Pretzel

Whoops, I actually meant May! My mistake there. I'll reach out closer to the date once I know which specific days I'll be in STL.

It's not a podcast, but there's a great discussion on that specific topic here: Personally as a student who does not teach I still find the "behind the scenes" information from an instructor's perspective pretty helpful if only in terms of helping identify different teaching philosophies to see what might work best for me. While I have taken fewer and fewer lessons over the years since I have learned a good deal about different bad habits I commonly fall into, I have also found it difficult to find new instructors (particularly when moving to new locations) that I feel provide enough benefit to be worth the cost. Hearing about how instructors that I know are effective approach these kinds of things makes it easier to identify if another instructor I might be interested in seeing is on the same page, so to speak. It's a bit of a moot point for me currently since I can count the number of instructors within a 2 hour's drive of me on a single hand, but luckily there are solutions to that problem as well.

@Rick_D I know I'm going to be in the STL area sometime before/after the weekend of the 17th since I have flights that depart from there to go attend the Preakness ($80 flights instead of $250+ from KC or other closer airports). Would only be in STL on weekdays though, so might not work out.

Things didn’t work out with the cutting horse barn my wife was working for there in Virginia. Their Texas facility we were supposed to move down to ended up delayed for at least an extra year after they’d had us leave Virginia to meet them down there “shortly”. So we ended up getting some land by her family in Missouri and building a house of our own down here instead. Not as many courses, but there is one 5 minutes from the house that’s only $62/mo for both of us to be members at and other nicer ones within a reasonable drive as well. @Rick_D I’ll try to remember to let you know when I’m heading up that direction. It may happen more frequently in the coming year since a dealer for a business I started recently is based out of St Charles so making deliveries myself might be more economical than shipping.

I'm in Missouri nowadays, but the opposite corner of the state from St Louis. I don't mind traveling if a group was planning a tee time though.

With all of my wedges/short irons I have 4 main shot types that I use to hit the ball different distances with different trajectories. I have my "normal" shot with standard yardage and ball flight, a "knockdown" shot with shorter yardage and lower ball flight, a "3/4" shot with shorter yardage and normal ball flight, and a "1/2" shot with shorter-still yardage and normal trajectory. Of those shots, the only one with a swing that is intentionally different in any way is the "knockdown" shot where I move the ball back a little and keep a bit more shaft lean at impact. Multiple sets of irons and wedges ago I used a shag bag and a big field to measure out how far I hit each of those 4 shots on average with all my clubs 8i and below, then I printed out some homemade shaft labels and put them on the corresponding club for easy reference. Nowadays I don't do that (they get damaged and fall off too quickly/easily without real shaft labels), but I do have those distances noted on a laminated sheet I keep in my yardage book cover. I rarely carry an actual yardage book, it's mostly just to keep my scorecard dry and intact now that I live in a more humid climate where sweat doesn't immediately evaporate, but it means I can have a typed out sheet of these yardages handy at all times without taping them to my shafts. So long as there isn't some forced carry or super slippery greens conditions that would necessitate a shot with more spin or higher trajectory I've found this to be much more consistent than just using a 60* for everything inside its full swing yardage and trying to tell the small difference between a 70% swing and an 80% swing.

They are, it’s the winter testing period here, and the new Red Bull car is using a “zeropod” minimalist sidepod concept very similar to what Mercedes ran for the first year+ before eventually giving up on the concept to try and copy last year’s Red Bull. The irony is that Mercedes switched away to try to get faster, but Red Bull switched to it and appears to have only increased the gap to other teams compared to last year.

With the testing results thus far it looks like Red Bull really just decided, "Yeah, the zero pods were actually a good idea but Mercedes is just stupid." Both Newey and GP (Max's race engineer) were grinning ear to ear as Max went out and smashed every other time on the board by nearly a full second despite not being on a qualifying simulation run.

