Month: July 2020

You might not be aware of this, but golf has returned. It’s back. They’re back on the tee! Everyone is excited!

With the return has come a commercial that has befuddled me more than any ad I can remember. This isn’t a “standing in the hall of fame” type of situation where the ad gets played so much you want to donate your ears to science; this is a golf commercial that challenges the intelligence of the golf community. It challenges the simplicity of a man standing on a hill trying to go for a par-5 in two. It challenges basic eyesight.

It’s a simple ad, really. Dustin Johnson, one of the most famous golfers on the planet, holing out a hybrid on what appears to be a tough green to hit. If I told you that was the ad and you’d never seen it, that would be enough. But it’s the commentary that goes along with the action that is so offensive to golf fans that it has forced me to spend time in my life breaking it down (and time in yours reading this).

So, the commentary. Here is the word-for-word voiceover by someone not named Dustin Johnson (maybe Sam Elliott??):

“Some see a beautiful golf course with an incredible view. Dustin Johnson sees an aggressive pin … a two-club headwind … and a branch that blocks his line to the green … Dustin delivers because he sees things differently … so do we … RBC … a global financial institution with over 150 years of insight and expertise.”

So there is the copy, now to breakdown the issues FJM-style, here we go.

“Some see a beautiful golf course with an incredible view. Dustin Johnson sees an aggressive pin … a two-club headwind …”

The idea that any golfer would ever say “man, look at that aggressive pin” is insulting to us balata fans. Golfers might say “that’s a tucked pin” or a “brutal hole location,” but what’s an aggressive pin? The aggression in the game lies with the shot. That was an aggressive shot. But it isn’t with the pin. The pin isn’t aggressive, which is defined as “ready or likely to attack or confront.” Now, in 2020 I guess I can’t say that a flagstick wouldn’t take on animate characteristics considering all we’ve seen this year, but I’m going to assume for my point that the flag is going to remain insentient and sit in the hole just like it was put there.

We move on …

The commercial begins with the above shot of a golf course, the one us regular folk would think is beautiful. But not Dustin. Dustin sees that aggressive pin, even though the only green we can really see is the one that looks a mile or two away in the distance. I’ve circled the green below.

There is the green. I’ve looked at this image for far too long trying to figure out another possible green that he would be playing to, and I’m not seeing it.

Since we are looking at this shot, why don’t we introduce our golfer/actor into the fold. Dustin joins us in this next shot, looking somewhat in the direction of the circled green.

If we were splitting hairs, you could argue that Dustin is looking well right of the green in question, but this is most likely some green screen work so no reason to hate on the simple issues with this commercial when much larger problems start to present themselves (just wait for the branch).

The next shot you can see is one where the golf course is presented much like a yardage book. You see lines and wind direction and whatever the hell those half-circles are around his feet, and you see that the animation is pointing us to the green in question that looks Happy Gilmore-y far away.

Now to the green. This is our first shot of the green and the tough approach shot (shoutout animated birds … always a nice touch).

The hole looks slightly different than the shot we’ve seen previously, but it’s fairly close. The bunker is to the left like above, the green looks much smaller in this shot than the one that Dustin is checking out and the trees behind seem adjusted, but considering this is all happening in about 4 seconds, we can give a pass to this.

My biggest issue, initially, with the commercial was this idea of a branch in the way up by the green. Dustin is in the fairway, hitting downhill to a green with a hybrid. What branch would be in play? Is there a tree planted in the middle of the fairway? One directly off the green to the right?

The branch appears to be short and right of the green, but I see nothing that resembles a tree in the previous shot. Maybe “branch” is just a metaphor for problem. Maybe RBC and DJ dove deeper into the idea of trouble and presented the branch as a universal issue for Dustin. A metaphor for one of the greats in the game. Could the branch be a bunker? A valet driver, the 5th green at Oakmont, Brooks Koepka? Maybe “branch” is everything Dustin battles as a professional golfer. Is it possible we haven’t asked DJ about this branch before? I’m intrigued but I’ll digress.

This is where the commercial falls apart. This is the ball approaching the green. It’s supposed to be the same green that we saw earlier. It is most definitely not the same green! It isn’t even close!  The green here has a bunker to the right and trees directly behind the green and a totally different green complex and no bunker left and I could continue but I think you get the idea here. THIS GREEN IS MY OWN PERSONAL BRANCH!

Look at the original green again and then look at the approach. It’s hilariously inaccurate. It’s almost like someone made a 30 second commercial and didn’t think an idiot would spend four days breaking it down. LITTLE DID YOU KNOW, GRAPHICS FELLA!

