Ben Giunta

Claude welcomes Ben Giunta, owner of The Tour Van, to discuss his career, his experience fitting pros on both the PGA Tour and LIV, and how he applies that expertise to help amateur golfers find the perfect equipment for their game.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
It's the Son of a Butch podcast. I'm your host
Claude Harmon this week Ben Jenta from the Tour Van
and listen. I think the guys that work on all
of the tours all over the world, PGA Tour Live,
LPGA DP Asia, Champs Tour, the guys that are looking
after professional golfers and their equipment, I think are some
of the unsung heroes in professional golf because they're people

(00:26):
that are so important to what professional golfers are trying
to do, and equipment plays a vital role. So I
think this is a really good pod not only talking
about equipment at the highest level, but also talking about
equipment for you and what to look for with your equipment.
So it's a deep dive into equipment for you golf

(00:48):
equipment nerds out there. This is a good one, or
we get to it. This podcast is being presented to
you by Platform Golf. You ever feel like practicing indoors
never truly prepares you for real course conditions, Platform Golf
solves that problem. Their true Slope platform brings uneven lies
and breaking putts indoors, and it's fully integrated with most
golf simulators. It's not just realistic. It's immersive, from sidehill

(01:12):
lies to sloping greens. Platform Golf creates an experience that
feels like you're actually on the course. So whether you're
a weekend player or a tour level pro, this is
the future of off course golf. You can learn more
at platformgolf dot com and discover y I, along with
many top PGA teaching professionals, trust platform Golf to elevate teaching,

(01:33):
training and performance. So go check it out. So, Ben,
we're here in the Live Tour truck the end of
the Live season, and before we get into kind of
what that world is like, there's one tour van on
Live that kind of encompasses all of the manufacturers. They
call them OEMs, but all of the big manufacturers now

(01:55):
are a part of Live. That wasn't the case in
the beginning. This used to be actually the old Callaway truck.
But just to give the listeners an idea, so we've
got one truck on live for how many players.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
I would say any given week we probably have fifty
eight to sixty.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
Fifty eight to sixty PJ Tour any given week, it's
going to.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
Be probably one, well in between one twenty and probably
one fifty, and then.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
When we get to the FedEx cop it's thirty. Stuff
like that. But a normal week in and week out,
you've got about one hundred and fifty PJ Tour players.
And how many trucks on an average week are.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
On the PG Tour Probably a dozen.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
Yeah, it doesn't so every manufacturer, tailor, made titleist.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
Yeah, Cobra, you've got component company.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
Component companies, the shaft company, stuff like that. So the
idea to try and put one truck together for one
tour and then one truck for fifty some odd players.
I can remember in the beginning, the first time we
really kind of saw you guys doing stuff was in Portland,
the second live event. But so, how did you guys

(03:00):
get involved in this product?

Speaker 3 (03:04):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (03:04):
So ironically the very first event was at Pumpkin Ridge, right,
and that our second event was first domestic event, right,
So that happens to be where I'm from. And so
when we kind of caught wind, one of my so
I I came from Nike, right.

Speaker 1 (03:21):
Yeah, you were, you were the Nike Tour. So Nike
had equipment from when to when.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
Well, so equipment came out and probably two thousand and
two three somewhere in there and went all the way
to sixteen sixty sixteens when they pulled the cord.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
Yeah, I can still remember being at Hartford and with Brooks.
Brooks was full head to toe Nike had all the
golf clubs and stuff, and he'd really only been with
Nike for a very short period of time months.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
Maybe it was the first season, and.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
So it was his first season. So I can still
remember when we were like, oh gosh, you know, we've
got fourteen clubs in the ball now to kind of
figure out what we're going.

Speaker 3 (03:56):
To do and where we're going to go totally.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
So I, you know, having my Nike history in the background,
working out on the tour, working with these trucks, working
with these athletes.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
I had a coworker that did.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
The same thing over in Europe and he actually covered
the first event in London. They had reached out when
and when it was getting off the ground, right, they
were recruiting talent, specialized talent, and there's not a ton
of people in the universe that do what we do that.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
Have specifically I think, do what you do at the
tour level. There are loads of people that keep club fitting.
There are some great clupfitters that aren't on the PGA
Tour working with elite athletes, but to work with tour players,
it's a little bit like I always say, the tour
vans are like the pits for Formula one, right, That's

(04:45):
where the cars come in. That's where everything gets tweaked.
So you had the background with Nike Live was looking
to do something.

Speaker 3 (04:53):
Yeah, so they.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
Were kind of bootstrapping the whole thing right out of
the gate, and they were looking at each end of
visual venue. And since I happened to be based at
Pumpkin Ridge for the first event in the US, it
was it was an easy conversation. They asked if I
would like to do it. I was like, yeah, might
as well. This will be fun, and that just led

(05:17):
to future conversations once they kind of got to know
these guys and they got to know my background, and
they realized not only did I have experience working with
the athletes, but I had experienced working on these trucks,
and I had Rolodex with the OEMs, and I could
probably pull this whole thing. I could be the conduit
to get the support that this league needed to get
it off the ground to support the athletes. Right, it

(05:38):
was very toxic, you know, initially to get off the ground.
Nobody know, none of the manufacturers wanted to touch it.
They didn't really know how to support the players. They
were going to do it off course indirectly. But I
was able to, you know, because I had the experience previously.
I knew everybody, and so I just started making phone

(05:58):
calls and in product and kind of putting the plan together.
And shortly before we actually even launched that Portland event,
they asked me to build the trailer that we're sitting
in right now.

Speaker 1 (06:10):
Yeah, I think that, you know, in the beginning, I
mean I've been this is the fiftieth live tournament. I've
been to all of them. I mean, it was very
kind of you know, a gang of kind of like
and a brother. Everybody knew that, you know, everybody wasn't
really happy with what was going on, But we still
had to play tournaments, and we still had to basically
prepare very much like we've always prepared. So the relationship

(06:33):
that you've found between you know, someone like yourself that
is on the kind of equipment side, those relationships take
a long time. I mean I look at DJ DJ
was with Taylor made his entire career. You know, it
was a fifteen year relationship. Piece of Barbara who builds
all his clubs and stuff. You do kind of build
these as the player and the manufacturers, especially at the

(06:57):
tour level, you do build a relationship. I think every
player eventually if they're with a manufacturer for a very
long time. Ben Showman at Cobra who I'm sponsored by.
You know, Ben has a real personal relationship with Ricky Fowler.
You know, Keith and DJ are boys. Keith was at
his wedding. So the relationship with the equipment being built

(07:21):
and looked after and maintained again, I think he is
very much like a Formula One pit crew. A driver
needs to have total confidence in the engineers, the strategists
and then the guys working on the car. So how
do you build that relationship and how have you seen
that relationship evolve over the years as the technology in fitting,

(07:47):
the technology available for fitting, and then the technology available
that's constantly evolving from a build side of things. What
do you feel like is the most important thing for
you as a as a club rap or a club
builder to establish with a player and their team.

Speaker 3 (08:07):
Yeah, I think you hit it on the head.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
It's about establishing a rapport with the athlete, and it
just it just flat out takes time. The first year
we were out here, you know, guys were they kind
of knew we were here to support them and if
they really needed something, they would come in and get
the work done. If you look at a couple of
years later, now we our whole model was a very
proactive approach when I was with Nike, and so I

(08:30):
kind of took that and I'm like proactively up and
down the range, just checking in with guys, making sure
that their you know, equipment is performing how it needs
to perform. And I'm trying to get ahead of it,
right I'm trying to seek out, Okay, is there an
opportunity for them to be better? And I'm talking with
the caddies, I'm talking with the various coaches, you know, right,
like trying to get a sense of what's happening with

(08:52):
the athlete, not only directly with the athlete, but with
the team around them, because that's how you did those relationships.
At the end of the day, like once they're like
the player, they didn't need something where they'll just come
in and try to get it done, or they're kind
of searching, and that's when the trust in that rapport
really comes into play, because if we can execute at

(09:15):
a high level and we can deliver a piece of
equipment that addresses some sort of issue that they have,
then we're winning, right, We're building confidence in the player.
They're not worried about the piece of equipment anymore. They're
going out to the golf course and they're playing golf. So,
you know, this is so different than working for one
manufacturer because we have every manufacturer.

