Tiger, Angelina, and the biggest secret in golf
Why you're better off with Tiger's driving than his putting
In Golf Magazine's Survey of the American Golfer, we played a game of Would You Rather...? Your answers to two questions jumped out at me.
We asked, "Would you rather have Tiger's game off the tee or around the greens?" Three out of four of you said you'd prefer the World No. 1's short game over his 300-yard drives.
Sorry, wrong answer.
Once upon a time, I would have agreed with the majority. As we're all told, solid ball-striking is dandy, but scoring is all about the short game. Drive for show, etc. Mark Broadie has changed my mind. We've got it backwards. A professor at Columbia Business School in New York City, Broadie, a 3-handicap, has logged and analyzed more than 60,000 shots hit by players of all levels, from Tour pros to that guy on your range wearing a dime-sized groove in his hosel. After years of research, Broadie found that compared to Tour pros, everyday players throw away more shots from outside 100 yards than they do from inside 100 yards. In other words, for you and me the long game is more important to scoring than the short game.
How could this be? Location, location, location. There's less real estate inside 100 yards of the green, meaning less room to make Alpo of your hole. Whereas there's much more room outside of 100 yards from the hole, so there's more space in which to slice into woods, chunk long irons, and top drives into marshes (but enough about my last hole.) It adds up. Better ballstriking helps you bypass all that potential trouble.
Broadie stresses that the short game isn't unimportant, just that for amateurs a good long game is underrated, and a source of many wasted strokes.
Back to our survey question. Should you take Tiger's driving or putting? Broadie gave me an example based on the thousands of shots he's tracked. Take a 20-plus handicapper who struggles to break 100 and who averages about 200 yards off the tee. Statistically, if Below Average Joe starts driving like Tiger -- hitting it 100 yards longer and almost never losing shots to woods, water or O.B. -- he'll save about 1.1 strokes per hole. Give our hacker Tiger's putting game, and he saves .65 strokes per hole. For the typical chop, not only is Tiger's driver a better weapon than his putter, but statistically it's almost twice as effective.
What about a slightly better player--a 90s shooter? Via email, Broadie broke down how taking Tiger's long game and short game, respectively, would help a typical 15-handicap: The 15 would become a scratch golfer with Tiger's long game (shots of 100 yards or more from the hole) and would become a 5-handicap with Tiger's short game (shots inside 100 yards from the hole).
A good putter helps but only so much.
Speaking of (ahem) scoring, our survey also asked which you'd rather do: play a round with Tiger Woods, or "play around" with Angelina Jolie. More than 80 percent of you chose a tee time with Tiger over a date with Angelina. (Don't worry. She'll hire a babysitter.)
Hey, Tiger's a living legend, but to the 80 percent of you who chose Woods over Angelina, I gotta ask: How many V1s have you taken to the head?
