Johnny Miller on FLOG

[A.G._Crockett]

In Miller's monthly column in one of the magazines, he contends the following.  (Hope this is an accurate paraphrase)

In the "old" days, because the money was so much less in professional golf, players naturally became conservative in order to make a check each week and enough money over the course of the season.  Now, with the money for a high finish being so huge, players have gravitated toward a go-for-broke style, hoping to catch a hot week/streak and make their money in just a few events.

More to think about...

[Cliff Hamm]

I tend to agree with his comments.I have followed professional golf for 40 years and gone to numerous tournaments.  It struck me, now quite a few years back, that players never have swung so hard.  Granted equipment changes help, but back in the days of steel and persimmon, I don't believe players typically swung with 110% force.  No one brought the club back like Daly past 3:00 and he is not alone.  

Part of this is what I might call the Vijay influence.  I read recently even Tiger said he changed to Vijay's philosophy of long is better and the rough ain't so bad. Clubs and the ability to control the ball better have a lot to do with it, but in the 'old days' players did not swing for the fences anything like today.  One wonders if the old timers had swung harder how much further they would have hit it.  At the same time how many more trees would they have found?

[Brent Hutto]

Part of this is what I might call the Vijay influence.  I read recently even Tiger said he changed to Vijay's philosophy of long is better and the rough ain't so bad. Clubs and the ability to control the ball better have a lot to do with it, but in the 'old days' players did not swing for the fences anything like today.  One wonders if the old timers had swung harder how much further they would have hit it.  At the same time how many more trees would they have found?

One possibility, perhaps untestable, is that Vijay is just flat out correct. It is entirely possible that someone 20 years earlier could have learned to keep the ball in play while swinging "110%" and that they would have found that a wedge from the rough beats a 7-iron from the fairway on average.

Assumptions are funny things. They can drive entire populations of people to strive for sub-optimal results with everyone involved thinking there is no better way to proceed. If everyone hadn't "known" (i.e. assumed) that the only way to win professional golf tournmants was by granting absolute primacy to the requirement that approach shots be played from the fairway, then maybe the powerful modern golf swing would have evolved decades earlier.

Here are a few assumptions that were accepted as incontrovertible fact by every player on the PGA Tour not that long ago.

1) Working out with weights to gain strength and muscle mass will ruin your golf swing.

2) Nobody wins a major championships unless they do whatever it takes to hit fairways and avoid the rough.

3) Drive for show, putt for dough.

4) A real player can play any shot he needs around the green by opening up his sand wedge. Lob wedges are not serious clubs.

Prophecies tend to be self-fulfilling. If everyone believes that swinging hard means making too many bogeys it doesn't prove the point for someone trying to swing harder, making some bogeys and declaring the matter settled. Vijay Singh knows how to swing harder than Jack Nicklaus would ever have wanted to swing and still keep the ball in play more than 99% of the time. The way he knows that is because he's spent his whole life believing that it's better to swing hard and therefore developing a swing with an acceptable failure mode that doesn't lose golf balls when he plays every tee shot flat out.

Assumptions matter.

[JESII]

The reasons for the go for broke mentality on Tour are numerous and inter-related in many ways.

Huge top-end money
Equipment specialized for attacking play
Courses prepared to accept attacking play
Players who never learned the 'finese' style
Guaranteed weekly endorsements
Top ten bonus money

"One wonders if the old timers had swung harder how much further they would have hit it.  At the same time how many more trees would they have found?"

I think one thing we can be sure of is that at the highest level players have always figured out how to swing as hard as they can WITHOUT SACRIFICING ACCURACY. Today the equipment allows players to swing much harder because, among other reasons, balls do not spin as far off-line as they used to.

[Brent Hutto]

I think one thing we can be sure of is that at the highest level players have always figured out how to swing as hard as they can WITHOUT SACRIFICING ACCURACY. Today the equipment allows players to swing much harder because, among other reasons, balls do not spin as far off-line as they used to.

The equipment has to be a factor, no doubt. But if you look at video of Jack Nicklaus's swing and Tiger Wood's swing at the point when they each won about their tenth major there's not really much similarity. And that would be true if you compared one of Nicklaus's successful contemporaries with one of Tiger's. Everything from conditioning to swing mechanics is designed with a different intention in each case.

When you say that Jack Nicklaus for example was swinging as hard as he could without sacrificing accuracy, that is contingent upon the swing he was using. All that ankle-rolling and leg action and back arching would have failed to keep the ball in play if he tried to swing 20% harder. But that just means that he built a swing that was incrementally more powerful than his contemporaries while still functioning under the assumptions of the era.