Now to the Dustin reaction at the end. He holes the shot for what I can only guess is an albatross/double-eagle. Considering how far it looks like he is and the fact that he’s hitting a hybrid, it has to be for a two on a par-5. The Double Eagle Club, which considers itself the source on double-eagle stats, says the odds of making one is 6 million to 1. Since we are talking of Dustin Johnson, we can cut those odds well down to, why don’t we say, a million to 1. You think that ball goes in and Dustin gives us this reaction?!

Actually, that’s probably accurate. I take back my stance here. Dustin probably would look longingly into the abyss after his ball disappeared with the same reaction a lot of us have when this commercial comes on.

My request to RBC, because I love Canada and I do enjoy Dustin; hire me next time you want to make a golf commercial. I am cheap and willing to look at the final product and change some of the golf vernacular and at least make sure the golf hole remains the same throughout the ad. I am even pretty good at half-circle drawings, so I could do all that stuff around Dustin’s feet.

Standing in the hall of fame!

I’d never seen Brad Faxon so rattled.

Faxon — one of the calmest and most consistent humans you’ll ever meet — was beside himself. Bryson DeChambeau, not even a year into his professional career, was standing in front of one of the best putters to ever pick up a flat stick and explaining to him how putting works.

Can you imagine the audacity that requires? Explaining putting to BRAD FAXON! It would be like explaining the guitar to Eric Clapton, or the saxophone to John Coltrane.

The entire room had the exact same reaction I did. “Is this guy fucking serious?”

It was December of 2016, the conclusion of a whirlwind 18 months of golf that saw DeChambeau win the NCAA individual title and add his name on the Havemayer Trophy as the latest phenom to snag that elusive U.S. Amateur victory. Only Jack Nicklaus, Phil Mickelson, Tiger Woods and Ryan Moore had previously pulled off the NCAA-U.S. Am double-dip in the same season. Then, to back it up, Bryson had contended for 35 holes at the Masters with a small “a” next to his name until a triple-bogey on his final hole on Friday plummeted him down the leaderboard. His credentials were impeccable. He’d already established himself as the best amateur we’d seen in a decade. But Faxon’s reaction — and everyone else listening to a kid talk to one of the best to ever perfect this part of golf’s craft — was rightfully justified.

Who on earth did this kid think he was?

DeChambeau had arrived at Tiburon putting side-saddle. He insisted when joining my podcast, The Clubhouse with Shane Bacon, that the correct term was “face on,” not side-saddle. No matter what term he used, the fact that he was doing so in a tournament while paired with Lexi Thompson in the final day of a silly season event, was the talk of the tournament. Despite the fact that they were well out of contention.

I can still remember Faxon’s face as DeChambeau walked out of the room. A man with eight PGA Tour wins, a man considered a virtuoso at his craft, was speechless. Even if everything went well for DeChambeau, I thought, he’d be fortunate to have the kind of career Faxon had. The sheer brazenness of this whole encounter reminded of one of my favorite golf quotes, uttered decades ago by Craig Stadler after he’d listened to a fresh professional golfer bragging about his amateur accolades. 

“You see the guy next to you? And the guy next to him?” Stadler said. “Every one of them, All-Americans.  There’s an NCAA Champion, a U.S. Amateur champion, a British Open champion — hell, some of these caddies were All-Americans. So just so you know, nobody here gives a damn if you’re an All-American, or if you even went to college at all.  All anybody here wants to know … can you play stick?”

Four years later, we’ve learned something; not only can Bryson play stick, but he does it his own way, and he isn’t a single iota afraid of what people mutter about his approach as they stand around him.

DeChambeau’s been nicknamed The Mad Scientist, but even that suggests that his approach might be “mad.” It isn’t. His approach, unique as it is, works. And it’s working at a clip that we aren’t used to seeing in the modern game. 

Think for a second about what we’ve seen from Bryson since that moment in 2016 when he was paired with Jordan Spieth at Augusta National, hoping to break golf as Bobby Jones 2.0. He had a bag of irons all the same length. We know now it works. We’ve seen a putter that looks like it’s got more technology than the 2022 Tesla. Works. We’ve watched a skinny kid with respectable power (45th on the PGA Tour in driving distance in 2017) transform his entire body, now looking like a bouncer who quit drinking, knowing the jokes and memes would come as he continued to grow horizontally, teasing the world with social videos of 400-yard drives, none of us realizing this was the new reality. 