Speaker 1 (09:33):
You have every shaft, you every you have all the heads,
you have different irons and stuff like that, so you
can basically be somewhat equipment agnostic. And a lot of
the guys that went to Live just I think everybody
knows this, a lot of the manufacturers that they were with,
you know, didn't renew. I mean DJ was with Tailor Made.
When his contractor went out, they didn't want to renew.

(09:55):
I mean there were guys that, for the first time
in their career were somewhat able to to try different stuff.
How many clubs on average do you feel like in
the old days, most companies wanted you to have in
the bag.

Speaker 2 (10:11):
I think most of those deals were somewhere between eleven
and twelve clubs. You know, maybe a big deal had thirteen,
but there was always like one for most players, there
was at least one or two pieces of equipment.

Speaker 3 (10:23):
They could kind of float around in the.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
Bag, and maybe they had to play the driver and
maybe they had to play the putter. But you know,
fairway woods were always fair game. Hybrid's utility that those
types of clubs were always fair games, so the player
could kind of search what they wanted, but they were
they were strapped to whatever it was within the portfolio
of the manufacturer they were contracted with.

Speaker 1 (10:44):
Yeah, and the other thing, I think, if you're a
rookie on any tour and you signed with a manufacturer,
you're most likely going to be playing fourteen clubs in
the bowl. And then if you play better and you
become a superstar and stuff like that, and you're going
to go to a new company. The deals I think
have historically been okay, maybe the putter is off limits,

(11:05):
maybe the driver is off limits or something like that
for the better player. But a lot of players just
had to play fourteen clubs. So now that there are
players that can tinker. What is the difference, in your opinion,
between tinkering with your equipment and maintaining your equipment, because
I think the misconception is everyone out here is if

(11:27):
they're coming into the tour van, they're tinkering and they're
looking to try something or change something. But a lot
of times it's just maintenance. So we'll get to the
tinkering part first, but just week in, week out maintenance.
And again to use the Formula one analogy, the maintenance
on the car, the maintenance on the equipment. For you
guys is what what are the players from a maintenance standpoint,

(11:50):
asking you guys to do week in and week out
at the tour line.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
Yea, So the most used pieces of equipment here the
loft and line machines, Potter left and lie iron, loft
and lie. You know, some of these players were checking
weekly because they just want to make sure they're Bryson. Yeah,
they're set. They're set right where they need to be right.
They hit a lot of golf balls. They hit it
hard off of a variety of different terrain. Sometimes it's
soft conditions, sometimes it's firm. If you're in firmer conditions,

(12:16):
the materials will move. So it's just making sure that
you have a consistent baseline and that's where they'll often lie.
Aspect of it kind of comes in and then grips.
Those are the two things that.

Speaker 1 (12:26):
Are so you're checking the losts and the lies, and
then they're looking at grips. The other thing. I don't
think people realize as well. If you travel eighteen twenty
weeks a year with your equipment, they are through where
and tear of getting on and off airplanes. Listen, a
lot of these guys, both on the PGA tour, on Live,

(12:47):
a lot of the superstars, they fly private. They're putting
their they're not even putting their equipment in a club
gulp carry. It just goes into the back of the plane.
They don't even put anything over the top of the clubs.
They just put it in the back of the But
things irons get bent, wedges get get something gets dinged
and banged. I think DJ is, in my opinion, just

(13:09):
a complete savant when it comes to loft and lies.
I mean he will sometimes say to Aja, listen, this
wedge should be going this distance. There's got to be
something off with the loft of the lie. He'll take
it to you guys who guys will do it'll be
one degree out or to. But at the tour level,
if you're if your sand wedge is supposed to be
fifty six degrees and it's fifty it's been bent to
fifty five or fifty four or it's been bent the

(13:31):
other way, Yeah, that's going to have. So when you're
checking lofts and lies, the player comes in and says, Okay,
if you're going to work with a player in the beginning,
you want to basically check all of their equipment.

Speaker 3 (13:43):
Yeah, we blueprint that we've been bluing.

Speaker 1 (13:45):
So give me the give me the blueprint, tell me
what that's all about.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
At the tour level, so I would say, like easily
in the first couple of years, every player that would
come in and we'd blueprint the bag. Right, So we're
running through the loft and lies on irons and wedges,
we're measuring them, see what they are, write them down,
and we're checking what shafts in there, what length, what swingweight,
the whole thing going through the bag.

Speaker 1 (14:05):
So you're just getting data, exactly baseline data of this
is what the player's bag is. So in future, if
their equipment gets off, Yeah, we've got a basically, or
if you're going to build them something new, if they
say listen, hey, I want to try on new edge
or something like that. One of the things I always
noticed that that you that all the reps do. But

(14:27):
if they're going to build, let's say, can I get
a new three wood? Right? The first thing that you
guys always ask is listen. You'll always come to either
the caddy or the coach and say, because the player's
hitting balls or working or practicing or on the course,
you say, listen, can I get their three wood? Measure
it weigh it so that we're trying to get Because

(14:49):
that's the other thing I think people would be fascinated by.
You're you're trying to match apples to apples, because the
last thing you want to get is have them testing
apples to oranges with they are, but the grip's got
to be the same as theirs. The swing weight's got
to be the same as there. So yeah, that data
collection blueprint, how long does that normally take for fourteen

(15:13):
clubs just to get there? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (15:15):
Fifteen to twenty minute. Yeah, we can rip through it
pretty quick. And I think the interesting thing you bring
out like a three wood right, or we're trying something new,
we use that data as a baseline exactly right, make
sure we have the right length, we have the right
swing weight, the right grip, like the things that are
immediately going to be different. But usually unless we're replacing

(15:35):
a club that's broken, that's failed, and we're just building
a peer backup, there's got to be something we're looking
to do different. And so if we're controlling eighty percent
of the variables and we go, okay, we need a
little bit more loft, we might use the exact same shaft, head, everything,
but we're chasing literally three quarters a degree more loft.

Speaker 3 (15:54):
That's it.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
Everything else is exactly the same, because that's what the
goal is, is to maybe get the ball a little
hire at a little bit of spin, and loft's going
to be that one variable that we're going to start.

Speaker 1 (16:05):
With at the tour level, both on your time on
the PGA Tour and and here on live. What is
the number one numbers from a launch monitor standpoint that
when you're looking at let's just go through irons, right.
If we're looking at irons, what are you looking at

(16:26):
and what are some things that the average golfer could
take to their kind of set up and say, Okay,
what do I want kind of my numbers to be?
So let's say you're looking at iron numbers and you're
looking at players, So you know baseline iron numbers for
a nine iron, a seven iron, and a five iron.
Are there any kind of baseline numbers you're looking at,

(16:49):
just generically from a launch and spin standpoint?

Speaker 2 (16:53):
Yeah, So I think if you took like a seven iron,
right like, we're gonna want to see a launch windows.
Very players specific and speed determined, but some are.

Speaker 1 (17:03):
But on tour, the high speed guys, there are a
group of I mean basically out here right now. Of
the fifty ish players on live. What percentage of those
guys would you categorize as high speed guys?

Speaker 2 (17:20):
I would say ninety percent of them.

Speaker 1 (17:22):
Yeah, so ninety percent are in the high speed range.
So their seven irons are all kind of going to
go a similar ish distance like there isn't really maybe
maybe Bryson can get twenty yards more, but you know,
DJ Brooks, Cam Smith, Waco, John Roll, There're seven irons

(17:42):
are all going to go within.

