“Crosby weather” strikes on Day Three of the 2023 AT&T Pro-Am

Despite the best efforts of the PGA Tour in bumping tee times up by an hour in the face of forecast high winds, Mother Nature took the wheel today at the 2023 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, as increasing winds led to a weather delay being called just after 12 o’clock. Conditions didn’t improve (not that any of the old Crosby hands expected them to…) and play was called at 2:30 p.m.

The current plans announced by the PGA Tour are to return Sunday morning at 8:00 to finish the third round, with final-round play expected to start at 12:30. Amateurs are not required to return for the completion of Round 3 (but are welcome to, if they choose), and only the pros will be playing in the final round. A pro-am champ will be announced after the completion of 54 holes. With the amateurs being excised from the field for the final round the cut will move to the Tour’s normal 65 and ties, from this event’s usual 60 and ties when the pro-am teams are competing.

Chief Referee Gary Young explained that the delay was predicated upon conditions experienced at holes 9 and 15 at MPCC Shore, where the exposed conditions led to instances of unacceptable ball movement on the greens. In multi-course events of this type, every effort is made to maintain identical playing conditions at each course for each round. A minor relocation of a hole, of no more than a yard or so, can be made if necessary, but conditions at MPCC were such that the amount of change in the hole locations that would have been required to mitigate the situation was deemed to be unacceptable.

Before the weather moved in with a vengeance, Saturday morning had gotten off to a good start for NorCal golf fans, as overnight leader Kurt Kitayama of Chico was quickly joined at the top of the leaderboard by two fellow Northern Californians, and Stanford Men’s Golf alums, Joseph Bramlett, of San José, and Brandon Wu, of Danville. Bramlett and Wu played at Pebble Beach Golf Links today, while Kitayama was at Spyglass Hill.

Wu quickly stepped up to the solo lead with a birdie at his fifth hole of the morning, Pebble’s long par-four 14th, and was joined there minutes later by Bramlett, who rolled in a 32-foot birdie putt at the Jack Nicklaus-designed par-three 5th hole.

Bogeys in tough, windy conditions at holes 9 and 10 (#9 is playing hardest today, at nearly half a shot over par) dropped Bramlett back to 9-under, but he got one of those shots back at #11, a strategic uphill par 4 that takes the course routing away from the ocean. He had this to say about the weather conditions after play was suspended:

Chico’s Kurt Kitayama leads after two rounds at AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am

Pebble Beach Golf Links, and indeed all of the Monterey Peninsula, on and off the three golf courses where the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am is taking place this week, is utterly spectacular in bright, sunny weather. In gloomy, overcast weather like today, with a little bit of light rain and drizzle thrown in, it takes on an entirely different aspect—calm, quiet, and conducive to introspection and deep thoughts.

OK, enough of that—let’s talk about golf.

Today’s light rain and drizzle—though it led PGA Tour officials to launch a preemptive strike and call for “lift, clean, and place” for the first three rounds, despite Thursday being mostly clear and dry—did not impede play at any of the tournament’s three courses: Pebble Beach Golf Links, Spyglass Hill, and MPCC Shore. The 8:30 opening tee times went off without a hitch at all three, and play was never stopped or delayed over the course of the day.

The stiff onshore breeze that was bending the flagstick on Pebble’s shore-hugging 18th hole late Thursday afternoon died down overnight; only a moderate surf breaking against the rocks at the water’s edge broke the calm.

First-round leader Hank Lebioda, who opened with an 8-under 63 at MPCC Shore on Thursday, started his morning with a birdie at the daunting par-four 10th hole at Pebble Beach, solidifying his lead, while a posse of other players, including Chico, California’s Kurt Kitayama, Harry Higgs, and England’s Justin Rose, moved up to 8-under.

Rose, playing at Spyglass Hill, went out in 32 on the back nine, on the strength of two birdies and an ace—at the par-three 15th hole—with another birdie, at the 3rd hole, pulling him to within a shot of the leader, but two late bogeys dropped him to 6-under and T-11. Harry Higgs carded two birdies and an eagle, at Pebble’s par-four 4th hole, with a bogey at the par-five 6th—after excursions to the left rough, the right rough, and a right greenside bunker—marring his card, also dropping to 6-under and T-11.

The wind came up after lunch, most noticeably at Pebble Beach, but it appeared not to faze Kitayama, who closed his second round at the 9th hole, a tough cliffside par-four, after rolling in a birdie at #8 to tie Lebioda at 9-under.

After moving to 10-under and the solo lead earlier in the day after a birdie at #2, the shortish par-five which has played the easiest today relative to par, Lebioda dropped back to 8-under with a double-bogey 5 at the fifth hole. Designed by Jack Nicklaus and put into play in 1998, number 5 is a deceptively difficult par-three that is playing second-toughest in the tournament to date with an average score of 3.58. Recovering one of his lost strokes with a birdie at the long, intimidating par-five 6th hole, a bogey at #9 dropped Lebioda to 8-under, T2.

With that slip by Lebioda, Kurt Kitayama inherited the lead going into the weekend.

Kitayama’s lead headlines a strong halfway-point showing by NorCal golfers. San José native and Stanford Men’s Golf alum Joseph Bramlett went around the Shore Course at Monterey Peninsula Country Club in 4-under 67 today to close the day at 8-under, T-2; Brandon Wu, another Stanford Men’s Golf alum and a native of Danville, joined Bramlett at T-2 after completing his second round, also at MPCC Shore.

Martin Trainer of Palo Alto sits T-12 at 6-under; Maverick McNealy, who narrowly missed a win in this tournament two years ago, sits at 1-under after two rounds, T-57, as does Nick Watney of Davis. UCLA graduate Kevin Chappell, a native of Fresno, is even par going into the third round, and James Hahn of Alameda is at 3-over. Hahn, who notched his first win at the 2015 Northern Trust Open at Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, recovered from a 6-over first round at Spyglass Hill with a 3-under 69 at MPCC Shore today.

Tomorrow’s forecast is showing rain, with high winds in the afternoon prompting a one-hour bump in the starting tee times. First balls will be in the air at 7:30 a.m. at the tournament’s three courses, in hopes of concluding play before the worst weather moves in.

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.