Stubbornness or lack of research?: "Drive for Show, Putt for Dough"

[Vinsk]

The Golf Channel had Palmer, Nicklaus, Player and Trevino sitting down for golf talk. I know these guys are old, but still ambassadors of the game so it's a little disappointing to hear Gary Player say:

" I think length is the most overrated thing in golf today. It's a FACT that 70% of golf shots in a round are played from 100yds in. You drive for show and putt for dough and that's just a fact."

I would love to hear GP's thoughts after reading LSW. Thoughts on this? Do these guys just not bother with modern golf or are they aware and just being stubborn?

[boogielicious]

23 minutes ago, Vinsk said:

The Golf Channel had Palmer, Nicklaus, Player and Trevino sitting down for golf talk. I know these guys are old, but still ambassadors of the game so it's a little disappointing to hear Gary Player say:

" I think length is the most overrated thing in golf today. It's a FACT that 70% of golf shots in a round are played from 100yds in. You drive for show and putt for dough and that's just a fact."

I would love to hear GP's thoughts after reading LSW. Thoughts on this? Do these guys just not bother with modern golf or are they aware and just being stubborn?

Stubborn is my guess. They played at a time when the top tier dominated and the majority of the fields were not as good. They were long hitters and good at approach shots. Where as the other lower tier plays were just long. You could show Gary P. all the data in the world and he would ignore it. He was a great player and the first real fitness guy in the sport. But he is a touch full of himself as well.

[vangator]

To really score, you need all aspects, but the short game is the most important.  There are a lot of players that can hit the ball a mile, but they don't make a living on the tour.

The longer you can hit the ball equates to shorter putts.  The greens on the tour can be brutal.

Jordan Speith is a good example.  Not the longest on tour, but can fill up the hole.

Cory Pavin has won the US Open.  I don't think any long drive champs have ever won a tour event. 

[saevel25]

18 minutes ago, vangator said:

To really score, you need all aspects, but the short game is the most important.  

Statistics say otherwise. 

[Marty2019]

I kind of agree with Gary Player.   Length is an advantage, for sure, but if you include putting, most shots are not even full swings.   And yet, every time I go to the golf course I see a dozen guys on the driving range practicing their full swing, and maybe 3 or 4 at most on the chipping or putting green, and they are usually just waiting for their tee time.   

1 hour ago, saevel25 said:

Statistics say otherwise. 

I don't see how you can logically say the short game is not the most important part of the game, when 60 to 70% of the strokes on anyone's scorecard, including the pros, are not even full swings.  

[inthehole]

Marty - you haven't been around this place too long so let me fill you in.   The owner of this site has put out a book, LSW, that empirically proves through exhaustive research and data that  the long game and GIR are the most important parts of golf.   There have been countless threads on the subject ...

[iacas]

It's simply a casual stubbornness. There's no ill will or anything in there… they're just ignorant to the actual reasons for their success.

Gary, despite being a relatively short hitter (Lee was a bit longer than average IIRC, but not exactly a thumper), was not "short" - he was just "relatively short."

They're simply, like many people, falling prey to the same types of thoughts others have. When a tee shot misses the fairway a bit in a major, they've cost themselves maybe 0.3 strokes. When their approach shot lands 40 feet away instead of 20, they've cost themselves another 0.4 strokes or whatever.

But when they miss a ten-footer, really, they've cost themselves (back then) about the same 0.3 or 0.4 strokes, and yet… they think they cost themselves a full stroke. Meanwhile they don't consider having cost themselves any strokes on the drive or the approach shot.

It takes a little mental effort to come around to that way of thinking. It's not difficult, it just takes a little bit of effort, and once you do, you can simply "know it" and move on.

I shot my best scores in 2015… and I honestly don't think I practiced my short game at all. Not once, all year.

@Marty2019, you're new, and I won't thump for it too hard, but check out LSW. @vangator, you are not new, and should know better. This isn't really the area of opinion anymore - it's pretty much a fact, in general, that the long game is what separates golfers.

[mvmac]

4 hours ago, Vinsk said:

" I think length is the most overrated thing in golf today. It's a FACT that 70% of golf shots in a round are played from 100yds in. You drive for show and putt for dough and that's just a fact."

And yet Jack's length over Player/rest of the field was a huge advantage. 