I know Lewis has said he’s always dreamt of driving for Ferrari, but I honestly never thought he’d actually go drive for them with how much of a disaster the organization has been ever since 2008/2009 or so. Schumacher, Todt, and Braun ruled with an iron fist in the early 2000’s and the power vacuum created when they all left nearly simultaneously turned the team into a case study on messy internal politics. I know Mercedes has mentioned Lewis has an anti-poaching clause, but that doesn’t mean Ferrari can’t independently pursue others from Mercedes to work with Hamilton. I’ll be curious to see if Bono moves to Ferrari with him or if he’ll be stuck with one of the many comically bad race engineers Ferrari has trotted out lately. Hopefully for Lewis the strategy team will finally figure out some of their baffling calls as well.

My dad and I played in a weekly golf league for 8 or 9 years together, during which time I was anywhere from a +3 to a 5 handicap and he was pretty consistently a 15-18 handicap (the league was the only time he ever played). We’d get about 15 rounds in together a year that way. I know for a fact that over the course of that time there were plenty of instances where he beat me on 9 holes and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was one or two times he beat me for two sets of 9 holes in a row. The variance in scoring for any golfer who is shy of playing professionally is just so high that I’d never stake that kind of money on a bet like this unless I rarely played with the other person (and even then, maybe not).

If an instructor cannot accurately assess the knowledge level of their student and tailor their instruction accordingly, then by definition they are not a good instructor. A good instructor also must be able to assess a student’s swing to identify both the current state and a realistic endpoint given the student’s time and commitment levels, using that to plan accordingly on what key pieces of the swing to correct/adjust and in what order to do so. The entire article assumes that anybody who uses any kind of technology or terminology is automatically a bad instructor in that respect. The reality is that technology is a vital tool to help instructors determine what is actually happening in a student’s golf swing. More information may not always be necessary to create an instruction plan for a student, but it also never hurts and can be irreplaceable in many cases. A good instructor knows how to use the technology to guide their instruction instead of trying to blindly ”fix” numbers on the readout with cookie-cutter lessons that ignore the needs of the specific student. The only thing that article seems even remotely correct about is that an instructor must understand cause and effect on ball flight to be good (a “system teacher” they call it) and that trend-followers and those who have a one-size-fits-all approach are not good instructors. It stops short of directly stating that just appearing on a ranked list does not mean they necessarily are good. Beyond that it’s absolute hogwash, nothing more than a misguided nostalgia trip to “the good old days” when you ground it out of the dirt hitting a hundred balls an hour while the instructor watched. Good golfers absolutely do not need to work on multiple items in the same session unless each of them will not affect the other. The most effective progress is made when you make a change, commit it to muscle memory, and then build on that as your new beginning. Without actually committing changes to muscle memory you’ll be left perpetually chasing a feeling and reverting to old (bad) habits again and again when the going gets rough.

Any driver that whined about cold tires being "dangerous" has immediately and permanently lost any respect I may have had for them. It's no more dangerous that taking corners at 100+ mph any other time would be, the grip level is just a bit less so you'll be driving slower. Unless you're an idiot, that is, who tries to continue to drive the same speeds in every corner before your tires warm up. They're the best drivers in the world and they're paid millions of dollars to find the limit of grip and drive to that limit. I have zero sympathy for the ones who aren't as good at their job as the rest of the field complaining about it being trickier to handle in cold weather.

