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.
Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee said a word he used in his recent Q&A with Golfweek turned what “would have been a mild controversy into something that was sort of flammable.”
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.
Cowen told The Daily Telegraph that the virus had sapped him of much of his strength.
“You really don’t want this,” Cowen told the paper back on March 22. “I’m feeling horrendous and wouldn’t wish this on anyone; no matter how young and fit they may be.
” … it felt like my whole body was shutting down and I said to my wife I think I’ve only got 10 percent body strength left to fight this.”
But a message on the Pete Cowen Golf Academy social media accounts on Tuesday indicated that the famed teacher was vastly improved.
As many of you will be aware, in recent weeks unfortunately Peter Cowen has been extremely ill battling against the COVID-19 coronavirus.
I am delighted to announce that Pete is most definitely recovering and… https://t.co/0KcTmXb3cN
— petecowengolfacademy (@petecowengolf) April 7, 2020
The note, which came from academy manager Nick Huby went on to say:
“I’m delighted to announce that Pete is most definitely recovering and improving day by day slowly building his strength back up.
I am confident Pete will be able to get right back to the business of improving people’s golf very soon.
Peter and his family would like to thank everyone for all the kind, supportive messages and well wishes they have received.”
Among those worried about Cowen’s well-being was Woodland, who said the following to Golfweek via text:
“My thoughts and prayers are with him and everyone during this time. My family and I are at home feeling great trying to entertain three kids under 3. We are healthy and have no symptoms.”
Lee Westwood of England with his coach Pete Cowen during a practice session at the Worksop Golf Club in England.
According to an earlier article in Golfweek, Cowen coached Lee Westwood to World No. 1 in October 2010, ending the 281-week reign of Tiger Woods, and rebuilt Henrik Stenson’s swing, which led to victory at the 2016 British Open. Cowen attended the Honda Classic last month, where rookie sensation Viktor Hovland asked for help on his short game, as well as the Arnold Palmer Invitational, where he spent time with Koepka, and the Players Championship in March, where he worked with Woodland before the event was canceled.
In Golfweek’s exclusive Q&A with Golf Channel’s Brandel Chamblee he offers strong opinions on the state of golf instruction past and present
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.
Matthew Wolff at the Sentry Tournament of Champions at Kapalua. Photo by Cliff Hawkins/Getty Images
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?
A TrackMan 4 launch monitor.
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.
Photo by USA TODAY Sports
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.
Brian Harman skipped football practice one day when he was 11 to take a lesson from Jack Lumpkin. All these years later, they’re still together.
Brian Harman skipped football practice one day when he was 11 years old. His mother, Nancy, drove him from their home in Savannah, Georgia, to Sea Island, where he took an hour-long lesson from Jack Lumpkin, a fixture on every list of top golf instructors. Growing up on a golf course, Harman had picked up the game on his own, but he wanted to find out what one of the best teachers thought of his ability.
“He didn’t tell me to get lost,” Harman said. “He told me I was doing well and come back in a few months and he’d check me again. For me, that was like a rite of passage. I started going once every six months, and our relationship just grew from there.”
That initial lesson was equally as meaningful for Lumpkin, who knew talent when he’d seen it and from Harman’s very first swing knew he’d seen something special.
“There was no doubt in my mind that he was going to be a Tour player if he was inclined to do that,” Lumpkin remembered. “After that first lesson, I couldn’t wait to see him again. I used to wait to see his name in my lesson book because I just knew how good he was going to be.”
All these years later, Harman, 32, and Lumpkin, 84, are still together. Their hard work has made Harman a two-time PGA Tour winner, most recently at the 2017 Wells Fargo Championship.
“Jack is Brian’s safety net,” said World Golf Hall of Fame member Davis Love III, a fellow Lumpkin student. “He’s like ordering your favorite comfort food at a restaurant.”
Lumpkin played on the PGA Tour in 1958-59, but he was married and had two young kids to think about and accepted a position as an assistant golf professional. He learned the ropes under Masters champion Claude Harmon, father of Butch, at Winged Foot, and was head professional in 1968 at Oak Hill Country Club when it hosted the U.S. Open.
Lumpkin moved back to his native Georgia and, in 1976, joined the Golf Digest Schools with the likes of Jim Flick, Davis Love Jr. and Bob Toski. He came to Sea Island Resort as its director of instruction on Jan. 1, 1989, seven weeks after Love Jr., his best friend, died in a plane crash.
Lumpkin, the PGA Professional of the Year in 1995, is the type of pro who has forgotten more than most instructors know. Harman describes him as “old-school,” while embracing the latest technology such as V1 Golf, a swing analysis tool, Swing Catalyst, and TrackMan launch monitors for dialing in performance, but never as a crutch.
When Harman won his first PGA Tour title at the 2014 John Deere Classic, Lumpkin was one of the first people he thanked. Their work together has a certain rhythm that Lumpkin calls “guided discovery.” Rather than spoon-feeding a swing fix to Harman, Lumpkin has a habit of subtly mentioning how he likes a move made by a certain player. That player’s swing may just so happen to be on the screen in Lumpkin’s office for them to review.
“Then he lets me figure it out until it becomes second nature and I own it,” Harman said.
Need to buy for the golfer on your list? Let us offer some suggestions.
As the holiday season approaches, there’s likely a golfer on your shopping list. Maybe you’re that golfer on your shopping list (it’s OK to pick up a little something for yourself, too). Either way, let us guide you through the aisles on your quest for the perfect golf gift.
From tees to footwear to the latest in electronics, get a head start on the holiday season with Golfweek’s 2019 Holiday Gift Guide.
Take a look at our picks for some of the best golf-related gifts available in every budget range:
FootJoy Flex XP
Buzz: The Flex family of golf shoes was a popular new addition to the FootJoy family in 2019, and this fall the company is adding a waterproof, spikeless version to its lineup. The Flex XP has turf-grabbing traction elements to go along with its sporty, casual style.
