Many of the golf gliterari are giving this guy no respect. He sat down and used his brain to figure out a new approach that may, may have disrupted the game. If he is correct, I say bravo.
The rising golf star is using data to rethink the game’s smallest norms—and he’s leaving everyone else in the rough
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bryson-dechambeau-masters-augusta-national-analytics-11605081050
“On the Monday before the U.S. Open at Winged Foot back in September, DeChambeau’s coach Chris Como sought out an unusual adviser: a professor at Columbia University’s business school. Como wanted to run DeChambeau’s strategy for the tournament by him, and it was a strategy most other golfers considered sheer lunacy. But the validation DeChambeau’s team wanted wasn’t from his peers, it was from this professor, Mark Broadie, who pioneered golf analytics.
Winged Foot has narrow fairways and brutal rough. The conventional wisdom was that for anyone to have a prayer of winning, they needed to value accuracy above all else. DeChambeau planned to do the exact opposite: the biggest driver on tour was going to ignore the consequences and smash the ball as far as he could, whether it landed on the fairway or not.
“The analytics were behind it,” Broadie says.”
DeChambeau was a teenager working when he was analyzing his swing and realized why he was having difficulties being consistent. The clubs themselves were inconsistent. All standard golf sets have clubs of different length, affecting the ball’s loft and distance.
“Why do I have to hit variable length clubs?” DeChambeau asked Schy. “Why can’t I hit all clubs the same length?”
“That is a very easy question to ask, but a very difficult one to answer,” Schy replied.
So like any curious golf technicians, they jury-rigged an experimental set and ran a test with makeshift irons. It worked wonderfully. He never wanted to go back.”
Only 3 players have won NCAA, Amateur, and US Open; Nicklaus, Woods, and DeChambeau. I expect he’ll also win lots of majors like the other two.