2019 CSCC Celebrity-Am
He's the pro at Greyhawk, and had two friends "caddying" for him: a protege since high school who is now an LPGA Tour rookie (for another week or so), Sarah Schmelzel, and her father. Stan is a world-renowned short game instructor, and midway through the round we were joined by Terry Holt, who is Bernard Langer's caddy. He was there to get some green-reading tips from Stan. Sarah was giving Stan some putting instruction during the round. That has to be a good omen for Sarah's career. She kept her card and will be playing at the Founders' Cup in March.
I asked Stan if she was his caddy or his coach, and he said "She's my friend". Talked to Dad a little, too, and he said he took her to Stan as a Junior for help with putting, and when she went to college he and Stan remained friends. Nice people, all of them.
I asked Stan about Peter Kostis and Gary McCord not being on TV anymore (The Kostis-McCord Learning Center is at Greyhawk). He said "I don't know", but the look on his face was more like "I wish you hadn't asked me that". So I guess it will have to remain a mystery for now.
Terry talked about Bernard's extended stay in a greenside bunker last week. Bottom line, he said, when a World Golf Hall of Famer takes 4 to get out of a greenside bunker, there's a problem with the course design, not the player. If you're reading this, Jack Nicklaus, he's talking to you. He said Nicklaus has designed greens on other courses that had to be redone to make them playable, because he felt that triple-breaking putts were his last line of defense against 30 under par. I recalled Nicklaus writing that he tried to design golf courses that were fun to play for players of all abilities, and said that if length is no longer sufficient to hold off low scoring by the pros then the answer is not tricked-up courses but narrow fairways at strategic points, high rough, and well-placed water hazards. Terry agreed with that.
(I've been remiss in my blogging, and haven't yet written about the last Nicklaus course I played, the Pronghorn Resort in Bend, OR. I've never seen so many holes with obstacles in the middle of the fairway. From single trees to a large desert island of sand and trees. He seems to have it in for the straight hitter.)
I heard some of Stan's answers to the amateurs' questions. He said at his clinics he asks the students "What makes a putt break?" Most of them know the answer is "gravity". Then he asks why one putt along the same line would break more or less than another, and his answer is "time". The longer a putt is rolling, the more it will break, because gravity has more time to act on it. Which makes perfect sense to Mr. Science. Then he asks which putt breaks more on the same line, an uphill putt or a downhill putt in the opposite direction. Anyone can see that you have to hit the uphill putt with more initial speed, but only experienced golfers would know that more speed means less break, and even they wouldn't instinctively know that less break was because of less time, not because of more speed (though they are mathematically related in the case of two equal-length putts).
In response to another question he said he asks the students a question about a pendulum motion, which would be the perfect model for putting, and said that is the reason that "anchoring" was banned: When during the swing of the pendulum does the highest acceleration occur? Anyone who hasn't been a physics major at some point in their academic career has probably never considered such a question, and is likely to answer "at the bottom". Actually, acceleration is highest at the top, and zero at the bottom. Speed is highest at the bottom. But golfers often try to "accelerate" through the strike of the ball, which introduces opportunities for mishaps, notably a thing called "the yips". (Stan didn't use that word, but it seems to me that the scientific description of the yips would be "an unhelpful sudden and uncontrolled acceleration of the hands and wrists".) He also talked about the length of the backswing and follow-through. Since the putting pendulum is slowed by impact with the ball, the follow-through must be shorter. Bad putters have a longer follow-through.
He also was asked, and talked about the orientation of the blade to the swing path. He said the blade should stay perpendicular to the swing path, because that is how it must be at impact if you want to hit the ball on line. And that since the swing is on an inclined plane, then the blade must be open to the target line before impact, and closed after, because the swing path is open to the target line before impact, and closed after. There is another school of thought on this point, which is that the blade should stay perpendicular to the target line throughout the swing. I find that easier to do, but the physics of it states that the only way to do it is by manipulating the club with the hands and wrists throughout the swing, which introduces an additional source of error. My reaction to seeing the face open and close is to increase my hand manipulation to try to get it to the right place, which would be the worst possible reaction. I suppose Stan would have a way to cure me of that.
He also talked about taking the pin out, or leaving it in. There has been some scientific investigation of that, which he says proves his point of view. He says he has always taken the pin out when he was trying to make the shot. The ball stays in the hole (instead of lipping out) when its center of gravity is inside and below the edge of the hole. If the ball hits the pin and rebounds from it, it spends less time inside the edge (the center of the ball never reaches the center of the hole) , which means less time to drop below the edge than if it had continued on without hitting anything (there's that time and gravity again). The tests were done with various types of pin materials, in case something softer would make a difference, but it didn't.
It was a fun day. Lots of good talk and good information, and I met two pros for the price of one, and a famous caddy to boot.
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