"Wizards"
Phil Kenyon, a bad dream, and a true handle on things.
“Wizards”
I had a bad dream last night. I’ve had a bunch of these dreams recently. They’re not all bad, but usually of a similar flavor. Most of my dreams aren’t easy to recount — and I’m actually skeptical of anyone who can recount their dreams with a specific, intelligible plot. In mine, a lot happens in a short amount of space, and there’s a lot of backstory I’m not privy to, and usually it’s not coherent enough to make heads or tails of. There’s just snippets.
In this dream, I’m in a hotel room, presumably before a tournament, scrubbing my clubs clean in the bathtub with a wire brush. The irons go easily enough. But I play raw wedges, a soft steel without any finish, and they rust in the humid outdoor air. It happens slowly, and then suddenly you have a totally rusted wedge. I don’t think it looks very good. It’s almost sloppy. A professional takes care of his tools better than that.
I start with the lowest lofted wedge, making my way down the bag, and the rust comes off easier than it should, the way it happens in dreams. I set it aside and get working on the next one. As I finish that one, I look down at the wedge I just cleaned, and I see some rust forming around the leading edge. I must have missed a spot. I wipe it off, turn to grab another, and I see the other clean wedge, a thick front of rust crawling up the face. I look at the wedge in my hand, rust climbing up like a wave crashing on shore. I turn and see that my irons — chromed, like normal, that don’t rust — slowly succumbing to a wave of oxidation. Even my putter, stainless steel, that I’ve taken such good care of for twelve years, has started to rust over, starting from the neck and heading out towards the toe.
And then my alarm went off, and it was time to start the day.
Last week, in a text chain with the other pros, I got a message: “Good afternoon, I have a 2-hour putting lesson with Phil Kenyon that has come available this Friday. Please let me know if anyone is interested.”
Phil Kenyon is the Sea Island Golf Club Director of Putting. But you might know him better as the guy who started working with Scottie Scheffler at the end of 2023 — the reason he’s a half-stroke better at putting each round, and a reason he won eight times last year. Kenyon is out on Tour most weeks. He’s only around Sea Island occasionally, and a lot needs to align to get in to see him.
I’ve written plenty about putting, specifically about the sensation when you just see a 10-footer so well that you know it’s going in before you hit it. It’s my primary argument against Strokes Gained being the end-all stat that some calculator-heads believe it is — you can’t quantify “just seeing it.” What you can quantify, though, is not seeing it — and I’ve been putting like total shit recently. I can’t see anything. It’s like driving with one of those foil things on the windshield; I can’t see, and the GPS is saying the road goes vaguely left, and man I hope I’m right. And, recently, I’ve been wrecking my rig pretty bad.
So, when an opportunity to have Phil Kenyon look at my putting popped up, I jumped on it as quickly as I could.
He asked how I’d describe my putting, almost like a doctor asking what brings you in today. I told him that I’m a visual, non-linear, feel-based putter who feels like he’s flying blind. I wanted any excuse not to learn AimPoint or switch to the claw. I just wanted to putt like I putt when I was 17 again, when I “saw” it. I could tell by his face that he’s heard this before. But, in someone as experienced as Kenyon, I could tell he’s fixed this before. It wasn’t terminal. As mushy and subjective and emotionally murky as it was, it was treatable.
He watched me hit eight putts on the SAM PuttLab (think 3D motion capture for putting — stroke analysis). Then, we went out to the green, where he watched me hit: one lag putt; one big swinging 8-footer; one 10-footer that broke about a cup. He heard me say “yeah, I’m just not seeing it well man,” watched me hit eleven putts, and then said:
“Ok, so let me know if I’m right here: I’m guessing you struggle with speed control, that’s making you doubt your reads, you have trouble adjusting to slow greens but adjust to fast greens well, you’re pretty good at the really tricky downhill sliders, but you struggle a lot with the big uphill ones. Any of that sound accurate?”
Every word of it was spot on.
Phil Kenyon has a skill I usually associate with my thesis advisor in college. My junior year, I took a graduate course she taught, an introduction to machine learning algorithms. I hadn’t written a line of code since high school, and I was never a computer science guy. But, by the end of the course, I’d built, from scratch, a GPT chatbot that sounded like my favorite author. I’ve told her that it was the easiest course I took in college, and it’s because she’s incredibly gifted at explaining complex things in simple terms— she’s mastered the invaluable skill of “explain it to me like I’m five.”
