The Anatomy of Going Low

This was published in the July 2011 issue of Golf Canada and the 2011 RBC Canadian Open official souvenir program.

At its core golf is a game that revolves around numbers and they can be expressed in an almost infinite number of ways – by reaching a par five in two strokes, making a quintuple bogey eight on a par three or the fact that a 300-yard drive counts the same on a scorecard as a one-inch putt. So when Paul Goydos stood over a birdie attempt on the 18th green at the TPC at Deere Run during the first round of the John Deere Classic last July, a small margin – 87-inches – was the final barrier between a remarkably low round and a slice of the PGA Tour record book.

If he missed it, he would have cleaned up his par and posted an 11-under round of 60. A tremendous result, to be sure, but it would have been the ninth such score on the PGA Tour in the last 10 years – and by the time the year was out, one of 13 in that span. If he made the putt though, he would become just the fourth player in the history of the PGA Tour to record a round of 59 – the once mythical score that is easily attainable in a video game, but is often beyond the realistic comprehension of even the most brilliant golfers.

In that moment Goydos was telling himself “Just keep doing what you’re doing,” and what he had been doing was flourishing. During the round he successfully hit 13 of 14 fairways, 16 of 18 greens in regulation and when he lined up the left-to-right breaking putt from seven feet away, he had already accumulated just over 180-feet of made putts on the day. (For context, 100-feet of made putts in a round is considered exemplary.) The pressure was immense, perhaps more than he – a two-time winner on the PGA Tour – had ever felt during his professional career.

But with a chance to permanently etch his name in the record book, Goydos didn’t deviate from his routine. He treated the moment like it was an anonymous birdie putt at any point, in any round. And when the ball sprung from the face of his putter, Goydos knew he had made it before it actually trundled towards the centre of the hole and found the bottom of the cup.

“That just happened to be a day where my rhythm was perfect and I didn’t get in my own way,” says Goydos. “I was seeing things perfectly clearly – I could have told you that that putt was a left-edge putt 100 yards from the green. I actually had probably had that putt before. Another factor is that [on] both 17 and 18, one of my fellow competitors was on a similar line so I got to see another ball roll [first]. All the good things that can happen were happening that day. The key was just taking advantage of it.”

Just how well do you have to be playing and how precise do you need to be to accomplish a score like that? When speaking to reporters about his final stroke of the round, Goydos summed up how dialed-in his game was quite simply. “The putt would have gone in a thimble,” he said.

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While it doesn’t speak to the integrity or sportsmanship that both sit at the heart of the game, the cold, hard math of tournament golf dictates who wins and who loses. From the first hole to the 72nd, the objective for most players is to play a golf version of the limbo – how low can you go? In every tournament there are factors that a player has no control over – course conditions, weather, who your playing partners are, etc. – but they do have the ability to manage how they mentally and physically approach a round. For Jason Bohn – a two-time winner on the PGA Tour who also recorded the lowest ever score on a North American-based professional golf tour with a 58 on the Canadian Tour in 2001 – shooting a low number comes down to one very basic tenant.

“It’s aggressiveness, absolutely,” he says. “What I think happens to some guys or in some situations when they get really deep under par, it’s almost the flip side of others that shoot low numbers. They get four, five, six-under par and they almost get a contentment.”

He continues saying that too often players get out to a good start and would rather throttle back to keep from ruining a good round rather than keep pressing forward to get as low as possible. The ones who eventually do get to those really low numbers have often done so by continuing to fire their approach shots at flag sticks and attacking par-five greens on their second shots.

“They’re able to do that and still hit the high quality golf shot that [is required] to shoot low scores,” says Bohn.

“If a player shoots 67 [or] 68, they were probably playing well enough to shoot something deep if they had holed a couple long ones,” adds Canadian Graham DeLaet, who fired a 10-under par 62 at the PGA Tour’s Reno Tahoe Open last August. “Mentally, however, it is not always that easy. A player knows when he or she is playing well, and the goal on those days is to keep making birdies and stay aggressive. If a player gets four or five-under early, it is easy to try to cruise in, which usually results in a couple bogeys and turns a potentially great round into a very average one.”

Goydos agrees that staying assertive is a crucial element but he approaches it from the macro perspective of a 72-hole marathon rather than the micro perspective of an 18-hole sprint.

