It seems in every infomercial there’s eventually a moment when the host says, “But wait … there’s more!”
We’ve reached that point in the Q&A with Brandel Chamblee, which took place at the Waste Management Phoenix Open before Sungjae Im or Viktor Hovland won. If you missed Part I or Part II, click the links to catch up. Trust us, Part III with Chamblee is better than The Godfather III.
GW: If Bryson DeChambeau came to you for advice, what would you tell him?
BC: (Laughing) What would I tell him? There’s a lot of things I like about Bryson’s game. I guess I would tell him to go back and look at the records of John Schlee, Mac O’Grady and Bobby Clampett (note: they won a combined four PGA Tour titles, or one fewer than DeChambeau on his own). I would say you go look at those records. And you just tell me if that led to the kind of career that you want. Because that’s where you’re headed.
All those players were highly technical, very conscientious players, very sharp intellectually, but is that the kind of career you want? And then it’s like, “What kind of career do you want?” There is room for curiosity in the game, but the game is more art than it is science; it’s more abstract than it is linear. And you’re completely linear and that’s great if you want to be an engineer, but this game, the beautiful thing about golf is engineers can make money out here, you know, but artists make more money.
Seve made a hell of a lot more money than Mac O’Grady, and the thing is that those engineers are all sure they’re right. Because math adds up and they go down and they look at all these numbers and it absolutely has to work. You look at the way DeChambeau looks at a miss, he looks at it with such an incredulous hatred last week when his ball goes left, he’s like, “How does that go left?” It makes no sense to him because two and two is four. But not on a golf course it’s not. Two and two, to quote “The Big Short,” two and two equals fish. Can’t remember the character’s name that said that but two and two equals fish. Golf is not like that. So I would tell him to go look at those players and then look at their careers. It’s like, “Do you want a career like that? Because that’s where you’re headed.”
GW: The class of 2011 had its “quarter-life crisis” last year. Jordan Spieth was winless, Justin Thomas was injured for a stretch, but he’s bounced back. Daniel Berger was out, too, and looks to be on solid footing again. Patrick Rodgers still hasn’t won yet and struggled to keep his card. And Ollie Schniederjans lost his while Michael Kim is lost in the wilderness and hardly has made a cut since his lone win at the 2018 John Deere Classic. Xander Schauffele was the unheralded guy of the group and was the best of the bunch last season. What do you make of them?
BC: It’s beautiful that Xander is taught by his father, Justin Thomas is taught by his father. Those two have gone on. So, the others did what? They went and started talking to every teacher there was, or their teachers started changing the way they taught them. Again, you cannot overstate the fact that both Justin Thomas and Xander were taught by their fathers who were there, not for their own benefit as teachers, but purely for their son and they enjoy watching their sons invent and create and get better. Experience will make you better.
Schniederjans has this incredibly sharp angle of attack, lowest launch angle on the PGA Tour. When you start seeing people with a launch angle of six, they’re in trouble. That’s way too much angle. They’re not going to have great proximity to the hole and it’s going to creep into their putting.
Not quite sure what happened to Daniel Berger. Growing a superstar is fraught with issues. You get, you know, lured away by equipment contracts, you get lured away by teachers who have only their best interests in mind. Yeah, they’re trying to make you a better player but they’re also trying to use you as their guinea pig for their ideas. You make a little bit of money, maybe you get a little complacent. There are all kinds of potholes out there. Injuries, there’s all kinds of things. You go to the gym and hurt yourself, things like you look at Camilo Villegas and Anthony Kim, they were going to be superstars but they go into the gym, they hurt themselves, existential hurdles, nocturnal issues. There are all kinds of things that get in the way of growing a superstar.
GW: Which of the Class of 2019 – Viktor Hovland, Collin Morikawa and Matthew Wolff – would you want to caddie for, to have as your meal ticket, for the next decade or two?
BC: That’s a tough one. You would be happy if you got any of those three. It may just be that 20 years from now, all three of them have comparable careers the way Phil (Mickelson) and Ernie (Els) did, who came out at the same time and the question would have been asked, “Who is going to have the better career, Phil or Ernie?”
To the degree that Phil beat Ernie is only because Phil is smart enough not to let anybody mess with his golf swing, and he had multiple teachers and none of them changed his golf swing one iota. If Ernie had stuck with the golf swing that he had in 1992, he would have probably annihilated Phil. You look at Ernie Els’ golf swing in 2000-2001, he goes up to the top and casts. Els was nowhere near the driver of the golf ball that he should have been because he cast the club. He threw away all his power on his angle in the transition. The reason Ernie Els couldn’t beat Tiger Woods was not because Tiger Woods was better at golf, it was because Ernie Els was being taught to cast the club. He couldn’t drive the golf ball like Tiger Woods. And he was winning majors when Phil couldn’t win majors. It took a bizarre set of circumstances for Phil to start winning majors, like a solid core golf ball turning everybody into inaccurate drivers that put them in the rough and all of a sudden Phil could beat people in the rough.
But to answer your question, I guess probably Viktor Hovland. If you’re a caddie, you would never have to stray very far from the fairway, you’re not going to get mud on your shoes very often. He’s got the smallest miss of just about anybody out there and he’s just a delightful young man. He hits as many or more solid shots than anybody in the game. He hits it right on the meat of the club. Tony Finau and Hovland, those are the two who could at any moment just go off.
GW: What do you think is holding Finau back?
BC: Nothing. I mean, is he a great putter? No. But statistics lie a lot and win totals lie a lot. He is more on the cusp of breaking out than any other player in golf right now. He may only win one time this year, but he may win four or three, he may do what David Duval did. He is, as we sit here and speak, he’s second in Strokes Gained: Tee to Green, only Rory is better than him. He’s seventh in Strokes Gained: Total, in spite of the fact that he’s a below-average putter. He’s an extraordinary golfer. Any minute, any minute he could go off.
If you look who in the top, say, 200 in the world, who is poised for a breakthrough, there’s Sungjae Im, Ben An, Joaquin Niemann and Matt Wolff, Collin Morikawa. There’s Doc Redman, but there’s nobody more poised to break out than Tony Finau. There’s Victor Hovland, good gracious, it’s Finau and Hovland who are the two that are most poised in my opinion. But Collin Morikawa is right there. Those are the players who are most poised to break out.