That’s, of course, worked. The whole time we were laughing, he was tinkering. And it just keeps working.

If this week is any indication, DeChambeau might be tiptoeing into the Mark McGwire territory, a controversial colossus who surges in popularity simply because of his power. McGwire — and a half dozen ballplayers turned bodybuilders like him — broke baseball in the late ‘90s with their ability to transform the game from the fundamentals (singles! hit and run! sacrifice fly!) to raw, unapproachable power. The Cardinals sold-out games not because they were winning (they weren’t), but because they had a guy on their roster that could hit any pitch as far as anyone could see, on a regular basis. It was a spectacle.

Bryson is doing the same thing. (And at the risk of being naïve, unlike McGwire, I believe he’s doing it without pumping an entire pharmacy into his body.)

Longest drives of the week for @B_DeChambeau:

377 yards
376 yards
374 yards
367 yards
366 yards
365 yards
364 yards
363 yards
362 yards
355 yards
355 yards
355 yards
355 yards
354 yards
353 yards
352 yards
348 yards
348 yards
346 yards
345 yards
344 yards
344 yards pic.twitter.com/0tWgS0WrUP

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) July 5, 2020

Look at this tweet. Just look at that damn thing! Because of the character count restriction, it had to stop at 344 yards. If it continued you’d see drive after drive in the 305-330 range, and more often than not, those drives were ending up in the fairway (the first three rounds in Detroit, Bryson was hitting 64 percent of his fairways before a looser Sunday that saw the 26-year-old in the short stuff just six of 14 times). 

And while we marvel at the distance — and we should because it was a singular focus of this guy to get bigger, get stronger, and hit the ball a kilometer — it’s probably just as important to see something else that Bryson broke this week, from my pal Justin Ray at the 15th Club. 

.@b_dechambeau –

– Longest average measured driving distance ever by PGA Tour winner (350.6)

– 1st time since beginning of ShotLink a tournament winner led field in both strokes gained off the tee & strokes gained putting

— Justin Ray (@JustinRayGolf) July 5, 2020

 

It isn’t just the driving. He’s hitting it a mile, sure, but he’s making everything and doing it with that wild-looking putter. It’s the first time since the beginning of ShotLink that a tournament winner has led the field in both strokes gained off the tee and strokes gained putting. Suddenly the fat grip on his putter and the crazy lines on his golf ball look more innovative that weird. Somehow he hasn’t lost his touch despite all those pounds he’s packed on. 

This isn’t how golf is supposed to be approached. How many times, growing up, did you hear someone tell you that it’s just about fairways and greens? I lived for years hitting 2-iron off tees because I was so determined to find fairways, knowing — in theory — I would have an easier shot to the green. 

Bryson doesn’t really care about what history has to say about what he’s doing. If you’ve been anywhere near a cell phone this week you’ve seen what DeChambeau said before the Rocket Mortgage even started, apologizing to Donald Ross for what he planned to do to the late designer’s golf course. 

“I think there’s a lot of bunkers that are around like 290 (yards), so hopefully I’ll be able to clear those and take those out of play. So, sorry, Mr. Ross, but, you know, it is what it is.”

And with that final line, I think I finally started to get Bryson. He’s flawed, but he’s entirely his own man. It is what it is, and the apologies, from now on especially, will be minimal.

There will be complications that accompany his certainty of self. We’ve seen it already in his approach to a lot of different people inside and outside of the ropes. This is a guy that berates a cameraperson on Saturday for simply doing their job. Do you know how many times Tiger Woods has had a camera on him when he’s nanoseconds away from a complete and total meltdown? That’s part of the game, kid, and complaining that the attention of an event is on you sure isn’t it. If you start doing that, you’re going to quickly become more of a villain than you want to be. 

But what that whole 2016 experience has taught me over the years about DeChambeau is, he believes all the ridiculousness that comes out of his mouth. He believes in spritzing his golf ball on a range. He believes that bringing a planter box out to the practice green is the perfect putting tool. He believes, while sitting in front of Faxon and others that spent decades grinding on a game that never seems to care how much time you put into it, his approach to putting is the way. 

It’s working. It’s all working. Who knows how long it’ll last and what’s next for him? I suspect he will continue to say stuff that will make many of us roll our eyes, but what we have to understand and accept at this point about DeChambeau is this: He isn’t rolling his eyes. He’s all-in. The Bryson Golf Experience is working because Bryson is the only one that has to truly buy-in. 

It might be time to stop laughing at some of his quirks and start emulating them instead.