This year, no it doesn't matter at all per se. But this year they had the most dominant car in all of F1 history, setting records for most race wins in a row and the largest percentage of race wins over the course of a season by a single team. In those circumstances it doesn't matter who is in the #2 driver seat because Max Verstappen is able to win both titles for the team without any help. If future years have tighter competition, however, it becomes more concerning to have a #2 driver who is sub-par compared to those of your rival teams. You lose protection from under/overcut strategies because your second driver is out of position to defend, and if your main driver encounters problems (mechanical or of their own making) you're dead in the water because the second driver is not in position to pick up a win or even just a decent points haul at all. Perez, driving the most dominant car in F1 history, got beat last weekend by a driver in their own sister team. A sister team that was dead last in the constructor's championship prior to the race in Mexico and clearly one of the slowest cars on the grid. Whether it's an issue of confidence or an issue of skill, he has fallen off the pace entirely and would very likely be outperformed by many other teammates. The reason many people were tying his odds to the final WDC placing for him previously, myself included, was that it was a clear benchmark of performance relative to others and it's at least a measurable way to show if somebody is pulling their weight for the team after you factor in any mechanical troubles and strategy compromises. Points and standings are also often important items in driver contracts, with certain clauses or payouts taking effect depending on how a driver performs (both in terms of points and in terms of performance relative to a teammate). We already know the Red Bull is absolutely otherwordly compared to the other cars, to the point where even an average driver should (in theory) be able to consistently beat rivals from other teams. Obviously they may be hampered occasionally by strategy calls to protect the top driver, but for Perez this year that wasn't really the case ever simply because he was never in a good enough position for his strategy to make much difference to Max's race. After watching the race and everything else though, I honestly feel like last weekend was the nail in the coffin regardless of if Perez finishes 2nd in the WDC or not. Like you said there, the turn one move was absolute desperation and made no sense at all really considering Perez knew his car was much better on tires and faster for the duration of the race than the Ferraris as a result. His start was fantastic, but if Leclerc does anything to try to avoid Perez it means Verstappen is now in danger. Perez went from not being in a position to help Max but never hurting him to putting himself into a situation where he could have crashed Max out of the race entirely.

It's absolutely over for Sergio Perez at Red Bull, that was a truly brutal weekend for him which is particularly unfortunate considering the amazing start he got off the line to even be in position to make a pass on Charles Leclerc in turn 1 in the first place. Outqualified by Daniel Ricciardo who was driving a substantially slower car followed by a very, very desperate T1 move leading to the DNF. Meanwhile Ricciardo finishes miles ahead of Tsunoda while both outlasting Piastri and heavily pressuring Russell in the closing laps. His aggressive defense on Hamilton early in the race delayed the pass by several laps despite the difference in machinery and would have helped to just further build the margin for Verstappen if the red flag never came out. Not to mention the fact that he just wiped out any benefit and breathing room in the WDC standings that he received from Hamilton's DSQ in Austin last week, the race between those two is now 20 points with 3 races to go. If Hamilton finished out the season in P2 and Perez doesn't finish at least P4 or higher in every single race then he loses out, but if the events of this weekend are anything to go by he may simply be fighting to just beat out Ricciardo in substantially worse machinery much less Hamilton in a much closer car comparison.

Perez is definitely getting the boot at the end of the 2023 season, I give him less than a 10% chance of staying in the Red Bull for 2024 and 0% if he loses P2 in the WDC standings. The biggest indicator is that now not even Christian Horner is defending him. Marko has always been critical of the 2nd driver alongside Max even when they're doing their job and taking home P2, but Horner has defending the #2 driver each time (Kvyat, Gasly, and Albon) up until the point which the decision seemed to be final that the #2 driver was going to be leaving shortly. His first unqualified negative comments for each of those drivers came only weeks before the announcements of their departure.

I have golf friends, and I play with them whenever it works out for both of our schedules. I also like to golf outside of just the times when my golf friends are available to play. Just because they can't play doesn't mean I can't play either. Usually I play better than the people I get paired up with, but it's never an issue to me of them "keeping up" or anything like that. I enjoy having company out on the course, and if those I get paired up with don't feel the same then I also enjoy just being out there to play a round of golf. You're not burdening anyone by playing your own game out on the course so long as you keep up with either the group ahead or the standard pace of play, and if they feel that way you are more than welcome to tell them to get bent because they're a jerk anyways.

