I look forward to at least a few more years of bringing my audience the stories from Pebble Beach (I’m no spring chicken, after all…) and hope that people enjoy reading about it as much as I enjoy writing about it.

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.

************************

† (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.