Speaker 2 (17:44):
Yeah, probably ten to fifteen yards of carry. If you're okay,
carry right, and that's what we're doing. So you're looking
at a launch window somewhere between probably fourteen and sixteen
depending on the athlete and how they deliver spin rates
were you know, rual thumb is basically take the you
have times to buy a thousand, so seven iron, you're
going to roughly seven thousand. You know, maybe I like

(18:06):
to maybe go a couple under that, you know, sixty
eight hundred for an average seven iron, right, and it's
six iron would be you know, fifty eight hundred, and
you just kind of take that across the board, you
know apex. You know, peak height is another element of it.
So that's where you're going to get, you know, the
speed off the face, times the launch, add the spin,
and we're going to hit peak heights. Most most guys

(18:28):
are living in that one hundred to one hundred and
twenty foot range at this speed level. For stock shots,
those numbers kind of parallel one another, whether it's a
five iron and six you know, down to your wedges,
those that launch and spin window is really pretty same.
Obviously there's a progression there, but that is going to

(18:48):
allow them to control the golf ball because that's the
name of the game out here is you use a
piece of equipment to hit a golf ball in the air,
and you have to figure out how far it goes
and how it gets there.

Speaker 1 (18:57):
I think the average golfer is obsessed with as they
should be because they don't have speed. They're obsessed with
clubhead speed the most. I think the average golfer doesn't
really spend a lot. I mean, if you tell them
what ball speed is, but everybody kind of has in
it at a pro am or something and look at
my club head speed or something like that. Yeah, But

(19:18):
at the elite tour level, I think I hear ninety
percent of the conversations around controlling the spin, so the
spin of the golf ball coming off the face, generalizing
the problems for tour players and higher speed players, and
then what you do when you're not on live your

(19:40):
day job of just fitting regular golfers. From a spin standpoint, Ben,
what does the average golfer struggle with? I mean, do
they spin it too much or do they not spin
it enough?

Speaker 3 (19:52):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (19:53):
I think it actually can go both ways. I would
say the way a lot of the product is engineered now,
a lot of them are not spinning enough and that's
how you get these irons to go so far for
the consumer is they're launching high. It's the classic high launch,
low spin. But you don't want that with a seven iron.
You just don't. You can't control it, and that I

(20:16):
would say that's probably the biggest is under spinning these irons,
just they fly in slower speeds. And to play good
golf and to play consistent golf, you absolutely have to
have the proper launch and spin ratios to control the
golf ball because it can fly to one point, but
if it doesn't stop, it doesn't do you any good.
You land it in the middle of green, goes right
to the back usually you don't want to be long.

Speaker 1 (20:37):
And then the other thing ben is from the instruction
side of things. To me, one of the big significant
differences specifically in the irons for the average golfer is
the tour player pretty much consistently has a manageable and
effective angle of attack, how much they're hitting down on

(20:59):
the ball with the seven iron. The biggest complaint I
hear from the average golfer is I don't take dimmits
other than kind of a sand wedge, maybe pitching wedge
nine iron. But I'd say over the course of three
hundred and sixty five days a year with the average golfer,
non tour player, the biggest complaint that I hear in
the biggest fault that I see from an iron standpoint,

(21:22):
is not hitting down on the golf ball enough. So
that's where I think you're talking about. The equipment now
is designed to help the golfer hit it further. You know,
lots of offset, big you know, center of gravity, big
heads and stuff like that. But if you don't hit
down on your irons, you hit these kind of flat

(21:42):
bullets because the ball doesn't launch high enough.

Speaker 2 (21:46):
Yeah, I think it depends on the player, right, it's
but you're right, like, if your shallow, you don't create
a lot of lyft. I think that's where the CG
of the heads helps with a lot of the game
improvement stuff, so they do get some, but really the
factor is that that doesn't spin either. If you don't
hit down on the golf ball, you're not creating the
spin to help one launch it high and keep it

(22:08):
up in the air with the right spin.

Speaker 1 (22:10):
And then also everybody you know, you go to every
tour event and player hits an eight iron hits it,
you know, fifteen twenty feet past the flag, I design
spins it back. The average golfer would just they love
that shot, they love seeing it, But the fact of
the matter is they just don't drive the car fast enough.

(22:31):
They don't have enough speed. So hitting down on the
golf ball with your irons as a rule of thumb,
for the average golfer is going to help them get
that higher launch and that higher.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
Spin, better spin. Yeah, and I think that's where the
club fitting element for the average player is really really important.
Make sure you get the right head that's going to
get you into the right launch window. You get the
right shaft that's going to help kick it. Even if
your club delivery isn't where it needs to be or
it's not consistent enough, if you can get the right

(23:04):
shaft to kind of release through impact, it's really not
that much different than we're trying to do out here
with the high level players. We're still trying to get
the shaft to release through impact, which keeps the head
more square and allows you to deliver the club head
to the golf ball with the proper amount of loft
to get the ball fly.

Speaker 1 (23:21):
In What percentage of recreational handicap non elite golfers. Would
you say, have never been club fitting?

Speaker 2 (23:29):
I think now a lot of people have had some
level of fitting, you know, the detail of fitting that
we do out here. Not many, right, I mean, I
think there's some outfits out there now that specialize.

Speaker 1 (23:41):
In Yeah, and then TJ too, are Superstares, Golf Galaxy,
all of these big box kind of retailers. Now you
can go in there golf tech and stuff and get fit.
So for everyone listening that, let's say you haven't. You've
got a set of golf clubs that maybe you were
given or you just kind of got as a Christmas gift,
they're not really fit for you, and you're a fifteen handicapper.

(24:04):
What is a good cheat code for a fifteen handicapper
to go in and be able to say to a
club fitter, Listen, I'm looking to invest some money in
my game. Golf is important to me as a player
and as a person, and I want to get club fitted.
I think a lot of people listening that's kind of

(24:25):
scary because they don't know what.

Speaker 3 (24:27):
Yeah, they don't know what they don't they don't know what.

Speaker 1 (24:28):
They don't know, and you know there's going to be
a lot of maybe terms. So what are some questions
that the average regular golfer can ask when they're going
to go in and get fitted for golf clubs for
the first time, or they're looking to go, Okay, my
game is improving now, right, I was at twenty and

(24:49):
now I've worked for the last couple of years. I've
been taking lessons, and there will be a point where
the instructor says, listen, I think there's some gains. I
say this all the time. Listen, you're your golf swing's improving,
you're getting better, You're hitting the golf ball further. I
think we need to look at maybe adjusting what we're
doing shaft wise, what we're doing loft and head wise.

(25:09):
So when a player goes in and says, listen, I'm
looking to make some upgrades and Mike, what are some
questions that they should be asking the fitter.

Speaker 2 (25:17):
Yeah, so the novice player is going to want to
make sure that you've got at least the right length
of the shaft, right, the right flex. You know, loft
and lie is always going to be important, just to
give you the best opportunity to deliver ahead square and
then generally like at least a head that's trending to help.

Speaker 3 (25:36):
You get the ball flying.

Speaker 2 (25:37):
The other part is for especially for the more novice player,
is making sure they have the right assortment of clubs.

Speaker 1 (25:43):
Yeah, so the set makeup. Give me what you think
for let's say a kind of ten to twenty handicap. Yeah,
what should they be looking at from a bag set up?
Let's start with the wedges. So average guys on the
PG eight, on the pur Live or any of the
big tours, Yeah, LPG most players now are kind of

(26:04):
in that three to four wedge category. Do you think
that's something that kind of the ten to twenty handicappers
should be looking at?

Speaker 2 (26:12):
I so, I actually do, partly because of the way
the irons are engineered. So if you kind of look
from the middle of the bag out, a lot of
these irons have stronger lofts, right, So you're looking at
sometimes twenty eight to thirty degrees loft seven irons.

Speaker 1 (26:28):
So it's a an old school standard would have.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
Been probably thirty four to thirty five.

Speaker 3 (26:33):
Right.

Speaker 2 (26:34):
Most of the guys out here with Live or somewhere between,
most of them are probably right around thirty four to three.

Speaker 1 (26:40):
And I think the tour guys on the PG it
would be around the same.

Speaker 2 (26:42):
So the waterfall effective when you have an iron that's
strung like that is it gets down to the wedge.
The pitching wedge, which would be kind of your first wedge,
can sometimes be forty two forty one, like they're really
really strong, and.

Speaker 1 (26:54):
It used to be right around forty eight forty nine.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
Right, Yeah, so you just buy the evolution of tech
anology is going to suggest that you probably need to
have a gap wedge that's somewhere between forty eight and
fifty degrees, depending on what the loft of your pitching wedges,
and then you're gonna want fifty.