I'd bet at some point in his childhood Tiger Woods attempted to emulate Jack's style of swing (since he states that as a youngster he idolized everything about Nicklaus). He probably figured out pretty quickly that there were other ways to swing which let him go after the ball much harder. His mental image of his golf game involved bombing the ball out there not just incrementally further than Nicklaus but far beyond everyone who had ever played the game. Coming along in the time and place that he did, Tiger had access to newer modes of learning and more powerful swing techniques. So did a lot of others like Hogan-idolizing Vijay Sigh. The result is the power game that we see today.

Still, in the end we can't know how that power game would play out with wound golf balls and persimmon driving clubs. Statisticians would say that the external changes in balls and drivers are completely confounded with the internal changes in mental assumptions and physical conditioning that occurred among top players over the last 20 years.

[JESII]

Brent,

Interesting perspective. I'm not sure I ever thought of the effect our own assumptions have on how we approach an activity but it certainly seems it would be significant.

This anecdote should support your side.

I grew up playing golf on a good, hard golf course designed by William Flynn in the late 1920's. It is widely known that ball striking is a premium there and I became a pretty good ball striker. I also was a bit of a purist in the sense that I have always played forged irons and my on course approach was to try and hit the "proper" shot all the time, eg. I would always try to shape the ball into the pin the way Hogan spoke about it, high, low, right-to-left and left-to-right.

At the point where I felt my game was worthy of trying to earn a living on I turned pro, moved to Florida and played minitours, Monday qualifiers and Q-school for three years. With not enough success to live on I stopped playing and got a real job. The first time someone asked me what about my game was lacking as compared to those that succeeded at my level and moved on to one of the two real Tours (PGA or Nationwide) The first thing that came to mind was ball striking to the extent that those guys were real good at hitting one shot all the time and very rarely hit any other shots. In other words, they would have their standard shot and they knew what the ball was going to do. Whether it was a fade, a draw, high or low they hit that shot all the time and never thought about "the proper shot" for the circumstance.

My assumption that hitting all the different shots at the appropriate time would be better than hitting one shot all the time is the one change I would make if I were to go back and start over.



More to your point about players now understanding that they can play at least as well from the rough as the fairway so long as there is a sustantial distance advantage, do you think the increased length off the tee (therefore reduced distance into the green) today versus 1975 which turns the second shot into a wedge as opposed to a 7 iron for this shot out of the rough is a contributor to this change of approach? Or put another way, 30 years ago if a player sacrificed accuracy for an additional 25 yards they were still hitting an approach club (out of the rough) that was difficult to control, whereas today players are sacrificing an 8iron out of the fairway for a wedge out of the rough. I think the basis for the FLOGGERS position is that they are hitting wedges into the greens so why sacrifice the distance.

[A.G._Crockett]

Miller's point here is NOT about the advantage of distance vs. the penalty of rough.  His point is that MONEY has changed the season-long strategies of golfers because you can make your season with a hot week or two.  If I bomb away, and happen to catch a couple of weeks where I have the driver and putter going at the same time, then the rewards are huge.  In days gone by, Miller says, the better season-long strategy was to play conservatively and try to earn consistently throughout the season.

Kind of like the difference between putting $10 into lottery tickets vs. passbook savings each week?

[Cliff Hamm]

Miller's point here is NOT about the advantage of distance vs. the penalty of rough.  His point is that MONEY has changed the season-long strategies of golfers because you can make your season with a hot week or two.  

I believe the two issues are intertwined.  Money at the top these days is obviously huge.  The question becomes am I better off making the cut and getting a check each week or trying to win the lottery big time?  In the past I think most pros went for the check each week and hence wanted to keep the ball in play. If you bomb away you are more likely to miss a cut.  Today golfers realize the money at the top is huge and to have any chance at it you must bomb away.  This includes hitting it further and straying but doing better with a wedge from the rough than a 7 iron from the fairway.  

Brent's post on past assumptions I think hit the nail on the head.  As equipment changed and money has become bigger and bigger past assumptions also changed.  Big money is one of the reasons why and perhaps provided the impetus for the change of philosophy. But the question does remain.  Could someone like Nicklaus actually have been better if he too crushed it every time.  He may have missed more cuts but actually won more.

[Brent Hutto]

My theory (totally untestable, of course) is that there is indeed a threshold effect to the FLOG strategy. I'd suppose the actual threshold depends on how thick the rough is and how firm the greens are. But a good guess would be that a wedge out of the rough is worth it while a mid-iron is not.

An interesting problem is just how that factors into course architecture. To keep the biggest hitters from having wedge second shots, you'll need a bunch of holes in the 480-560 yard range. Those start looking like what we've always thought of as "Par 5" holes, no? Perhaps what FLOG renders obsolete are holes in the 360-450 yard range (assuming we for some reason don't want to watch driver-wedge). I think there is plenty of spectator and player interest in the short Par 4 of around 290-340 yards since that brings a go-for-it dynamic into the tee shot. Then up in the 500's you blur the line between "drivable Par 5" and "ridiculously long Par 4" since you basically expect the strongest players to get somewhere near the green in two strokes.

