The St. Simons Open, pt. 2
How I played at the St. Simons Open, what I learned, and how I'm going to improve.
Alright, part 2. If you missed part 1, I did a detailed walkthrough of my approach for a tournament I played two weeks ago. In part 2, I’m going through my mid-round adjustments, post-tournament assessments, and what I’m looking to improve going into my next event.
Apologies for the late hour this is hitting your inbox — there was a lot of material to get through here. In fact, I almost cut it into two parts to make this a three part series. But I decided that people probably want me to get into more regularly-scheduled programming rather than continuing to hear about an event I played two weeks ago now. I didn’t want to compromise depth of insight, so this is a long edition that gets a bit technical at times. For those non-golf-sickos, I highly recommend reading last week’s edition first — it explains some of the statistics I’ll be using here, and will probably help a lot of things make more sense.
As for future programming, I’m competing again next week, so I’ll probably have something else that’s been sitting in my notebook a while. In any event, I’ll be back to focusing on writing well instead of focusing primarily on substance.
Lastly, I might be pushing up against the email length limit with this one — if it cuts off at a weird point, try opening it in a browser. It seemed like things worked out OK last week though — fingers crossed.
That’s all for now — enjoy part 2!
ROUND 1 BREAKDOWN
I shot level par 72 in round 1. Here’s the card:
At this point, there was already a 62 and a 63 in the clubhouse, with another 62 to be posted before the end of the day. I had some ground to make up.
A scorecard really doesn’t tell you much about what happened during a round of golf — there’s no indication of how well you did any particular thing. I’ll be using Strokes Gained data to illuminate what really happened.
But first, I like to play a game: I’ll go hole-by-hole through the round and try to figure out what would have needed to happen for me to shoot 65 — “I left that wedge shot out left and didn’t give myself a real birdie look, –0.5” or “I missed 8 footers on 11 and 12 — one of those needed to fall, –1”. It’s a sort of eye-test version of Strokes Gained that I compare against the actual data.
After going through the round, I figured I lost a stroke apiece for my three 3-putts, needed one more midrange putt to fall, and lost three shots approaching the green. Let’s compare this to the real stats, Strokes Gained against PGA Tour average:
Pretty close! I lost the majority of my strokes putting, lost a shot approaching the green, and was pretty level off the tee and around the greens (short game).
Let’s take a deeper look into the putting:
As you can see, there are two glaring problems: 3 three-putts, and 3.4 strokes lost from 15-40 feet. As it turns out, I three-putt 3 times from 15-40 feet — so two problems become one. Let’s get into what might be happening.
On the 12th, a putt from the fairway hopped into the air before it got to the green and came up way short — this happens sometimes, and is mostly bad luck (unless I get more comfortable chipping from this Bermuda grass, which will take some time). I had two more three-putts. On the 6th, I had 27’ for birdie and ran it 6’ past the hole. On 16, I ran a 36’ birdie putt 6’ past. I missed both comebackers.
Importantly, not only did I run my first putts past the hole, but both of these putts missed the hole on the low side. This tells me something really important — let me explain
Consider a left-to-right breaking putt like I’ve drawn here. I’ve marked two lines through the hole: one along the line the ball would take through the hole, and the other perpendicular to that line. This creates four zones around the hole which I’ve labeled A, B, C, and D.
If you start a putt on the correct line and you miss it short, it’ll end up in zone A, finishing in front of the hole and low of the intended entry point. Similarly, if you start the ball on line but hit it too hard, it’ll miss the hole on the high side and finish in zone B. If you miss in either of these zones, you probably started the ball on a good line and just missed your pace.
However, consider the other two zones. If you miss in zone C, you left the putt short but also missed high. That means, if you gave the putt enough pace to get to the hole, it would miss even higher. Most likely, you started the putt too high, and you missed short because you subconsciously knew it needed a very slow pace to fall all the way to the hole.
Now, for zone D, you hit it too hard and still missed low — you would have had to hammer that putt to keep it high enough to hit the hole. It’s not a speed problem, it’s a start line problem. This is exactly what I did on the three putts on 6 and 16: I hit them too hard and still missed low. This indicates that it’s not so much a pace problem; I’m hitting it too hard as a reaction to the start lines that I’ve chosen.