Speaker 3 (27:11):
Fours in fifty eights.

Speaker 2 (27:14):
I think in the retail space for more novice are
much more playable than the old school fifty six and six.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
I think having a fifty four versus a fifty six
is the difference in the loft is going to if
you miss it, you have the opportunity hit it a
lot further. But then I agree with you. I think
a lot of players I see, you know, in that
kind of ten to twenty handicap range, they've got a
sixty degree wedge in their bag. They're trying to hit
it really really hard. It balloons, it spins way up,

(27:42):
and it doesn't go anywhere. So that kind of good
kind of four degree loft increment. So I think a
good rule if you're going to go fifty six sixty
fifty four fifty eight. I do see sometimes you get
these kind of big, kind of barren valleys where the
loss are just way off. They've got these dead zones

(28:03):
in their wedge set up, they've got a sixty, and
then they're kind of all over the board, So making
sure those losts fifty four fifty eight. And then you know,
from an iron standpoint, you know, a ten to twenty
handicapper that doesn't have a tremendous amount of speed, what
would you think would be kind of the threshold of
their last real iron before we get into kind of

(28:24):
the hybrid.

Speaker 2 (28:25):
Yeah, it's probably somewhere. It's five four iron somewhere in there.
I mean, you might start progressing at a five iron.
I would say four iron is a good breaking point
where you're going to either have a utility iron or
a hybrid or a lofted wood.

Speaker 1 (28:38):
It's hard for the average goal for to get a
four iron.

Speaker 3 (28:41):
Into the air and it's speed driven.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
It's speed they confidence because you look at it and
it's a straight, straight, or faced blade. The lofts are
stronger on it, so it might be twenty one degrees, but.

Speaker 1 (28:51):
It still looks when you look down at it like
it's not going to get in the air. Yes, you're
going to want to hang back because one from a
swing standpoint, you're not getting the golf ball in the air. Optically,
you feel like, okay to get it in the air
and need to swing up on it. But I've talked
about this on the pod before. The easiest way to
make your iron game better is to try and hit
more down on your irons. But most golfers are coming

(29:15):
over the top of it and hitting down on it
with the irons, and that got so I think the
hybrid world and the utility iron for the majority. If
you're in the ten to twenty handicap range and you've
got a four iron in your bag and a three
iron in your bag, that's just that's crazy. Yeah, you're
just never going to use those. So you've got two

(29:36):
clubs in your bag that one don't perform and as
a result of them not performing, you basically stay away
from them. So you've got two dead clubs in your
bag that never get used.

Speaker 2 (29:49):
Yeah, Or if you get stuck in that one hundred
and eighty to two hundred yard position which you're going
to live in, you don't have a tool, So throw
a tool there that's useful. Hybrid by nine wood. Those
are going to be much easier to get the ball
in the air and hit straighter.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
Let's talk about driver fitting because I think everybody listening
wants to hit the golf ball further at the tour level.
You mentioned it, I've mentioned it before, but the holy
grail of driver fitting is high launch, low spin. Yeah right,
I think a lot of people know that. Can you
golf for dummies dumb that down for everyone listening and

(30:29):
say what is that? What does that mean? And why
is that the holy grail?

Speaker 3 (30:35):
Yeah? So think about well, first of all.

Speaker 1 (30:38):
The driver. The difference between the driver and the iron
is the iron is on the ground, So you've got
to get the golf ball that's on the ground in
the air. The driver is already in the air.

Speaker 3 (30:48):
It's on a t Yeah it is.

Speaker 2 (30:51):
And I think you know, an athlete's club. Delivery is
going to dictate how much lofted impact they're gonna you know, deliver.
So some players may hit up on it more and
they are looking at a very low lofted part to
get at the end of the day, we want to
launch it somewhere between eleven and thirteen degrees and probably

(31:12):
for a high level player, for a high speedy speed player,
somewhere between twenty one and twenty four hundred.

Speaker 1 (31:18):
DJ likes to hang. Given his delivery, he likes to
hang between eighteen hundred and twenty two hundred. Anything in
that range is really really good for him because he
has speed because of the way that he delivers, whereas
someone else that is an elite player that plays professional golf,

(31:38):
like a guy that doesn't have the kind of speed
that the DJ has that delivers it very different. Let's
say a guy like Honor Bond Lahiri. Bond wants it
to spin kind of where Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:48):
He's looking at the low two thousands.

Speaker 3 (31:50):
Yeah, absolutely, And.

Speaker 2 (31:53):
Part of it is the ability to work the golf
ball at that The spin rates right, So if you
hit a draw, it's going to come down a little bit.
You hit a fade, it's going to come up a
little bit. Generally speaking, DJ hits a flat fade. It's
pretty unique. So his fad probably spins about twenty two right.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
When he's playing his best, he's right around two thousand. Yeah, Brooks,
who has a similar shape. They both hit fades, but
Brooks hits a little bit more down on it left
then then and down and left on it then DJ.
DJ's kind of angle of attack, you know, is kind
of around that kind of point five to zero. Whereas
when Brooks was playing his best of the years that

(32:28):
I worked with him, you know, with the driver he
was when he was winning Major, he was one and
a half degree down on it. But the spin rate
for the regular golfer, they're tending to spin the golf
ball too much.

Speaker 2 (32:40):
Yeah, I think that with the driver, with the Yeah,
because of club deliveries, you start to swing it farther
left with an open face, you're you might as well
be playing pick about him and hitting down on it
and hitting Yeah, those are all spin creating. Now that
the product is all engineered to help keep the head
more stable through impact, If you can keep the face
more square relative to the path that it's being delivered on,

(33:03):
it'll spin less, and it will you know, your start
line will be a little bit tighter even if it's
a little bit left because your path has left. If
the head is relatively square to that, it will hold
that line a little bit better. It still may fade back,
but it's not going to be a huge slice. So
the fitting aspect of that is making sure that you
you're able to control the face impact relative to your path.

(33:27):
This is definitely getting into your Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:29):
I mean one of the things that I think everybody
looks at the first time they get on a launch monitor.
They're gonna they're gonna look at their club at speed
and they're going to say, Okay, how can I get
my clubhet speed faster. I've talked about this on on
the pod before. I was out at Titleist years ago
when they were kind of one of the first ones
to kind of have their own kind of proprietary launch
monitor technologies, is pre track man days. Sof and I

(33:51):
was there. They were looking at club at speed numbers
with a driver and a player said, Okay, how do
I get more clubhead speed number? How do I get
how do I increase my club umber? And I never
will forget this. The player said, why don't you just
try and work on having that clubhead speed be consistent
every time you hit it. The immediate thing is how
do I get more clubhead speed? What we're all trying

(34:12):
to do at this level is how do we make
what the player does consistent? And he does it all
of the time. When you get too much spin with
the driver the golf ball, that's when the average golfer
sees that ball kind of go up and lift and
then keep lifting and ballooning. For the tour player, the

(34:33):
ball gets out to an apex and doesn't rise and
stays there. It looks like it just gets to kind
of thirty six thousand feet and they turn the seat
belt sign off and then the ball just flies. So
when an average golfer because and the other thing loft, ben,
I see so many players playing with not enough loft.

(34:56):
They have low lofted drivers. DJ kind of his loft
is kind of around.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
Yeah, he is like an if you look at the
nominal piece of it, like what it actually is, it's
probably around eleven eleven.

Speaker 3 (35:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:08):
Take that into yesterday. Five minutes before Bryson was going out,
he had his guy Connor with the backpack and he was.
It was colder yesterday than it was the first round.
First round it was warmer, so he was messing around
with driver heads based off of the temperature and the
ball and he was torn around. So DJ's hitting balls

(35:30):
next to him. He's got an eleven degree driver. Bryson
put a five degree driver, and I mean that is
a staggering distance. That is a completely different animal based
off of the way that they deliver the golf club.

Speaker 2 (35:48):
Yeah, yeah, and yeah, Bryson sits in that five and
a half six degree window most of the time.