Still rings true, even if he did get outqualified this afternoon finally 😆

Definitely, and a lot of it probably has to do with how someone might alter their swing to hit a draw vs a fade. My "feel" for them is mainly adjusted by moving my ball position forwards or backwards, then setting up and gripping the club so the face feels/looks square to my intended start line when placed behind the ball. The main thing this does is just moves my shoulders to be more open or closed at address, and then I just feel like I swing along my shoulders. The further apart my shoulders feel compared to my feet/hips the more curve my shot will have, hence the push draw and pull fade. Another "opposite" way of thinking about it is to set up with the same ball position and/or shoulder angle at address each time and just adjust the face angle to get a draw or a fade, which gives straight/push fades and straight/pull draws. The same thing is happening, you're creating a mismatch between the face angle and the swing path, it's just starting from the opposite side of the equation (face angle instead of swing path) to get there.

If someone seems upset or annoyed about their shot but the result ends up good, my go-to compliment is usually, "Good miss" for that reason. My personal etiquette pet peeve is a little bit backwards in that it's an established tradition that I dislike, but the people who strictly follow the "honors" system on tee boxes in casual rounds when players of different lengths off the tee are grouped together. I've had scenarios before where I made a birdie on the previous hole and had to wait on the next teebox for the group ahead to move up, while others in my group could have teed off safely but waited specifically because of the birdie. It usually just results in the group falling a bit behind, and I suppose is just a specific instance of disliking it when people don't play ready golf.

He birdied one of the holes (had an eagle look) and parred the second. Gave him a much wider fairway to hit off the tee both times and more green to work with in front of the flagstick for the day's pin positions, which was helpful during a week that played exceptionally firm (was a dry and hot week for the tournament itself, on already-firm turf) with equally exceptionally long rough due to very heavy rains throughout Colorado this spring (they got more rain in the month of June alone than they usually get for an entire calendar year). On the par 5 first it made more sense to me, just because he really did need the extra room to land and stop the ball when hitting a 3 or 5-wood approach over the ditch short of the green. The green itself is not very deep front to back, and the shape is a bit of a diagonal strip from short left to long right following the curve of the ditch with a shaved apron behind it on the right that feeds down into the cabbage and the green itself sloping to the ditch in front. Going more than 3-4 yards long of the green to a back right pin position often leaves you with a 30-40 yard shot out of thick rough to a slippery green with a ditch if you hit that pitch long. Him hitting it into the 15th fairway avoided the pot bunkers that flank either side of 1 fairway (with a forced carry of 290-300 to clear them) and makes the green narrower but much, much deeper. Missing right into the ditch is okay because the ditch is pretty dry and thin on the right side of the green, missing left is also okay because the hill back behind the green will feed the ball back towards the putting surface. I don't know that it actually gave him a better outcome, but when I asked him he said he did it to help eliminate the miss over the green on that back-right pin position with the shaved aprons that feed the ball into a long and difficult short game shot with any misses (left, right, or short) being at least no worse than they'd be from the intended fairway if not better off. On the par 4 18th it seemed marginal at best to me really. He did it because the main fairway squeezes in between two pot bunkers again in the landing area, with the 17th fairway being massively wide at the same distance and downhill from the teebox (more distance off the tee). Makes the approach a bit more uphill, but also gave an angle to better avoid the pot bunker short of the green depending on pin position. I don't think he really gained anything there, but I could at least see how maybe he thought it was worthwhile to be more likely to hit fairway and have a slightly shorter approach shot when the usual 2nd is from 200-220 anyways on that hole and I've seen pros only advance the ball ~15 feet using a wedge out of the rough on 18 before (it grows real thick in that area). Pace of play wasn't terrible since the timing worked out reasonably well, but it was still a short wait on each tee to confirm the fairways were clear each time. As long as on-course OB is clearly marked and communicated where/when it applies, I have no issues with it at all really.

Just the other weekend I scored for a Korn Ferry tournament in Colorado and in my group on Sunday one player waited twice on the teebox for an adjacent fairway to clear so he could intentionally play into the "wrong" hole's fairway for a preferred angle into the green. I can absolutely see the pace of play arguments for internal OB markings, even ignoring the safety aspects entirely.