So this is the adjustment: I need to make sure I’m not under-reading my lag putts. For round two, I need to make sure I’m starting my lag putts high enough.
Now let’s look at ball striking. I hit 11/14 fairways and 15/18 greens, both well above Tour average. However, I was effectively level in strokes gained off the tee, and I actually lost 1.1 strokes approaching the green.
Last week, I talked about my strategy: play conservative, hit a ton of fairways and greens, stay out of trouble, and make up ground by avoiding mistakes. However, I’m hitting tons of fairways and greens and still losing ground, statistically. This means I’m leaving it pretty far back in the fairway and pretty far away from the hole when I do hit the green. Maybe, instead of hitting irons off tees and aiming at the middle of greens, I need to get more aggressive.
After talking with Lou Stagner, my former assistant coach and a golf stats guy, we decided to keep doing what I was doing. If you aim at the middle of the green and the pin is tucked to one side, it’s theoretically 50-50 whether you miss on the same side as the pin or not. It seemed like I was effectively just losing a bunch of coin flips. The law of averages should give me some more birdie looks tomorrow if I keep doing what I’m doing.
So that’s the breakdown: after all that, I’m going to play some more break on my lag putts, and I’m not going to change much else. It takes some time to explain, but I’m really not changing much. I want any mid-tournament adjustments to be as simple as possible. Just play the lag putts higher and go about my business.
AFTER ROUND 2:
I shot +1 73 in round 2. But there’s a caveat: I’ll be writing as if I finished at –3 69. I tried to drive my last green to give myself a run at the cut and came up short, making triple. It made sense contextually — the cut is all that matters, so missing it 1 and missing by 10 are effectively the same, and it’s a risk free play — but statistics are context-agnostic. A three-shot swing like that is a big enough error to outweigh most of the subtler insights the stats can provide, so I’m fudging the numbers. I’ll leave a more detailed explanation in the footnotes here.[1]
Here’s the scorecard including both rounds:
This newsletter is already plenty long, so I’m not going to go into specifics for round 2 — I’ll focus on the event as a whole. The important part is that I lost ~3 shots approaching the green in round 2 and was roughly level putting. Meaning, for two rounds, my Strokes Gained profile looks like this:
I’ve already talked about my putting, so I won’t belabor that point much. I lost strokes putting outside 15’ both rounds, so lag putting is going to be a substantial area of focus for me moving forward. What I’ll say: I’m changing my grip on putts outside 25’ to give me some more room to make longer strokes without adjusting my body.
So let’s look at the other weak area of my game: approach shots.
As you can see, I’m doing reasonably well outside 150yds and inside 100yds, but from 100-150yds I’m losing significant ground — almost 2 whole shots per round. This bucket in particular (100-150) is vitally important for succeeding in mini tour golf.
As we saw last week, to go as low as mini tour golf requires, you need to beat Tour average in one of three areas:
Off the tee, hitting it further than expected into tighter corridors than the math suggests,
Approaching the green, hitting it dead at the pin instead of aiming away to ensure you hit the green, or
Putting, making significantly more midrange putts than a Tour pro.
We can rule out putting: PGA Tour greens are effectively flawless, mini-tour greens are very much flawed, and so it’s unreasonable to expect to beat tour players. Similarly, mini-tour courses are usually very tight, and pushing it into risky areas between OB stakes is a great recipe for stacking up penalty strokes and missing cuts. This leaves one option: you need to be elite approaching the greens. Mini tour greens are softer than PGA Tour greens, and the green surrounds are usually easier to chip from. This is where you’re going to make up your ground to shoot some really low scores.
Keep in mind that, at this event, –15 for three rounds was in a tie for sixth. Someone shot –21 and did not win the golf tournament. The expected difference between a 6’ putt and a 15’ putt is 0.4 strokes — you need to hit it close over and over to be competitive.
There’s two things I’m doing to improve my approach play. One is just to practice a lot. I have two performance drills I do on the range. First, the ladder drill: pick a 20yd window (eg. 100-120) and try to land 5 balls in this window, each ball leapfrogging the next. If you hit a ball short of your last shot or long of the end window, start over. Do it until you’ve fit 5 balls in the window (ideally, I’ll be able to fit 6 balls in 20 yards soon). Second, I’ll have my phone spit out random numbers from 100-150, and I’ll try to get 5 in row within 3 yards of the target number.
