All of this ball speed and club speed talk has reminded me of the day I was trying out the Geek Dot-Com-This driver I had received from Jerry Crowell, the teaching and playing pro with whom I worked on his swing a couple of years back.
This is actually a good opportunity to educate people unfamiliar with launch monitor technology how some of this stuff goes, so…
I did some digging following all of the brouhaha concerning the Trackman supposedly clocking Tiger Woods’ club speed at 129.2 mph on Saturday with his 14th hole drive.
Another post for the techo-geeks among us!
I have always called it as I see it, and I have myself disregarded numbers that I did not trust, such as the time I averaged 135 mph club speed, 195 mph ball speed and 350 yards per drive over 5 drives on a golf store launch monitor.
That’s got to be what happened, because the only other explanation for showing a Rory McIlroy drive carrying 365 yards on Wednesday at the range would be that there’s some fraudulent representation going on somewhere.
I will admit that my initial thought when I saw a 365 yard carry with 181 mph ball launch speed was, “My God, the balls are going way too far!”
Of course, that would be anyone’s initial thought if you figured everything was on the up and up, right? But then… I thought a bit and…
**Update At Bottom
If the Modern Golf Swing doesn’t…
I heard all of the uproar about Rory McIlroy’s drive at the PGA Championship venue Quail Hollow this week – a 365 yard carry with the driver is impressive!
I couldn’t wait to get a look at his numbers – I mean, the winning long drive distances from the 90’s were in the 360-380 yard range, and these guys had 135 mph club and 195-200 mph ball speed to get those distances in total, meaning carry and roll, not just carry.
I don’t myself, and I’m the one in the video!
These swings are from Monday, when I went to the range to get in some swing work and to focus on that “One Major Move” with the right arm and side.
I wasn’t swinging all-out, probably in the low-170 mph range with the regular driver (I had the radar out to keep an eye on the speed), but when I got home to look at the video, I was scratching my head.
**David D. sent me this Youtube clip…
How does he do that, when I’ve never met Dustin Johnson, who has likely never heard of DJ Watts or MCS Golf Swing theory?
Well, Dustin Johnson proves the MCS Theory by producing the same kind of ball speed numbers that I can – but he’s a 6’4″ PGA Tour player, ranked #1 in the world, and a far better athlete than I am!
I hadn’t done this before, but I was shocked by what I found when I researched the standard weight of the Momentus Power Driver to compare it to the standard modern driver.
What I found was that it wasn’t just the head that weighs more – the entire Momentus driver has a mass of – are you ready for this? – 500 grams, which is actually more than one pound of weight!
I slipped out to the range today for an hour to hit some balls, to see how things would go after having practiced my setup procedure for a few days.
I had just gone out to get some exercise and make some full swings, but I predicted late last winter that I’d be increasing my numbers with the tighter pivot that I had worked on.
Nothing against Rickie Fowler, this is about equipment and marketing hype.
You’ll remember the Mark Twain line about there being, “Lies, damned lies, and statistics,” I’ll wager – and I’m not accusing anyone of lying here, just of the same old “hype” over numbers that mean absolutely nothing they are meant to mean, but tell you all you need to know.
This time is Golf.com’s Extra Spin piece about Rickie Fowler “crushing” a persimmon driver, but if you look at the Trackman numbers and read some of the Twitter responses to the piece, you’ll see that no one who knows even a little about golf, equipment and technology was fooled for a second (or at least, not many).
