Post by Richie3Jack on Jun 19, 2015 14:12:01 GMT -5
I actually like the layout of Chambers Bay, but I despise the condition. Right now the 'greens' (liberal use of the term) are rolling pretty decent, but come the afternoon they roll like shit. This is also the United States Open, meaning that it should represent United States golf and United States golf in particular prefers plush and well manicured courses. This course just is not visually appealing in this condition.
If you want to see what the course *should* look like, head to www.pgatour.com and scroll all the way to the bottom and now you see a course that is far from ANGC, but it's much more appealing to the eye and my guess is that the afternoon groups didn't get screwed over by bumpy greens.
Of course, the big news is Tiger, who shot 80 (+10) yesterday and it was awful to watch out there. He topped it off (pun intended) by cold topping a 3-wood on 18 into a bunker he should have never gotten into.
Even though I work with Chris Como, I really don't know what he is teaching Tiger and nor do I care to pry. I just have a hard time believing that Chris is teaching him that backswing pivot given what I've read of Chris' 'unrestricted pivot..' And I've heard Tiger say repeatedly that he's having difficulty getting into the positions that he wants to. It goes to show you that where the golf instruction industry has failed to understand and failed the golfing public (again, the industry, not just Chris Como) is with teaching how to practice.
I think one could take this a step further and blame the education system as a whole, too. Sounds crazy, but I never had a teacher in grade school, middle school, high school or college that ever taught anybody studying and learning methodologies. So the same is likely to apply to golf instructors...they don't teach golfers how to better practice.
And you can blame this on the Tour. A couple of years ago I noticed this as I went to PGA National then 2 weeks later at Innisbrook followed a week later by going to Bay Hill. Wednesdays were filled with hours of hitting balls, then playing a practice round and then more hours of hitting balls after the practice round. And there's a bewilderment as to why so many players are getting injured.
But, the larger point is that Tour players really need to understand that you would be better off hitting 100 balls and doing the mechanics 'correctly' than you would be hitting 1,000 balls and doing 500 'correctly' and the other 500 'incorrectly.' Hitting 1,000 balls and doing them half correctly is still better than nothing, but it's just going to take longer.
Took me 30 years to understand that. But the larger problem is that it's more about *how* to practice than just saying 'hitting 100 balls correctly is better than hitting 1,000 balls and hitting half of them correctly.'
That's where golf instructors really need to get involved and step up their game instead of studying motion arms, CoP traces, wrist graphs, etc. And they really have to stop worrying about thinking that if they phrase a concept a certain way that will be the magic bullet for the player 'getting it.'
Because all of that is for not if the player isn't guided in the right direction to actually implement what you are teaching and then implementing that on the golf course and in competition.
I got to watch Tiger on the range and while he was hitting it well, it was interesting to see that he still had the same mechanical issues. Again, I don't think Chris is teaching him to restrict his pivot and lower his upper body in the backswing from my conversations with him. But, it was easy to see that in all likelihood those mechanics were going to rear their ugly head when he got onto the course.
The big thing I've learned from people like Lucas Wald, Jeff Martin, Adam Young, Trillium Sellers Rose, Dr. Richard Keefe, Dr. Keith McDaniel, etc. is that you really want to have a swing without swing thoughts. For years I thought it was literally impossible to do so, but now I see that's not the case. And nor should it be. I can type on a computer at nearly 100 words per minute without having thoughts on what keys to stroke. The same with musicians who can play a song just by hearing it and not seeing the sheet music. Or when we play video games.
Only golf is there a widely held belief that it can't become 2nd nature and a kinesthetic feel be developed over time.
The other issue is that 'deliberate practice' is usually considered to be going from p3 to p9 at full speed. But it doesn't consider that:
1. The speed of the golf swing makes it difficult for the brain to figure shit out.
2. If you're going from p3 to p9, you're missing p4 and p5. That's not 'more of the swing' that you need to develop, but it's a critical point where the speed is so fast and you have such a quick change of directions that by going from p3 to p9, you're ignoring perhaps the most difficult piece of the swing to change.
Anyway, my feeling on Chambers Bay was that it should be a bombers course. It's wide open so getting the ball closer to the hole becomes more important since you're less likely to be hampered by such a bad lie than you can't advance your 2nd shot. Also, the greens looked like they needed high window shots so they could hold. I also considered the players that could strike it well from 175-250 yards.
That's why I picked these guys on the blog:
Rory McIrloy
Jordan Spieth
Rickie Fowler
Hideki Matsuyama
Bubba Watson
Jason Day
Keegan Bradley
Phil Mickelson
Dustin Johnson
JB Holmes
For dark horses I had:
Kevin Chappell
Shane Lowry
Angel Cabrera
Gary Woodland
Brooks Koepka
I was going to pick Jimmy Walker in my top-10, but I was afraid that Chambers Bay may be a lot like Doral was this past year where it was so much about forced carries that the 3 longest hitters at the event (Holmes, DJ and Bubba) were the only ones contending.
In the end, I did have DJ as my pick as I posted it on Facebook and Twitter.
He met the criteria and I knew from watching a show where they played Chambers Bay that the greens were slow and quite undulated. The only comparable course on Tour I could think of with such slow and undulated is Pebble Beach; where DJ has dominated over the years.
One good thing can be said for Chris Como, one of his students, Jamie Lovemark is currently t-7th. I worked with Chris and Jamie last year after Jamie's disastrous start. Chris got him to 77th out of 180 golfers over his last 10 events in Driving Effectiveness. Before that, Jamie was 182nd out of 185 in Driving Effectiveness.
