Enjoying the Game of Golf

[00:00:03] Speaker A: I don't necessarily know what the answer is to do it. I think it does kind of start with maybe taking a little bit. Taking a little pressure off of it and just having a little bit of fun, trying to find joy in it in some way or another. If that's trying to see how low of a score you can shoot with nothing but a five iron or play left handed, I don't care. Do something to have some fun. You know what I mean? That four hours on a golf course should be a time to enjoy something, not a time to add agony. How do we just enjoy being out there? It's a great game. That was my prayer the other day, was just, I just want to leave this golf course happy one time. You know, I don't care If I shoot 81, 91, 61. I just want to leave happy and feel like it had a good time and feel like I hit some decent shots along the way. You know, how do we do that so that we don't turn the game we love into a reason to hate life at the end of the day? [00:00:49] Speaker B: Well, don't. Don't sleep on your freshly shaven face. Did you have a date or no? I tell you, you need to shave. [00:00:59] Speaker A: Let's see. So it depends on. I shave twice a week, basically. I shave on two Tuesdays and usually on Friday because I've got a podcast on camera on every Tuesday and usually on camera every Friday, and that usually the Friday shave will usually get me through church on Sunday and then Monday I look like hell. So it's. I'm very strategic once in a while. If I. If I'm a little off sometimes I'll shave Sunday morning before church if I'm got time and if I look bad. But no, this is. This is just the cycle. You know, it's kind of like playing the golf course. You. They were telling us at Riverwood that day, Tony, that, you know, the greens are a little slower on Mondays. That's. That's me. My face is pretty slow on Mondays, but it's pretty quick on Friday and Saturday. You know, it's just the. The cycle of when you cut it. [00:01:51] Speaker B: So, yeah, anyway, let's. That's one more time than I shave a week. It's usually once a week. Usually. [00:02:00] Speaker A: Do you clean shave sometimes? [00:02:02] Speaker B: Sometimes, yeah. Like once a week. I'm. I'm. I haven't clean shaven in a while. I just get the. The beard thing out. No, guard it. Just say, that's good enough. [00:02:13] Speaker A: Yeah. All right, well, we've played Tony and I played some golf since we got together last. Do we want to talk about that? We could talk about. Mike and I talked about. I don't. I don't know if I want to talk about the first round. Um, you weren't there for that one, but I was texting Tony throughout my. My first round. It was my first round, like, six weeks. I was so excited about it. Yeah, he told. He told me before, like, write down your. Your mission for the round. So I just wrote on the scorecard, enjoy the blessing. Playing golf is a blessing. I just want to enjoy the blessing. And by about the. After I took a 10 on number five, I wasn't feeling very blessed. And I'm gonna be honest with you, it didn't feel. I hit three in a row out of bounds. And I said, will, this is going to be. I was thinking about the podcast that we did that time where you said you were talking about, you know, I just want to have fun. And then. Or it's like, I'm going to set the course record and it's like, double, double, triple, quad. I'm just here to have fun. I. I started off trying to have fun, and by the fifth hole, I was like, this is not any freaking fun at all. This stinks. But I had a little bit of everything, though, that day. I had say I had it up here. I had. I usually keep track of penalty strokes in a round by the back nine. I had to go to the tally system to keep up with it. I ended up with 14 penalty shots by the 12th hole. [00:03:26] Speaker C: Wow. [00:03:27] Speaker A: 14 for. And then the worst part about this, and I texted this to Tony on the 12th tee. We had. Literally that day I had released the podcast where he talked about this. So I just heard this episode four or five times editing it right before we put it out, where he talked about check in the analyze phase of the post shot routine. How he checks his alignment is like, oh, that way. I don't chase a rabbit hole. You know, for 12 holes, I literally chased 12 holes of a swing thought before I figured out that my feet were lined up down the right tree line. Then that's why I kept hitting this massive block out of bounds. After that, I fixed my alignment and I played the next several holes pretty good until I was bitten by a fire ant in the top of my backswing on 17. And that kind of. Kind of put an end to the progress. [00:04:15] Speaker B: But the bless the blessings promptly stopped. [00:04:18] Speaker A: Yeah, it was. It was just one of those days where if some. You couldn't you couldn't ride out that many bad things to happen. I mean, 14 penalty shots, a fire ant bite. I, I. When I finally did fix my alignment, I hit it exactly where I wanted it to, but I hit it, I guess, maybe a little too far. I either hit it too far and it got, it went through the fairway or it got into the rough, and the rough was just so deep that I couldn't find it. Tony, I think you played there. It was right before your club championship at Eagle Ridge. I think that rough was thick. [00:04:46] Speaker C: That rough was terrible. I mean, I was, you know, if you hit a ball marginally through the fairway or a bounce spread or whatever, it take everybody in your group looking for it for two and a half minutes before we find it, and you almost have to step on it. And I remember walking up and down some fairways helping people find balls. I probably found five or six golf balls just like this far off the fairway that people had lost and they could never found them. So I was thinking about that and I was like, man, like, that's gonna destroy the mowers. Like, it's just gonna destroy the blades and everything, having to cut that eventually. But yeah, same thing. [00:05:22] Speaker A: When I lost the one on 12, it. I spent more than my three minutes looking for it. Nobody was behind me to start with, so I was like, I'm finding this golf ball. I don't care how long it takes, I'll let somebody play through, but I'm not leaving this golf ball. And because I already lost a half a dozen on the front nine, I was running a little low. You know, it's like, I gotta make. [00:05:42] Speaker C: Sure I got a golf. [00:05:44] Speaker A: It really was. And then, but when I finally did find a couple of balls, but they weren't mine, so, yeah, I felt several that day. So that, that rough was, was thick. [00:05:54] Speaker B: Well, I, I want to jump on the, the alignment thing because I, I hear that from clients, you know, on a regular basis that they're out of alignment. And so, like, how did you pick up on that? Is it just you, you went through everything else before you got to alignment? You know, there's always grip, stance, alignment. But I hear that a lot from my guys is, you know, how do you, you know, you got your dominant eye, and if you're, you think, what you think is, is lined up straight or wherever you want to, want to be lined up isn't what is actually happening. So how do you correct that? How do you notice it and how do you correct it? [00:06:35] Speaker A: Let me answer first I'm going to give the wrong answer, and then I want Tony to give the right one. Okay. I check it as a last resort when nothing else I've tried has worked. [00:06:44] Speaker B: Okay. [00:06:46] Speaker A: Because, because here's, here's the reason we talked about this, I think on one of the shows, like when you, or maybe this wasn't on a show, I can't remember. But I can take alignment for granted because at Sully's shout out, every single shot, I'm pretty much square because the launch monitor is parallel to the mat. And then I just have to make sure my feet are parallel with the mat and I'm good to go. So I assume after hitting 20,000 golf balls since January on a mat where I was perfectly square, that my alignment was fine. I've put enough reps with my alignment that now there's a completely opposite way of looking at that by saying you haven't actually had to line up in the last 10,000 shots because you always have a cheater code. It's like hitting balls with an alignment stick down. You don't get to do, do that. Yeah, but I just assumed that since I'd done it so many times, I was good on alignment, I mean, and then after I hit and it was that army golf type day where it was left, right, right, left, left, right, left. And there was no rhyme or reason. It was either a block or a snap hook, which is, that does tell you your swing path is inside out. Right. So I'm way underneath the plane, which is my normal tendency. But it's as simple as if I don't get the club face squared, I'm going to block it. And if I do get the club face square, I'm going to snap hook it. That leaves you a razor edge, you know, line in between. So how I finally checked it is that when I had shot, let's see, after I shot 49 on the front nine with like 12 penalty shots, I was out of ideas. And we had a long, I had a long wait on 12, and I could see it was going to be a while down there. And I was just like, I mean, I'm sure it's perfect, but why don't I just double check alignment and make sure that it's not an alignment problem? And so I, I, while I was waiting there, I, I picked a target and I went through my entire routine just like I would hit a regular shot and try to get myself where I'm ready. I'm okay. I'm ready to hit the ball now. And I just took my driver and laid it down on my. My toe line, and I stepped back and I took a look at it, and it was aimed pretty much my. My feet were lined up about 20 yards right of where they should have been lined up. And your feet, your foot line should be parallel to your target, and mine was basically aimed at my target, which, if you do the geometry of that, if your feet are pointing at your target, your actual alignment's about 20 yards, probably, right? So. But there's an interesting thing that I've struggled with since then, and Tony and I played, I think, our match the next day, and I played absolutely terrible because once I fixed my alignment, all of a sudden the rest of my swing sucked. Mike and I, we did a video after Tony left last time we recorded where I talked about your posture. You know, grip, alignment, posture. Right. And. Or, you know, posture posture. Grip alignment, I guess, is pga. I say gap instead. Grip, grip, alignment, posture. But anyway, if your posture's off, it's going to throw your swing off. We did a video about how if my shoulders are slouchy, it kind of makes you a little bit over the top in your golf swing. And then when you get, you know, have better posture, it gives you the ability to swing more inside out. Well, same thing with your alignment. When I've been lining up with my feet so far, right. I'd been compensating that by getting my shoulders kind of open to my foot line, and now I'm. I have more of a tendency to swing over the top. So now that I've kind of got it all aligned, I'm coming even more inside. And Tony saw me hitting balls. I guess it was when we played together the next day that he's like, you got to get your hands up, like. And we kind of worked on my takeaway a little bit more, trying to get my arms up, and now I'm hitting a lot better. But it's funny. When you don't do things right in your alignment, it forces you to do things terribly in your golf swing to make up for it. And then when you fix it, it turns ugly. So that's the wrong way of looking at it is that when all else fails, go back to fundamentals and just make sure that nothing you're doing in your fundamentals is wrong. But, Tony, what's the right answer? Because I'm pretty sure I should have done that sooner. [00:10:45] Speaker C: I'm not going to say there's a right answer, but, like, think about. In any other thing we do in Life we're trying to problem solve, right? Like, you know, your kid comes in, says, dad, my Game Boy isn't working. Well, you could take the whole thing apart and try to find a shorten the circuit. Or you could be like, well, does it have fresh batteries in it? Are the batteries dead? Right? Or I can't get my car to start. Well, does it have gas in it? Is the battery, you know, dead? Like, these are basic things that the equivalent of the golf swing would be your alignment, right? So why go down this rabbit hole? And I'm guilty of it sometimes too, with, you know, I like tinker with stuff, mechanics or electronics, things of that nature. And I will like to deep dive and try to figure out what's really going on. But sometimes it is just as simple as, let's go through our basic checklist of. These are the