Kenyon and I went back inside, and we looked at a graph of the putter’s acceleration through the stroke. It starts negative (as in, picking up speed going backwards), then crosses over positive as the club slows down[1], and then stays positive until it gets back to the ball. In transition, from when the club starts slowing down for real until it has enough pace to make it to the ball, the acceleration should be basically level, a flat plateau on the graph — this is what makes for a smooth stroke.
But, as you can see on the graph, my stroke doesn’t have that flat plateau. I’ll get to the top, stop it, start down, realize I’m not speeding up quick enough, make a quick acceleration to try to adjust, and then drastically slow down before impact. It’s relatively consistent, but it’s no simple way to putt.
If you look at my stroke, you wouldn’t see any of this — I certainly didn’t. And so I wondered, if I thought I was stroking it pretty smooth, why did the graph have this much going on? Where was I going wrong?
Here, I expected Kenyon to get into the weeds[2]; as I asked what I was to do about this, I reached into my back pocket to get my notebook. I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss a word. But, as it turns out, I missed the whole thing — before I could even touch the notebook in my pocket, he said, “oh, you just need way quicker tempo.” And that, in one sentence, was the whole answer.
We did work on it for a while. He put a rangefinder battery on the flange of my putter, and I was supposed to throw the battery off on the backstroke, making sure it got past the point where my putter stopped. If I made the stroke I was used to making, the battery would stay on almost until impact and drop just behind the ball. This means that the stroke is too slow, that I’m not loading the putter on the way back.[3] Then, in my attempts to fix it, the battery would fall off halfway back to the ball — this means I’m getting fast from the top of the backswing, quick and jabby. Really, the deceleration (relative to the backswing; acceleration relative to the direction of the putt) needs to happen early, so the battery flies off when the putter gets to the top.
And that’s basically it. We changed my alignment a bit, and I’m getting my shoulders to move a little differently to keep my head more still over the ball. But that’s all. Nothing complicated.
In the week since the lesson, as I’ve been putting it to work, I’ve been thinking about what he said. I picked his brain as much as I could, and it’s clear he’s The Guy for a reason — I don’t think there’s anything he doesn’t know about putting. Nothing stumps him. He’s seen hundreds or thousands of people putt, and he calls upon all that experience as he watches me putt, sees how I read a green, interprets the data from the SAM PuttLab. He knows that, when I walk through the door of the studio, I’m not bringing with me anything he hasn’t seen before.
But that’s only part of it. Because I’m a good putter, and I’ve been putting for a long time, and I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m putting poorly (because that’s my job), and I’d watched video, and I’d putt with a mirror and a mat and gates and a chalkline — and I brought all of this with me into the studio. And, with all this, all I could tell him was that my eyes were deceiving me, and that I know I’m a good putter, but everything just feels wrong, and I’m three putting and missing shorties — and he took all this, combined it with all his expertise, and told me to… make my tempo faster. That’s it.
I called my dad afterwards, and he asked how the lesson went. The first thing out my mouth was, “Might be career changing.” For a couple reasons. First, the amount of valuable information I got during those two hours was astounding — I did pick his brain more than I’m letting on, here. But, at the same time, it really just boils down to a couple things. Align the putter better, more rotation and less side bend to keep the head still, stroke it to the metronome, and get the battery off the back of the putter.
A lot of this first year playing professionally, I’ve felt totally in the wilderness. Golf, regardless of your plans for it, takes time, and there’s a lot of doubt to wade through when the progress doesn’t come as quickly as you’d hope. A lesson like that from Phil Kenyon does more than teach you how to putt better — it reminds you that good putting is possible, that it’s something I can do. It’s not something that some people can do and other people can’t, something you can have for a while and then lose forever. It’s still there. You just need the right guidance, need someone who knows what to look for.
And, not for nothing, but I’ve started putting pretty damn well.
Paresh and I work with the same coach, Jared Zak. Though it feels weird to see his government name spelled out like that. We’ve called him “JZ” for as long as I’ve known him. And, lately, we’ve given him a different nickname: “The Wizard.”
Paresh had a lesson with JZ from 1-3, and then they’d head to the course to play nine. They asked if I’d like to join, and I did. I’d played poorly the day before, and I’d hit a couple foul balls off the tee, and I felt like something was off with my swing. I hadn’t looked on video for a while. I spent an hour trying to figure out what was going on before heading out to go play.
