So what do you think the most common mistakes are. I love when people
say, you know, the old sniper mentality of am small, miss small.
I'm like, yeah, but we're never gonna miss small in golf.
So I like the idea of am small and except you're gonna miss big.
But if there's any one thing that I would say to really answer your question
besides work on your speed, hit driver more often, hit driver with only
one shape, Like those are just mandatories. But then it's what we call
the Tiger five because he's infinitely smarter in the game of golf than I am.
Tiger was getting frustrated with feeling like he was making the same mistake every
day, but instead of laughing about it, he sat down and came up
with the five things that were the most common mistakes he felt like he was
making that were silly. And they are bogeys on par fives, doubles,
three putts, bogies with nine iron or less, and then what he called
blown easy saves. And so Tiger somehow figured out that if he could keep
those five mistakes to six or fewer per tournament, that he would win.
Hi. This is Jim manstaid from Lewisville and I play at Windmill Lakes Golf
Club. This is Golf Smarter number nine hundred and thirty, the Tiger five,
a cure for the most common round killers, with the creator of the
Decade golf app, Scott Fasst. This is Golf Smarter, sharing stories,
tips and insights from great golf mindes to help you lower your score and raise
your golf IQ. There's your host, Fred Green. Welcome back to the
Golf Smarter podcast. Scott absolutely thanks for having me, Fred, really looking
forward to it. I am looking forward to talk to you again too,
because you were on a couple of years ago when you were first introducing I
think you were first introducing pretty cul Me. It was, yeah, the
Decade Golf app, and it's it's made some tremendous advancements in those couple of
years and there's a lot that it offers and I want to talk about,
but we're not going to talk about the product for a while. Let's talk
about why we need the product. I was watching a video that you did
with the guys at Barstool oh yeah, on your website, and I really
really enjoyed watching it because of the nine hundred and thirty episodes of Golf Smarter
that I've done. Watching this video is like, yeah, those are all
the things that we talk everything that this kid was like his mind was blown
about what you showed him, and his mind was like, oh my,
my rock my world, and you change my viewpoint of all these little nuanced
things that he was doing. It's like, well, that's what we've been
talking about here on Golf Smarter the entire time. It's crazy because one of
the main criticisms I used to get was that everything I teach is just common
sense, which I'm like, I don't disagree with that, but nobody does
it, so it's not common sense and it certainly isn't easy to do.
But more importantly, even if it is common sense, I don't believe in
anything as intuitive or you just you know, people just get it. Everyone
you come out of the womb a blank slate. Everything you know you learned
at some point. Nobody just knows how to pick a target or how to
play patient discipline golf, Like, that's just not in our DNA. So
even if you know, laying up guys are the main ones that you used
to just wear me out about this and I'm like, that's fair enough,
but like you didn't know this at some point, and I doubt you'd actually
do it still. But again, it takes so much effort to learn and
to really again do on a daily basis. It's just really difficult to do
it is, And you know, I think that's why the show is called
Golf Smarter. I mean, it's just there are things that you can do
that are going to improve your game without having to worry about your stroke.
I mean again, one hundred percent. Raymond Floyd has a book, The
Art of Scoring is what it's called, And on the back page of it,
you know, the backjacket, he says, even if you and I
had the identical games and skills, like so, just you're a clone of
me, but I've got my mental game and you have yours, I would
beat you ninety nine times out of one hundred. And I'm just like,
that's it's such a true statement. It's incredible. And I mean, you
know, Decade got started almost ten years ago now, which is amazing.
In twenty fourteen, when I did all this work and then caddied for will
z alt Taurus, who again was just a seventeen year old junior golfer at
my home course when he won the Texas sam and US Junior that summer.
And you know, at the time he was ranked thirty three hundred in the
world. I was on the corn Ferry Tour the couple years prior to that,
so even when he was like nine to thirteen years old, I was
playing full time professional golf basically, So he was the junior at the club
that would just tag along with me constantly and we'd do chipping and putting,
gating, story playing. Yeah, I mean it was really cool. But
I just remember as as he got older, just thinking to myself, I
don't understand how this kid doesn't win every single golf tournament that he plays,
and he just hits it like no one I've ever seen. And again he's
ranked thirty three hundred in the world, never won more in a high school
golf tournament, and luckily for me, I hurt myself a couple weeks before
the Texas Amateur. So I called him and was like, dude, I
did a lot of work on strategy with data from shot Link, and like,
I think this has to be what you're missing. Let me caddy for
you, and he winds up winning by three shoots four straight rounds under part.
And it was just one of those deals where I'm like, that was
just amazing to watch because this kid at that time, he'd never beaten me
in a single round of golf, Like however many times we'd played, he'd
never yet beat me, and here he shoots rounds that if I'd won the
Texas Sam, I'd have been like, I played great, well theoretically I
should I would have won because at that point he'd never beat me once,
like he's gonna beat me four straight times. But that just shows you how
much strategy in thought process, Like Raymond Floyd says, Will was basically the
same player overnight, except he got two two and a half shots better.