things that the device needs to operate. It needs gas, it needs air, it needs spark, right? That's the engine. These are the things that the golf swing needs to have its best chance of success. It needs a sound grip, sound posture, sound alignment, right? So I would always say start there before we go down the rabbit holes of other things, just to make sure you're not missing something that's super easy to fix, right. And the other thing I was going to say is if you find yourself in a situation where you're consistently aiming 20 yards right, 20 yards left, whatever the case may be for your particular golfer we're talking about, there's nothing wrong with going and playing a practice round and just laying an alignment stick on your intended target line until your brain starts to train and recognize. Okay, in an outdoor open space environment, I need new sight lines, right? Or maybe you've been playing golf for 20 years at the same course, playing your massive pull slice, because you do aim 30 yards, right, they will put their alignment stick down. You're going to look at the golf course in a completely different way and you're like, oh, maybe I can actually give myself a chance now. I don't have to make this massive over the top swing because I was just aimed so far, right? So that's something I'm going to do. You know, personally, whenever, because I'm just in such a slump right now mentally with everything, I'm going to try to just go to a different way of looking at the golf course, different way of looking at golf. And next time I go play a practice round, of course, I'm just going to put alignment stick down on every single shot, right? From tea to green Just to declutter my brain, declutter my thoughts, and get rid of that variable. Just make sure that sound. That's. That's kind of how I'd look at it. [00:13:09] Speaker B: I love that. Do you get, you know, for the amateur golfer, is there some pushback there? Is there some, like, poo poo on that? Because I. I've wanted to do that I've wanted to do because I. I would spend a lot of time hitting because I was like a gym rat. So I was always spending time in the cage as a baseball guy. But always. I love going to the driving range. But then the same thing would happen. I'd go, I'd play a game, and I'm like, this does not feel like all the hours I spent in a cage. This does not feel like all the hours I spent hitting off the mat. And I wanted to take a mat with me and drop the mat down the corset would feel the same. But I love that. But I would imagine there's a lot of guys that, you know, just would feel weird doing that. Just like they feel weird stretching before they go hit or going through a stretching routine. So how do you get over that? How do you get over that? And, like, I'm. This is going to be a practice round, so that means I'm going to lay the stick down and so. [00:14:16] Speaker C: Well, I mean, the pros do practice rounds, right? If you go and you watch a PGA tour event or LPGA tour event or a college event, you know, the day or two before the actual competitive round, they'll drop two or three balls from different spots and hit shots to see how the ball comes out of the rough, see how the ball reacts around the green. When they're in this bunker, they go on fort in a par five and two, and they're like, okay, this is a fine place to miss. If I don't get it on in two, fine. What if the pins in the front, right? How. What part of this hill do I have to play it on to funnel it down the green? Or it's in the back, right? What angle do I need to take out of the bunker? Pros in all sports spend time practicing, not just competing. So I think we gotta get out of our own egos a little bit and say, if I want to get better at something, I need to practice in the actual scenario. It's your scrimmaging. It's your shadow boxing, right? It's, it's. It's your sparring partner. It's. It's getting to Know your opponent and the real actual setting. And you can't do that on a driving range. You can't do that on a simulator. It's just too different. You have to practice in the actual environment that you want to compete in. [00:15:22] Speaker B: Well, what are some other ways besides alignment stick that. Like somebody could practice when they're. They're just playing around. [00:15:30] Speaker A: Seth, I'll answer in because there's two. It kind of goes back to what I was talking about with the simulator. You need to make sure that you're practicing in a way so that you can make sure that you're doing it right. But you also have to be able to turn the. Turn that off and be able to do it without the training wheels. Because when you're on the golf course, you're not allowed to have alignment sticks helping you and guiding you to that. Right. So it's a. [00:15:51] Speaker C: The. [00:15:51] Speaker A: The night that I played, I went over to our. I called it the studio where we go over there and hit and do our other recordings where I had golf balls. Just spent like two hours working on alignment. I would, you know, I had a video camera out, and I would put a shaft down and make sure that. Just getting myself acclimated to. Okay, this is what square really is. Because what happened was once I started opening my foot line up, I didn't do anything differently with my shoulders. My shoulders had been square. Alignment is more than just your feet, right? Your, your. Your feet, your hips, and your shoulders can all be aligned differently and technically, I guess, even your elbow. Tony's talking to me a lot about my right elbow getting too high at address. I can be square with the shoulders, but pull my elbow over a little bit. It usually. They kind of go hand in hand. If I, if my elbow comes up, it's usually going to bring the shoulder with it. But I can do some manipulative things to. To make my shoulders look square but still have my elbows off. So it's not just one. If I do this one thing that I'm, you know, if this one part of my body is aligned, everything else is too. You've kind of got three or four different alignment dimensions, right? So once I fixed my feet, I didn't change anything else. Now, my shoulders and my elbows were way left because they were square with my feet, right. So I had to get used to, okay, what is square with my feet? Because square with my feet feels 2 or 3 degrees open, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it is. It's a huge difference. It feels like I'm hitting a 30 yard slice or that's what I feel like I'm setting up to hit. But then I have to actually adjust my shoulders to what it feels like I'm would do if I was trying to hit a draw because that's what gets my shoulders back square. So I have to train that with, with the, your feet, it's usually with an alignment stick on the ground. You line up, put an alignment stick on your toes, walk back, see if it's where you want it. But then with your shoulders, it's while you're over the ball. I think usually what I've always done is take the shaft, lay it over your shoulder line and when you look down the target line, you should see it parallel to your target. If you see it pointing way left, it's, you know, you're, you're open, way right, you're closed. So you have to kind of go through the, the technical things to be able to do it the right way. But then you also have to train yourself in that process of what does this feel like? So that when you are in a round or a competitive round or a regular round where you can't use the alignment sticks, you know what that is and what it feels like. So that's kind of the two different sides of it. Tony, how do you break those two things apart in the way you teach it or the way you do it? [00:18:23] Speaker C: Yeah. So again, I think it's, I, I go back to training like an athlete. There's no difference. Then again, we're going to study the film, we're going to do our ball handling drills in basketball, we're going to do our batting cage practice in baseball. That's all fine. And well, that's, that's, that's setting the process, that's getting comfortable with a new stance, a new posture, a new alignment or whatever. But then at the end of the day, you do have to take it to the course and play. And that's where I think, just saying straight away, I'm dedicating this to be a practice round. I'm not trying to go out there and you know, shoot the course record or break 70 or break 90, whatever it is. I'm solely here to practice. But the problem is people say, well, I've paid for the round of golf or whatever, so I don't want to practice, I want to play. But in no other sport again do we not practice on the field that we're actually playing on. Every time you go to basketball practice, it's In a gym with a 10 foot hoop and your free throw and your three point line, the boundaries, right? Every time you go to a football practice, whether it's an indoors dedicated facility or it's outdoors, there's still lines, sidelines, end zone, hash markers, right? No, no other sport. Do we think we can get better by practicing solely off the golf course or solely outside of the field of competition? It just doesn't work that way in anything else. I mean, if I'm wrong and you can find something else, fine, let me know. But again, I always look to what the best do. If the best are practicing in a certain way, they have their gym time, they have their driving range time, they have your simulator trackman time. But before the actual tournament starts, they're on the course, they're learning the golf course, they're practicing the shots that they're going to encounter on the golf course, they're learning their sight lines, right? I'll. I went to the PGA Championship and I went to the practice round and I saw Dustin Johnson and Joaquin Neiman and Cam Smith. They might have hit two or three balls per tee shot. Sometimes, you know, because they're like, ah, I'm not really. And you hear them talking with their caddy, like, what if we went fade up the left side, bang, hit it. Oh no, I overcut it. Okay, well maybe let's try it again, but let's hedge it a little bit more at the tree or whatever. And they're trying to figure they're practicing the opponent, right? They're practicing, how do I need to perform on this course for this week? Because, and that's where like even if they go to the British Open or whatever, the conditions can change drastically from day to day, right? So they might have to tweak their equipment. They might get a more bounce on a wedge or less bounce on a wedge or my wedge setup might change due to the course. They might change their long iron game, go to the hybrid versus the four iron or something like that because of the course conditions. But they have to practice the course, they have to practice on the course that they're going to play. There's no other way around. So I think training your mind or trying to trick your mind and say, okay, if I want to be the best, I gotta practice like the best. Maybe that'll help some people dedicating just this is what it is. Even if it's just I'm gonna play two balls and the first ball I'm gonna throw, alignment, stick down, the second ball I'M gonna try to do it. And without the alignment stick right on the golf course, this is the day when it's not too busy, when you don't have a bunch of people waiting on you or whatever. Those afternoon, two hours before daylight, you're the last person off the tee. Those are fine to do it as well, because you're probably not going to get 18 in any ways. Use that as valuable practice time. But a lot of times people can't even practice fairway bunker shots or greenside bunker shots because they don't have anywhere to do that. They don't have a practice facility to do bunkers. Well, how else are you going to get better at it? Use the time you're playing golf to practice? That's okay. [00:21:56] Speaker A: So speaking of fairway bunker shots, you want to talk about river wood? [00:22:02] Speaker C: Okay, so I guess we do need to catch up on our own personal golfing that we've been doing lately. So Garrett and I have won the first two weeks at the Sully's indoor whatever it is. Yeah. Shout out. We. We've won the first two weeks we played this week. I don't know if it's going to be enough this week. The course seemed like it was easier. We shot eight under. Gross. But I think we should have shot better. [00:22:25] Speaker A: I think I need to. I need to interject here. I don't know, Mike, if you. I didn't fully appreciate how competitive Tony was until we started doing this. Okay. Like, we win. Okay, so we play the first week, we shoot five under. I didn't think that was going to be that great. I was like, you know, it'll probably be in the ballpark, but I don't think it'll win. We end up. He. And he texted. We played