“I only shot four-under [on] my first nine holes and then shot eight-under on the back,” he says. “As the round kept going and [I was] getting lower and lower, you’re not supposed to think about it. My thought process when I was nine-under after 14 holes was…that nine-under is going to finish 50th in the tournament, if that, it might be even lower. There’s no reason to stop being aggressive on hole 16 of the tournament. You’re going to need to get somewhere around 20-under par – and as it turns out [Steve] Stricker shot [26-under par to win]. So staying aggressive was a function of trying to win the tournament, not a function of trying to protect that particular round.”

As far as individual accomplishments within golf, recording a double-digit below par round is tremendous but breaking 60 is without equal. Open it up to other sports however and there is an apt comparison to a pitcher in baseball throwing a perfect game, in terms of frequency and historical context. There are some differences, of course, most notably that baseball is a team game and a pitcher does not bear the full brunt of responsibility for the outcome.

“Whenever [someone] pitched a perfect game, they probably had some good defensive plays being made [for them] but it’s a similar concept in the sense that the pitcher has the best stuff maybe that he’s ever had,” says Goydos, pointing out that both require a degree of good fortune.

“Behind him any ball that might have been hit hard was hit at somebody; borderline pitches were called strikes instead of balls – a lot of good things have to happen that turn maybe a two or three or four hitter into a perfect game [and] the same thing happens in golf,” he says.

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If not for the sheer magnitude of the moment, the first sub-60 round in PGA Tour history may very well have been over shadowed by another rare golf accomplishment – the hole in one. During the pro-am prior to the start of the 1977 Danny Thomas Memphis Classic (now the FedEx St. Jude Classic) President Gerald Ford – just six months removed from office – recorded an ace. Two days later Al Geiberger – who won 11 times on the PGA Tour, including a major with a victory at the 1966 PGA Championship at Firestone Country Club – become the first to record a round of 59 on the PGA Tour. After that landmark round it was 14 years before Chip Beck duplicated it at the 1991 Las Vegas Invitational and another eight years until David Duval accomplished it at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic in 1999. In total, the span between when Geiberger first accomplished the feat and when Goydos became the fourth to do so was 33 years.

But just 24 days after Goydos’ round of 59, Stuart Appleby joined the club in thrilling fashion by rallying from seven shots back at the start of the final round to win the Greenbrier Classic. Bohn thinks that advancements in the physical and mental training process of golfers are a major reason for why something that can only be called a statistical anomaly would be possible.

“There’s so much more that goes into that now than did 50 years ago. It’s a combination of both,” he says. “It’s a freak incident that two guys broke 60 within a month, but I don’t think it’s a freak incident that more guys will continue to break 60.”

What it really amounts to is a process of evolution rather than a revolution and while golf technology has improved massively in recent years, Goydos points to a piece of equipment used to maintain every golf course rather than one used by every golfer as a critical component in making a low-scoring round more attainable.

“People talk about advancements in golf, I would say one of the biggest advancements in golf is the lawn mower and the condition of the greens,” he says. “To shoot that type of score, you’ve got to make a lot of putts which means you’ve got to have perfect greens for the most part and…I had greens that I would imagine guys in the 60s would just drool over.”

If you look at the top 100 players on the PGA Tour last year, they played a little over 84 rounds for the season on average. Even with so many opportunities, the sub-60 round remains a mirage for most. And perhaps the fact that players just want to compete and never know when they’ll have a chance to make history is what is so alluring about it.

“I wasn’t trying to shoot 59,” says Goydos, “[I was] trying to put myself in position to win the golf tournament.”

Golf's Global Stage

This was published in the June 2011 issue of Golf Canada.

The history of golf is rooted in the soil on the eastern shores of a small university town in Scotland. The future, well, that could cover a much more expansive terrain.Golf is becoming more global than ever, as the game marches towards its debut in the 2016 Summer Olympics in 2016 in Brazil.

Between the PGA Tour, European Tour and LPGA Tour, there were tournaments played on six different continents – with Antarctica the lone holdout – in 2010, and 18 different countries were featured in the winner’s circle.

Ty Votaw, the Executive Director of the International Golf Federation’s Olympic Golf Committee, and a big reason why golf is now part of the Olympics, says the Games will be a launching point for even more global expansion.

