Fargiveness, Can You Imagine?
Fargiveness
Hole No. 1 at Augusta National might be the most underrated hole in professional golf. The green is spectacular, but the bulk of my appreciation for the hole is based on how it tests tee shots.
The fairway is not particularly narrow, yet the tee shot is demanding. Some players elect to hit less club than driver off the tee; others try to thread a driver between the fairway bunker on the right and the trees on the left to shorten their approach shots.
Well-executed tee shots enable scoring opportunities. Errant tee shots are punished severely.
The tee shot on No. 1 is consequential. And it is your first swing of the day.
If you’re a golf fan, consequential swings are the most engaging moments the sport offers. If you’re an equipment manufacturer, your goal is to optimize them away.
As club technology progresses, the penalty for mishitting the ball is decreasing. Striking the ball with the center of the club face will always be an advantage, but the consequences for deviating from the center of the face are less severe with each iteration of new technology.
Modern technology makes missing the center of the club face more forgiving. Simultaneously, the best golfers in the world actively train to increase their swing speeds to capture as much distance as possible.
Surely there is a cheesy word to aptly describe this confluence of factors. Well, TaylorMade found it:
Fargiveness, can you imagine a more on-the-nose descriptor of modern driver technology?
By making drivers more fargiving and lessening the consequence associated with each swing, equipment manufacturers are not doing anything wrong. They are doing exactly what they are supposed to do.
Fortunately, well-designed golf courses like Augusta National stand up to the challenges imposed by advancements in fargiveness. Torrey Pines, site of this week’s Farmers Insurance Open, does not. It is…quite fargiving.
In my previous newsletter, I included a table displaying precisely how much more Torrey Pines fargives than the typical PGA Tour course. Here it is again:
Wide misses are not penalized heavily at Torrey Pines.
I could pick pretty much any hole (like No. 4) at Torrey Pines to reinforce this concept, but let’s just focus on Hole 7.
No. 7 is a long par four with trouble lining the right side of the hole. You might reasonably imagine that challenging the trouble on the right side reaps some benefit. Risk and reward are correlated, right? No, not at Torrey Pines.
Here is how Bryson DeChambeau handled No. 7 last year:
Look how far left he hit this tee shot! Super fargiving!
As you can see in the above screenshot, a green side bunker protects the front right side of this green. Plus, the green tilts at such an angle that approach shots coming from the Left Rough are advantaged compared to shots coming from the Right Rough. Thus, there is no reason to challenge the right side of the hole, especially since nothing penalizes super wide left tee shots except for a few sparse trees.
Sure, a fairway bunker guards the left side of the fairway, but even players who find the left fairway bunker outperform players who find the Right Rough by nearly a quarter of a stroke.
99% of golfers cannot bomb the ball over the fairway bunker like Bryson, but that is not the point. The point is that the boundaries of players’ dispersion patterns are not threatened at Torrey Pines. Wide misses avoid stiff penalties.
Torrey Pines is the antithesis of optionality. Taking less club than driver off the tee is rare. Why hit less than driver? The fairways are extremely narrow and missing the fairway by a few yards results in a similar penalty to missing the fairway by a much wider margin. You might as well rip driver.
Players hit high, straight drives into narrow fairways over and over and over. Then, they launch long irons at the green and try to get the ball to stop as quickly as possible over and over and over.
With a bit more architectural imagination, golf can be infinitely more creative and compelling.
In many ways, Torrey Pines accentuates the direction modern professional golf has evolved. Launch the ball with as much speed and fargiveness as possible. No imagination is necessary.
While watching the Farmers Insurance Open this week, consider the consequences of each shot. Does a well-struck golf shot gain a significant edge over an average golf shot? What about compared to a poorly-struck golf shot?
Repeat this exercise at The Masters in a few months and see what you discover.
I’ll be at the event this week to update my perspective on the golf course. It’s easy to get lost out there, so if you do not hear from me again this week, please send help.
Tell the authorities I was last seen on a long, tight hole with a small green. That should narrow it down.
Tennis Court Conditions
Last week, I spoke with a professional tennis player who relayed an interesting insight worthy of real estate in Finding the Edge.
Court conditions play a significant role in tennis. When predicting outcomes, sharp tennis bettors consider the firmness of the court. The cooler the court, the slower the court plays.
The player told me that Centre Court generally plays slower than the other courts. The more a court is worn in, the faster the court plays. Since only a limited number of players have the credentials to practice on Centre Court, the court receives less play than other courts.
Therefore, a cold-temperature match on Centre Court should play much slower than a warmer match on another court.
I was unable to find much published research on which players benefit from a slower court. My intuition is that, on aggregate, players with a strong serve want the firmest and fastest conditions possible.
I have no doubt sharp modelers factor in temperature when predicting tennis outcomes. Evidently, whether or not the match is on Centre Court matters too.
As the Australian Open concludes this weekend, you may want to pay attention to court conditions and which player the conditions favor.
Course Ratings
While we’re talking about lack of imagination within the golf world, Golf Digest released a ranking of the courses on the PGA Tour. They published the rankings a week after I’d posted my tiering of PGA Tour courses. What a coincidence! To be fair, I did get credited here.
Golf Digest, if you’d like to collaborate on another piece, my contact info is below.
I fargive easily. But I do not farget.
Feedback/Contact
Email: Joseph.LaMagnaGolf@gmail.com
Twitter: @JosephLaMagna
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