[newtogolf]

Long game and short game are both important, long game as demonstrated by LSW gets the edge in importance.

I think the mentality is a combination of stubbornness and denial.  Most people are more willing to admit their short game is lacking rather than their distance, it's an ego thing.  Most people also only think distance as it relates to tee shots and fail to recognize the advantage distance offers on every shot i.e. the ability to use a shorter club on subsequent shots.

[saevel25]

4 hours ago, Vinsk said:

" I think length is the most overrated thing in golf today. It's a FACT that 70% of golf shots in a round are played from 100yds in. You drive for show and putt for dough and that's just a fact."

I would love to hear GP's thoughts after reading LSW. Thoughts on this? Do these guys just not bother with modern golf or are they aware and just being stubborn?

If all shots were equal in importance in how they relate to score than maybe short game and putting would be bigger. 

The fact remains that not all shots are created equal. Distance is a huge advantage because putts made by distance is not linear. You go from 95-99% at 3 feet and to 50% from 8 feet to 12% from 20-25 feet. You lose nearly 45% in the first 5 feet out from 3 feet. 

LSW has it right on what you should be working on outside a glaring weakness. 

[Patch]

The idea that the long game is more important than the short game has been around for 12 or 13 years now. I think it was one of Molinari brothers who brought it up back in the early 2000s. I personally believe in the concept as long as the golfer has the length to reap those long game rewards. 

By the same token if the golfer is "length challanged" , then that golfer will need to rely more on their short game to score well. 

[Phil McGleno]

15 minutes ago, Patch said:

The idea that the long game is more important than the short game has been around for 12 or 13 years now. I think it was one of Molinari brothers who brought it up back in the early 2000s.

I do not think you are correct-The Slate article dates back only to 2010 and that was one of the first things to set off the discussion. Even back then it was only a few people who even gave it any credit. LSW and ESC further helped us understand this.

Molinari started KEEPING STATS back in 2003. He didn't begin working with Broadie to understand these things until 2011.

Quote

In the spring of 2011, the PGA Tour introduced a new statistical category called strokes gained-putting. The brainchild of Columbia Business School professor Mark Broadie, the stat was the first of its kind to measure how golfers compared to the median as opposed to blindly bleating numbers about putting average and total putts without giving the data any perspective.

Naturally interested in how his personal data could be interpreted, Molinari contacted Broadie. The two met just before the 2011 U.S. Open, and the professor plugged nearly a decade’s worth of the player’s stats into a program that analyzed what these numbers actually meant in relation to his competition.

“I had all of the data from before,” Molinari said. “I just didn’t have the ability to calculate the gains and the losses. I was very skeptical in the beginning. But when something is based on fact, when you look at the numbers for 10 years and the numbers show consistency every year, it’s difficult to say that’s wrong.”

So there you go.

15 minutes ago, Patch said:

I personally believe in the concept as long as the golfer has the length to reap those long game rewards. By the same token if the golfer is "length challanged" , then that golfer will need to rely more on their short game to score well.

That is not entirely accurate at all and implies to me that you still do not understand the point of the long game/short game stuff.-The point is not about how far you hit the ball, but how well you hit the ball on longer shots-Tee shots and approach shots.

[DrvFrShow]

Quote

@Phil McGleno  That is not entirely accurate at all and implies to me that you still do not understand the point of the long game/short game stuff.-The point is not about how far you hit the ball, but how well you hit the ball on longer shots-Tee shots and approach shots.

Exactly. Driver, for example, is a hard club to hit well and needs work to hit it accurately. Swing flaws show up here. So we hackers have to make decisions around how well we hit this club. Open hole? Go for it. 

What makes the biggest difference to us hackers is making good decisions on the course. We know that hitting a driver gives us the most distance off the tee, but if we read LSW, and if we paid any attention to how well we actually hit our driver, it may not always be the best club to hit, even though we hit it further than everything else. Take this hole. 

Red represents my driver, yellow my 3W, pink my 4 iron. This is a short par 5. An optimistic shot with the driver gives a good chance of reaching that green in 2, but too much of a chance of having to punch out from those trees. If that tree wasn't there on the right I'd hit driver every day. But I think I'll hit my 3W, even though it'll make this a definite three shots to the green. Then my next most important shot is my 50 yd lob shot hopefully off the short stuff.