“Clearly the benefit that golf will have in being part of the Olympic Games between now and 2016 is that it will allow governments of countries around the world – where golf is just developing – and national Olympic committees of those countries to provide greater attention, greater resources, and greater manpower behind the development of golf in their countries,” says Votaw, also the Executive Vice President of Communications and International Affairs for the PGA Tour and former commissioner of the LPGA Tour.

“The only way that happens generally is if the sport is an Olympic sport and golf had gone lacking in those areas of attention – resources, manpower, and dollars – because it had not been an Olympic sport since 1904.”

For many years the United States had a monopoly on the game, at least, if major championships are the currency by which golf wealth is measured. From 1960 until 2000, American-born players won 233 of the 302 (77 percent) major championships that were contested on the men’s and women’s tours. In the decade since, they’ve won 32 of 80 (40 percent).

Steven Schlossman is an American history professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the co-author of Chasing Greatness, a book that details the 1973 U.S. Open where Johnny Miller famously fired a final round 63 to win the title.

For the book, he did extensive research about Oakmont Country Club and five of the U.S. Open Championships (three men’s and two women’s) that have been played there. He says that while the winning numbers are certainly relevant statistically, he also points to the international participation rates in those tournaments – an American national championship, mind you – as a further illustration of the continuing evolution of the game.

On the men’s side, the number of players born outside of the U.S. that made the cut increased from six percent in 1973, to 20 per cent in 1994 and finally to 48 percent in 2007.

It should also be noted that players from three different continents (Miller in 1973, Ernie Els in 1994 and Angel Cabrera in 2007) won those tournaments.

On the women’s side, the increase is similar but much more pronounced, increasing from 14 percent in 1992 to 62 percent in 2010. While only a small sample size, this shift does underscore the fortuitous timing of the ongoing global golf advancement, with the 2016 games just five years away.

“Every tournament, if you look at first, second, third and you see what countries are represented and who [would get] a medal if those were the Olympic Games, gives us a lot of interesting momentum heading to the Olympic Games as we experience that between now and 2016,” says Votaw.

As much as it’s important for the growth of golf, the opportunity to tee it up in the Olympics will become equally important for the players themselves.

“It’s huge for golf to be in the Olympics,” says PGA player Ian Poulter. “It would be an honour and privilege to represent my country and win the gold medal.”

Votaw takes it one step further, and says that for golfers to be able to have close contact with some of the greatest athletes in the world can only be a good experience.

“You’d have to compare it to tennis where Roger Federer stayed in the Olympic village and was just another great athlete,” he says. “He wasn’t Roger Federer – who was the no.1 player at the time in the tennis world. He was just another great athlete in an Olympic village filled with a bunch of great athletes.

“That mix, that exposure and that interaction between elite athletes from around the world, and seeing golfers as their equals as Olympic athletes, is going to be a wonderful experience for our players, both men and women.”

Of course, there are still some issues that need to be ironed out between now and then. Votaw says that while the game is on a trail to global prosperity, there are still areas in the world that need to mature in the short term, in order to have a truly global Olympic competition.

“[If] you look at the top 500 in the world rankings on the men’s side, I think only 14 players come from countries in South America, and eight of those come from Argentina,” he says. “So there’s some work to do to develop golfers in South America, such that there can be some representation from that part of the world at the Olympic Games in 2016.”

Votaw adds that it’s a similar scenario for women’s golf, but the more dominant South American country is Brazil, rather than Argentina.

Still, there is a foundation there with players like Camilo Villegas, Jhonattan Vegas and Angel Cabrera.

Even if the future of South American golf is looking bright, there is an area on the opposite side of the planet that most agree is the next frontier of the game – Asia.

“In the long-term I think we will see more and more Asian- born players coming to compete on the PGA Tour, much like we see on today’s LPGA Tour,” says Tom Abbott, an analyst for the Golf Channel. “The South Korean influence on the LPGA has been strong but because of mandatory military service, the men haven’t had the same opportunities. In places like India and China, the situation is different, so I would expect to see an impact from those two countries.”

One of the greatest things about the game of golf is that it doesn’t discriminate and it doesn’t know any other languages. The rules of the game are the same no matter what your native tongue is, whether you’re a touring professional or a weekend hacker.

So when gold medals are hung around the necks of the Olympic champions it will be a momentous occasion.

“There’s no greater accomplishment for a sportsman,” says Votaw. “There may be major championships in men’s and women’s golf, there are major championships in tennis for men and women – but you only get one chance every four years to win a gold medal.”