on, like, a Tuesday. He texted me Thursday. Do we have the results yet? So, no, it won't be. We won't get on until Monday. He texts me Monday morning, seven o'. [00:22:55] Speaker C: Clock. [00:22:55] Speaker A: Do we have the results yet? No, they haven't opened yet. He texts me at 9 o'. [00:22:59] Speaker C: Clock. [00:22:59] Speaker A: You got the results yet? No, it's 9 o'. Clock. I don't even know if they go. Finally, we get the results. Like, hey, we won. Awesome. So the next week we play. We shoot 10 under now, and we were on 59 watch late in the round. I mean, we. I think, didn't we? Bogey 18. No, we bogeyed 17 and par 18, which is a par five. So if we go par, birdie, we shoot 60. We. We were legit in the Ballpark of. Of. Of shooting 59. And that day, I'm like, okay, I think we won. I mean, like, I mean, I'm trying to be, you know, not too arrogant or whatever about it, but it's like, I'm pretty sure we won, so we get the results back. He's like, okay, we won, but what did everybody else shoot? I was like, I don't know what everybody else shot. He's like, well, I want to know how much we're winning by. Like, it's not enough to know that we're winning. He wants to know how much we're winning by. So hyper competitor over there. And then this week, yeah, we didn't play. I mean, it's weird. We shot 8 under. I didn't feel like we played good at all. But we, We've. I will say this, though, we have had tag teamed very well. Like, I think this past week, the first week, I think we both shot 73, but we best balled 67. And then I don't know what we did last week. This week, I shot 69, you shot 68, but we best balled 64. So we. We tend to not birdie the same holes. And when I make double, he makes birdie and helps out a lot. So we just been. I know the first round I played a good front nine. You played a good back nine. It was like we handed the baton to each other on 10, and I didn't hit another good shot. And you didn't miss another good shot or miss another shot. And then, you know, the. The other rounds, we just kind of. If I hit it out of bounds, he says, okay, I make birdie now, and if he hits it out of bounds, I make birdie. So it's been working out pretty good. But then we played our. I love the idea. Tony texted me a while back and said, I want to get together a couple times a month and do a competitive round with the two of us. Just go out, play 18 holes. Like it's a two man, you know, battle at Bighorn or whatever you want to call it kind of thing. So we did our first one last or this week? Last. Last week? Yeah, last Monday at Riverwood. Had a lot of fun. I want to share the. The story. Can we share. Should we share the story of the guy we played with? We told him the name of the podcast and told him to listen to it. So I don't want to, you know, embarrass the. The new listener. That being said, his plan for the rest of the year Tony is, Is like the. I hope he does hear this, because it's like, man, I. I mean, I want to take care of people out there. And like, I don't know if he even realizes the train that is coming down the other side of that tunnel if he goes down this path. Like, do you. Do we want to tell that story out of love for, for our boy Keith? I think Tony's saying, though. Yeah. [00:25:55] Speaker B: So I'm. I'm curious, as Tony identified in the, in the Sully's league, has Tony identified the, like, top two or three teams and is keeping track of, like, his competition? [00:26:08] Speaker C: Yeah, we got the ladies that are right on our heels. Maria, someone else. They're. They're chomping, chomping us down. They're. They're right on our heels. [00:26:19] Speaker A: Well, it's the same scoring system that I was talking about during the summer league, right? Where you get points for gross, points for net. So I'm pretty sure we've won the gross and they've won the net. So it comes down to which one does. Do we do better net or do they do better gross? That's kind of the different. The difference maker. Now. I. I think it's probably easier for us to lose the gross than them to lose the net. I'm guessing Tony. So we got to keep. Keep our foot on the gas. But I think they do pay off these pots, too. [00:26:46] Speaker C: But that's also why I don't care. That's why I also want to know how much we were winning buys. Because I don't care about the net. I just want to win gross. Like, I just want to be the best. That's all I want to. That's all I care about. You know, I don't care about a gift card. I just want to say we won. We won. That's it. [00:27:00] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I know that the best the team that I expected, so I think there's seven teams that have played in it, and I don't know the names of all of them, but the, the ones that I recognize as the. That I thought was going to be the team to beat, they didn't play last week. So we didn't see, you know, we didn't have a. A comparison. Now, they did see us out there after we played our round. They asked us what we shot. And I think maybe after that, I think. I like to think that they saw 10 under and they're like, we can't beat that. We're not even gon try. I think maybe that's why they didn't play. I doubt that's it. But. But no, I think we. We kind of have an idea of who the. Who the teams to beat are, but definitely a battle with the. With the ladies on the net because they are on our. On our heels. So we got to stay at it. [00:27:40] Speaker B: Do you guys have a team name? [00:27:42] Speaker A: No, we don't. The best golf tag team ever, probably something like that. We. We haven't really shown the best two man, best ball golf team ever or something like that. We don't. We're not very creative around here. [00:27:57] Speaker C: So anyway, back to this whole concept of playing competitive solo matches, right? I just. I felt like for both of us, right, we're both in that really low handicap range. We're both trying to get better to the plus side. And, you know, I was just like, why don't we just do something twice a month? We set it on the calendar since everybody's so busy where we go and play. Course, it's just straight up stroke Play. Play for 15 bucks, 20 bucks, whatever the case may be. But just to play more rounds that actually matter and have something, whether it's pride or money, right? Trying to. Trying to stay in that competitive. Every stroke counts. Type. Type mindset. So I set us up at Riverwood. It is blowing like 25 miles an hour. Just super windy. I mean, you're hitting it on the driving range and the stuff just comes right back in your face. [00:28:41] Speaker A: And I hit one shot. Did you get sandblasted on that first shot that I hit? Because I came out of the driving range. I hit my first ball, and I was pretty sure I sandblasted. I was like, I might want to go to the other side of you. Yeah. [00:28:53] Speaker C: The wind's blowing in, like you're facing, you know, down the right side of the driving range driver. The targets are to the left, and all of a sudden it's just. Just right in my face. I was like, yeah, that happened. Anyway, so we played and neither one of us played phenomenal, but I think it was tied going into the 10th hole. And then, you know, we. I think, what was I. Down, down one stroke going into 18. Really tough finishing hole. We both hit our balls into the left fairway bunker and the pins in the front bunker on the left, huge false front. And I was like, well, you know, I'm have to try to choke up on a seven iron and hit it on the green and make the birdie. Just try to hit a good shot. So I hit a shot out. It doesn't come out Great. Just caught it a little heavy. And Garrett steps up, and he's got, like, one foot in the bunker, one foot out of the bunker, balls up near the lip. And I was like, I could catch him here. Like, this could go anywhere. He could go out of. He could go into the bunker left. He could go out of bounds right, like. Because if he tries to go to heartless, he steps up and takes his sick siren and just blast it. It's piercing the wind. I'm like, well, there it goes. And, yeah, he dropped it to probably 10ft or something. Like, that was a really phenomenal shot. Ended up winning him the winning in the match. But it was a lot of fun. I think it was a good time to. Again, just, like, you know, not here to. To be friends. I mean, we're going to cheer each other on and support each other with good shots, but, like, we're just here to try to get better, push each other to get better. It was a lot of fun. [00:30:23] Speaker A: We had a really good time. [00:30:24] Speaker C: I do think I've. I've figured out for me, Garrett and I talked about this a little bit, but I think I figured out for me mentally, I'm just either burned out or just not in the right headspace to play my best golf right now. Like, I just don't. I don't know what it is, but I just. It's. Again, it's probably all the other stuff of life going on, you know, like, it's just taking its toll on everything. But I'm trying to. For me, personally in golf right now, I'm trying because I didn't have a good club championship. It was terrible. I mean, the first round, I hit great shots, and again, more of the same, just putts on the edge, putts lipping out. And, you know, I just. I think I was coming to the realization that for whatever reason, with all this stuff I've got going on outside of golf, I'm just mentally just not sharp. I'm not focused. I'm not with it. Like, I totally missed a thing I was supposed to attend on a Monday night because my brain is just everywhere in a fog and not. You know, and I felt so bad about that, you know, so it's just like everything's coming down at once, and I'm just like, golf is just not. It's not on my. It's, like, not even making me happy right now. Does that make sense? Like, it's not even. I'm not even enjoying it. Yeah. So I'm struggling with that personally. And I don't know if I need a break from golf just for a little bit or. I don't know. I think what I'm going to try to do is just reframe that. And again, the reframing, like, why am I here? Like, I always know why I'm there. I always have that goal. But reframing how I play the game, whether I start to try to learn how to hit more bump and run shots in the greens, kind of like the old timers do, you know, like where they just roll it up to the green and just see how creative I can get with different shots. And I, I saw this. I was preparing for a class of the day, and I saw this quote by John Wooden, and he was talking about how athletes come to him. They're all nervous, right? I get to the shooter game winning free throw, and I'm just so anxious and nervous and I can't even perform. And he was like, but you should be excited, right? Like, you've been playing and practicing your whole life to get the opportunity to do that and to try it and just be excited about that. You have the opportunity. So I think I'm going to try to try to play a new style just for fun. Just trying to get out of this rut and try to make it more, I don't know, creative or something, just to get myself out of this kind of slump. That's kind of where I'm at with everything. [00:32:50] Speaker B: Well, I, I'm. I've been through what you're going through right now, and the, the only thing is just time, you know, you can't wave the magic wand and, and, and get, get through what you're going through. You just have to go through it. But at least I like that you're playing with Garrett, you know, and just reminders that you're not alone. And I think that's great about sports and golf. You know, you can be with other people to support you and kind of lift you up while you're kind of. You're used to lifting people up with what you do with, with your teaching. You know, you're trying to build these, these young minds and bodies up to help other people. And now you're having to kind of rely on other people to kind of hold you up while you're going through it. And so, yeah, my heart goes out to you. Better days are ahead, though. Easy to say. People used to tell me that when I was going through my divorce, hey, give it time. You'll be okay. And I'm like, give it time. I'm lost so much weight. My pants don't fit. I can't sleep, you know, just caught. My body is just constantly churning. My mind doesn't, you know, won't stop and. But then, lo and behold, you know, one day things get a little better and so it's just time. [00:34:13] Speaker A: Well, I was, I was really grateful. I was really grateful to get. To get out and play with Tony the other day. We had a really good time. It's fun, Tony and I. I've told you this, Tony. I don't know that I have ever played a lot of golf or played closely with somebody who was as equally skilled as me. Like, and I don't mean like, that is. I'm so good. Nobody's