I mean literally overnight. I just played him like a video game. And
so again just the camp saying that I say all the time, and every
podcast I say it, probably seven times per podcast. But it's like,
if you feel like you should have shot lower after every round of golf you
play, there's only one of two things that possible. You're not as good
as you think you are, or you made mental and strategic mistakes. There
literally can be nothing else that it can't keep getting unlucky every single day,
so your expectations are out of whack. You're not as good as you think
you are, or you just keep doing dumb stuff every time you tee it
up. And that's what I was doing, and I played professional golf in
my twenties. I would do all kinds of dumb stuff, and then I
would go to Chili's or the outback that night with my buddies and we would
laugh about all the dumb stuff we did, and then I would go do
it again the next day. And it's funny because I've tried to analyze why
that is, and the only thing I've come up with is I just was
under the impression that, well, just practicing more, just getting better is
going to make those mistakes go away. So missing the green with that sand
wedge or gap wedge and making a bogie where you're like, I just need
to get better with my sandwich, like, or maybe you just need to
play a little smarter and stop trying certain shots and trying to move the balls,
you know, working it both ways depends, and just stop making it
so difficult. Oh, there's so much to pick apart on that way.
You just podcast in its own, Yeah, exactly, But I need to
back up on one thing. I want to know what it is about that
first round that you caddied for Will that just rocked his world to just flipped
him out, to be perfectly honest, So I took all the shot length
data, combine it with launch monitored data to air quotes, picked optimal targets,
and so I explained all this to him, you know, the week
leading into it, I had him start not meditating, but just listening to
a song with the long, slow beat to try to like start controlling his
breath if he's freaking out out there. I was trying to like figure out
if this goes wrong, why, And I just thought he's gonna get out
there and completely freak out. And so that first round of golf we had
gone through target selection. Like I said, I used to play a lot
of golf with Fred Couples at ninety two, three and four when he was
a member at glenn Egles here in Plana where I grew up at. And
aside from Fred when he was number one in the world in the Masters Champion,
I've never seen someone hit the ball more out of the middle of the
face than Will like it's he doesn't mis hit golf shots, which is just
incredible to say. So that first round. I mean again, there's sometimes
we're aiming at flags, depending on how far they are from the edge of
the greens and how long the shot is. But for the most part,
I would say, out of eighteen shots, you know, I bet we're
aiming somewhere between the middle of the green and the flag, you know,
on fourteen of the eighteen shots. And I swear to you, he hit
every single shot like a laser beam, exactly where I told him to.
And he birdied all the par fives. He had another birdie maybe maybe a
bow. You'd be shoot sixty seven. And I promise you I was driving
home that day and I was thinking, I think he would have shot lower
if he just fired at every single flag today, like he hit it so
exactly where I told him to. He still wouldn't have missed a single green.
And you know, so I literally was like kind of scratching my head,
kind of like is this right? And I'm like, well, he
stripes it. And then the next day we came out, you know,
he had a one or two shot lead after the first round. He comes
out the next round, and he is a nervous seventeen year old wreck and
he hit it out of the middle of the face, but all over the
lot. He hit it so bad and he shot seventy And then I was
driving home and I was like, that would have been seventy eight if I
wasn't there, like controlling his emotions, keeping him present, not letting him
get frustrated. I mean, so after the first round was like, hmm,
I don't know about this. But after the second round and then the
third and fourth round, you realize this is a game of you know,
just a game. It's math game again. I really like chess and poker
and backgammon are obviously math games. We all know that, but you would
never think of golf as a math game. But it really is about the
odds of you hitting a certain shot, your resulting expectation from there, and
then how do we manage our way around a golf course like a giant weighted
expectation problems. It's funny because when I spoke at MITS Sports Analytics conference a
couple of years ago, I used to think I was pretty good at math,
and then I met some people who are actually good at math. And
I'm just embarrassed because I'm up there like explaining two plus two to these people.
I'm just like, what am I doing here? But at the end
of the day, it is that simple. Once you understand I've got a
fifty percent chance of hitting this shot or whatever, and well that's not a
high enough percentage. I need to find a different shot. It's like the
one adage where I actually do strictly say a percentage is from the trees.
If you can't pull the shot off that you're trying to ninety percent of the
time, you need to pick a different shot. I mean. And the
math is literally that straightforward. And it's funny because I did all this work
independently on my own prior to Mark Brody's book coming out, and I actually
didn't even remember reading this passage. But it was like a couple of years
later and we're actually having a lunch with David Ogrin at the PGA show and
David was like, was there anything you two disagree on? And I was
like, I doubt it. I mean, I was like, if we
do, I bet Mark's math is correct. I'm letting my bias as a
player say, well, I get it. That's how it works, but
that's not really how it works. And David Mark Brody kind of laughed,
Who's marks the inventor of the Strokes Gained Statistics of Columbia business professor. Really
smart, nice guy. And he's like, honestly, if there's any one
thing that makes me mad with Scott is that he doesn't give me credit for
the ninety percent rule. And I was like, what do you mean.
He's like, that's a chapter in my book. And I was like,
I swear to you, I only read the data chapters. I didn't read
the appendices or anything at that at that point. I didn't and I've gone
back and read him at this point and it was just laughing. I was
like, well, that makes sense. We both independently came up with the
exact same answer. And that's again, I know, you talked about average
golfers a lot, you know, for your show, and it's just from
the trees. Like, I don't care if you make bogie one hundred percent
of the time from the trees, but it's usually not that hard to not
make double. And so so once you're in the trees, you know,
people say like, well you can get that shot, back like, no,
you can't. That SHOT's gone. You have an opportunity to regain that
shot, but you have to do something special to regain it. We still
just have to make mathematically correct decisions from there. It's like if you've gone
all in on your last hand of blackjack and you get an eighteen and the
dealer is showing a twenty. That doesn't mean the math changes and you hit
on it because you're like, well, I don't want to go home with
nothing. Like you still do the correct thing. And that's again the math
is just so straightforward. It's crazy sometimes amazing. We're going to take a
time out. We'll be back to talk more with Scott Fawcett about decade Golf,
among other things, and playing smarter golf. Right after this, when
I was watching that Barstool video, there was that one scene that you had
with him where he's in the trees. He hits his drive in the trees
and he's got this hero shot in his mind where he's like, and it
looked like eighteen inches of rough. The ball's at the bottom of it.
