I have had a passing familiarity with James Hahn and Dong Yi for close to 20 years. They were members of a dominant Alameda High School golf program at the time Kelseyville High School was competing on the highest levels led by the likes of Brels Solomon, Shawn Auten and Jonathan Carlson. After high school, Hahn and Yi played collegiate golf at Cal-Berkeley. Ultimately they turned professional, played mini-tour golf and qualified for the Web.com Tour.
Hahn got to the final stage of Q School some five years ago and Yi was caddying for him. They came to a par-5 with water fronting the green. With Golf Channel cameras rolling, Hahn wanted to go for the green in two while Yi wanted his childhood friend to lay up short of the water. Without being completely sure what to do, Hahn and Yi neither relied on gut instinct nor golf strategy to make their choice. Instead, they played rock, papers, scissors from the heart of the fairway to make the decision. Hahn”s scissors overwhelmed Yi”s paper and so he went for the green in two. It turned out to be a wash as Hahn made par on the hole.
This story was reiterated in the early pages of Mark Broadie”s Every Shot Counts: Using the Revolutionary Strokes Gained Approach to Improve Your Golf Performance and Strategy (Penguin Group $35). Broadie is a firm believer in the importance of statistical strategy and there is no doubt that rock, paper, scissors is probably not the way a professional golfer should make difficult choices, especially with a PGA Tour card on the line at Q School.
Broadie is a strong believer that putting is overrated and has the stats to back it up. He tells another telling tour story that features Tiger Woods during first-round play at the Frys.com Open in 2011 at CordeValle just outside San Jose. As we mentioned in last week”s column, total putts per round was always the statistical mark for great putting on the PGA Tour. At the Frys that year, Tiger shot a 73 and had a total of 27 putts on his scorecard. Without knowing anything about chip-ins or hole-outs, one can easily surmise that Tiger owed the success of his round to his putting. With 27 putts, he most probably had nine holes of two-putts and nine holes of one-putts. The tour average is just about 29 putts per round, and in 2011 Kevin Na led the tour with an average of 27.8 putts per round.
Yet in the press conference at the conclusion of his round, Tiger stated that it was “probably one of the worst putting rounds I”ve ever had. I can”t putt the ball any worse that I did today.” So what gives? Was Tiger simply being Tiger? Was he overly critical about all aspects of his game simply because he shot a 73? Or was he onto something when he contended that a round that included 27 total putts still could be called one of his worst rounds of putting prowess in his long career?
Well, the anecdotal notes about that round at CordeValle definitely gives us a tale of the tape. On two of the holes, Tiger missed 3-foot birdie putts. He also two-putted from 4 feet and from 6 feet. On the holes when his birdie putts were longer than 6 feet, he made one putt out of seven. His longest-made putt of the day was a 12-footer. The average first putt on the greens that day for Tiger was 11 feet while the average for the PGA Tour that year was 17 feet. In other words, Tiger”s ball striking that day was pretty special and yet he wasn”t able to convert 3-, 4- and 6-foot putts for birdie. In fact, his ball striking was so rock solid that maybe he should have had only 22 total putts and been able to shoot a nifty 68. Woods” round at the Frys was a classic example of statistics failing to tell the real story.
With the benefit of ShotLink technology, Dr. Broadie has tons of statistical evidence at his fingertips. For instance, with more than 10 years of accumulated stats, Broadie is able to say with total accuracy that the pair of 3-foot putts for birdie that Tiger missed were glaring stumbles on a tour where that putt is made 96 percent of the time. The 4-footers are made 88 percent and the 6-footers are picked out of the bottom of the cup 77 percent of the time. Tiger was not only frustrated by those short misses, but he was also statistically throwing away the tournament when you consider that those putts are no-brainers for his peer group on the tour.
Of course, Broadie also has statistics that point to the difficulty of making medium-length and long putts. For instance, among the greatest golfers in the world on the PGA Tour, only 50 percent of the pros make putts from the distance of 8 feet. Think about it. Perfect conditions, consistent green speeds and the best golfers on the planet, and yet from a mere 8 feet away, they only make that putt in competition half the time. Think of what that means for the local bogey golfer who plays public access courses with humps and bumps, inconsistent rolls, early morning dew on the greens and fellow golfers who drag their feet on the putting surfaces. It”s already a tough enough game without having statistics tell you so.
From 15 feet away, a distance most of us would consider an attainable birdie putt, the pros hole out in one shot just 23 percent of the time. From 30 feet, the big boys make the putt just 7 percent of the time. From 60 feet the make factor is just 2 percent and the chances of three-putting from that distance occurs 23 percent of the time. It does go to show how extremely talented even bubble boys such as James Hahn are when you consider the success of a low-scoring round probably has more to do with long, accurate driving coupled with solid iron play leading to a large amount of putts inside 8 feet. When you go way back in time and consider Johnny Miller”s final-round 63 at Oakmont in the 1973 United States Open, you do realize that the greatest final round of all time in a major championship was because Miller was hitting almost every fairway and then knocking down the flagstick to make tap-in birdies.
So putting is not the end-all and be-all to golfing greatness that we have always surmised. Next week we”ll explore what it was that made Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods the greatest of their eras, and what it is that makes Rory McIlory the dominant linkster of this modern era. We”ll also look at how the greats of the game use this statistical knowledge to emphasize what they need to practice to become a better golfer. Ben Hogan always said the answer to golfing success was in the dirt. Nowadays it seems as if the answer is in the statistics.