ever. I'm just saying, like, equally matched up one side and down the other. I think you've got to. You're a half an inch taller than me. I hit the ball four yards further. You've got one mile per hour, probably more ball speed where you shoot within one shot of each other on every single nine hole round we play. I mean, it's like we are lockstep everywhere we go. And I mean, I've played with players that were a lot better than me. I've played with people that I was a lot better than, and I've played with people that were the same skill but just played a different game. Like, I would. We might both shoot 37, but I would have, you know, eight pars and a bogey and they would have one par on the entire round. You know, so it's. But Tony, I play a very similar game, and I'm pretty sure it's always. We have been either tied or one shot better or worse than the other in all three of our rounds. In our, in our best ball matches the other day, we were. You let me back in it, the front nine, I was down four, going to seven or eight, and then I think I made par and he made double and then on nine, he hit it two feet out of bounds and I ended up getting. Making par there. So the. I got back into it there. So then we carried over the front nine bet to the back nine bet, and I was up one going to. To 18. And he told that story. I mean, we just lock stuff with one another all day long. So from my standpoint and Tony's standpoint, trying to get better at, at the game, it's a great exercise. But at the same time, from the, you know, the human side of it too, I mean, we we finished up, we went in and had a couple of beers and talked a little bit. Talked about life, you know, I mean, nobody's. Life's perfect. Everybody goes through tough times, and it's good to have that on the back end of the competitive, you know, rip each other's throats out for four and a half hours and then go have a couple of beers and put your arm around them kind of thing. You know, it was a lot of fun. But I would like to, you know, we've talked about it some, because we did. We talked about after the round the other day. I've been there too, Tony. You know, and it's in my. I told. I think I was telling you this, Tony. The difference in you and I is I didn't acknowledge that I was in a funk for like a year and a half. I just, like, put blinders on and, you know, macho man, I'm not gonna admit that I'm hurting kind of thing. And I went and played absolutely lousy golf for 18 months before I finally admitted, like, something must be in my head. I don't know what it is, but something is in my head and I'm not able to play good golf. But, you know, you acknowledge the challenge right now and. And all three of us can acknowledge what the. What is making it harder to enjoy the game. I don't necessarily know what the answer is to do it, you know, to how to enjoy it. I think it does kind of start with maybe taking a little bit. Taking a little pressure off of it and just having a little bit of fun, trying to find joy in it in some way or another. If. If that's, you know, going out and trying to see how low of a score you can shoot with nothing but a five iron, or if that's play, he'll play left handed. I don't care. Do something to have some fun. You know what I mean? But I don't know. I mean, that's one of these things. Again, not to throw us out there as the guinea pigs, but I. I hope that whoever's listening, we're not the only ones who have other things going on in our lives that might distract us from our. Our golf game and playing our best golf. So what I hope we can learn from it is that no matter how much bad crap and, you know, as. As we record this episode, it's the. You know, we've had a really tragic week here in the country with a lot of really nasty stuff going on, and there's a lot of bad Stuff going on in the world. That four hours on a golf course should be a time to enjoy something, not a time to add agony somewhere or another. So I wouldn't mind having a segment just on that. How do we just enjoy being out there? It's a great game. It's, you know, we make it so damn hard. That was my prayer the other day, was just, I just want to leave this golf course happy one time. You know, I don't care If I shoot 81, 91, 61. I just want to leave happy and feel like it had a good time and feel like I hit some decent shots along the way. You know, how do we, how do we do that so that we don't turn the game we love into a reason to hate life at the end of the day? [00:38:32] Speaker C: Yeah. So I've got a two fun events coming up the rest of this month, I think it is. Or one this month, one next month. Again, my brain is over. I have to look. But one of them is the four club challenge. So you get to pick four clubs and you play 18 holes and you see what you can do. So that's a fun way to deep pressure it, you know, just to make it more unique, more of a unique experience, more of a one off. And then I got invited by one of my best mentors. You know, I worked for him in summer camps and stuff when I was in college and I had him as a professor in college. And he's just like a second father figure to me. He reached out and him and another good friend of his who was also a mentor are going to be coming to Charlotte to come playing a fundraiser golf for him. And they want me to play with him. So that'll be fun to get to. I probably haven't seen those guys in 15 years, you know, face to face. So that'll be a lot of fun. [00:39:25] Speaker B: Where are they coming from? [00:39:27] Speaker C: Texas A and M. Nice. Yeah. So that'll be a good time. Yeah, that'll be a good time. But yeah, I was thinking about that as you were saying, what are some ideas? And I do think there is something to be said for different types of challenges. You know, taking half the clubs out of your bag and saying, I'm only going to play with a driver, a seven iron, a wedge, a putter and a five iron. And just seeing how, how you play, how would you navigate different shots when you're in between clubs and you don't have a full number? And a lot of people might find out that they like the game more because rather than putting all this pressure on flying a ball in the air and landing, it's got to stop. Perfect distance. Like, I mean, I know guys who are in their 70s who go out there and shoot 75, 76, and they just hit this little 200 yard dinker off the tee and then they just dink it again and it stays in play and it just rolls up to the green, you know, and then they two button, they get out of there. So I think there's a lot of fun to be had in taking the game from your standard. 14 clubs, four and a half hours, 18 hole, write it down and putting limitations on it, putting different scenarios. You know, they have the games, the poker chips where like you hit a tree, you get to keep this poker chip. If you three putt, you gotta hold the three putt poker chip until someone else three putts or you make a birdie or something like that. Like, there's all kinds of ways to make the game more fun. Even instituting if you're playing with people, you know, just some silly drinking games, right? Anytime, anytime someone says their catchphrase or anytime someone does that thing they normally. Oh, that he threw a club, everybody drink. You know, something like that. Just. And then that hopefully will help the club thrower realize what an ass they're being, right? Because they're chunky. You know, I think when the rest. [00:41:10] Speaker A: Of the group can't stand up straight because, well, and also I think there's. I don't know if you even realize this, Tony, because so on the. I should not have won the other day because on 17, I hit three balls, hit two what I thought were out of bounds. And we get up there and just as like a passing. And I'm. I'm furious. Like I'm. I'm beyond mad at that point. And we get down there and just for the sake of formality, I went, I got out of the cart and I walked through the woods to see if I could find. It happened to find both balls. They were. It was actually a little bit more open in there and that at least you could see the golf ball. But I doubt Tony could see me because I was in jail. I mean, there were trees, like, there was no gap, but I came really, really close. My ball was at just the right angle where I couldn't really take a normal stance. I had a choice of either basically turning around and hitting it almost backwards and probably maybe damaging my club in the process, or trying to hit it left handed. And I came very, very close to Hitting it left handed. I had the stance and was ready to hit it left handed. My honestly, the reason that I didn't do it, I felt confident that I could make contact with it, but I was not the angle that I was going to try to take. There wasn't much of a gap. I was just going to hit and pray that it got through it right. But I did feel comfortable hitting it left handed because it in the studio here that I, as I call it, I hit balls left handed all the time. I don't do it at Solis because it's. I'd have to go to the left hand to bay to do it and it's not really worth the trouble of switching bays to do it. But in here I hit left handed shots all the time and I've learned little things like it's. It's ironic because of the way the club is. If you want to hit a shot with loft, you actually need to hit like a five or six iron left handed. If you want to hit it lower, you actually hit the wedge because the higher lofted club, when you turn it upside down has less loft and the higher lofted clubs or lower have more loft. So I'm just, just goofing around. It doesn't seem like. It's like I sit there and spend an hour doing it, but when I'm burnout and I've hit, you know, enough of these shots, enough of that, it's like I'm just gonna f off for a little bit here and hit a couple of left handed shots. And then lo and behold, once in a while you get out on a golf course and it's like, hey, I'm comfortable doing this because I've done it before. And same thing with, you know, playing the five iron, bump and run type thing or whatever. I mean, yeah, you're probably not gonna adopt that as your go to shot all the time, but you'll find yourself in a situation sometime where you're like, oh, I know how to do this. I spent an entire October in 2025 hitting this shot. I know what I'm doing now. So there's some good things that can come out of that too. That it's not just doing something different for the sake of doing something different. A lot of times you learn some cool stuff and you know, you may, you may go two months of this, take a nice winter, you know, recharge, whatever, and then come out next January, February, March, playing the best golf of your life just because you took that time, right? So sometimes it's good to just find a way to have fun. I wanted. That was our other topic is that, you know, we're at. It's mid September right now. So I was talking to Mike the other day about how there's kind of a seasonality to golf. Well, even if you. He said, well, my clients play every day, all year round as well. That's. I do too, in some way or another. But there's still a seasonality to it. You've got your preseason, you've got your regular season, you've got your postseason or your off season. And we're kind of at that transition right now where most of our in season is kind of coming to an end. I don't know. You may have one more tournament, Tony. That's a serious tournament. We've got the Rider cup at Solly's coming up here in a couple of weeks, so we're not quite there yet. But October, November, ish. It's not that I'm done playing, but my focus is going to start to change a little bit into more winter mode. And, you know, whether it's what you do at the gym, what you do at practice, what you do and the simulator, what you do when you're on the golf course. So I was just kind of talking with Mike about that a little bit from the workout side or the practice side. So Tony, how much do you adopt that with, you know, with your students and things is that there's. You're not going to necessarily. What you. What you are going to do in practice in July is probably a little bit different than what you're going to do in January. [00:45:22] Speaker C: Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, you know, for one, daylight is a factor as we get into the winter months. You know, people who work can't necessarily get out and go play 18 holes anymore, even nine holes after their work shift. I mean, shoot, by the time it gets to be 4:30, 4, 45, you pick your kids up from school, it's pretty much dark here, you know, in the winter time. So that eliminates play during the regular week for a whole host of people. So yeah, the winter time can be a great time to work this on. Strategy, mental side of