Speaker 1 (35:54):
Again, that ten to twenty handicap range. What is in
your opinion the no go threshold of two little loft
that you wouldn't want to go less. You need to
have more loft than this number, and you wouldn't want
to go lower than this number.

Speaker 2 (36:14):
I don't think you really want to be below nine.
I mean, even like guys who have some speed, some
amateurs that have the speed and deliver fairly neutral. You know,
it's harder to hit it straight with less loft, right,
So the if you have more loft while you hit
a sandwich straight or because it has more loft, right,
So it works the same with the with the driver.

Speaker 3 (36:34):
You just have to be really good.

Speaker 2 (36:36):
At controlling the spin because the spin is is going
to get the rise, but it's also going to create
the curving. And so it's it's all about again, it's
the right it's the right launch, it's the right spin.

Speaker 1 (36:49):
What is the.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
Player, and it's it's optimal for the player. You can
paint these wide pitchers of Yeah, somewhere between ten and
twelve degrees is where the actual loft on the golf
club needs to be. But it's going to vary based
on club delivery. You know, spin rates. If you look
if you just threw a dart and you're like, what's

(37:10):
optimal for the vast golf space.

Speaker 3 (37:13):
It's launch it.

Speaker 2 (37:14):
Let's launch it at eleven degrees and twenty five hundred
and you could apply that to almost any spin rate
or speed.

Speaker 1 (37:20):
Range and any caliber of players.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
Yeah, and it's like, okay, that's going to be in played.

Speaker 1 (37:24):
So that would be a good cheat code if you
ever Yeah, if you ever get on a launch monitor
and you're looking at your numbers, optimal would be kind
of launching it really eleven and above and spinning.

Speaker 3 (37:36):
It at mid two thousands.

Speaker 1 (37:39):
Yeah, twenty five to twenty eight.

Speaker 3 (37:41):
You're not going to get in too much trouble. You're
not going to leave a ton on the on the table, and.

Speaker 2 (37:45):
You're not going to you know, come up really really
short if you're spinning at twenty eight hundred and you
miss it like it's totally fine.

Speaker 1 (37:53):
One of the things that I've seen ben when when
players get fitted for drivers and they get a driver
across the board, whether it's to door player or non
tour player, when they do get a driver that is
fitted for their game, and what they do the center
contact with the driver, they start to hit it less
off the heel and less off the tow. They're hitting

(38:15):
it more in the center of the face. And through
the launch monitor technology, now I look probably more at
ball speed numbers with the driver than I do with
clubby speed numbers, because if you're catching it more in
the center of the face, the speed at which the
ball is coming off the face, that ball speed number
will jump. And if the ball speed number jumps, the

(38:38):
amount of side spin and curve diminishes. So I think
everybody that is slicing the golf ball, you get on
a launch monitor, and we do see sometimes that six
seven eight degree left path, the face is hanging wide open,
and it's hard for them to then control the spin.
Everybody thinks, Okay, I want to get my path to

(39:01):
the right. That's incredibly hard for a lot of players
to do is to get that path way to the right.
So I always look at the path number and think, okay,
if there's six seven degrees left with the path, if
we can just get that in half, dial that back
to maybe three, they're still going to be left, but

(39:23):
they're going to catch it more in the center of
the face. They're going to catch it more in the
middle of the golf club. Then it's going to curve less.

Speaker 2 (39:30):
Yeah, I think you know, from all the experience I
have working with high level players and the consumer. Yeah,
if you can narrow down the left right, usually the
face doesn't get hung as far open. So it's it's
a win win. You don't all of a sudden go
from swinging at seven left to three left, but the
face stays the same amount open.

Speaker 1 (39:49):
Well, I think I'm always trying to have players, when
they look at their path numbers right, how much that
can affect the ball speed. So you've got that path
with the driver kind of in that six seven, eight
degrees left. You're hitting down on it, You're going to
struggle to control the face. You're going to get a
lot of heel strikes, a lot of toes strikes. You're
not going to hit it in the center of the face.
So the more you're missing the center of the face,

(40:11):
more goes, you know, kind of all over the place.
And I think when a player gets a driver that's
fitted for what they do, regardless of their handicap level,
they're going to hit it more in the center of
the face. And I've seen the ball speed numbers jump,
so not necessarily they hit it further because they're catching
it more in the center of the face. It's curving less.
But when that ball speed number jumps, the club head

(40:33):
speed number sometimes goes down maybe a mile a mile
and a half, but they hit it ten to fifteen
yards further because they're catching it more in the center
of the face. That relationship between getting a set of
golf clubs as you're changing your golf swing, that's a
thing that I always get asked by the average golfer

(40:53):
as well, Hey, I want to get a new set
of golf clubs. I feel like my golf seeing how
can I somewhat future proof my bag because it's expensive
to buy golf. You know, we're so spoiled out here
on tour where somebody wants, you know, Bryson wants, you know,
three drivers. You can make them three drivers. He wants

(41:14):
to try three three woods. You can make them the
average golf for it. They just don't have the money
to be able to do that. How can you future
proof a set of golf clubs if you're looking to
get a new one?

Speaker 2 (41:24):
Yeah, I think if you look at the big picture
of using what you have or adding on to it,
like using the technologies out there, using TrackMan, using foresight
to see like look at the data see see you
know you talk about boss speed, Right, that's an efficiency number.
That's how solid you're striking it. And if one is

(41:45):
club delivery is an element of it, right, But how
the shaft you know, reacts and releases with the way
you deliver the clubhead. So how's the part moving through
impact to give you that efficiency? So if you can
use the technology out there to make sure that it
always comes back down the launching its ano the right window.

Speaker 3 (42:03):
But the efficiency of the strike is how you can sit.

Speaker 2 (42:07):
There and build your own golf bag to maximize what
your potential is going to be.

Speaker 1 (42:13):
How different in twenty twenty five is the equipment that
the regular golfer, non tour access player. How different Let's
say a driver, So you're going to get a new
driver from whatever manufacturer. You go to one of the
big box stores and you're going to buy this driver. Right,

(42:33):
I've just used the company that you know that I'm
a field cover. You're going to go get a Cobra driver.
You're going to get go get fit for it. How
different is that driver versus the driver that Ricky Fowler
is Billy? Because to me, I look at you can
you can as just a regular human being if you
can afford it, you can go buy a Ferrari, which

(42:55):
is a Lamborghini, which are some of the fastest most
car that you buy. And then there's a Formula one
race car. So how different is the equipment in twenty
twenty five? And then kind of do a deep dive
into I think it's probably more so with drivers than
any what you're doing on the inside of a driver

(43:15):
that I think a lot of people don't even have
a concept that that is a part.

Speaker 2 (43:18):
Yeah, I think the heart and soul of let's use
the driver for example, Right, is you know, a tour
part versus a consumer part of what you would get
at any of the golf shops. It's the same. The
difference is the ability to tune it for the player. Right,
And so I think you know stuff out on tour.

Speaker 3 (43:35):
We have the.

Speaker 2 (43:36):
Tools and the resources to decide, you know, does one
head have a quarter degree more loft or a half
a degree more face angle than an X Right, if
you walk into a golf shop, you look at five
drivers that are all built exactly the same all.

Speaker 1 (43:51):
So you pick up a ten point five degree head,
it's going to be the heads, all five of them
are going to be ten point five. They're all going
to tend to be forty five in long. So there
is this saaneness to that.

Speaker 3 (44:02):
There's the sameness to them.

Speaker 2 (44:03):
But if you really dive a little bit deeper and
you start really getting technical with the heads, they all
sit fractionally different. They're all a little snowflakes. And so
we can go through our drawers and cherry pig heads
specifically for the player.

Speaker 1 (44:19):
Some players want to see more loft with the driver.
Some people don't. Some people want the driver to sit
a little bit more open, some people like to have
it to a little bit more close. So how do
you adjust a driver because, like you said, the average
golfer is just going to go pick a driver. They
don't really know what they like. So how do you

(44:41):
then adjust the driver head to look like it has
more loft, to look like it doesn't have more loft,
to look like it has more face doesn't, And then
what you're doing on the inside of the driver with
the hot melt stuff, because I just find that fascinating.

