Just Golf

Improving Your Golf Game
So you want to find the "magic club" that will enable you to be a great golfer. Sounds great! But you need to know what the facts are.

Even Tiger Thinks So
Now Tiger says that clubs that fit is the most important thing, even for a beginner.

The Nine Ball Flights
There is a common diagram in many golf books that purports to show the nine basic ball flights. Unfortunately, that diagram is somewhere between useless and incorrect. Here is a version (actually two versions) of the diagram that correspond to physical reality.

US Open Report - 2002
I had an opportunity to attend the Sunday round of the 2002 US Open. Think Bethpage Black. Think Tiger, Phil, and Sergio.

You Da Man!
I posted this one as part of the discussion of the 1995 British Open on rec.sport.golf.

Road Trip!!! San Diego '98
Most of my family has gravitated to San Diego over the years, so I get there fairly often. My trip in the summer of 1998 had several interesting golf-related events. I got to play Torrey Pines. I visited the Callaway and Taylor Made factories, as well as their R&D facilities. And I got some really interesting "face time" with Dick Helmstetter (the R&D directory of Callaway -- he's the grandfather-looking guy in some of the Callaway commercials), Dick Rugge (then R&D director of Taylor Made, now the specifications chief of the USGA), and Alastair Cochran (his book is my absolute favorite on how golf really works).

The Great Square Groove Controversy
In the late 1980s and early '90s, it was widely -- and incorrectly -- believed that square grooves were illegal. Here's how that rumor came about, and what really happened.

Can the Wind Blow a Golf Ball Into the Cup?
On January 6, 2009, I got a phone call from Tommy Craggs, a fact-checker for ESPN The Magazine. He was following up on a "tall tale from sports", where a mis-struck putt was blown by the wind into the hole. It turns out the calculations are interesting, in that almost everything it requires is stuff a college freshman would have to know to pass Physics 101.

Constraints and Sports Technology
In every game the rules serve as a set of constraints that, in surprisingly large measure, define the nature of the game. This is an editorial, a strongly-felt argument that the USGA is caving in to the golf equipment manufacturers and, by so doing, giving the lie to their boast that they "protect the game". It isn't just about protecting existing courses from being obsoleted by technology; it's about keeping the competition based on skill and not the depth of your pocketbook.

Copyright Dave Tutelman 2010 -- All rights reserved