Wolff went low on Saturday and is beginning to look like world-beater fans thought he’d become.
This time last year Matthew Wolff was cruising.
The rising star on the PGA Tour had put together consecutive runner-up finishes at the U.S. Open and Shriners Hospitals for Children Open before a nagging right hand injury aided a poor run of form– five missed cuts, two WDs and a disqualification for signing an incorrect scorecard in 20 events with just four top-25 finishes – that plagued the rest of his 2020 super-season.
The 22-year-old looked more like the world-beater golf fans thought he’d be on Saturday at Country Club of Jackson, shooting a 7-under 65 from the morning wave to climb into contention at the 2021 Sanderson Farms Championship. In fact, Wolff is using the same set of TaylorMade P7MC irons he used at the U.S. Open and Shriners after he switched to the P750’s in the summer, according to the PGA Tour’s Sean Martin.
“I think that I’m just kind of putting everything in perspective a little bit,” said Wolff, who made a 36-footer on his final hole Friday to make the cut on the number at 5 under.
“I’m getting a little older and a little more mature and unfortunately last year was really hard for me and I wasn’t in a happy spot but I think at the end of the day I’m going to learn from that and I already have learned from it and definitely know in the future I think it’s going to make me a better player,” explained Wolff, “because I guarantee you that’s not the last time I’m going to have a little hiccup in my career and having that so young I feel like I’ve already learned so much more than maybe some guys who have had an easier career and stuff, even though it’s not easy to have a good career throughout the entire time.”
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Expectations were high for the Oklahoma State product coming out of school, and rightfully so. Wolff turned pro after a sophomore year in Stillwater that featured a program-record six wins, including the individual national championship. He won on Tour just a month later, outdueling Bryson DeChambeau and fellow rookie Collin Morikawa at the 2019 3M Open with an eagle on the 72nd hole.
The California native who now resides in Jupiter, Florida, added that he’s working on the right things and that’s led his game to make a turn back to the positive side. His happier mental state certainly helps, too.
Yesterday, @Matthew_Wolff5 made a 35-footer on 18 to make the cut on the number.
Wolff took advantage of little-to-no wind during most of his Saturday morning walk, and got into a rhythm alongside Luke List, who shot a 4-under 68. He birdied his opening hole and added two more on Nos. 4 and 6, with his lone bogey of the day sandwiched in-between on the par-5 5th.
Another birdie on the 9th put Wolff at 3-under 33 at the turn, and the train kept rolling with a two on the par-3 10th and a two-putt birdie from 28 feet on the par-5 11th. He added two more on Nos. 14 and 15 to put to bed his lowest score since his Saturday 61 at last year’s Shriners.
“I’m really happy with where I put myself and looking to have fun and just go out there and do my best tomorrow,” said Wolff.
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.
21-year-old Joaquin Niemann of Chile shoots a bogey-free 66 to lead Justin Thomas by one after the opening round in Maui.
To borrow a phrase from Roger Daltry and The Who, the kids are going to be all right.
Joaquin Niemann, 21, and Matt Wolff, 20, a pair of whippersnappers, may be the two youngest players in the field at the Sentry Tournament of Champions, but you wouldn’t know it by their impressive starts in their debuts at Kapalua’s Plantation Course.
Niemann signed for a 7-under-par 66 to claim a one-stroke lead over Justin Thomas after the first round in Maui and Wolff, the youngest player in the field is nipping at his heels after shooting 69. It continued a run of good form by Niemann, who despite an 0-3-1 record at the Presidents Cup in December, said it gave him a jolt of confidence.
“I think the Presidents Cup was huge for me, for my career, for my future. During that week, I learned a lot. I was with the best players in the world and played against Tiger, I was teamed with Adam Scott and talked a lot with them. It was an unbelievable week,” Niemann told Golf Channel after the round. “Ernie told me it was really important for me and it was going to give me a lot of experience and confidence for my future.”
Niemann missed only one green in regulation — at 16 — and recorded his 14th career bogey-free round on the PGA Tour. The new year started with a bang, a 31-foot birdie putt at the third hole for his first birdie as Niemann picked apart the newly-renovated Plantation Course on a day when the tradewinds laid down. He made birdie on all four par 5s to continue what has been an impressive season for Niemann, who won the opening event of the 2019-20 Tour season by winning A Military Tribute at the Greenbrier, and booking his ticket to Maui.
Niemann’s early success on Tour had a profound effect on another youngster in the field, Collin Morikawa, who turned pro in June and booked his ticket to Maui with a victory in Reno at the Barracuda Championship.
“For me, the person before us that got his card was probably Joaquin. You seem him do it in the start — you see young guys win on the PGA Tour — it gives you some sense of belief,” Morikawa said. “I’m sure what Matt, Viktor and I did this summer are going to change a lot of guys in college and how they view how they’re going to go through college, how they’re going to come out, what starts they’re going to get, can they make something out of it.”
Love laying here in prime time watching Kapalua Golf. Such a great mix of old veterans a young dreamers. I wish well to all youngsters. We were all there yrs ago. Good Luck to all Have a terrific yr. I’m jealous 👍
Wolff, who defeated Morikawa and Bryson DeChambeau in a playoff at the 3M Open, got off to a sluggish start, missing a short birdie putt at the fifth and taking three putts from 53 feet at six before his putter warmed up. He birdied his final two holes to join a logjam at 4 under and tied for fifth.
“As I kept on going I got more comfortable with my swing and the course and knew which way the wind was blowing and I felt like I hit some really good shots,” Wolff said.
Thomas, a past champion of this event in 2017, torched the back nine with five birdies en route to a 6-under 67.
