It started with a simple question from my wife.
“Ask Brandel if he thinks Matthew Wolff’s swing is sustainable,” she suggested, and with that Brandel Chamblee of Golf Channel and I went down a rabbit hole, touching on an array of topics including how social media and YouTube have “bitch-slapped instruction into reality,” why Trackman doesn’t necessarily make golf swings better and how all those top-50 instructor lists are a joke.
In part II (coming soon), Chamblee digs in to why he’s not on board with Rickie Fowler’s coaching change, what’s wrong with Jordan Spieth, and who’s really coaching Tiger Woods these days. Sorry, you’ll have to wait a news cycle or two for all of that but we promise it will be worth the wait. It’s Chamblee breaking it all down in his inimitable fashion.
The transcript of our conversation ran nearly 10,000 words – but we spared you from having to suffer through some of our asides and trimmed his infamous verbosity – and only left the juicy stuff.
With no further ado, Brandel Chamblee everybody.
Golfweek: Since I know my wife is going to ask me later on if I asked you her question, I’ll just start there as I’m interested in your take. Is Matthew Wolff’s swing sustainable?
Brandel Chamblee: Absolutely. That’s like saying, Is Miller Barber’s golf swing sustainable? The funkiest golf swings endure the longest and are the most consistent. You can’t find a funkier golf swing than Ray Floyd. Ray Floyd was winning golf tournaments at 49 years of age, he was on the Ryder Cup at 50. Same is true of Miller Barber, same is true of Lee Trevino, same is true of Jim Furyk. Find me a more consistent player over a longer period of time than Jim Furyk and you’re talking about the Mount Everest of golfers. So, it’s not only sustainable, it’s a golf swing that is going to lead to other players who are adopting the moves in his golf swing.
GW: For the longest time, we were headed in a direction towards everybody trying to do the same thing, get the same numbers, but now we’re starting to move the opposite way. How do you explain that? It would seem that with the ease in checking your numbers these days, that we should be moving towards everybody being more like Adam Scott, right?
BC: No, I think that people realize the movement patterns and the teaching philosophy of 30, 40 years ago has run into YouTube videos and social media, which acts as purity for teaching and I believe about five, six, seven years ago the whole instruction world, the pendulum began to shift away from restriction to more freedom to move, to turn. Turn those hips, straighten that right leg, lift that left heel. When you do that a whole host of possibilities happen. Your hands are going to get high and when they get high you’re going to end up with guys like Matt Wolff and Justin Thomas. It used to be everybody tried to swing perfectly on plane, left arm on shoulder plane, club and club face and left arm in same alignment at the top. These are all aesthetic ideals which work to restrict the athlete.
So, now then you’re getting all this freedom and athletic movement, so you’re going to see swings like Viktor Hovland. He basically learned his golf swing on YouTube. Yeah, he’s had a few teachers and so forth, but the errors in teaching have been kicked to the curb by social media and by YouTube and by people who had access to that stuff. Look, the whole reason I wrote my book, I would say 95% of the reason I wrote the book I wrote was to swing the pendulum of teaching away from irrational ideas to the commonalities of the greatest players of all times.
GW: Miller Barber found something that worked – hitting balls and playing over an extended period of time – but in this day and age if he had a Trackman in front of him wouldn’t he have moved away from a swing that was perfectly good?
BC: He probably would have been a lesser player. I mean it’s absolutely a fact that Trackman helps you dial in your golf club equipment. It’s an absolute fact, no question about it. It’s good for that. It’s not obvious that it’s good for the game. It’s not obvious that it makes you a better player. Does it help you dial in your equipment? Your yardages? Yes, it’s more convenient than laying golf bags out there 50 and 75 yards and hitting those targets.
But it’s not obvious that Trackman makes you a better player in terms of your golf swing. Miller Barber had he had instruction perhaps earlier somebody would have said to him, ‘Look, you got to set your wrist earlier on the back swing.’ Why? ‘I don’t know, because I think it looks better.’ But now today Miller Barber would go, ‘Well, hold on a second, why would you want me to set my wrist earlier own the back swing? Because right here on YouTube I can see that Ben Hogan didn’t do that and I see that Jack Nicklaus didn’t do that and Tiger Woods didn’t do that and I can see that Greg Norman didn’t do that. So why do you want me to set my wrists earlier on the back swing?’ Because nobody did that.
The teachers are being exposed for their idiocy, but I stood on the range with a prominent teacher who had acolytes all around him who then went out and those acolytes talk with acolytes and then they completely spread this flawed philosophy through all of teaching and all teachers stuck to that ideal and all teachers taught flawed philosophies and these philosophies finally got bitch-slapped by reality. YouTube, there it is, you’re wrong, they’re right.
Before that who had video of all these people? You had to really, really be a student of the game. And then even if you were you still had the periodicals that would post stories and you’d go to the airport and go to the grocery store and there they are touting that this is how you swing a golf club and you say, ‘Well, I guess I’m an idiot because here are these guys on front pages of magazines telling me that I need to set my wrists and swing flat and keep the club in front of me and stay balanced and have a compacted golf swing for more consistency.’ These are all packaged lies. They didn’t have malicious intent, but they just weren’t vetted out. Now those ideas get vetted out by social media. It’s peer review. Put those out there, the whole world goes to their computers and says, Wait a minute.
GW: It does seem like if you go by the rankings of instructors, all the best teachers in the country are working with PGA Tour pros. It seems farfetched that it could be that simple, right?
BC: Oh, the rankings are ridiculous. They couldn’t be any more inaccurate. When I look at those lists and the people that put those lists together, they’re my friends, and again there’s no malicious intent but they put them together based upon those teachers that are the most marketable, that are writing the most columns.
We can clearly, in an objective way, determine who the best teachers are and we’re just not doing it because we’re lazy, but the PGA of America has the ability to objectively tell you who the best teachers are based upon any number of metric — club head speed, launch angles, or how about just six months before a player comes to you what their handicap was and after that for the next year what their handicap is and, of course, there’s all kinds of factors that would come into play there. There would be squabbling and there would be people who mess around with those numbers, but we would be on our way there. There has to be a better way than what we’re doing right now which is just the opinion, by the way, of all these teachers.
All I know is that when I get that list I know one thing: these for sure are not the top-50 teachers in the world. For sure. That’s 50 out of the 27,000 that I know for sure are not the top-50 teachers in the world. And by the way I go down all the lists and I get a (pad) out and I write down what they teach, what their ideas are and then I go look up all their (pro) players and then I see are they better or are they worse? I do it for all 50 of them. It takes me days to do it, but I do it just for giggles. I go online, I look at their ideas and some of them crack me up.
Coming soon to Golfweek.com, Part II of this discussion with Brandel Chamblee.
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