There's trees with low hanging leaves everywhere, and he's got this little opening way
out in front of him that he sees going, Okay, I see an
opening. Now. He didn't calculate the trees, he didn't calculate what the
ball, where the ball was sitting or anything. But he's like, I
got this shot, and you're like, no, you don't. Don't even
try it. And it brings me back to one of the lines that we've
used on Golf Smarter almost from the beginning. And I got this from a
listener and I use it so often and remind myself so often, which is,
don't follow a bad shot with a stupid shot. There's a saying that
I love that's if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. And
it's just like Franky was, I'm not kidding that particular shot. Tiger could
have sat there all day and not pulled off the shot Frankie, a fourteen
handicap, was going to try. And I'm like, this isn't even where
doubles come from. This is where triples and hire come from. I get
it. It's a reachable par five. I sure wish I was in the
fairway, but you're not. So what people don't really understand is if we've
got to keep it under a tree that's thirty forty yards away. Well,
a, that's an extremely low launch angle to begin with. But we've got
to get the ball up above the rough and then keep it down so like
you have to get it above the rough almost immediately because otherwise it just gets
tangled up. And we've all hit that shot where just putters twenty yards if
that ahead of you, and now you basically have the exact same shot again.
And it was just crazy to sit there and watch this guy like I
was just trying to be quiet because I'm like, surely he's going to figure
out that's not the shot. I was just sitting behind him like he did.
I think he's about to say that's the shot, and he did,
and it was just what was funny at him obviously chip it out. Yeah,
listen, you had him, you had him do the shot, like
no, no, no, do this shot. Just get yourself in the
fairway first, and then you gave him the opportunities like go ahead, try
it. Yeah, I'm dropping a ball for you. Go for it.
And because he's having to try to keep it so low, he's like leading
with the heel more like a lot of people when they're trying to deal off
the club. They lead with the heel instead of like how like a DJ
or somebody would be turning it down with that lead wrist. So you're still
presenting the face square, but just with less loft, and he's leading with
the heel, and he just cold shanks it further into the junk, And
it was like, that was the best outcome you got because at least now
you're over there further right where you can try to go up over the trees
from there, like it was that was. And then here's the other thing.
Even if he pulled the shot off, he was gonna have like I
don't know, one seventy or something left, but by chipping out to where
we had him chip out, he had like two twenty, which again I
get it, there's a difference in one seventy and two twenty, but it's
not nearly enough to offset leaving it in the trees ever. I mean,
again, that's the ninety percent rule that we were just talking about in the
first segment. There's just no teed A. He would never pull it off,
but B it's just it's you're typically trying to get it a little forty
yards closer, but it just doesn't even matter unless you get it up and
around the green. It almost doesn't matter. I mean, the difference on
the PGA Tour from eighty and one hundred and twenty yards is a tenth of
a shot. Like it's it's just nothing. And so here's a forty yard
difference. And so like hitting a lob wedge from eighty feels a lot easier
than a gap wedge from one to twenty or whatever it is for you,
but it's just not it's just just not that much easier until you can actually
get it up there chipping, which again is why I talk so much about,
especially on short part fours, where people tend to lay off and they're
just like, well, I'm just gonna get a three wood out there in
the fairway, and it's like get it as close to the green as you
possibly can. Absolutely, yeah, get it in the fairway if you can,
but get it as close to the green as you can. It's not
necessarily hitting all fairways, right, well, you can make shots. Yeah,
the fairway's gonna jump in the wave a few shots accidentally, I mean,
And again that's where you play super aggressive off the tee and then you
reassess if you happen to hit the fairway, well then that's gonna be.
We can play a little bit more aggressively from here. But if you're just
laying back. I mean again, when Brooks won the uh, I don't
remember's the PGA or US Open. At beth Page, he gets up there
on he either makes he makes like a birdie or a par on seventeen to
have a one shot lead or maybe a two shot lead. I think he
had a two shot lead on eighteen t And Faldo said, you know,
we'll see if he plays keeps aggressive here or if he plays a little bit
smarter and a little bit more conservative by going with an iron off the tee.
And it's like fairway's twenty two yards wide where two iron's going Like you're
not hitting that honestly, you're not hitting that much more than sixty five or
some odd percent of the time. Like you're just not hitting that much.
And the funny thing about beth Page is the bunkers don't have lips for the
most part, and so driver up there, you would much rather be in
the bunker at one hundred and ten than in the rough at one seventy five.