The main problem may actually be that many courses have their Par 4's clustered between about 380 and 460 yards which is pretty much the least interesting length range for watching a FLOGGING contest. Either they hit the fairway and try to knock a sand wedge to six feet or they hit the rough and try to judge a gap wedge from whatever lie they have and end up within 10-15 feet if they guess right. All the iron and fairway wood shots will be on long Par 3's and those Par 4/5 holes of 500-some yards.

A.G. Crockett,

Returning to the perspective of Johnny Miller's article, you sure make it sound like FLOG is a better game for spectator interest than the old deal of a bunch of guys steering around the course with both hands on the wheel hoping to cash a 25th-place check every week with a few Top 10's thrown in when their putter gets hot. Maybe from a sufficiently remote perspective a few decades hence we'll look back at the 90's and 00's as a golden age of exciting go-for-broke power golf on the PGA Tour...

[JESII]

Today, full field event purses are split in a consistent manner. 18% goes to first and so on. It's the same every week now, was this purse split different 30 years ago? Was it more bottom weighted?

I think Miller overlooks a couple of things in making an accurate statement. Today's players do play in the manner he says, but I think the reasons are more than simply the amount of money at the top.

On the other hand, think about it, the huge purses of today (including bottom money) would seem to allow more conservative play because players start each week with $10,000+ worth of endorsement money and making the cut means another $10,000 minimum. Sure, $1,000,000 payday is life-changing for a large percentage of those guys, but as far as stlyes of play and how that relates to the purse breakdown, I might not agree with his assesment if the proportions are the same as 30 years ago.

[Brent Hutto]

Big money is one of the reasons why and perhaps provided the impetus for the change of philosophy. But the question does remain.  Could someone like Nicklaus actually have been better if he too crushed it every time.  He may have missed more cuts but actually won more.

Which might bring up an interesting question about Nicklaus relative to his peers. Everyone thinks that Jack hit that patented high fade with a 2-iron better than anyone out there during his peak years. How was his skill with a pitching wedge out of the rough relative to his peers? Would Jack have been better served by a long-iron hitting contest or a wedge-out-of-the-rough contest?

[A.G._Crockett]

A.G. Crockett,

Returning to the perspective of Johnny Miller's article, you sure make it sound like FLOG is a better game for spectator interest than the old deal of a bunch of guys steering around the course with both hands on the wheel hoping to cash a 25th-place check every week with a few Top 10's thrown in when their putter gets hot. Maybe from a sufficiently remote perspective a few decades hence we'll look back at the 90's and 00's as a golden age of exciting go-for-broke power golf on the PGA Tour...

Brent,
I didn't mean to say that at all, and I don't agree with it being more interesting.  I was just giving Miller's perspective as a possible additional or alternative explanation of WHY flogging has become the Tour ethic instead of just distance vs. accuracy as the explanation.

[George Pazin]

The reasons for the go for broke mentality on Tour are numerous and inter-related in many ways.

Huge top-end money
Equipment specialized for attacking play
Courses prepared to accept attacking play
Players who never learned the 'finese' style
Guaranteed weekly endorsements
Top ten bonus money

I think another factor often overlooked is simply the depth of competition these days. The days of playing conservative golf and winning anything other than a major are probably long gone. I think this also explains why we sometimes see one hit wonders in the majors. With regular tour events, there are too many guys who can throw up a lot of birdies in a hot week. So players are likely going to go for it all the time, figuring they'll have their own hot weeks, win or finish high enough to guarantee their card, and keep on playing.

The last part of your post is totally true as well. There doesn't seem to be as much "sacrificing accuracy" anymore.

[Jim Nugent]

Big money is one of the reasons why and perhaps provided the impetus for the change of philosophy. But the question does remain.  Could someone like Nicklaus actually have been better if he too crushed it every time.  He may have missed more cuts but actually won more.

Which might bring up an interesting question about Nicklaus relative to his peers. Everyone thinks that Jack hit that patented high fade with a 2-iron better than anyone out there during his peak years. How was his skill with a pitching wedge out of the rough relative to his peers? Would Jack have been better served by a long-iron hitting contest or a wedge-out-of-the-rough contest?

Nicklaus pitching game, I always heard, was so-so.  I think that was around the green, but it suggests to me he may not have been super on full shots out of the rough.  

Jack said he made his living on par 5's.  Very similar to Tiger, who is a total of something like 1200 under par on par 5's on tour.  

[JESII]

From what I know of Nicklaus (admittedly not much) he was very detail oriented. I would have a hard time believing he missed an opportunity to gain an advantage because of preconcieved assumptions. Brent makes an interesting point about what is essentially thinking inside the box, I think the best player ever would think outside the box pretty well when it comes to his expertise....Course Management. I think the #1 reason Jack may have never employed this approach was that the advantage to him at that time was not there.