Also great to see one of my Tour clients, Daniel Summerhays, is currently t-1st.
3JACK
If you want to see what the course *should* look like, head to www.pgatour.com and scroll all the way to the bottom and now you see a course that is far from ANGC, but it's much more appealing to the eye and my guess is that the afternoon groups didn't get screwed over by bumpy greens.
Of course, the big news is Tiger, who shot 80 (+10) yesterday and it was awful to watch out there. He topped it off (pun intended) by cold topping a 3-wood on 18 into a bunker he should have never gotten into.
Even though I work with Chris Como, I really don't know what he is teaching Tiger and nor do I care to pry. I just have a hard time believing that Chris is teaching him that backswing pivot given what I've read of Chris' 'unrestricted pivot..' And I've heard Tiger say repeatedly that he's having difficulty getting into the positions that he wants to. It goes to show you that where the golf instruction industry has failed to understand and failed the golfing public (again, the industry, not just Chris Como) is with teaching how to practice.
I think one could take this a step further and blame the education system as a whole, too. Sounds crazy, but I never had a teacher in grade school, middle school, high school or college that ever taught anybody studying and learning methodologies. So the same is likely to apply to golf instructors...they don't teach golfers how to better practice.
And you can blame this on the Tour. A couple of years ago I noticed this as I went to PGA National then 2 weeks later at Innisbrook followed a week later by going to Bay Hill. Wednesdays were filled with hours of hitting balls, then playing a practice round and then more hours of hitting balls after the practice round. And there's a bewilderment as to why so many players are getting injured.
But, the larger point is that Tour players really need to understand that you would be better off hitting 100 balls and doing the mechanics 'correctly' than you would be hitting 1,000 balls and doing 500 'correctly' and the other 500 'incorrectly.' Hitting 1,000 balls and doing them half correctly is still better than nothing, but it's just going to take longer.
Took me 30 years to understand that. But the larger problem is that it's more about *how* to practice than just saying 'hitting 100 balls correctly is better than hitting 1,000 balls and hitting half of them correctly.'
That's where golf instructors really need to get involved and step up their game instead of studying motion arms, CoP traces, wrist graphs, etc. And they really have to stop worrying about thinking that if they phrase a concept a certain way that will be the magic bullet for the player 'getting it.'
Because all of that is for not if the player isn't guided in the right direction to actually implement what you are teaching and then implementing that on the golf course and in competition.
I got to watch Tiger on the range and while he was hitting it well, it was interesting to see that he still had the same mechanical issues. Again, I don't think Chris is teaching him to restrict his pivot and lower his upper body in the backswing from my conversations with him. But, it was easy to see that in all likelihood those mechanics were going to rear their ugly head when he got onto the course.
The big thing I've learned from people like Lucas Wald, Jeff Martin, Adam Young, Trillium Sellers Rose, Dr. Richard Keefe, Dr. Keith McDaniel, etc. is that you really want to have a swing without swing thoughts. For years I thought it was literally impossible to do so, but now I see that's not the case. And nor should it be. I can type on a computer at nearly 100 words per minute without having thoughts on what keys to stroke. The same with musicians who can play a song just by hearing it and not seeing the sheet music. Or when we play video games.
Only golf is there a widely held belief that it can't become 2nd nature and a kinesthetic feel be developed over time.
The other issue is that 'deliberate practice' is usually considered to be going from p3 to p9 at full speed. But it doesn't consider that:
1. The speed of the golf swing makes it difficult for the brain to figure shit out.
2. If you're going from p3 to p9, you're missing p4 and p5. That's not 'more of the swing' that you need to develop, but it's a critical point where the speed is so fast and you have such a quick change of directions that by going from p3 to p9, you're ignoring perhaps the most difficult piece of the swing to change.
Anyway, my feeling on Chambers Bay was that it should be a bombers course. It's wide open so getting the ball closer to the hole becomes more important since you're less likely to be hampered by such a bad lie than you can't advance your 2nd shot. Also, the greens looked like they needed high window shots so they could hold. I also considered the players that could strike it well from 175-250 yards.
That's why I picked these guys on the blog:
Rory McIrloy
Jordan Spieth
Rickie Fowler
Hideki Matsuyama
Bubba Watson
Jason Day
Keegan Bradley
Phil Mickelson
Dustin Johnson
JB Holmes
For dark horses I had:
Kevin Chappell
Shane Lowry
Angel Cabrera
Gary Woodland
Brooks Koepka
I was going to pick Jimmy Walker in my top-10, but I was afraid that Chambers Bay may be a lot like Doral was this past year where it was so much about forced carries that the 3 longest hitters at the event (Holmes, DJ and Bubba) were the only ones contending.
In the end, I did have DJ as my pick as I posted it on Facebook and Twitter.
He met the criteria and I knew from watching a show where they played Chambers Bay that the greens were slow and quite undulated. The only comparable course on Tour I could think of with such slow and undulated is Pebble Beach; where DJ has dominated over the years.
One good thing can be said for Chris Como, one of his students, Jamie Lovemark is currently t-7th. I worked with Chris and Jamie last year after Jamie's disastrous start. Chris got him to 77th out of 180 golfers over his last 10 events in Driving Effectiveness. Before that, Jamie was 182nd out of 185 in Driving Effectiveness.
Also great to see one of my Tour clients, Daniel Summerhays, is currently t-1st.
3JACK