The Clever Formula Tour Pros Use to Out-Smart Golf Courses | The Game Plan | Golf Digest

it's July 1989 and something incredible just happened within two hours of each other four different players each hit the same Club on the same hole in the same tournament and they each ended with the same score a hole in one it was a mathematical Miracle Golf Digest pegged the odds of four golfers making a hole-in-one on the same course in a day at more than three hundred and thirty thousand to one but what about within two hours at a US Open like this a near impossibility it's why it's never happened before and it's never happened since but behind the bizarre circumstances of Oak Hill's sixth hole on that day was a strategy a clever little tactic that the best players in golf use on every single hole they play look closely and you'll be able to see it it's a strategy built on safety and smart and statistics the events of Oak Hills sixth hole that day in 1989 may have been unlikely but they weren't by mistake it was a happy result of a carefully crafted game plan foreign [Music] golfers think of standard greens they often think about something symmetrical like a circle or an oval but the interesting thing about great golf courses is how asymmetrical the greens are Oak Hills greens have all these little bulges and sharp Corners during the tournament usually on Saturday or Sunday the pin will be placed in one of these bulges and that creates a problem you've probably heard the phrase a short side Miss before at some point that's when a player's shot misses the green on the side closest to the hole this is what a short side Miss looks like on paper it doesn't look that bad because in many cases the ball appears closer to the hole but Pros they're absolutely terrified of them what makes short side misses such a killer is the tiny amount of green between them the player and the whole there's almost none to work with and therefore no margin for error it means players only option to try to get their ball close is to hit a finicky High shot usually from a really unpredictable lie in the rough they need their ball to stop quickly that's their only chance of trying to save power but the problem is even good shots tend to roll out close to 20 feet and end with missed par parts it's not that uncommon for players to miss on the short side but when they do it's usually by mistake some combination of a mental error or a double cross or a recovery shot gone wrong that's actually what happened the first time Tiger Woods ever blew a 54 hole lead in a major championship during the final round of the 2009 PGA on the 12th hole on Sunday Tiger's six iron recovery shot ran through the green into the short side he made a bogey and gave Yang his first taste of the league [Music] Columbia Professor Dr Mark Brody The Godfather of golf analytics has actually studied this so deeply that he created a new very nerdy statistic it's called the short-sighted index this measures how often players get up and down from various locations around the green and he found that players average about half a stroke more when they miss the green on the short side compared to when they miss on the long side of the green first question is what is short-sightedness here's an example where two balls that are off the green are both 20 yards from the hole the ball at position a is 20 yards from the hole it's five yards to the edge of the green and then another 15 to the hole the ball on the right at position e is also 20 yards from the hole but it has 17 yards to get to the edge of the green and only three yards on the green so in golf speak if you're on the left side you've got 15 yards of green to work with if you're on the right side you have three yards of to work with so even though both shots are 20 yards from the hole in the rough one is relatively easy and one is relatively difficult the short-sighted shot is almost four tenths of a stroke more difficult than the long-sided shots which is huge think of that as like 40 percent less likely to get up and down Miss on the short side just twice around and you've just lost a stroke do it once more after that and you're about to lose another one making that short side mistake is one of the quickest ways to bleed strokes and so Pros build entire game plans around avoiding the short side Miss when the pin and the short side are long left you'll often see Pros shift their target down and to the right when the pin and the short side is on the front right they'll do the opposite they'll aim longer and more left in many ways this anti-short side Miss plan is a defensive strategy but it's something that sticks even when Pros are ready to go on offense when they start getting more aggressive you'll often see players start attacking along slopes rather than looking at direct lines at the pin they'll work a draw into the green so it falls down a right to left slope although landable lawn and try to spin it down a slope back towards the PIN the 14th Hall at Oak Hill will be especially interesting in all this a short uphill 320 yard par 4 most players are going to try and drive the green but they won't have the Precision with their driver like they do their irons to land the ball exactly where they want especially on mitt's hit it's likely to turn the hole into a potential two-shot swing with those avoiding the short side looking at a birdie or eagle or those who don't staring at a par or worse Tiger Woods and Nick Faldo were two of the best tacticians in golf history and Tiger's rare 2009 mistake aside where Masters at avoiding the short side of the green that's how tiger landed on his nine Windows Theory they learned to work the ball from out to in no matter where the pin was they always moved from safety to Danger the closest airport ever got to the short side was at the very end of its Journey which brings us back to that historic Four Hole In One Day at Oak Hill in 1989. the pin that day was in a bulge at the very front of the sixth green the short side Miss was in front of the green 2 where there was also water and a nasty bunker so all four players decided to take an extra clock a seven iron and they each sent their shots long of the pin more than 20 feet long in Nick Price's case and they each watched their Ball come back down the slope and then gently fall into the hole there won't be any more holes in one there we're going to plant a tree there said one USGA official afterwards they didn't plant a tree there but a few decades later Oak Hill did blow up the hole and completely redesigned it the par 36th Hall is now a long snaking par 4 that ranks as the hardest Hall on the golf course there won't be any more holes in one there anymore that guy was right defend against the short side Pros know it's the best way to avoid disaster and then every now and again something magical may even happen foreign

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Id: uWQpHrd7it8

Length: 7min 30sec (450 seconds)

Published: Mon May 15 2023