things, physical side of things. You know, if you're not playing every single day, then you can accept being a little bit more sore as you're building up your muscles over the winter months, you're probably going to be eating more, so you may as well be bulking with muscle anyways. Right. Try to offset the over. [00:46:09] Speaker A: Pretend it's on purpose. [00:46:11] Speaker C: Yeah. Pretend it's on purpose. Right. I had an acronym, abb. Always be Bulking. Right. So that's. That was my mod. I'm just always bulking. The cut will come eventually, but it ain't coming down. But yeah, no, you can, you can afford that. That because you're only playing once a week on Saturday, you know, when the weather's good or something like that. So you can. As we talked about the seasonality, the, the timing and the, the phasing in and phasing out of the different workout schedules. So we talked about periodization back probably this first or second episode. So this is a good time for the phasing of. And you let. You talk about a lot, a lot about working out in the gym, trying to get back in the gym for you. Garrett. So this is where as we start to wind down, we're not playing golf two times a week or whatever. You can really go harder on the strength training, right. And be okay with being sore because you have that time to get less sore before your weekend or whatever. Recovery. Front loads are heavy worked out. Yeah. The recovery with the front end of the week and then so that by the time you get to Saturday, you're good to go. The simulator stuff, working on yardages. A lot of people don't know what their yardages are. The winter time is a great time to go book some time in a studio and figure out what your actual carry numbers are. Not your ego carry, but your actual carry. And then work on a practice plan for the off season. For what. What areas do you need to get better? You might find that your. Your gapping between your clubs is not great. So you need to take that time to go get your clubs adjusted. Right. This. And that's one valuable use of that time as well. You might need to invest in a putting mat if you noticed you've been keeping track of your stats over your seasons and you notice if you're a 90 shooter, you want to get to 80s, you've got four or five, three putts around. We got to figure that out. You take some time over the off season, when you're going to be indoors anyway, to get a nice putting mat. Work on your stroke, work on your ball position, work on your tempo, whatever the case may be. And I think nowadays with the affordability of launch monitors, personal use, launch monitors for the house and the affordability of nets, things of that nature, people can figure out a way to work on some stuff, whether it's just distance control games or you know, hitting a. What does it do when I choke down an inch on my club with my pitching wedge, what four yardages can I get just by changing how I grip the club up or down the shaft? So it's valuable time to work on that type of stuff. So it's that when the spring hits, all that work has been done and you have a new game plan going into the golf season to see if your progress or if your work is making sense. [00:48:39] Speaker A: Well, and Tony, I forgot this has been since we last played too. So I. I think I had texted you maybe something about my swing weight or check. I don't know if swing weight matters or something. Anyway, we started talking about swing weight a little bit off offline. And I had my swing weights checked the other day. And it seems that all my clubs are on the heavy side from driver all the way up, you know, down through, maybe pitching wedge. But they're also not consistent. Like my pitching wedge is a D6, my nine iron's a D5, my seven iron's a D6, my driver's a D7 or D6, and my three wood or my two irons like a D3. So they're all over the map. I had never looked into swing weight, but as I've. We just played around with it the other day, took the weights out of my driver. It just. Which gets it down to like a D0. And I picked up a couple miles per hour. But then I increased my spin rate. And you're kind of analyzing. Well, why is that? Well, it's because the weights themselves are actually set up to lower spin. So when I take those out, it lowers the mat or lowers the. The weight, but it also makes me spin it more. So, you know, that's not the thing to drive, try to drive, try to dive into. And you got a club championship on Saturday or you've got a big tournament next week. Right. But over the off season, be a really good chance for me to try to experiment around with. Okay, do I want to put. I talked to you about. Okay, what if I just put a counterweight in my driver? Well, that's going to make the club a lot heavier, but it's going to slower. It's going to lower the swing weight, which sounds backwards, but it. It does. It's called a counterweight. So it does. It adds. It adds total weight, but it lowers swing weight. Or do I just need a new driver or do I need. Whatever. There's a time to do that. The gym. I have been thinking about this A little bit. I had gone. I was doing really good. I did not. I haven't been to the gym the last two weeks because with our match last week on Monday, I was. I didn't want to be. Well, the week before, I was trying to play, so I kind of didn't go to the gym because I didn't want to be sore when I tried to play. And then I just kind of got lazy last week and didn't go. I'm hoping to. I'm kind of looking at it right now. My birthday's early November. If I can keep the weight loss thing on track, I should be down to a point where hopefully I'm closest, you know, in the ballpark of my target weight by my birthday. That would be a good time for me to start the strength training thing. I loved what you had said on our last episode. I think about the pulling exercises as opposed to the pushing, because I had actually thought about that at one point last year, that a lot of the things that I'm trying to do in maintaining my angles and stuff through impact come from that pulling motion. Trying to pull everything in tighter. Think about a figure skater kind of pulling themselves in tighter to rotate faster. But then kind of got away from it a little bit because I didn't know if it was even. Felt was even right. So hearing you say that about the pulling, I think that's. I'm going to go on like a. A pulling frenzy over the winter. Right. But. But again, that's not something that I would necessarily want to do right the second. Because I know in two weeks we have a big Ryder cup thing at Soly's, and I'm not going to work out that week. Probably no matter if I start. If I start that this coming week, I'm going to quit the very next week because I don't want to be sore the week of the big tournament. So there is a. You know, that. That seasonality a little bit, that it's a good chance to. To get into some different things. I got to work on my putting, too, Tony. We've not done anything with my putting. I like the drill that you gave the other day with the speed control. That was really cool. We need to do some videos on that, too. But my tempo is very inconsistent. I've noticed my putting. I got that way the other day at Riverwood. I noticed I was real jabby with it. [00:52:00] Speaker B: I got a quick thought. This is. I don't want to lose it, but listen to you guys talk about getting ready for tournaments. And just, you know, get to the end of the season and playing meaningful matches. And this can dovetail into the putting, too, Garrett. But I got conversations with two different clients this week. One was playing club championship at one club, and one was playing a club championship at another club. One guy was going to go see his swing coach, and he's like, I always like to go. And he helps me feel confident going into the match. And then I had my other guy. I was like, are you going to go talk to anybody before? He's like, no, I am. Don't want anything to cloud my thoughts. Swing, you know, extra swing thoughts. [00:52:50] Speaker A: He's from the Tony Roselli school of preparation. Less is better when a big round is coming up. Yeah, so everybody. [00:52:55] Speaker B: Yeah, so everybody's different, but I'd love to hear. And no one is not wrong, you know, necessarily right or wrong, but it's hot. Like, you know, as a player, you know, how do you figure out what's best for you? And it's just funny because one was like, oh, my gosh, yes, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go see my guy to get ready. And the other guy was like, oh, my. Absolutely not. I'm not talking to my guy until. Until next week. So just curious. What, y' all had a tick on that again? [00:53:23] Speaker C: Look at the best in the planet. You know, the tour players, they got their coaches with them, behind them on the range. You know, they're looking at trackman data. They're checking some stuff. I know Chase Duncan will often go down with Akshay for some of the tournaments just to get him ready, but a lot of times when you're doing that, you're not overhauling swing mechanics. You're overhauling swing stuff. You're. It's there as a. It's just like having your coach on the sideline of basketball, right? They're there to coach you. They're there to get you confident. They're there to make some minor tweaks and reinforce some things, maybe. But, yeah, I. You do what you got to do. That makes you comfortable because it's such a mental game, right? It's such a mental confidence. And do I feel comfortable over the shot types of scenario? So if. Whatever it takes to. To make you feel better. I mean, I loved watching, like, the Last Dance documentary, man. We. We grew up watching Jordan and them and that whole episode on Dennis Rodman with their, like, look, Phil Jackson said Dennis is going to do his thing, but I know if he. I let him go do this, he will come ready to play. And sure enough, he did. He came ready to play, handle his business. So whatever rituals you have or whatever gets you comfortable, do it. You know, Garrett made the smart ass comment, you know, go to the Tony Rosai school of don't prepare for big tournaments. And he's right. That's not how I normally like to be. That's just what happened. Given life, I mean, if I was normally so, if I was really preparing for a tournament normally, like before, you know, all this stuff happened and my time is divided and whatever, I would have a dedicated practice routine on the driving range. It could be something very simple. It could be a little bit, you know, of block practice where it's just nine irons warming up 50 yard pitches, then it's, you know, 120, 125, 130 yard shots where I'm trying to hit those numbers with the wedges because the scoring clubs. And then it's 10 drivers intention to hit my fade every single time between these points just so I get that repetition, that confidence going and then it's putting and chipping. I might play 18 holes and I'm trying to score, you know, I drop random balls between 30 and 4ft and I'm trying to score 32, whatever it is, you know, with my putting strokes. But I'm going to do whatever it takes to get me confident that I trust my swing, I trust my putt reads, I trust everything about my game such that I've built in those reps before I go to the tournament. That's how I would ideally do it. Right. It takes time. You have to have time to do that. And again, we're not making money playing golf. That's, that's my philosophy of how I do it. For me, everybody else is different though. Some people go get drunk the night before and then they're just happy the next morning or hungover. But they say they play better. I don't know. I mean, you'd be surprised. I. I've played with people who have a terrible front nine, let's call it, and then all of a sudden they get plastered at the turn and then they go and shoot even far. It doesn't make any sense. But for whatever reason their mentals get in such a state where that de stresses them and allows them to perform fluidly. I don't know, it's just different. [00:56:24] Speaker A: Yeah, it's the, it's the tin cup thing, right? Like 10 cup. Let's. Well, I think I should say you should work on Your short game and let's go get drunk. And then he gets drunk and he's hungover and he shoots 83, right? So that doesn't always work. I grew up playing golf with a guy that man, I used to find it so fascinating to play golf with him because he played better drunk. But he also had a tendency to over compensate or over overplay that. So I can remember a few times I go out there Sunday afternoon and he would like, let's go play $5 a hole. And we go out and play 1 o' clock and he's sober, might even go to church that morning. We go out front nine, I wear him out, win 35, 