Speaker 2 (44:58):
Okay, Yeah, So when we talk about fine tune and
the driver for the player, like I'm always going to
start by just cherry picking a head that's going to
be closest to the loft and face angle that we want,
and then we can tune them with the adapters. You know,
every manufacturer has an adjustable adapter, so sometimes we'll use
that as a tool. But when we talk about like
the guts of the driver and manipulating, maybe we want

(45:19):
to kill an extra two hundred RPMs of spin, Maybe
want to make it slightly more draw biased or fade bias.

Speaker 3 (45:25):
We use a.

Speaker 2 (45:26):
Material it's out here in the dustry. It's called hot
melt or rat glue, and we can inject that Basically,
it's a hot glue, sticky glue into the head to
really tune you know, it can tune the acoustics, it
can tune the launch and spin characteristics. It can change
the feel of the head itself.

Speaker 1 (45:44):
And the hot mild is basically weight.

Speaker 2 (45:46):
Yeah, it adds weight. Yeah, there's a weight element to it.
But it's a kind of a sticky glue that we
use a hot gun and then you inject it where
straight into the head.

Speaker 1 (45:58):
So for a driver head, it's normally that port where
you can eject it is kind of down where.

Speaker 2 (46:03):
Yeah, so sometimes you can go into the hozzle. Usually
there's like a small little hole around the hozzle cavity.
Some of the drivers you can go right through the
weight ports. You know, a CALWOI driver's got several weight
ports and you can go right through those parts. And
so if we want to make a driver low spin,
for example, we're going to move that weight more forward

(46:25):
into the head, so it will kind of move the
CG just slightly more forward. When you do that, you
can put it closer to the face. You could put
it up on the crown, but it moves the center
gravity just enough to create a slightly different spin characteristic.
So if we need to knock off one hundred and
fifty two hundred RPMs of spin, we can do that
with the glue if we can get enough in there.

(46:46):
You know, throwing a gram or two doesn't really do anything.
If we throw four or five grams in there, then
it starts to manipulate.

Speaker 1 (46:53):
And I've watched you when you guys shoot the gun
into the head. You'll take the head and then you'll
tilt the head to where wherever you want that glue
to go. And then the glue goes there, it hardens
and it settles and it stays there, and it adds
that different component I'm always fascinated by. And the one
thing that you guys will always say is hey, for
us as the coach, you'll always ask if a player

(47:16):
is working on driver, hey, what does he want the
driver to do? Meaning what shape does he want to do?
And where does he what? Where does he not want
the miss to go? Okay? So like for dj D
doesn't want the golf ball, for fade guys, they don't
want the golf ball going left for the draw guys,
they don't like the golf ball is going right. So
that kind of moving around the glue, that is to
me like when they bring the cars into the garage

(47:39):
and they just do a little tweak in the setup, right,
they change kind of you know, the angle or kind
of the way the car is going based off of
the track. Sound Wise, how important do you think sound
is to club fitting?

Speaker 2 (47:56):
To club fitting, it's not really that important because it
that's just a result of the ball hitting the space.

Speaker 3 (48:03):
It's acoustics.

Speaker 2 (48:04):
But generally speaking, you know, most of these guys want
to hear kind of a Duller Thudier sound. That's just
what they grew up playing with. And normally like the
high pitch sound. And you know, there's been some ping
drivers from time to time that get really high pitched,
and you know, I don't think the player hears that

(48:26):
as much as the people around them, to be honest.

Speaker 1 (48:29):
So then they say, man, that driver's loud, and then
the player starts thinking, then a loud driver.

Speaker 3 (48:33):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (48:34):
So the sound doesn't change really performance, it's just a
result of the engineering. But that hot glue can dull
out that sound and make it a little bit better.
You know, I think the other really, when you talk
about these little fine tuning elements of the equipment, light
angle is a really big piece. So a li angle

(48:55):
is going to dictate your start line. So when you
talk about a driver, you know, if a player, if
DJ is missing it a little bit left and it's
is it The question is is it is it a
start line miss left or is it you know, is
the head starting left and going left right. So there's
there's a difference there and how we would tune the equipment.

(49:18):
You know, if the start line is a little left,
we may want to take a club and go a
little bit flatter with it to move the start line
a little bit farther.

Speaker 3 (49:25):
Right.

Speaker 1 (49:28):
Shaft technology with the driver, I think heads are hugely important,
getting the right loft, getting the right lot, you know,
that whole set up. But I think for the average golfer,
there just there's I mean, there's only a certain amount
of driver heads on the market right from every manufacturer.
So you know, every manufacturer will make a certain amount

(49:48):
of driver heads, so they'll have a high spin and
low spin and stuff. They might be what do you
think three or four heads in the product line across
the board. There are a million different shafts you can try, right,
Why is scheft technology so important and what are in
your opinion, working with the everyday golfer, what are the

(50:12):
issues that they struggle with from a shaft wise and
from the tour level, what do they struggle with?

Speaker 2 (50:17):
Yeah, it's the timing device. It's what goes from the
human body, from your hands to.

Speaker 3 (50:22):
The club head.

Speaker 2 (50:23):
It's that shaft, especially in a driver, it's the longest shaft.

Speaker 1 (50:26):
In the timing device. I've never heard anyone describe a
shaft as a timing device.

Speaker 2 (50:31):
So you have to get that shaft to release through
the impact zone. So the shaft, you know, of course
it can control launch and spin, but it impacts direction.
So again kind of back to the start line, all
these little tweaks like if I give you, if I
give a player a shaft that releases a little bit later,
it's going to push the start line right right.

Speaker 3 (50:51):
If it releases earlier, it's.

Speaker 2 (50:52):
Probably going to move it left. So again, it's matching up.
It's working with the player, it's the coach. It's what
are the what is the objective and how do we
optimize that right? It's no different with the everyday consumer.
It's exactly the same. It's figure out the timing device.
How do we put a piece of equipment into a
player's hand where the shaft releases through the impact zone,

(51:13):
delivering the head as square as possible to get it
to fly in the air.

Speaker 1 (51:17):
Any generalizations you see at the recreational, non elite player
shaft wise with the driver, that you see a generalization
on the bad side.

Speaker 2 (51:30):
I would say, well, generalization, I think you're a player
is going to benefit from a shaft that plays a
little bit stiffer than it is too soft, because I
think it's going to give you more stability through impact. Now,
when you start to fine tune it, you don't If
you're only swinging a driver at ninety five miles an hour,
you don't want to be swinging an extra stiff, right.
I'm talking about like small hedges. If you are a

(51:51):
quick tempoed golfer and you swing it at one hundred
and two with a driver, and really the threshold for
an extra stiff is one hundred and seven to one
hundred and eight, but you have a fast tempo and
you're kind of quick and jerking, you put a harder
load on it, stiffer, more stable, is going to give
you a better chance of delivering that head to the
ball more squarely.

Speaker 3 (52:08):
Right.

Speaker 2 (52:09):
If you're somebody who has lower speed, yeah, you're going
to want a shaft that's going to be a little
bit more active to help maybe get you a little
bit more kick at the bottom.

Speaker 1 (52:17):
I think everybody is kind of that auto flex that
came out that Korean you know, one shaft you had
to with the pink that you said to mortgage your
house to be able to afford. I think everybody, you know, imitation,
everybody imitates everything. Every manufacturer now has kind of like
a really good game improvement driver shaft for the older

(52:38):
golfer that's going to give them a lot of kick,
that's going to give them a little bit more speed
at the bottom, and things like that. But from a
shaft standpoint length wise, for just the everyday golfer at
the tour level, what do you feel like most people's
driver lengths are.

Speaker 2 (52:56):
Somewhere between forty four and three quarters and forty five
forty five.

Speaker 1 (53:00):
Anybody over other than Bryson going longer.

Speaker 2 (53:03):
There's a few, not many, very small percentage of guys
really kind of going over that threshold.

Speaker 1 (53:09):
Because I do see some and some recreational fifteen twenty
handicaps are trying to hit the golf ball further that
come in with a forty six inch driver, and I'm like, dude,
what are you doing?