I mean, it's just it's literally not even close either. And so
it's like everything about hitting driver on that hole in every circumstance, even with
only a one shot lead, even if you're one back, like it's just
the mathematically correct play. That's one of the things I talked about decision making
there. It's not right or wrong, it's just mathematically correct. I mean,
it's a very narrow way of looking at something. But there's a good
and a bad decision there isn't the situation doesn't really matter. I mean,
especially in golf because it's the only sport in the world that's not played with
a shared ball. There's no defense for the most part, you know,
except for live or unique situations with tea times that you really even know what's
going on in the golf tournament to where you can actually use, you know,
game theory to make you know, a suboptimal but optimal for this situation
decision. Like in poker at the final table, I can play very suboptimal,
but I'm making optimal decisions based on the status of the tournament. I
can see everyone, what everyone's doing. I can do certain things. Yeah,
asked, is alatoris after the Masters that first year when he finished second
as a corn or not even a corn for I members, a non anything
member. And when Hideki hit it in the water on fifteen, Will was
on seventeen t like, he's right there, but he couldn't see that it
went in the water, And I'm like, what are you doing there?
And He's like, I have no idea if that ball is wet, if
it's up, you know, I'm a few shots back. But again,
as we've always talked about Scott, it's just irrelevant information. It just doesn't
matter. I'm going to play my game and see what happens. Interesting.
You know, how you say there's no defense in golf. I'm not so
sure I agree with that because one of the things that I've always had an
issue with is that the US USGA is an advocate for the golf course,
not the golfer, right, and so I would say defense is the golf
course. I mean again, I would agree with that. I actually wouldn't
agree with that. I'm saying when I say defense, there's nothing you can
do to nothing you can do to impact your opponent's play. You're both playing
the same golf course. So that's kind of like like an interaction that that
cancels each other out because everyone else is playing the same course. And I
used to get people all the time again because I'd say that. Sometimes they'd
be like, well, I mean there's some games and ship stuff where you
can jingle change in your pocket and you know, move a little bit.
And I'm like, well, I'm not. I'm saying, you're not trying
to be a jerk, like we're trying to play this game like gentlemen.
Yes, there's things you can do to impact your opponents play, not that
won't get you a very bad name in golf. Well that's probably why this
isn't the biggest podcast in golf the golf world because I say stupid stuff that
comes out and and people like you go, no, I mean it's not
stupid, it's just you know, I'm a recreational golf I'm not a competitive
golfer. I don't play in tournaments. I don't play for money. I
just go out and want to beat myself. That's really. I love being
with the people that I'm with, but I'm just out there trying to,
you know, do a little bit better every time I go out there,
which is I mean, everybody everybody says dumb stuff every once in a while.
You're not going to find a bigger Tiger or Rory fan than me,
and they both support bifurcation. I guarantee you that's the least well thought out
idea in the golf ball roll back debate. It's just again. I hate
saying it's just it's just stupid, and Tiger supports it. So like on
this one situation, Tiger's just wrong. I guarantee you I could convince some
of that in under five minutes in a debate too, where he'd be like,
huh, really, hadn't thought that all the way through? You're right.
I would be stunned if I couldn't get him to say those words.
So everyone can be wrong. Oh boy, oh boy. The Internet loves
controversy, and we're going to bring some up right after this. We'll be
brought back. All right, you brought it up. I didn't bifurcation.
Let's what about so many rules coming out because they want they want the tour
players to not hit it as far and punish us in the meat we're talking
about less than one percent of all golfers in the world is where the rules
are all coming from it feels like it's crazy. What do you think?
Yeah, the golf ball, the new golf ball rules for twenty twenty five.
I guess it's going to be next year, right. I literally have
no idea. I try to stay so far out of it, and I
mean, I know what they're doing, but I don't know. I thought
if you do that, that they're implementing it, I would think that happen
further way than that, but I could hopefully, who knows. I mean,
they could be implementing it for the tour first and then saying they're going
to do you know, do it for the rest of us later. But
yeah, just what is surprised they have the R and D done completely?
It's just so bifurcation. The problem with bifurcation, and people's default response is
well, they do it in baseball with metal and wooden bats, and yeah,
whatever the problem with bifurcation. I think we can all agree that golf
is in a great place right now, and a huge reason it's in a
great place is because of all these young studs Xalatoris, Moricawa, you know,
and Jordan Speeth, Scottie Scheffler. Just I mean, the list is
just really pretty endless. Over the last six years, to be perfectly honest,
ever since I released a decade and removed the need of the learning curve,
you know, I've worked with the vast majority of these players under the
age of twenty eight on tour. The reason bifurcation is a bad idea is
because if there's a tour ball or a roll back ball that amateurs play or
that the tour plays, and then a juice ball that amateurs play, where
do you draw the line. So the way the PGA Tour schedule works,
you get seven exemptions for the players that are coming out of college, so
they've got to play the non rolled back ball basically through the NCAA Championship.
So now we're talking, we're in the first week of June and with the
FedEx Playoffs starting just a couple months away. You used to have a lot
longer where the players could Monday qualify in they could finish in a top ten
and use that start the next week that they could get Like when Justin Leonard
did it, I don't know how I should go back and look at it.
Justin Leonard gained status as a non member off of just exemptions, but
I guarantee you did it in more starts than it's possible for current college players.
And so now if we've got a college player who's capable more collaz alataurs
being perfect examples of being on tour, they're having to play the juiced ball
through the NCAA Championships and then switch immediately to a ball that's gonna spin different,
it's gonna fly different distances, it's gonna react different, and win chip
shots are going to be different. I mean, putting theoretically is going to
also be fractionally different, and speed control is by far the most important thing
in putting. And so these players, it's gonna take them a couple months
to adjust to the new ball to play competitively at the highest level. When
I say this, it's like people think I'm saying they're not gonna be able
to break eighty. Like, no, they're going to be really good,
But there's virtually no chance outside of luck on any given week that the players
could do They're certainly not going to do it at the scale they've done it
over the last couple of years. So yeah, sure, a player or
two every couple of years might still pull it. Off by just getting hot
one week. But for the most part, it's just that would stop,
and these players would now all be going to the corn Ferry Tour essentially the
following years a post to straight on tour, and so all this stuff that
we've seen recently basically drives up overnight. And I do believe that it's important
to have the PGA Tour as young as it possibly can be, and certainly
not any older that needs to be for just some arbitrary reason of changing equipment.