40 bucks. He drinks four or five beers back nine. That sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth beer kicks in and he wears me out, right? And then I end up, you know, maybe winning 10 bucks. And he's like, let's go play nine more. And we go play nine more. And by the end he's 13, 14, 15 beers and he can't stand up. And, you know, now we end up, I win 20, 30 bucks back on him. So everybody is different. I think one thing that I'm learning on this, and Tony, we talked about this the other day. You had mentioned we were talking about pre shot routine. A lot of people already have a trigger that starts their pre shot routine. They don't know what it is. So I had been experimenting with mine as we talked about in a couple episodes and where I'm trying to. Try to take a deep breath to kind of get that started. And I've noticed the other day that I. My trigger is that I tug on my right shirt sleeve. I do that almost every time. Whether it's just a subconscious thing that I do, I don't know why necessarily. I think it kind of starts from like trying to tuck my right shirt under, but I just started tucking it. I said, well, that's my trigger. Whether I. It doesn't make a whole lot more sense for me to just embrace that as a trigger than it is to suddenly start trying to do something that I've never done before. So that's why you. I think in a lot of things that we do on the mental side with golf, there are. And it's a, it's a balance that we're kind of talking about here. You don't want to lean into bad habits, but at the same time, you don't want. There are some habits that you can try to adopt that are going to hurt your game because they don't come naturally. And there's some things that you need to work through that uncomfortable, you know, uncomfortableness isn't a word, but that discomfort to. To develop the better habits. But a lot of it is just embracing what, who you are as a player and leaning into that. I mean, I think I probably tend to be a little bit more on the. Just because when I was playing a lot of competitive golf, I prepared heavily for tournaments, like over the top, as much as I possibly could. Very ritualistic. And I always played like absolute crap. So I'm guessing that if I were to ever try to get back into playing competitively, I would try to go a lot different direction on that. I would think about that a lot. Like when, when I was playing a ton of golf, you know, eight, nine years ago, 95 of my rounds, I would show up 30 minutes before my tee time, go to the driving range and hit about 25 balls, walk over the putting ring, roll about 10 putts and go straight to the first tee. And that's how I played golf. But when I had a tournament, club championship member, guess anything, I'm there an hour and a half early. I go hit 75 balls, then I go Chip, then I go to the bunker, then I go to practice long putts, then I go back to the driving range, then I go back. I mean, I had, like I said, a full practice session before I play, and then I'll be darned, I'll play terrible. Well, I wonder why that is. That's not how I normally do things. If I were to play tournaments again, I would say I would probably lean a little bit more. The John Daly school of thought, you know, where's the first team? What's the course record? Maybe not quite that extreme, but I think that's probably works a little bit better for me because it doesn't give me time to overanalyze and overthink. But at the same time, no, don't stay out drinking till 3 o' clock and then roll out of the car at 7 and expect to go play good golf. I mean, there is some element of preparation, that kind of stuff too. So, yeah, it's a balance. [01:00:23] Speaker C: Yeah. I saw this video the other day of Tiger and John Daly, and the question was posed, like, would Tiger have been Tiger if he had taken the John Daly approach? And would John Daly have been John Daly if he Tiger approach? Probably not, you know, and they each did what worked best for them and they both had great careers and got quite a bit out of their potential, obviously. So, yeah, there's that balancing act to it and figuring out what works for you. But you don't know what works for you unless you put yourself in the scenarios and tried some stuff, right? Like you just don't know. You just don't know what's go, what's going to work, what's going to perform until you. You've tried a few things. I've got a. My colleague at work, great player, has won like four senior championship Fight Club championships in a row. Still in the match play that we all played in the team, the member member match play. And he never hits a golf ball before he warms up. Maybe two or three shots, that's it. He just goes and plays and he plays phenomenal, you know, so everybody's different. [01:01:23] Speaker A: I've even noticed myself. I mean, I remember saying on one of the first shows that I noticed that it takes me about 25 balls to get warmed up. And I've actually noticed recently, Tony, we warmed up this week. I grabbed my lob wedge and hit just a few. I'm just, I'm still experimenting a little bit, but I think one of the things that I'm trying to do is maybe start with the lob wedge and hit four or five shots that are like, you know, hip high to hip high or whatever just to try to give myself a yardage of great. This is. You do this at the end right before we tee off. You go through and hit a 25 yard shot and a 45 yard shot. I kind of do the opposite. I kind of say, okay, I'm going to go hip high to hip high and see how far that goes. And then I'm going to go arm parallel to arm parallel and see how far that goes. And then I'm going to build my short yardages around those distances for the day. Right. But I'll do that for four, five, six balls and then I'll hit a couple of sand wedges. And what I've noticed is that when I go to the sand wedge is where I start to get a little bit more into the full shot. Not a completely full shot, but more. And sometimes it only takes me three or four swings to get to my target swing speed. And then the other day when you and I were playing, I never got to my target swing speed and I never got there the whole day. But for me, it comes more from rhythm than it does loosening the muscles. I think once I find that rhythm, I get that pop and I get that swing speed a little bit quicker. So it depends sometimes maybe even on the day. But. And I'm, you know, you're. You're constantly trying different things. I think there are some fundamental things that you need to. That all good players do. You know, getting themselves in the right mindset would be a fundamental thing. But what gets you in the right mindset is going to vary from player to player. Making sure your body is loose is probably a core thing. How you get your body loose is going to vary from player to player. There's probably a lot of different checklists that you can do on that. But I think more than anything, and we can talk about this a lot on the show, it's probably. There's not a magic bullet or a magic formula. It is a very individualized search. Right. You have to find it. But what it is in your golf game is going to vary a lot on the player and I think to the coach thing, too. Whether or not you're going to go see your coach or not before a tournament might be dependent on that player coach relationship. Tony and I don't really have an official player coach relationship. I don't suppose, like, it's not. I don't. Basically, I don't pay you, but you coach me a lot and you help me a lot. If I had a big tournament going coming up, I'd love to go see Tony beforehand. But it's because from working with you, we don't talk a lot about the technique unless it's, you know, you'll. You'll point out some obvious ones here and there. But I would feel great coming to see you three days before a big tournament because I feel like you, you have that ability to adapt to the player and what they need. I can. I'm pretty sure you keep my mind as far away from technicals as you could right before a tournament, but still make sure that you were, you know, checking the fundamental checklists off and making sure I was ready to play. Where if you're dynamic with your swing coaches, that you're always going to get a line that sticks out and work on technique and do, then maybe you shouldn't. Maybe you should stay away. I think sometimes it just depends on what you're doing with your coach. Heading up to a. To a tournament, or do they have the ability to adapt? Some coaches are better at. Some are really good at teaching the technique, but they're not as good at teaching the mental side or the strategy side. Some are really good at the strategy in the mental, but they may struggle a little bit on the technique. So it probably depends a little Bit on your coach too. [01:04:59] Speaker C: Yeah. And it's interesting too because like I've got the scenarios now where I will take like five or six students to a tournament, my college students, the PGA University Championship or the Carolinas Cup. Those are the two wins that we typically play in. And you know, when I get there, I need my couch. Nappy time is what I need. I need a glass of whiskey in my couch net. So college football and I'll be good to go. [01:05:25] Speaker A: Mike's caffeinated. Tony has apparently missed the, the caffeine that Mike. [01:05:29] Speaker C: I missed the caffeination window because my, my, my French press was not clean this morning. So I ran the dishwasher because I thought I ran it last night, but I didn't. So I missed my. I got to sleep in. [01:05:39] Speaker B: I slept until 6:30 this morning. I mean, that's two extra hours for me. [01:05:44] Speaker C: I feel great. But so anyway, so I've got, you know, five or six students and each one of them needs something different. You know, some are coming in, they feel good, something's good, they're confident, they're excited, ready to play, and you've got the one who's, you know, in their own head and they can't get out of it and they're nervous and they. I had one kid one time, he was literally crying on the putting green. He was so nervous, you know, and I was just like, man, like, put my arm around him, lean on them, hug on them and tell him it's okay no matter what he shoots. You know, just go out there and do your best and that's all we can ask of you. So, yeah, it is. It's a dynamic process. Right. And if you've got a stable of on your roster of kids, no two kid is the same. Right. It's such an individual, unique sport. They're not playing together, they're not feeding off each other's energy. You know, they're in five different groups with strangers sometimes. So it's a very cerebral game that we have chosen to be associated with. And yeah, I got the opportunity at the PGA show two or three years ago. Butch Harmon was talking with. I forget who it was. It might have been Danielle Kang or something like that. And they were talking about their relationship and he was like, I've been working with her for 10 years and it's always the same three things. And we write it under shoelaces sometimes because she's stubborn and she forgets and she comes to me after two months and it's the same three things. Yeah, but she's one of the top players of all time in her field. Right. So it's, you know, in, in the, the thing they talk about butchers that he's, he's more about, right. The coaching side of things, the mental side of things and trying to make people feel confident. You know, Rory went and saw him not that long ago when he was going through a slump and he said, he just gave me confidence in who I was and what I could already do, you know. So I definitely think, yeah, there's a, there's a one on one aspect to it, there's a individual aspect to it. And at the end of the day you got to find somebody vibe well with and that, you know, understands you and your personality and how to best help you. You know, sometimes there are situations where, as I told you with the little older lady who I played with that one day where she said, shut up, no more. Stop, stop getting in your head with all this external non golf stuff. Shut up and play golf. I appreciated that. That worked for me, right. Because I'm kind of a just say it to my face and be done with it type person. Other people, you can't do that. You got to be a little more cozy with it. Right. And that's not right, wrong or indifferent. [01:08:02] Speaker A: Well, and I played with a guy when, when I was, I was. This is so odd now looking back at it. It didn't seem odd at the time, but when I was about 13 years old, probably my best friend in the world was a 24 year old that I played a ton of golf with. And he, and I mean, we would call each other after, you know, at nights he would call me at 7 or 8 o' clock