Speaker 2 (53:18):
You can you can hit it further every once in
a while, but I yeah, it's rule with thumb. I'm
always all of our clients, we're we're pushing to shorter.
We're gonna go more tour standard because it's easier to
find the middle of the face.

Speaker 1 (53:31):
The longer the golf club, Yeah, the length of the shaft,
the harder. It's Yeah, the car might be fast, but
if you can't get the car around the track with Actually,
to me, that is what I'm always thinking about, is
from a speed standpoint. Yes, speed is important, but speed
doesn't do you any good if you can't get the
car around the track without crashing.

Speaker 2 (53:52):
If you can be efficient with what you have, you're
gonna win. And you know this is true probably any
golf course in the world. Right, if you hit it
in the fairway, it's the ball's going to go farther.
The fairways are faster than the rough so hit it solid,
be efficient with what you have, put it in play
and find it.

Speaker 1 (54:12):
Do you think it's important for a fifteen handicapper to
maybe once a year get on a launch monitor and
get some baseline numbers so that when they are playing
good or they're not playing good, they can look at
those numbers. But also from a club fitting standpoint. Hey,
you know, i was a fifteen at the beginning of

(54:33):
this year. I'm now down to you know, I've been
working hard, I've been playing a lot. I'm now down
to a twelve. Let me go ahead and look at
what my numbers are with my driver. Am I hitting
the golf ball? You know, as my club at speed increased,
as my spin? What is it doing now versus what
it was doing six months ago to a year.

Speaker 2 (54:51):
Yeah, if you want to be smart, I think you
want to create a baseline. When you're swinging it pretty
good and you're hitting it pretty solid, see what your
path face to path, club head speed, you know, your
efficiency numbers look like. And then yeah, check it every
six to eight months and see like, if you're trying
to get better and you're working with a coach and
you're in the gym right and you have a let's

(55:12):
use a driver club head speed as a baseline at
one hundred miles an hour, and you're physically trying to
get better through better body movement and just physically more fitness.
And now you're moving that driver at one hundred and
five hundred and six miles an hour. That's going to
impact launch and spin and maybe the equipment that you need.
But you have a metric, you've got a baseline from
where you were maybe six to eight months ago of improvement,

(55:35):
and if you start to go through these different thresholds
with speed, that's going to start to impact you know,
maybe what kind of equipment you would need. But it
also you can go the other way, right, if you
look at and you're not hitting it very good, but
you have a baseline of when you were hitting good.
And let's say you're down two degrees left, you know,
a degree and a half, and the face is relatively square,

(55:57):
and that's when you're hitting it pretty good. But all
of a sudden, you're swinging it more left and more
down and you're hitting it not very good. At least
you can sit there and go, Okay, it's not the equipment.
The equipment didn't really change my golf swings changed, so
you can put the time and energy into adjusting your
golf swing and trying to get back on track to
where you were swinging it good. I think that's where
the technology is really helpful is you can create baselines

(56:18):
so you can you don't even have to own the technology, right,
you can go to a lot of these shops or
find a coach that has it. Capture that data, put it,
you know.

Speaker 1 (56:27):
Put it in your phone, put it in your notes,
and so you've got it.

Speaker 3 (56:30):
And you've got a reference point.

Speaker 1 (56:32):
Start to finish. If a player, let's say Bryson wants
you to come in here and says, listen, want you
to build me a new driver. Okay, start to finish
if you don't have any distractions. How long is that process?
Take and talk me through the new build process of

(56:52):
building a new driver. But start to finish.

Speaker 2 (56:55):
How so I would say, start to finish, start from
the player walks into where they can walk out and
hit it. Temperature dependent because of the glue keyring is
a little bit of a variable. But if it's warm, forty.

Speaker 1 (57:07):
Five minutes, forty.

Speaker 2 (57:08):
Five minutes, so we're going to take a few minutes
and we're gonna cherry pick the heads. We probably already
know what the shaft is. We already have the data,
so we know how much we have to tip it.
That you know what is tipping, So it's raw. Shafts
generally are about forty six inches, right, So if you
shorten just the tip section of that shaft, it makes

(57:29):
the tip section of it a little bit stiffer.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
So the tip section the part that goes into the.

Speaker 2 (57:34):
Clott into the head. Yeah, so we're shortening it. So
big picture, a little shaft one oh one. Shafts are
broken up into like three different parts. There's the tip, mid,
and butt. So the tip section is engineered in a
certain way that you shorten that eight to ten inch window, right,
it's going to make that part of the shaft a
little bit stiffer without impacting the rest of it. So

(57:56):
it generally gives you more stability in the bottom of
the golf club, which helps help you hit a little
bit straighter.

Speaker 3 (58:04):
So we'll we'll tip it.

Speaker 2 (58:05):
We'll prep the shaft so we'll scrape the paint off
of it, make sure it's nice and clean, kind of
stand it up to create a little bit of roughness.
So when we use the epoxy, it kind of gets
into the fibers.

Speaker 1 (58:17):
Of and helps it stick.

Speaker 2 (58:18):
And helps it stick better, and we'll rough up the
inside of the adapter that we're also using. Right, So
mix the glue, throw a little stand in there, make
it nice, tape fit, slam it together and now it's
just time.

Speaker 3 (58:30):
It's a little it's just waiting.

Speaker 1 (58:31):
Yeah. So there's like a it's like there's like a
wall in this tour truck and if someone there's clubs
and that one's that one's still drying. And then so
the caddio will come back in because the player will
be like, Yo, we're's this driver. They want me to
try the caddy or meal come in. You'll go no, no,
give it five more minutes, some more. We're waiting for
it to drive. So then you then figure out grips.

(58:52):
Everybody's grips are different. There are some players that just
put the grip on and one wrap and then but
DJ's very specific in so DJ's wrapping on his iron
or on his clubs are.

Speaker 3 (59:06):
What Yeah, so he's got a build up in the
right hand.

Speaker 2 (59:09):
So we'll take So a grip is roughly eleven inches
or so We'll take half of a piece of a
tape and we'll layer that into the right hand only right,
so we'll kind of stagger the tape and then we'll
go over it a few times with some other tape,
so the right hand is slightly bigger than.

Speaker 1 (59:25):
Are there some guys that like left hand bigger?

Speaker 3 (59:27):
No, I have not really.

Speaker 2 (59:29):
There might be one or two guys that kind of reverse.

Speaker 1 (59:32):
But most guys, if they are going to have something different, yeah, they're.

Speaker 3 (59:35):
Gonna build it up right.

Speaker 2 (59:36):
Paul Casey's an example of that, where we have three
extra pieces in the right hand and it's all staggered differently,
and then another piece that goes right on the top
of it. You know, a guy like Thomas Peters has
got seven raps underneath a mid sized grip, so it's
all personalized.

Speaker 1 (59:52):
But again, then that goes back to what we talked
about at the beginning of the pod, was you build
that relationship with the player where if the player knows
that you can build them a golf club number one
that's going to work, but also get the grip component
right so it feels right as well, they then have
the confidence for you to go, hey, no, no, you
build this for me, you know what I like. And

(01:00:15):
they can put it down and it feels good in
their hands, and it looks good, and it looks the
way they want to.

Speaker 2 (01:00:19):
Get the grip wrong and the swingweight balance point wrong.
They won't even hit it. Yeah, they just pick it
up and they're like, this doesn't fit.

Speaker 1 (01:00:27):
They immediately know that it's just wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:00:29):
Yeah, so we you know, we never let that. I
can't at least try to. But yeah, like so once
they poxy's dry, then we cut it to the proper
length and we put the grip on and you know,
you know, POxy takes twenty minutes, it takes another ten
twelve to dry.

Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
Sometimes you'll come out and you'll put the club on
the player's bag and the first thing the player asks
is can I hit this now? And you'll say give
it five minutes of the grip or you'll say, yeah,
you can go with it now. They always want to
hit it immediately, and they always don't want to wait
long enough for everything to dry because they have no patience.

(01:01:10):
Who's the hardest type of player to work with from
a club fitting standpoint.

Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
Guys who have a unique sense of feel, Because feel
is not something.