There’s also a mechanical change I’m making. Let’s start by looking at three positions in my swing:
I’ve drawn a line on the shaft and a circle on my hands at three points in the swing: 3/4 back, 3/4 down, and 3/4 through (these are P3, P5, and P9 for the sickos out there). As you can see, the club goes up on plane, shallows out as my hands go towards the ball on the way down, and finish well under the plane line. The club moves around a lot; there’s a good bit of excess motion.
Compare this to a bootleg video of Ludvig I took at the RSM in November:
You can see: at all three positions, the club and his hands are basically in the same place. The club stays on plane. His hands stay on plane. As you might imagine, this makes it way easier to hit a lot of really good golf shots.
With my swing, however, there’s a bunch of excess movement. When you’re hitting driver or a long iron, it’s a long enough swing where you can make an adjustment mid-swing. I’m a good athlete, and I have strong bat-to-ball skills, so I can get away with some poor fundamentals when I’m making bigger swings. But on short irons and wedges, it’s a short swing, and there just isn’t time to make adjustments. So, when I get closer to the hole, I struggle to use my athleticism to overcome these technical flaws, and I lose strokes to the field.
So we’ve identified that I lost 3 shots to the field approaching the green and 3 shots to the field putting. That’s 6 shots. If you say I make par on my last hole, finish at –2, and get those shots back, I’m at –8 through two rounds and I make the cut. If I follow that up with a 68 in round 3, I finish –12 in a tie for 17th, and I make $1300. That’s an improvement for sure.
In professional golf, you can never be good at putting, and you can never be good enough at chipping. There will be a substantial focus on these moving forward because there’s always a substantial focus on these. I’ll especially be focused on my lag putting. In addition, I’ll be working on getting my swing more symmetrical and eliminating excess movement, and I’ll be doing performance drill after performance drill to get more comfortable inside 150 yards. Hopefully it all adds up to something soon.
I’m competing again next week, and I’ll give a little update in next week’s newsletter. Until then, I hope this has been a fun deep dive into the nuts and bolts of these tournaments and the process of getting better. Until next time, thanks for reading.
[1] How I tripled the last hole of the tournament by being stupid (even though it actually wasn’t stupid), a breakdown:
I’m not a leaderboard watcher — I just want to go about my process and make good decisions hole by hole. So, when I got to my last hole of the day, the 9th (I started on 10), at –2 for the tournament, it didn’t seem impossible the cut could be at –4. Here’s the 9th hole:
As I mentioned last week, I hit the ball a long way, so a 305 carry shouldn’t be much trouble for me — in fact, I’d hit the green with driver the previous day and made birdie. With one hole left, the difference between missing the cut by one and by ten is nothing — you play tomorrow and get paid, or you go home and you don’t. I had no reason not to go for it. But I hit a knuckleball that dove out of the air and into the pond, and my next tee ball plugged under the lip of the bunker. After a failed escape, I putt from under the lip out into the middle of the bunker, and from there I got up and down for seven.
On the scorecard, I finished at +1. However, the purpose of this post-game analysis (and this newsletter) is to produce a useful analysis of the results. We talked about fractional shots in a Strokes Gained context last week; saying I cost myself several whole shots in a go-for-broke run at an imaginary cutline would outweigh any subtler insights to be gleaned from the data. In any other context, going for the green under these conditions would have been dumb. In the context of a run at the cutline, there was no reason not to and every reason to root for a miracle. But the statistics are context-agnostic, so they’d just say that I made a total mess of the last hole that it overshadows anything subtler that happened before.
For this reason, I’m saying I hit a driver in the bunker (which I did) and got up and down (which I did) for birdie. I considered manufacturing a par where I hit 4-iron wedge, but literally making up shots felt like a greater stretch than just using the shots I actually hit. All of this is to say: I’ll be acting like I finished the tournament at –3 instead of +1 for the sake of useful interpretations of the data. Hopefully all that makes sense.