When I was playing professionally, that the new wedges came out with the
groover le in like twenty eleven or twenty twelve, I can't remember when they
were finally implemented. And I had entered Q school that year, and I'd
just been playing casual Friday golf with my buddies all year year back here in
Dallas. In the week before Q school, one of my friends, Martin
Flores, who plays on touries, like, how are you adjusting the new
wedges? And I'm like, I didn't even think about it. He's like,
well, Q school, you're gonna need new wedges. Like if he
hadn't said that to me, I would have shown up the next week for
sure, and been buying wedges in the golf shop to go into the first
round, assuming I didn't accidentally tea off on them and just get disqualified.
And it did take me a couple of months to be as sharp with him
because the ball was spinning less, especially out of the rough like chipping.
Everything was different. And so it's not like I couldn't play, but I
certainly was not as sharp as I should be. And a SHOT's difference at
that level is it's insurmountable. The counter that is, then people say,
well, they can just split their time, like nobody's good enough to play
college golf, do college work, everything else that's associated with college, and
split their time and maintain their world ranking because that world ranking is now was
so important with PGA Tour university. There's not a thing. It would be
completely ignorant to split your time between balls, and so that's just bifurcation just
doesn't work. And so then people say, well, then we'll just push
it down to it's just the usg events. Well, what about a guy
like me who likes playing in the US midm every once in a while.
Am I supposed to play the regular ball in my wolf game and then play
the roll back ball and the usg events. Okay, well we'll walk it
back all the way to elite tournament golf and college golf. So now you're
high school player. They're coming in as freshmen, and they've got to make
this transition. Like no matter where you do it, you literally just keep
pushing it on the younger and younger players who are the most important demographic in
the game because they're the future of the game. They are the future USGA
officials and golfers that bring other players in in their twenties in college, Like,
young players are the most important. So I don't care about rolling it
back. I can't believe they only chose five percent. Like, if you're
gonna do it, rip a band aid off, hammer it ten percent and
let's be done with it for a long time. And again, I hope
the point of this segment was a rant by me. But distance also just
isn't compounding to infinity. People think that these tour players are gaining speed every
distance every single year because of equipment. The smash factor, which is ball
speed divided by clubhead speed, has been capped at one point five for twenty
years. The only way this entire century to hit the ball further is to
swing the club faster. That's it. And yes, I get it that
longer shafts and lighter clubs and whatever allow that, but you still can't have
a smash over one point five. I've done this on Instagram live before.
I've got a twenty five year old Callaway Great Big Bertha, the original Great
Big Bertha, and a twenty five year old Strata, which the reason I
used a Stratus because was the first solid core ball. When people do these
tests and use the old balladas and titleists, the liquid core has evaporated,
the rubber bands have denigrated, like that's just an irrelevant thing. So I've
used a solid core ball, I've used a twenty five year old driver,
and I've got I turned ball speeds out of them and I'm fifty. These
guys could do it no matter how small you made the clubhead. And again
then people are like, well make the ball spin here. Well, if
you do that, that's only going to benefit some guy that hits it really
short or has a weird launch. You can't have a you can't have a
regulated ball in golf. Back to the idea of it's a non shared ball
sport. You just can't because the whatever ball you choose would be optimal for
one guy and suboptimal for another one. And that's just an arbitrary point that
I'm sorry, that's not fair to whoever. It just doesn't happen to be
optimal for I mean again, roll it back ten percent, five percent,
whatever, knock yourself out. But bifurcation is just an absolutely horrific idea once
you think it out all the way through from idea to actual implementation, and
you think that wasn't done. That wasn't done bifurcation. They're not doing bifurcation.
They aren't, or I don't believe they are. No, No,
I mean you think that it wasn't taught all the way through when a guy
like Tiger and Roy says that's the better alternative. No, they have not
thought that all the way through. I mean, well, yeah, and
I didn't. They're just wrong. They don't have a problem Tiger Roy,
I really do love both of you. You're my two favorite players. So
that's the wrong way. I'm sure they are listeners. Well, I asked
for controversy, and you know you talk about how the young, The young
players the most important for the PGA Tour. It's because the older players are
getting sucked out of a different one. I don't even want to go I'm
not even going to go close to that topic of live golf with you because
I have a feeling there's another rant there. But I want to talk about
because we have limited time now, I want to talk more about about decade
Golf app and all the products that you have, uh and the usefulness of
them for the rest of us. Do that after this. I get the
sense that most golf instructors are teaching people how to hit a golf ball,
but very few golf instructors, and I think it's mainly because of opportunity,
are teaching people how to play golf. I have a feeling you're going to
tell me they're a really big difference between two the best instructors and you can.
I mean, it's unfortunate because this is kind of a chicken or the
egg situation. But the best instructors for the most part are at very high
end clubs. And the reason that's important is because there's just less play.