Then again, maybe he just wanted to play the game better than everyone else the right way.

Just my opinion.

[JohnV]

Sam Snead once said, "I'd rather have a 9-iron from the rough than a 5-iron from the fairway",  which is why he probably never own a US Open, but it does seem to be the way of golf today.

Yes the payoff is big today and with the 70th place getting a good paycheck it seems like playing "flog" is the way to go.  But you still have to make sure you get to the top 125 (150) before you are worry free.

Probably the all-exempt tour has as much to do with the change in attitude as anything.  Once a player gets his $600K for the year, he has no fear.  I forget when the switch over to the all-exempt tour happened, but I'm sure it had some effect on the way guys play.

[Cliff Hamm]

I think the #1 reason Jack may have never employed this approach was that the advantage to him at that time was not there.

Then again, maybe he just wanted to play the game better than everyone else the right way.

Just my opinion.

Concur that there was little advantage for Jack to try to even hit the ball further.  He was generally the longest on tour by a substantial margin.  What was to be gained by hitting it longer when he wasn't being pushed?  Additionally, his wedges were the weakest part of his game.  At the same time if he had been able to gain some distance who knows what the result would be.  As far as playing the game the right way, I don't think there's a wrong way if one is successful.

[JESII]

Or maybe that no fear attitude starts with the knowledge that one or two real good weeks get you past that $600K number now so FLOGGING is the plan from the outset.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in the days prior to the all-exempt tour didn't the majority of the field have to Monday qualify each week? Assuming that's correct, that format would seem to encourage more aggressive play due to the huge benefit of being straight in the next event with a top 10 or whatever it was.

[JohnV]

JES, I'm sure that players got more agressive after they made the cut back then to try to top 10.  But before that, they wanted to make sure they got a check.

Interestingly, the European Tour is changing its cut number from 70 to 65 starting next year.  I'd guess that means more money for the top finishers.

[Patrick_Mucci]

Cliff Hamm,

Players swung hard years ago.

Just look at Palmer, Player, Nicklaus and Weiskopf.

But, look at the size of their driver heads and remember there was no such thing as the redistribution of weight in the clubface to make mis-hits go straight.

Shot's hit off center went off line, into water, trees, deep rough, bunkers or out-of-bounds.

Brent Hutto,

In the 40's and 50's Frank Stranahan proved that you could work out with weights and that it would benefit your golf game.  However, few had the discipline to pursue the required routine until Gary Player came along.

AG Crockett,

I don't think it's the money issue that created Flogging, I think it's the equipment issue.

They do it because they can.
They do it because the method produces results.

In the past it didn't produce the results because the additional incremental distance they could get didn't result in greatly increased opportunities to improve their scores.

It usually resulted in higher scores due to errant drives.

They couldn't treat hazards like the Maginot line, as today's pros do.

[PThomas]

hey, maybe they need to plant MORE TREES at some of the Tour stops to truly penalize unaccurate driving!

of course, rough with some teeth in it would help too....but people like to see birdies, I guess  

[john_stiles]

My guess would be that 'some' found that when they did take a chance and flog, and hit the green from the rough, and this happened a few times more;  maybe it developed into a playing 'style'.

As Pat Mucci said,  it worked.  Either by trail and error or some organized plan, it seemed to work.  At least it works for a number of them, including the world's no. 1 whose game/strategy/swing has resulted in a large number of balls in the rough.

Is anyone still amazed at the great number of shots, from seemingly difficult/deep rough that land on the green and stop ?  Many of these shots to greens playing fairly firm if we can believe our eyes and the TV coverage.

Between the top players almost playing a custom ball, with spin rates monitored so closely, players hit it straighter. It is not amazing, yet it is amazing, that the rough is often ignored.

Wow, this technology is good !  

To add to my amazement,  I would speculate that the fairways, as a rule, have also been narrowed through the years.

[john_stiles]

Flogging is the result of Darwinism in player's swings and attitude, and the intelligent design of equipment,  meeting in one awful classic golf course hurricane.

[JESII]

Do players all the way down the money list FLOG?

Is it considered FLOGGING if they are not having success?

If there are more people FLOGGING than we know does that mean it might not be that successful a strategy? Maybe Tiger and Vijay are just the best players. Who knows?

[Jonathan Cummings]

In his day everybody thinks Jack out muscled his opponents.  Some forget that he was a scientist when it came to putting.  

There was an interview I saw on TV 25-30 some years ago where Jack and Arnie were seating facing the interviewer.  The interviewer asked "in each of your views, who was the best putter to ever have played the game?".  Arnie's thumb pointed to Jack and Jack's pointed to Arnie.

These guys won tournaments in no small part because they had great eyesight, great judgement and made more puttts than anyone else of their era.

JC