When I hit a draw it actually usually has a noticeably higher ballflight than when I hit a fade. Part of this is that I like to hit a push draw, the other part is that with the way I swing for each of them a draw usually results in a more shallow angle of attack compared to when I'm hitting a fade (most of my fades are a straight fade or pull fade). The only time I hit what could be considered a straight draw or a pull draw is if I'm really trying to hook the ball around a corner, which means pretty much every draw I hit has both more dynamic loft (clubface is more open) and a higher launch angle (more dynamic loft, mentioned earlier, + a more shallow AoA). I think one big reason fades feel more controllable to many is familiarity, in that the vast majority of players have at one point in their golfing career had an over-the-top motion they had to fix. A slice is by far the most common unwanted ballflight, and most good golfers have at one point in their past successfully corrected a ballflight like that to get to the point of becoming a good golfer. They know what to do if the ball starts fading too much. Uncontrollable hooks are much less common than the OTT slice, at least in my experience (which is not from the perspective of an instructor), and thus fewer golfers who have progressed to being good or great have gone through the process of dealing with it and being comfortable knowing how to correct it. I do admit I could be entirely wrong though, because honestly it's a wild-ass guess that most people are more familiar with fades and slices than they are with hooking the ball. Could also be that opening the face on a fade and slicing still gets the ball up in the air and moving, whereas closing the face on a draw can have harsher consequences of the ball not flying very far. Could also just entirely be a bunch of old "common knowledge" folklore that has zero basis in reality and it's all just placebo effect and personal preference.

Wrong, this is literally straight from their press release on the matter: They have an ownership stake in the merged company, they aren't simply a sponsor. They will be the title sponsor as well, but they're a sponsor with an ownership stake and the only company allowed to invest further into the joint venture (with the exception being other investments that they approve of).

Saudi Arabia does, however, allow rose water in lieu of champagne at least (if you’re able to stomach the taste of it).

The PIF can increase their investment stake. Outside organizations and even the PGA/Euro Tours cannot do the same without approval from the PIF due to the first right of refusal. They’re a sponsor, yes, but one that explicitly reserves all rights to expand their financial stake and block other investors in the arrangement as it’s been laid out so far to the public. The PGA and Euro Tours are getting their initial financial stake in the merger by contributing their tours essentially, as you mentioned, because the PIF is the only one putting forth cash upfront in the deal the way it’s been described thus far. The issue for those tours is that the announcement specifically states the PIF reserves rights to both increase their financial stake in the created company AND prevent dilution of their financial stake through the first right of refusal. They’re the only ones with those powers, not the PGA or Euro Tour who could at a minimum have their stake heavily diluted or at worst also be barred from increasing their initial investment later on by the PIF itself. The parent company will get the revenue from all 3 tours, and the board will distribute it as deemed best for the company between the accounts payable, future year budgets, and profit for financial stakeholders. The only money that the PGA/Euro Tours would have available to expand their financial stake is their portions of the profits that get reinvested into the company and even then the PIF’s portion of reinvested profits offsets that. The PIF, on the other hand, has $600+ billion dollars of additional investments they can draw from to dilute the initial investment of the two Tours. To clarify, I’m not talking about immediate effects of the merger. They could very well start out with equal financial stakes in the merged company, with the PIF essentially paying in cash what the PGA/Euro Tour have valued themselves at to enter as an equal partner (not likely since PGA and Euro Tours themselves are not equally valuable, but I digress). I’m talking about the effects down the road when the PIF exercises their exclusive rights to expand their initial investment or block additional investors from joining as the financial stake each partner has begins to change. I’d very much like to be wrong about this, but it’s very weird to specifically call out in the announcement that the PIF has exclusive rights to increase their investment AND a first right to refusal for other investors. That’s borderline hostile-takeover merger terms right there.