and tell me how he played that day. We played together all the time. He was like a much older brother. But I'll tell you what, he caddied for me one time and it was a total disaster. And it would have been a disaster either way. It wasn't his fault. But he and I did not vibe well at all because what would happen is. And he was right in what he was doing, but his execution was bad. I guess with me is every time I would hit a bad shot, he knew I was such a head case and I had such a tendency to blow up on a dime and you know, turn a one under round into an 85 because I missed a six foot putt, you know, that every time I would hit a bad shot, the very first thing he would say is, all right now don't be Going and getting pissed off now. And don't be throwing stuff and don't be. He would immediately start telling me all the stuff not to do. [01:09:01] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:09:01] Speaker A: And I'm like, well, I wasn't gonna, but now you're making me more mad. And now I'm. And it always turned into that. I remember another story of a, my, one of my teachers or coaches growing up. He went to a U.S. open qualifier and his dad caddied for him. His, his dad on the second hole, he's standing on. He's on the tee box. He pars one, and he' with second tee box. And as he's in what I call the batter's box, his dad says, watch out for that water lift. And he of course hits it right in the water. And he's like, dad, you can't, you can't do that. I always enjoyed playing golf with my dad and he caddied for me a couple of times. And my dad's not a golfer. He, he never, he watched me play a lot, so he knew my game really well, but he wasn't going to try to tell me anything about my swing really. But we just had a good time and, and he was always, you know, really good. There is a really funny story though. He. When I was in college, I tried to play a couple of semi professional tournaments. Like they're, they're not anything big at all. It's a, basically a glorified gang, some with like 10 or 12 pros that throw 400 bucks in. You play for, you know, thousand bucks or first place. But he went with me to play the first one and I struggled. I shot like 84, 85, and we get to like the 14th hole and he's like, you know what I've noticed? I said, what? He said, these guys just, they hit their second shot a whole lot closer to the hole than you do. Like, you just need to, maybe you just need to hit it a little closer. And I'm like, the hell you say, pop. Like, why, why did you withhold this information from me for 14 holes? Why didn't you just tell me to hit the ball closer sooner? If I had only known closer all day. [01:10:44] Speaker C: So in teaching and coaching lingo, we call that redundant information. It's like, it's like you're the slowest kid on the track team and the coach is like, hey man, you see how everybody else is running fast and you just run faster? [01:11:00] Speaker A: It was. I, I've, I've played some great golf with my dad. He was with me the first time I ever broke par, he was with me with my first hole in one. I've had some great memories on a golf course with my dad and that was just, it was so funny and it wasn't like I laugh at it now and at that, at that point in time, like it didn't, it's not like it mattered, but I just remember looking at him like, you're kidding me, right? Like, hit the ball closer to the hol. An epiphany. But I will say, I mean him. I would feel much more if I had a big tournament coming up and I had to pick somebody to caddy for me. Between him and the other guy who was a single digit golfer, he's. I'd much rather play with him because he, he gets. He may not know the game of golf that well, but I'm his son, he gets me very well, you know, so getting the person is probably more important than your knowledge of the game of golf. And I think that's something when again, as we talk about a lot, some of our audience might be golf coaches like Tony. A lot of our audience is more like me. We're not professional teachers, but we, we just play for me, I'm getting to be, you know, around Tony and play a lot of golf with Tony right now. But still, most of my golf is by myself. I gotta learn how to coach myself through these, these things. You know, Tony's not gonna be able to be there for every single round that I play. And you gotta learn how to be your own coach and get to know yourself and what works for you and what doesn't. [01:12:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:12:12] Speaker A: And lean into those things and don't try to be just because you saw and I. Maybe this is a provocative thing to say, but I'm going to say just because Tiger said to do something, not only does that not mean that you should do it, but I got news for you. You are absolutely not wired like Tiger. Just because Tiger said to do something is almost probably a good reason for you not to do it. Because if we were all wired like Tiger, we'd have a lot more people like Tiger. He is a very, very uniquely minded person. If you try to do things exactly the way he did, you're not going to be able to do it because you're not made that way. [01:12:44] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:12:44] Speaker B: Or just an insert. Any professional golfer or YouTuber, you know, you have to filter. Yeah, it's a great point. [01:12:55] Speaker A: Take what you've got and do the best. [01:12:56] Speaker B: There you go. [01:12:57] Speaker A: Take the bit. Take what you've got and do the best with it. You know, I mean it's, I love that you can, but at the same time, as we talk about the winter, winter is a good time to work on some of these other things. So that next year maybe you do have a little bit more gain, maybe you do have a little bit more strength, maybe you do have a little bit more whatever. But you're not going to find that extra five yards on the driving range before a tournament or that extra thing. You know, like there's a time to try to develop and train that stuff. And we are kind of getting into that part of the year right now. [01:13:23] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:13:24] Speaker A: Where you can start to look bigger picture a little bit. But you know, try to, you got to figure out what works for you. And there's a lot of, there's probably a little bit too much trying to copy other people and not enough figuring out what really works for you. [01:13:37] Speaker C: Well, I did this, I, I did the math on this a while back and this is, this is going to bust a lot of egos. It just is. But again, I think I did the math and if the average tour player hits the ball, I think it's 300 yards now. And the average course length they play is 7200 yards. I don't quote me on the math, but it is a percentage that their driver swing, their driver carry is a certain percentage of the golf course. Right. And when I analyze that based off of like your average 15 handicapper and the tees that they're typically playing, if they try to play the tips of the golf course, 6,800 yards, 67, they are statistically playing a much harder golf course lengthwise than the pros are playing. So every swing, every drive, every iron, every approach, they are 20, 30 yards farther back than a pro. And we know that as the pros get farther away from the hole up to 200 yards, 200 yards is only 50, 50 to hit the green. So now you're Joe Blow trying to break 80. Your driver goes 225 yards and now you've got to hit 195 yard shot into a par four because you're playing too far back. You have no chance to shoot at your potential lowest score because your potential is not matching the challenge of the course you're playing. Does that make sense? That's why we have, that's why we have different tee boxes. [01:14:54] Speaker B: And that's a, that's a whole segment right there. As I. Yep, guys talk about that all the time, like humble Yourself, Go hit the white. Go hit from the whites. But that's very hard for guys. I would imagine most of the people listening are guys. Yeah, when I go play, I'm hitting in the closer tee box. Just like, don't worry. [01:15:18] Speaker A: I'll. [01:15:19] Speaker B: I'll, you know, go hit up here in front of you guys. [01:15:22] Speaker C: And it is an ego thing, because, I mean, the guy that Garrett and I got paired up with the other day, remember, he was gonna go play the white pee boxes. Garrett and I got paired with them. We're playing black. And the very first day, I was like, dude, do your thing. Do not worry about what we're doing. You paid your money, you play, you go have fun. Where you. Nah, I'll come play back here with you guys. I don't need to do this very often. All right, cool. Right? And, you know, and he had some fun, and. But then, like, they became points where, like, some of these holes, right, like, number on meadow, number five. I think it was a meadow, right, like, carry. You had to be able to carry it 230 yards just to get over the. The crap. And I was like, look, man, I was like, do your thing if you want, but you should play where you want to play from. You shouldn't let anybody else. I think a lot of, you know, social stereotypes and stigmas have a lot to do with it. You know, I don't want to hit from the ladies to use or something like that. I think they should get rid of all the men's teas, the ladies teas, the seniors teas. I think they should just call them, like, you're a lunatic tease. You want to have a party tease, Right? Let's just have fun. Teas or the. The, you know, the Tiger, the Nicholas, the Wood, the Trevino, the Hogan. Just. Just name them something completely different. There's been a few courses that have tried to do this. They say if you're seven iron goes 150 yards, play tee box number three. If you're seven iron goes 190 yards, play tee box number 10, whatever the case may be. But yeah, no, I think I'll run the stats again. I'll do the math. The. The math I did on it, but it's just like, they could. They're. They're playing a harder game. If you're hitting 180 yards plus on every single par three or on every single approach into a par four, you are hitting higher irons than the pros are on all of their shots, because the pros have a lot of wedges, a lot of short irons into their par fours, right? They can get to par fives in two a lot of times or very close to the green and two. So what, what, what chance do you think you have to go shoot even par when Your driver goes 220 yards playing from the tips, you gotta hit driver, driver, chip to get onto some par fours, right? Like what are we doing? [01:17:27] Speaker A: There's a really good, there's, man, this is, this is pretty, pretty meaty subject for an hour and 20 in. So I don't know if we'll. This will either be a really long episode or it'll turn into two really short ones. You know, I was just doing the math. [01:17:38] Speaker C: I got a math to take. [01:17:43] Speaker A: There's. I was doing the math there. And I do want to, if we have time, I want to talk about the, you know, Satan's Revenge, whatever hole that you call it on number five over there. That's a tough hole. But you know, if the average golfer. I saw a stat the other day. I didn't. It was something on Facebook that means nothing to me really. But it was like if you hit the ball 250 yards, you hit it further than what percentage of golfers. And one of the possible answers was 95%. So I'm guessing that's probably the correct answer. 250 yards is a really long way to hit a golf ball. I've got a good friend of mine, he's a good golfer. Played a lot of golf with him. He's. He's an 80s shooter, mid high 80s to low 90s, decent golfer. And we go to Solis and he always complains that the carry distance is off and it's because he only hits it 235 yards. 