So if I hit my driver here, and end up on the short side under that tree on the right, I'm hitting a little punch up, and then a 6 iron to the green. Good decision? No. 6 iron from 165 might not land on the green and I'd end up scrambling for par and probably bogey the hole. 3W? Most likely hybrid or even a 5 iron shot + lob shot onto the green + 2 putts for par. At least there's a chance for even a birdie here. But if I'm not playing all that accurate this day I might play my 4i off the tee. It's a gap wedge to the green for the third shot at worst.

A long hitter who consistently moves that red oval up into the open area past the tree on the right and tightens it to the size of the yellow oval would hit driver on this hole all day long. 

This is what I took from reading LSW. Distance is king but be smart about it.

Game Golf told me I need to practice driver and approach shots from 100 - 140 yds. and with the latter work on distance control as well as lateral dispersion.

 

[mvmac]

1 hour ago, Patch said:

The idea that the long game is more important than the short game has been around for 12 or 13 years now. I think it was one of Molinari brothers who brought it up back in the early 2000s.

LOL where do you come up with this stuff?

[Patch]

6 minutes ago, mvmac said:

LOL where do you come up with this stuff?

 

6 minutes ago, mvmac said:

LOL where do you come up with this stuff?

I remember it coming from the Golf Channel. Maybe 2010 or 2011? Something about "Molinari's Golf Revulution".  Molinari had been keeping stats for several years. This before he turned pro. As an engineer he was stat minded and thought that the long game was more important to achieve lower scores. He had all this data, but no way to decipher it. Around 2010/2011 he met up with some guy named Mark Broadie who was able to take some of Molinari's stats and make it work to show the importance of the long game. Thats as much as I remember about it. It was just a GC read I happen to pick up. 

[iacas]

25 minutes ago, Patch said:

I remember it coming from the Golf Channel. Maybe 2010 or 2011?

@Phil McGleno quoted the same article above. 2011 is not 12-13 years ago. He had no clue how to interpret the stats - he just had a bunch of them.

Phil responded to the other stuff you wrote too. And I tend to agree. It's not about hitting it far.

http://www.golfchannel.com/news/jason-sobel/molinaris-revolution-long-game-trumps-short-game/

[JonMA1]

10 hours ago, Vinsk said:

The Golf Channel had Palmer, Nicklaus, Player and Trevino sitting down for golf talk. I know these guys are old, but still ambassadors of the game so it's a little disappointing to hear Gary Player say:

" I think length is the most overrated thing in golf today. It's a FACT that 70% of golf shots in a round are played from 100yds in. You drive for show and putt for dough and that's just a fact."

I would love to hear GP's thoughts after reading LSW. Thoughts on this? Do these guys just not bother with modern golf or are they aware and just being stubborn?

I saw the show and wondered the same thing. My guess is that Player isn't the type to read LSW and then admit he was wrong. He seems set in his ways.

In the interview, Lee Trevino first stated that the expression "drive for show, putt for dough is BS". Gary Player then disagreed as quoted above. When asked what he thought, Nicklaus kind of side-stepped the question by saying (paraphrasing) "pros tend to depend on their strengths. For some its the short game, for others its the full swing".

---

3 hours ago, DrvFrShow said:

This is what I took from reading LSW. Distance is king but be smart about it.

Thank you @DrvFrShow! In all the discussions about distance, it seems this is often overlooked. It's exactly what I got from LSW.

Now if you're leaving your driver in the bag because you have no confidence in it, that's different and is more of a glaring weakness requiring extra practice. But trying to thread the needle with a driver on every tee shot is not good strategy, IMO.

As others pointed out, learning to control the full swing - mid irons, long irons, woods, driver - is the best way to become a good player. Easier said than done, of course.

[Patch]

4 hours ago, iacas said:

@Phil McGleno quoted the same article above. 2011 is not 12-13 years ago. He had no clue how to interpret the stats - he just had a bunch of them.

Phil responded to the other stuff you wrote too. And I tend to agree. It's not about hitting it far.

http://www.golfchannel.com/news/jason-sobel/molinaris-revolution-long-game-trumps-short-game/

Glad you found the article. The 12 or 13 years I spoke about was Molinari starting his long game stats back in 2003, which is in the article.