Warming up, I tried hitting balls to the same metronome I had been putting to. The backswing:downswing ratio in the full swing should be 3:1, instead of 2:1 for putting, but I saw no reason why the tempo shouldn’t be the same. With the metronome playing in my back pocket, I started absolutely flushing the ball. The quicker swing felt worlds more confident. The ball was coming out of a great window. I couldn’t miss.
I set up the tripod and put it behind me to see how the swing looked. I hit an eight iron that never left the stick. I checked the video. It looked awful. Everything I’ve ever done wrong with my swing was back with a vengeance. I turned the phone off. Screw it.
We got to the tee, me and Paresh and another student of JZ’s, Caden. My driver hasn’t been spinning. Backspin is what holds the ball stable in flight; if you don’t have enough, the ball knuckles offline pretty quickly. But if you square one up, it doesn’t float on the air like it should, and it lands flat and runs forever.
With that tempo in my body, I squared one up down the right side, like 360, hit 9i into a par five, and made a 12’er for eagle.
Off the second tee, I hit a 4-wood frozen rope down the middle. Sometimes, when I’m fully freed up and feeling it, I’ll get a bit cocky. As I walked off the tee, Caden’s dad told me “Great ball there.” And I replied, “yeah, why curve it? Just hit it straight!”
Caden was next, and he hit another dead straight ball. I said, “see? Straight ball.” We both looked over at JZ, thinking he had something to do with it. As Paresh walked to the tee, he said, “I like curving the ball, I’m gonna hit a cut.” And he hit a dead straight ball down the left side.
“Come on, man,” I said. “The Wizard’s here. He’s not gonna let the ball curve.”
Back when the Wizard nickname came about, Paresh would interchangeably call him the Magician. After some deliberation, we agreed: JZ is no magician. He’s a Wizard.
There is a difference, after all. Magicians trade in deception — they make a coin disappear and you wonder where they’ve hid it. There’s a real knack to it, some serious skill involved. I used to think this was how golf instruction worked, for a while. It’s such a fickle game, it’s hard to believe, sometimes, that there’s any real truth of the matter. That a coach just convinces you that this will help, and it helps as long as it does, and then you try something else.
I’ve been working with JZ for probably eight years now. Until recently, I’d see him every four months or so, and we’d move some stuff around, and I’d go back north on my own to work on it and eventually screw myself up again. And the cycle would repeat.
But now I live here, and I’ve worked with JZ pretty consistently for the last six months. After a couple months, it hit me that everything he was teaching connects: the hand path, the takeaway, the lines on video, getting lateral instead of rotary — even the stuff he told my trainer to help me work on in the gym. It all connected. There’s a method to it all, a big plan to get me in the right spots to play good golf.
JZ doesn’t tell you any more than you need to know. And, at first, I didn’t know why. I’m a smart guy, and I saw no reason why I couldn’t look at the blueprints. If I understood everything for myself, that could only benefit me, right?
On the second green, I told JZ I’d started hitting balls to a metronome, that I was striping the hell out of the ball, but that my swing looked awful. We would look at it next week. But he had a look on his face: I was finally getting it. The swing didn’t need to be perfect, or even good. I just had to hit the shot.
Paresh and I had a good laugh in the cart: imagine talking to a wizard the way you talk to a magician. You ask a magician where the coin went after he makes it disappear because you know he’s hidden it somewhere. You know you got duped, and you want to know how — that’s the whole fun of it.
The way down the second fairway, we mimicked the Wizard. “What do you mean where did the coin go? It disappeared. I told you I was going to make it disappear, and it disappeared. What the hell are all these questions about?”
[1] This got hammered into us during high school physics: objects can have negative acceleration with positive velocity. This happens when you hit the brakes in your car — the car is moving forwards (positive velocity), but its speed is dropping moment by moment (negative acceleration). Speed is what the speedometer reads; acceleration is the change from what the speedometer read a second ago. As the car slows down from 10mph to 5mph, its velocity is 5mph, but the acceleration is –5mph/h. [If you’re a physics nerd starting to type a reply that I’ve messed up the units: please go touch grass (but also actually please let me know)]
[2] I think it’s a damn catchy name, what I’ve given this newsletter, but the problem is that I can’t ever use this phrase. And it’s a great one. I’m giving in — I’ll give everyone that feeling when they say the name of the movie in the movie:
[3] This was a new concept to me — I always thought the putter was supposed to be a pendulum, just swinging at the natural pace that a pendulum would swing. But, really, the putter is supposed to load at the top, just like any other club. You apply a force to slow it down and speed it back towards the target. It’s not just gravity taking over. If you’re confused the same way I was, now you know too!