Golfweek’s three-part Q&A with Brandel Chamblee caused quite a stir in the golf world, especially among teaching professionals who took offense with some of Chamblee’s comments— including saying how social media and YouTube have “bitch-slapped instruction into reality.”
Plenty of industry voices have responded to Chamblee, who issued an apology via social media for his poor choice of words, but otherwise, he’s remained quiet as others piled on.
Chamblee broke his silence today while talking with host Jaime Diaz on his eponymous podcast, The Brandel Chamblee Podcast. Since Chamblee’s answers were presented on Golfweek.com’s Q&A in nearly their entirety, here is his full answer:
Chamblee: There was a phrase I used that I wish I could have tackled myself before I used it, and I certainly had never used it before, and it turned what I think would have been a mild controversy into something that was sort of flammable and it was used in the headline.
That phrase notwithstanding, I would say, other than that, there was a willful misreading of that Q&A. My point was that the PGA of America — and I’ve made this point numerous times, I’ve written about it, talked about it, gone on air and done numerous shows — that the PGA of America and the teachers of the PGA of America are the soul of the game. When you think about Harvey Penick or Eddie Merrins or Randy Smith or Sandy LeBauve or Peggy Kirk Bell or Bob Toski, on and on and on, they are the greatest link between the beginner and the captured golfer. I’ve said that innumerable times.
My point was that teaching has been improved at the, I say, the most notable level on the PGA Tour level by the internet. I don’t think that is any great insight. It seems obvious to me that some bad ideas in teaching, which I said were not maliciously intended but no less pernicious in their popularity. And those ideas were a centered head, an early set of the wrists and a restricted turn.
I think those ideas died a pretty quick death because of the peer review that is now available through the various social media outlets and the internet and YouTube. And beyond that I said that, and I believe this to be the case, the top 50 or top 100 teachers, whatever you want to say, when it is judged subjectively when it could clearly be judged objectively it will be an inherently flawed system.
Now, there were some people that took offense to that and those people are probably rightfully taking offense to that because they occupy a position amongst those in the top 50 or top 100 and they quite like their subjectively viewed position.
But who knows? As I’ve said, I’d like to know who the greatest teacher in the country is. I’d really like to know that. It may be a 75-year-old woman teaching off mats in Nebraska; it might be a 22-year-old, a young, just newly into the PGA of America person in Wyoming who is having the greatest success, but we won’t know until we start using objective criteria to judge the best teachers.
I was quite happy to find out that the PGA of America is going to do just that this summer. I talked to Suzy Whaley, the president of the PGA (of America), and she told me that’s exactly what’s going happen. They are going to for the first time ever use some objective measurement to sort of find who their best teachers are. I think golf will be better off for that and so will teaching. And that’s pretty much all I have to say about that Q&A.
Editor’s note: You can read Part I of the Q&A here Part II here and Part III here.