So Cameron McCormick, you know, I used to do some work with him
and his players. Way back when I first started doing this, he was
working with Xalators at the time, and so I went because Kramer Hickock's a
guy that I've worked with since he was a little kid, and I went
and watched a lesson with him, and Cameron just gets him out and they
sure they hit balls and they work on their swing, and then he gets
them out on the course and he talks through very well situations and how to
think of this shot. And again he's a great instructor, so he's very
good at getting players out on the course. But that's really only possible at
a super high end place. It's it's not like you can just if you
just go get a tea time in the middle of a place that's playing in
four and a half hours, like that's a two and a half hour nine
holes, let alone hitting any balls beforehand or anything like that becomes a very
inefficient use of everyone's time and money. Great point, and so I just
just unfortunately it's just really difficult to get out on the course with players as
often as you need to. And I'll have parents literally all the time they'll
complain to me about their kids. Instructors just like you know, Bob's not
getting out on the course as much as he needs to. With my kid,
I'm like, well, did you give him five hundred dollars his rates
two fifty an hour? Well, that's ridiculous, Like I don't disagree with
that, but do you do legal work for half price? For whatever reason?
Like, I highly doubt it. They expect them to come. They
didn't come watch my kid in a tournament to really see how he plays out
there. I'm like, well, now you're talking six hours, Like this
kid has moles and you know this guy has males defeat. Also, it's
just the game is it's the only sport in the world that's not taught on
the field of court competition. Where's a basketball lesson? Are they doing it
just in a in a gym with no hoop and no I mean no lions,
no, no tennis court with no net like golf. It's just it's
just a different sport because of how large the playing field is. And so
it's just it really is just impossible to get out on the course as much
as you need to. And you know, back to your question about the
decade, app that's the point of the decade app. And it's funny because
so Xalatorus obviously is the first player I worked with day Shambeau's the second player.
Because the SMU coach came up to me and said at the US Amateur
that summer after Will won the Junior and he's like, I don't know what
you're doing with Will right now, but I think it has something to do
with strategy. I've got this player, Brice, and to Shambeau that I
can't him to play the game, you know, air quotes correctly and you
know, with a little more patience and discipline. Bryce and when he was
in college, thought if it's my week, it's my week. I am
firing at every single pin and he's ranked fifty seventh in the world. I
mean, I literally created the decade seminar for Bryson because the coach at SMU,
json Enlos, said it's got to be done indoors, otherwise you're a
third paid coach, and so I did. I bought a drone and filmed
all this footage and just we just sat inside and talked through situations with the
entire SMU team. That SMU team not only had Dave Chambeau, it had
Austin Smotherman who's now on the PGA Tour. It had two other guys that
wound up winning the US four ball. Like out of that single room came
several tour players, more USGA champions, and it's just like it's such an
well, this is literally when the NCAA banned my seminar, they said it's
an unfair competitive advantage and it's funny. Just yeah, I mean it was
a great parting gift as they're banning me from doing my job, but it's
just such a hard game to learn to play correctly. Well, that's the
decade when people I just saw this post literally last night on Facebook where the
guys like I'm really considering stats app and looking at decade and clipped and there's
a ton of great stats apps out there now, but Decade. Yes,
it is a stats app, but its first and foremost point is teaching you
strategy and course management through when you buy the app, there are four dedicated
hours of just tutorial content. Bam, you watch this first and then you
start tracking stats. But then there's another one hundred hours at least of just
webinars that I've done for my members. Just you can just keep on absorbing
all of these ideas, because again it's just important. If you putted terrible
in a tournament, you would go practice you're putting that day. Most people
go work on their stroke and not their speed, which is you're probably actually
getting worse by doing that. If you put bad, you should go work
on your speed. Ninety plus percent of the time in golf, you think
bad. Again, thinking bad is what I believe leads you to the feeling
like you should have shut lower, but then there's no organized way to improve.
That's that's the point of decade. You're not comparing me to another stats
app. Stature generic like math is a commodity. If there's no one stats
app that is better than another stats app. The point of decade is to
teach you how to stop making those pedantic mistakes, which then obviously leads to
lower scores, and then we drive content to you based on the statue are
tracking that should help you figure out how to you know to stop making these
just again every day, the exact same mistake. That's the point. So
what do you think the most common mistakes are on the golf course by amateurs?
That is addressed by decade specifically, it's not hitting driver enough off the
tee, it's aiming at too many flags, or honestly not even really aiming
at anything, just kind of hitting it that way. Again, I love
when people say, you know, the old sniper mentality of am small,
miss small. I'm like, yeah, but we're stalking. We're never gonna
miss small in golf. So I like the idea of am small and except
you're gonna miss big. And that's the whole point of getting strategy in there.
But if there's any one thing that I would say to really answer your
question besides just these concrete work on your speed, hit driver more often,
hit driver with only one shape, like those are just mandatories. But then
it's what we call the Tiger five, which Tiger because he's Tiger. Now
I'm gonna praise you. He's infinitely smarter in the game of golf than I
am. Tiger. When he was in his early twenties and first playing professionally,
he was getting frustrated with feeling like he was making the same mistake every
day. But instead of laughing about it with his friends at Chili's, he
sat down and took notes, like, why do I feel that way?