240. Maybe our egos tell us we hit the ball further than we really do. But if you objectively analyze your game and look at how far you hit it, if you carry it 250 yards, that's 83% of 300 yards. Okay? And if you take a 7,000 yard golf course and multiply it times 83%, you come up with 5,800 yards. So if you're playing a 7,000 yard golf course, carrying at 240 yards, you're, you're like Tiger and those guys playing it from 8300 or something. If you do the math, whatever 7 divided by 0.83 is. So you're just making the game hard. You're playing a harder game than they are. Really. If you, if you look at it that way. But we played that. So the number five was a fun little, little, little story there. So we get to number five the other day. It's 450 into the wind. And Tony says, all right, this hole is. What'd you call it? The spawn of Satan or something like that? [01:19:21] Speaker C: Yeah, like devil spawn or something like that. [01:19:23] Speaker A: Devil spawn, something like that. Anyway, and I'm looking, I'm like, okay, it's 450 into the wind, par five. He's like, no, par four. I was like, oh, okay, well, where can we miss it? He said, well, it's out of bounds, right? And it's hazard lift. And if you hit in the hazard lift, you're gonna have to drop behind trees. So it's basically a two strip penalty. I said, okay, so hit it right down the middle. Gotcha. But we were joking about it after the, after the hall, I made triple. I hit it out of bounds, right? And then I re teed and I had a really tough 200 yard cut four iron around a tree in for my fifth shot and ended up making triple bogey or whatever. But I told you, I said, I, I want to put that down as like a mental mistake because I made double bogey. But the fact of the matter is it's a hard shot. Some hard shots, you miss them and you'll make bogey. Some hard shots, you miss them and you'll make triple. I couldn't hit two iron to play it safe because I couldn't carry it to the fairway, 230into the wind with a two iron. What do I do? You have to hit a. You have to try to hit a great golf shot just to not make double bogey there. But sometimes that's how it is. And yeah, I think I don't know how to keep from hitting the ball out of bounds. All I tried to do was, okay, I hit a bad shot, but I can't. There's nothing I could have done differently. Let's not let it ruin the rest of the round play as well. [01:20:38] Speaker C: So if you've ever looked into decade, Scott Fawcett has like this decision tree map of when to hit driver. When. Did not. Because he's, he's primarily hit driver whenever and wherever possible. Right. It's kind of his thing because the closer you are the hole, I like him. The easier the, the second shot is to get it close to the hole. Statistically, whether it's in the rough or the fairway, like I think it's 20 or 30 yards, you'd have to be farther back in the rough before it counts as a stroke, or 30 or 30 yards farther back in the fairway versus the rough before it is statistically a wash. Something like that. Any far closer than that, you're technically gaining. But he. He has this thing where he's like, do you have at least 75 yards between hazards? If so, it's a driver pretty much every single time. And then he goes. And then he goes through this decision tree, and it's like, if you don't have this, then this. And if you don't still don't have this, then this. He goes, well, then, where in the world are you playing? What kind of goofy golf course are you playing? And a lot of times it does feel like there's some holes where I've done the analysis on them. At some of these courses, these neighborhood courses, right. Where there's out of bounds everywhere because of houses, where you look at it, and you're like, this is one of those holes where he would be like, where the hell are you playing? This is stupid, right? Because golf course architecture is typically designed with at least 75 yards between hazards, so you should be able to hit a shot, some kind of shot in between those 75 yards. Yeah, that one is so tough because. Yeah, there's out of bounds, right? And then the hazard on the left. The whole fairway kind of slopes down to the left. And then if you do have to take a drop in the hazard, you're on an upslope with trees in your backswing, trying to hit up a hill that you can't even see the target. Yeah, it's just. It's just a really hard hole. And apparently it used to be a par 5, but they switched it to a par 4, so. So, yeah, sometimes there's just holes like that. There's just nothing you do, you know? [01:22:21] Speaker A: Yeah, and there's some things, too, that I've. I've paid attention to. I mean, I may even say this to you the other day. I mean, we like to measure ourselves against the pros. And I'm not trying to take away from them. They do. They're. They're really good. Not trying to take that away, but they don't lose balls in the middle of the rough. They've got spotters, and they've got spectators, and they've got. They don't lose balls in the middle of the rough. They don't have nearly as much out of bounds to contend with as we do because they. By design, to fit 30,000, 40,000 people into a venue. You need to have a lot of open space for them to stand in, which takes away from the out of bounds parts. So professionals aren't playing the same types of courses that we are. So when we hold ourselves to that same standard, it's a, you're playing a little bit different game. But, and I think to some extent I've tried, I, I tend to lean that that way too. With the driver. I hit driver almost whenever possible. But it's, it's not that I'm accurate with the driver, but I'm not that much more accurate with a driver than I am a two iron. And I think that's something I, maybe I'll do that over the winter is do some experimenting with that and say, okay, how many yards offline am I on average with a driver versus a two iron so that I have some numbers to back that up. Maybe I'm wrong, but to me, I feel like there's nothing that pisses me off in the, in the world, maybe as much, at least in the game of golf than hitting two iron on a 450 yard par four for the sake of playing it safe and then snap hooking it into the crap. And now I'm furious for, for that I could have done that with a driver. [01:23:43] Speaker C: Well, I played a course. Yeah, that's kind of Scott's whole point is there's no guarantee that just because you hit an iron off the teeth, you can hit the fairway. Happens to the pros all the time. They'll hit an iron and it goes to the fairway. Now, not only are they in the rough, but they're 70 yards short of where they would have been in the rough with the driver. Right? [01:24:01] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:24:02] Speaker C: So, yeah, it's, it's shooting yourself in the foot six ways to Sunday. [01:24:05] Speaker A: I played a course in college. I worked at Greenville Country Club for a while. Old Donald, Donald Ross course, 6,200 yards from the tips. And I think I, as I started to play there a lot, I started hitting iron off the tee and wasn't playing very well. And what I finally Learned was a 340 yard hole. I could bomb a driver. And yeah, I may end up 60 yards out from the green behind a tree, but from 60 yards I could figure out a way to still get it around the green most of the time, hooking it around or a bump and run or something. I could still find a way to score around that way. And I just started hitting driver all the time because it's like, yeah, I want to get as close as I can. I'll figure it out from there. That's not always necessarily the, the right way to do it. I know on the sim the other day we had a couple of holes that the landing area at 260 is just really narrow, but at 250 it's pretty wide and it's a 390 yard hole, so I'm pretty comfortable from 140. So we play to that and let's just, you know, there's times that that's not the case, but by and large, yeah, get, get closer to the hole more times than not so well. [01:25:06] Speaker C: And I had a college coach who said, yes, hit, drive whenever possible. He goes, but once you can get something inside of 100 yards off the tee, don't take any more additional risk than is necessary because you look at the stats too, and most people are just as good from 90 yards as they are from 30 because they don't practice the 30 yard shot, you know, so it's, it's a weird number and they fat it or they thin it. Yeah, there's so many ways to look at it, but ultimately it comes down to playing your best game that you can with the skills you have and then playing from the appropriate distances so that you have the potential to enjoy and have fun. That's where the handicap system kind of gets conflated too, is because, well, if you move forward in the tee boxes now, you're supposed to shoot a 69, whereas you play three tee boxes back, you're supposed to shoot a 74. And it's like, well, that means then you're better than a scratch golfer if you only hit it 220 yards because. Right. You see what I'm saying? Like, yeah, so it's, it's kind of, kind of goofy in that too. But again, we have to remember too, professionals are professionals for a reason. Professional athletes, that's their job. 24 7, 365 have nutritionist, strength coach, swing coach, mental coach, travel team agents, take care of all their personal affairs for them to where they don't have to worry about where they're sleeping, where they're going. This, it's all taken care of a lot of times, not everybody obviously, but when you get to that elite level, it's, it's pretty much your schedule is here, you go show up and play. But yeah, I mean, what, what, what expectations can we have as every day, you know, fathers, mothers, working, you know, and then you're gonna go try to take on a 7400 yard golf course and you hit it. 2:30. Yeah. And I was, all I remember was gonna say yes. People have such a conflated view of how far they hook the ball. I can't tell you how many times I've been playing with my buddy Joe at Riverwood or Eagle Ridge and we get paired up with, we call them Brads and chads. It's a 22 year old who's decked out in good, good gear and has Callaway everything or Taylor made everything. And I hit my seven wood. Bang. And they hit their driver, bang. And they're like looking at each other like, how the heck did his ball go farther than mine? Like, and they'd be like, what'd you hit? A hot three wood. I'm like, nah, seven wood. And they're like, they just like. Because they don't understand like how far people actually hit the ball and how hard it actually is to hit the ball 300 yards or whatever. Like everything's got to be perfect, attuned. You got to be strong, got to be fit. But you can see the mental disconnect happen, right? Same with your buddy on the set. Well, the sim can't be right because I hit it. No, no. [01:27:38] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:27:39] Speaker C: No. And you'd shave 10 strokes off your score if you actually ever hit a green because you didn't leave it 30 yard short because your 9 iron goes 170 when it really goes 120, you know. [01:27:47] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like we said that one time. I mean when I was a 11 or 12, 13 years old, I hit on a downhill par four, I hit a ball, that one hopped off the heel, got on the cart path, three bounces. And when I measured it out, it was 311 yards from the tee box. So then I went around for two years saying I hit about 310 yards. Like that's. People do that all the time. And it only kills your game because it's, you know, knowing what you hit it is more important than how far you hit it. And it's just, it's, it's funny to me and the playing of the business. I played a game at solids the other day trying to just get out of the. Just hitting golf balls non stop. There's a game where you just hit 60 shots from different distances and it keeps track. And it was interesting to me when I went back and looked. It scores you based on proximity to the target. And there were, it was funny. Like the 40 and 60 yard targets were not my best targets. It was like the 80 or the 120, one of those was my best. So once you figure out what that is, ever. How you do it to figure out this is the yards I'm comfortable from. For me, 90 to 120 is my really comfortable range because those are full shots, but they're with different wedges. From a lob wedge up to a gap. They're not stretching it, but it's just a normal full golf swing. But then there's other yardages I'm fairly comfortable with, but knowing what those are and then playing to them is a. Is much better than just wailing at it and getting as close as you can. All right, well, we've all got places to go, so we'll wrap. I guess. Let Tony take a nap and get some red light back to Saturday. [01:29:22] Speaker B: I could tell the minute we got on, I was like, oh, boy. It's gonna be a tough one today. I enjoyed it, though, Tony. Love you, bud. [01:29:32] Speaker C: Y' all hang in, boys. [01:29:34] Speaker A: Pleasure. See you, man. [01:29:37] Speaker B: All right. Bye. [01:29:37] Speaker A: Bye. I'm gonna take this. Breaking the action to support our sponsor, Black Buffalo. [01:29:47] Speaker C: Shout out to Black Buffalo. [01:29:54] Speaker A: And cut. That'll be the outtake. Grabbed my kids, old Bojangles. Cut from the other day, and now we're ready to roll. [01:30:04] Speaker C: Oh, God. There he goes. [01:30:09] Speaker B: You can take the boy out of the country. You can't take the country out of the boy. [01:30:13] Speaker C: We talked a long time. [01:30:22] Speaker B: Tony needs a nap. [01:30:24] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm tired, man. Okay, I'm ready. A little bit is better than nada. [01:30:39] Speaker A: A little bit or nothing at all.