Speaker 3 (01:01:21):
You can measure necessarily right.

Speaker 2 (01:01:22):
You can measure swing weight, but you know, when you
talk about the shaft feel or impact feel that a
player has, it's it's very subjective.

Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
It's the holy great. It's the only I always say
to the guys, listen, you are the only one that
can tell us what's going on with the players. I
would say, you're the only one that can tell us.
We can never get into your body. I can look,
I've seen, you know, with the guys that I work with,
I've seen thousands upon thousands upon them. I've worked with
DJ since twenty twelve. I mean, the amount of golf

(01:01:55):
swings that I've watched him make in practice, in practice, round,
in off weeks and tournament weeks is staggering. The amount
of ales I've seen. But I will never be able
to feel what he feels. You've built thousands upon thousands
of golf clubs for players, but you can only build

(01:02:17):
them to the way that they tell you they want
it built, and then give it to them, and then
ultimately they're the They're the driver of the car. They're
going to come in and go. The car feels loose,
the car doesn't feel like this. If you watch Drive
to Survive or anything. They'll come in and the engineers
so like the cars, same set up as we had
last time. They're like, it feels terrible. It feels terrible.

Speaker 2 (01:02:37):
So we had a scenario this week. This is a
good example of like that that fine tuning element. Right,
So we're building back up three woods fur Lahiri and
we take it out there and we hit it and
it's fine, pretty good, and he's like, it just doesn't
feel quite right. And so I'm like, all right, well,
let's move some weight around. And so sometimes before we
maybe hot melt something, we'll use lead tape and let's

(01:02:57):
pull a little weight out from the front because it
had an adjust them a weight in the front of
the head.

Speaker 3 (01:03:02):
Light that up. Put a little weight back.

Speaker 2 (01:03:04):
Let's see if we get the launch and spin and
get the head to move the way you're looking to
do it. So we we do that. It was a
terrible experiment. It didn't work, and I was like, all right, well,
let me try this. So I take that same piece
of tape, the same four grams, and I put it.

Speaker 3 (01:03:18):
Into the heel.

Speaker 2 (01:03:19):
I literally moved it from the back of the head
into the heel and all of a sudden, it was perfect.
The head started to release exactly how he wanted it to.

Speaker 3 (01:03:28):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:03:28):
We didn't change the weight overall, right, sometimes if you
go a little bit heavier, a little bit or lighter,
it will change how the shaft deflects. We didn't change
any of that. All we did is change where the
weight was in the head and what he was feeling
down through impact, how he was controlling the face of impact,
and all of a sudden, it was perfect.

Speaker 1 (01:03:46):
It's a tiny, tiny adjustment, but at this level, the
players are so in tune to what they do, what
they feel, and what they want to feel, and what
they want on a c the Bryson experiment, I'm obviously
Bryson is a very unique golfer. He's a very unique person.

(01:04:09):
He's an incredibly demanding person on his equipment. I think
Bryson's always looking for unicorns, specifically with the drivers. I've
watched him go through fifteen twenty different heads in one
practice session and stuff the rabbit hole that Bryson can
co go down. In your opinion, as someone who is

(01:04:31):
on that side of things, there's the technical side of
what he's doing, but I think Bryson's trying to match.
It's a science experiment, and he's trying to match a
very unique technique of swinging the golf club and delivering
the golf club. And he's asking a lot of his equipment.
What's that experience been like with Bryce? What have you

(01:04:51):
learned from being around Bryson from a club build and
fit standpoint that you didn't know?

Speaker 3 (01:05:00):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:05:01):
I think the one thing, especially actually the last couple
of weeks, because he's been doing a lot of ball testing. Yeah, right,
And so the one thing that really has come to light,
I would say, in the club fitting world, and this
is all about using these pieces of equipment to get
the ball into the air to go somewhere. You have
to control the actual golf ball. That's actually the name

(01:05:24):
of the game. And I think with all the ball
testing that he's done, in some small tweaks with his equipment,
you know, and I'm small and say small, right, he
might be modifying the loft by a degree again to
get the right spin ratios to control the golf ball.
I think that's the one thing that I've really learned

(01:05:45):
the last couple of weeks is how important it is
to control the golf ball because if you can't control it,
which he's had a little bit of a difficult time doing,
especially experimenting with these balls that launch and spend differently
than what he's been playing the last I don't know,
eighteen months.

Speaker 3 (01:06:03):
Is he is.

Speaker 2 (01:06:04):
Having a harder time controlling how far it goes downwind,
how far it goes into the wind, like those types
of things. Is It's really interesting. I think his golf
swing is constantly evolving. It may look the same, but
where it is in space, at the speed that he
delivers it, his fraction for areas like so so small,

(01:06:25):
so small, it's so small. So when he's rifling through
all these drivers, depending on what his club delivery is
at the time, maybe he needs a little bit more loft,
literally like a half a degree more loft, or maybe
it's a little less loft, you know, Like that's the
difference between him hitting it full send, straight exactly how
he wants it, and hitting it you know his miss

(01:06:47):
is usually a big hook and that it's like that's
the little bit of a difference.

Speaker 1 (01:06:53):
And going back to the car analogy, everybody, specifically on
the tour level, but everybody in the game is to
drive the car faster. The best players in the world
are constantly trying to drive the car faster without crashing it.
And that constant quest for speed, I think we are

(01:07:13):
in the speed era. Lastly, for the average golfer, what
do you feel like, equipment wise or the easiest low
hanging fruit to gain speed?

Speaker 3 (01:07:25):
To gain speed?

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):
So I would say it's actually more on like the
fitness side of it, right, like, prepare your body, you know,
stretch to move, to move, Prepare your.

Speaker 3 (01:07:38):
Body to move.

Speaker 2 (01:07:39):
Don't just like roll out of the car, go to
the practice range, hit a couple balls, and expect that
you're gonna be a peak performance, right Like, do some exercises,
do some stretching. Come up with a consistent program, both
on the golf course and off the golf course, getting
your body to move efficiently and consistently. I always tell

(01:08:00):
people out here, the most impressive thing about these athletes
isn't how far they hit it or how much speed
they have. It's how good they are to get their
body to move the same day in and day out.
That's the most impressive thing. Like if you think about
going to play golf for seven days in a row,
six days in a row, it's really hard and to
get your body to move the same day for seven days,

(01:08:23):
let alone.

Speaker 3 (01:08:24):
Week after week after a week.

Speaker 1 (01:08:26):
And then you throw life on top of that, strange bed,
strange pillows. How much sleep did you get, Do you
have a cold? How's the body feeling, and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (01:08:35):
It's getting your body to do as well as it can.
And I think building in those routines, especially if you
stretch just a little bit and you do a couple
you know, leg exercises, some air squats before you hit
a golf ball, you probably will hit it better and
your body will move more fluidly.

Speaker 1 (01:08:55):
I mean, we could sit here and talk for hours. Ben.
The Instagram site is it's the o' van, and I
think it's a really cool insight into some of the
builds you guys do and then your day job when
you're not out on tour. You guys have this kind
of tour build set up in two locations.

Speaker 2 (01:09:12):
Yeah, so we're at Pumpkin Ridge out and just outside
of Portland, Oregon, and then just outside of Nashville we're
at a club called The Hermitage. So we've got two
retail locations that my business partner, Jason Warner and he's
in Nashville. I'm out in Portland. That's our day job,
you know. So we that's actually the same model as

(01:09:35):
we have out here right. We have access to every manufacturer,
every shaft, every component, and we fit outdoors off of
grass just like we do with these players. It's all
component builds. I mean, it's it's as close to a
tour experience experience as you're gonna come. We work with
the best players in the world, and we build the
equipment the same.

Speaker 1 (01:09:53):
Way well, week in, week out, year in and year out.
I mean, you guys are the unsung heroes of the tour,
you guys, or of the mechanics. And I don't think
the players can thank you enough because you guys basically
keep the car running, keep the car on the track,
and and help them perform and get some rest in
the off season, and we'll do it all again next year.

(01:10:16):
Thanks for talking to us, some of which comes to
you almost every week. Thanks everyone for listening.