And I guarantee you those notes weren't because I should have gotten a better look
at Bertie with this borron to a back left hole location. So, after
tracking these things for I don't know, six months or year, however long
it was, I really want to ask him that someday, but how long
did you think about this? He came up with the five things that were
the most common mistakes he felt like he was making that were silly, and
they are bogeys on par fives, doubles, three putts. He tracked bogies
with nine iron or less, which I tell females to track bogey's inside one
thirty and men bogies inside one fifty, just because everybody hits their nine irons
different distances. And then what he called blown easy saves, which is subjective
to Tiger's opinion. And so I tell people to just track how many times
do you too chipping around? Which those five things, it's not no three
putts, it's not too many three putts. And so Tiger somehow figured out
that if he could keep those five mistakes to six or fewer per tournament,
that he would win win on the PGA Tour. And so again we're just
talking about bogeys on par fives, doubles, three puts, boge inside one
fifty and not two chipping. I mean, that's the data that we were
able to actually extrapolate from shot Link, and the actual number of how many
times those things happen for the winner is six point four per tournament, So
again that's one and a half ish times around that they're doing these really mundane,
pedantic things, and it's just like clean those up, and especially the
bogies inside one fifty. Tiger went from averaging two point three in the late
nineties. Yeah, he won, but he didn't win much. I mean,
I mean the thirteen shot Masters win makes people think that he just came
out of the gates winning everything, and from ninety seven on he didn't win
that much in ninety seven, eight to nine until the middle of the ninety
nine season, which I do believe is when he put this into play,
because he went from kind of you know, he won one tournament in the
first how many events he won like eight of his last nine, and then
crushed two thousand and it literally happened overnight, where in the first half of
ninety nine he was making two point three bogies per per per round in side
of one point fifty to one point three. He went from averaging two point
three basically in the late nineties to one point three in the two thousand,
you know, late ninety nine to about two thousand and eight range. Like
people say, like, maybe you got better overnight, Like I don't think
so. I mean, I just don't think so. There's only one explanation
for getting that much better overnight, and it's I changed my strategy. I
changed how I'm playing the game, not the mechanics of my game. And
so that's the thing again, Like sure, I'd love it if you buy
the Decade app, but as an amateur at home, those are the five
things you want to want to focus on. And if you finish a round
of golf and think you should have shut lower and it's not one of those
five things, you're kidding yourself. I mean, that's that's it. You're
just there's there really is nothing else to say besides you're kidding yourself if it's
not one of those five Wow, Wow, that's awesome, thank you.
Yeah, one of the things that one of the last things I want to
talk about because I'm intrigued by it, but I don't get it. Is
I've never understood how to use a yardage book. And I see that in
the Decade app you can print out or can you just use it on your
phone? Use that you can use it on the phone. Explain what that
can teach us and how to use it. Well, I mean again,
this is you'll never see a tour player playing an event without a yardage book.
And so let's say that you're a fifteen handicap who never uses a yardage
book. So we want to get somewhere closer to a tour player. As
the goal, we're just trying to shift across this spectrum somewhere. And so
the question of how you use it is great because it's like you're just using
this to see distances to certain bunkers, just how wide the greens are.
There's just a number of different things that you can use a yards book,
especially the Decade yards book, because we tell you how wide the fairway is
at different distances. We tell you the lip of this bunker is this far
to the front edge of the green, which again most of us use lasers
that point, so that's not quite as necessary. But you still just want
to have a satellite's view of where you're going. There's just again, there's
just strategically, there's there's no way. One of the things people used to
talk about doing was going up for practice rounds and walking the course backwards so
you're not fooled by any of the architects bunker lips that are thirty yards short
of the green. And I'm like, with lasers, haven't we kind of
gotten over? Man? I thought that bunker was right on the edge of
the green. Like, why you're not even lasering the bunker anymore? So
who cares? It's just an optical illusion. Once you start using satellite imagery
and overhead shots, like, there's no mystery anymore. And again, this
is where I actually do agree that a lot of the golf course architectures and
the enthusiasts get mad at me because they're like, you've removed all the mystery
of the game. I'm like, man, I'm not here to do your
job. I'm here to help players shoot the lowest scores they possibly can and
lose the frustration that this game brings you. Period. That's my job.
Your job is to make my job harder. My job is to make your
job irrelevant, not really obviously. That's where they get mad at me,
and I'm like, you have to design something. I'm not saying just give
us a long, straight hole with no bunkers, although that's what they did
out here at PGA PGA frisk going a couple holes. But it's just using
a yarns boo. There's just there's just too much information there. I mean
again, like I'm trying to figure out a way to answer this question a
little more concretely, but it's just something you start doing and you figure out
your own method. Again, there's videos in the decade app talking about here's
how you use these things, here's how you track stats a little bit more
efficiently, because I don't want you on your phone during the round tracking your
stats. I want you to do this after the round. It takes you
know, ten twelve minutes to enter the stats for the for the higher handicap
players, it didn't take that because we start with the first couple months in
our Foundations app with just tracking the tiger five, and then we add in
penalty shots, and then we add in strokes gain, putting you know,
over the next six months to where then it's not that big of a jump
to start entering all the data in the in the full elite version. But
again this is where just you know, what gets measured gets fixed. Whatever
that's saying is, it's just true. I mean, Brad Faxson's given me
a hard time for so many years. It's ridiculous. And he was trying
to just get me canceled by by saying players don't track your stats. You
know, I don't want my players writing down they missed an eight foot putt,
because then that's gonna be negative. I'm like, well, that's a
different problem. We can address that also. But how do I know if
missing an eight foot put is bad? Maybe you missed one, but you
make a bunch and you're at fifty five percent, like that's great, or
you're at thirty one percent that's probably bad. I mean, but you just
don't know. And I use with the fifty tour players that I work with,
I use the stats and data to illustrate to them they're not as bad
at something as they think they are, at a ten to one fold more
than I use it to say, this is what you need to work on.
Because again back to expectation management, back to mind set. If you
miss. I mean, I won't name the tour player, but I've watched
this tour player pout for fifteen minutes on the fourteenth tee at TPC Craig Ranch
here during the Byron Nelson a couple years ago, because they're waiting on the
tee after you just missed like a twenty footer, and he's just got his
head down and his full on mad face for fifteen minutes waiting for his te
shot, and I'm like, something's up here. There's no way that missing
a twenty footer. I go look at it, and he had basically missed
five straight twenty footers. Twenty footer on tour is fifteen percent. Yeah,
that's not interest missing. It's just not interesting to miss five fifteen percent things
in a row. Get to about twelve, and now I'm start like,
wow, that's really surprising. You're kind of dude to make one. At
some point, maybe we need to work on this. But for the most
part, nobody's as bad at something as they think they are. And that's
I don't want that player sitting there being mad for fifteen minutes. I want
him sitting there thinking about the next shot at hand, or just chatting with
his buddies, like there's no reason to dwell on the negative things already occurred.
M phenomenal. All right, real quickly before you have to run out
here, tell us how to find you online social media and get Get The
app is work for both iOS and android. It does, it does.
At this point, you can just go to Decade dot Golf. We finally
have matured as a company and actually have our domain working. We've been at
birdiefire dot com because I've partnered with it with the legacy stats app to make
that part of the programming easier. I quit Twitter because it's the most talk
successful on the planet. I suggest everybody that's listening quit Twitter also because it's
just awful. I'm at all We're getting political political, And then on Instagram,
I'm at decade underscore golf. Okay, excellent. One quick last question.
What about these tags that you put on your clubs, like arcos and
shot Scope, these things that track this information for you. I don't think
they're good. There's a number of logical fallacies that they make by saying,
hey, here's the average, here's how far you hit all of your seven
irons. Well, was I hitting softer was I flighting, it was I
turning, It was I into the wind. Into the wind hurts more than
downwind helps. There's just a number of different things. The only thing you
can really do to figure out how far your seven errand goes is get on
a range with a launch monitor and the ball you actually use and hit twenty
or thirty shots. Figure out your carry number. That's the only thing that
matters. And then again then you use the information the decade teaches you to
figure out how to adjust that for any given shot that you're about to hit.
So, I do think and it's why they all fail. I mean,
there's been a number of them that have gone, come and gone.
It's because people get it and they're like, oh, this is really cool,
and then after about a month they're like, huh whatever. It's just
they make a number of logical fallacies I do not agree with. Again,
I'm more than comfortable saying, sure the strokes gain data that they give and
other stuff. It's great. I mean again, it's math is a commodity.
But the logical mistakes they make are so blatant and obvious. I just
don't understand how they haven't changed them. Other than the fact it's what they've
hung their hat on. They can't change them at this point. And non
military GPS is not accurate enough to tell you how long a putt was.
It's not accurate enough to tell you when you're just barely in the bunker.
Were you in the bunker? You know, it's accurate to them like six
or nine feet if you're in the near the rough or the fairways. So
there's just a ton of data. I don't know how they do it.
I've never bothered looking because I don't care. But there's no chance the data
does not have to be cleaned up after the round, which makes it kind
of like, why not just enter the data and not screw with all of
that in the first place. Yeah, I really do believe that, And
I don't like just bashing air quotes compet but I do think that all of
the devices are highly flawed. Fascinating, fascinating. Well, listen, I
promise it's not going to be five years till you come back on the show.
It's just too much fun. You have too many opinions and too much
knowledge to share that we need to take advantage of. Scot Apprecia great talking
to you. Thanks so much for coming on you two for a thanks well,
it's been a unique experience to provide you with updates to my physical issues
that I've been dealing with the last few months. And to those of you
who live in weather battled Midwest and Northeast, I apologize for complaining about not
playing over the winter due to injury. I just can't imagine not having access
to reasonable golf conditions for most of the calendar year. Anyway, I'm happy
to report that there has been some progress and relief because I've amped up my
resistance and flexibility workouts to strengthen my tennis elbow. For long time listeners who
remember our sponsored Dynamic Golfers the daily workout, I'm still doing those each day
as well. I just love it. And lastly, I did have an
MRI and it showed some moderate narrowing around the nerve on the left side of
my neck at the C five C six level for those who want the technical
information, and thankfully physical therapy will work as surgery isn't required. Yay.
It's all good to know because coming up in March, I've scheduled to go
to Atlanta and if all works out, We'll be playing eighteen holes with our
friend doctor Bob Jones the fourth, and while there we'll record an episode together
and hopefully some video for our annual episode talking about the Masters and Bobby Jones
with his beloved grandson. I want to give a shout out to Jim Nanstead
of Lewisville, Ohio for being this week's Golf Smarter Ambassador. Jim plays at
the Windmill Lakes Golf Club, and I'm so happy to hear that it's Windmill
Lakes because if it were Windmill Golf Club, then I would be highly suspicious
of being punked by someone who plays in a miniature golf course. Hi.
I play at Clown'smouth Golf Course really either way. Jim has received free access
to Tony Manzoni's video of the Lost Fundamental, and you can too. I
invite you to become a Golf Smarter Ambassador with the incentive of getting a choice
of three great gifts for your effort by telling us where you're from and what
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