Transcripts - Episode 30: Golf Tempo, Ryder Cup History, And A Dominant PGA Win (Copy)

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Now, here's your host, Corey, with another episode of the Birdie Board podcast.

Welcome back to the Birdie Board podcast.

So on our last podcast, I did a little bit of a different format.

I broke up the episode into four different segments, and I've gotten some good feedback

for that.

I'm going to go ahead and do that again.

We're going to do the same four segments in this episode.

So we're going to start with Tor Talk, which is just a general PGA update.

What's going on?

We're going to then go into Weekend Winds, and we're going to talk about the tempo in

a golf swing.

The next section after that, we're going to talk about some back nine stories.

So this is just kind of going over golf history, and we're going to go over what happened in

the 1999 Ryder Cup.

And then finally, just like the last episode, we're going to close with some Clubhouse updates,

which are just some general updates for Birdie Board.

So last week, and we had a pretty exciting tournament, the Cadillac Championship.

So this was a pretty dominant performance, and if you haven't seen it, the winner was

Cameron Young.

He won with a minus 19 score in the end.

The take home pay for that was 3.6 million.

For comparison, this tournament actually pays pretty well.

The Masters tournament paid the winner like 4.6 million.

So we're talking only about a million dollar gap between a major championship in this one.

That's a pretty strong one.

What was most significant about the outcome of this tournament wasn't that Cameron Young

won with a minus 19, but it was what was in second place.

And what was in second place is significant was the score was only minus 13.

So Cameron Young won with a six stroke gap.

That is incredible in golf and very rare to win with such a big gap between first and

second place.

That really shows how dominant Cameron Young was through this tournament.

But no surprise, the second place person was Scotty Scheffler.

He is the one who had minus 13.

He was the sole person in that position.

And then for third place was Ben Griffin at minus 12.

And then there was a three way tie at minus 11.

A lot of times you'll see ties at second and third place too.

But I think that even shows how much more dominant of a win that this was for Cameron Young.

That if it wasn't for Scotty and Ben Griffin at minus 13 and minus 12, he beat the entire

field by eight strokes.

So minus 19 versus minus 11.

Like that it really shows how dominant Cameron Young was in this tournament.

Because of his win, he actually jumped up to third place in the FedEx Cup standings.

Right now, Scotty Scheffler is in first place.

He only has one win on the season, but he has so many top 10 finishes that he's just accumulated

so many points.

So he's at 2,431 overall.

And then the third place is Matt Fitzpatrick who won last week with his brother at 2,394

points.

So just a little bit behind Scotty.

And then Cameron Young in third place, mostly because of this tournament win, he got 700

points up to 2,371.

So if you're not familiar with the pointing, every tournament has a set of number of points.

First place always gets a huge number of points compared to everyone else.

It's usually like 700 or 800.

Second place will get like 300 or 400.

And then on will get like 100 or less.

So first place can really make a significant jump.

But as you can see as the season goes on, the leaderboard really starts to shake out and

stabilize.

So think about it in the beginning of season.

When we only had a few tournaments played, 700 points could easily push you up to first

place.

But now we're looking at maybe some of the bottom guys in the ranking.

If they won a tournament, they would have to do it 2,3 times to get to Cameron Young

or Matt Fitzpatrick or Scotty Scheffler.

Just think about it like this, like 700, 7 times 3 is 2100.

So they would have to win like 3 tournaments in a row.

And they still wouldn't be in the top 3.

That wasn't the case in the beginning of the season just because there's not as many people

had as many points.

But at this point in the season, we're starting to finally see who are the best golfers of

the season, who is the ranking the most consistently.

Scotty Scheffler, I don't think was a surprise to anyone.

But I don't think second and third place would have been guessed right now that it would

have been Matt Fitzpatrick and then Cameron Young.

Now Cameron Young, like I said, a big reason he's there is because he just finished with

a win.

So that jumped him up from, I guess beforehand, he was at like 1600 points or so, which would

be more middle of the pack.

So he jumped up with that.

Matt Fitzpatrick though has been impressive.

He has three wins on the season.

I don't think people would have expected that.

And if three wins is actually the most out of anyone, that's more than Cameron Young,

it's more than Scotty Scheffler.

Now Scotty's up there because he's had so many top 10 finishes.

But it's been impressive with how consistent Matt Fitzpatrick has been this year.

He's playing very, very good golf.

All right.

So next section of this podcast is weekend wins.

And we're going to talk about the tempo in a golf swing.

The reason that I wanted to bring up the tempo is because I think it's actually something

that has helped my game out the most recently.

I watched a YouTube video recently about chipping.

And the reason I watched it is because I'm at the beginning of the season, like everyone,

those fuel shots are harder to get back.

So I just needed like a refresher, some tutorials, something like that to get my chipping back

a bit.

One of the videos that I watched that really resonated with me is putting the importance

of rotation into your chip.

What this helped with is just making sure my hands didn't get lazy or that the chip

was all just my arms.

So what the tip was in the video was when you do your chip, she's the club.

So the idea of this is just simply to make sure you get your full rotation.

But the practical things and the practicing that you would do is after you take your

chip, you see that like it's a sore.

If you're a right handed golfer, you try to get the club to your left hip and you

see that.

And the only way you're going to do that is if you have full rotation.

So this was helping me and I was going through the process and practicing this.

And what I realized was starting to happen is because I was getting this full rotation

of my chips, I was starting to do that with my iron swings and my driver.

And what happens when you do something like that with your iron swings and driver is

you actually end up creating a good tempo because the only way you can do something

like that is to have a good tempo.

So the core message here is most golfers swing too fast and they definitely do that

under pressure or they are trying to make a big swing or a distance swing.

I'm sure we've all been there.

But the key thing is that tempo is always going to outpace the mechanics of a swing.

You can have a flawed swing with good tempo, but you can't have a good swing with bad

tempo.

That's essentially the takeaway here.

Some of my best rounds I've ever had and definitely a time I had a nine hole stretch where I was

essentially plus one.

It wasn't because I was swinging mechanically pure.

It's because I had the best tempo rhythm that I could have ever had.

Now for me when I'm really playing well and I have good tempo, I'm not thinking about

it too much, which helps a lot.

That always helps in a golf swing.

But to get into a good tempo rhythm, you have a couple things you could do.

So what a good tempo looks like is like a nice smooth takeaway.

You're not rushing at the top.

You're letting your hips kind of turn before you start your downswing and then you have

a nice smooth controlled downswing.

A simple cue that has helped me in the past is back pause through.

So what that's doing is you start your backswing.

You're taking a slight pause.

It's not a mechanical pause.

It's just letting your club naturally rest and then you bring it through.

This tempo though of saying back pause through, back pause through can really help you build

that tempo that you need for a good golf swing.

It can help you regain control if you're feeling like you're having a bad round.

This happened to me yesterday a little bit when I golfed.

I was playing 18 holes at a local golf course and I started off really strong.

I first like four holes.

I was bogeying well.

I was staying consistent and I just felt like I had good tempo.

And then I got to hole five and it had a drivable par four which is always tempting.

And I drove it and I had a long drive because I was trying to reach it there.

So I got it up there like 275 or so to 80 which was about how long the hole was.

But it was far to the right.

It wasn't quite a slice.

It was just a push to the right.

I was able to chip it up on the green and walk away with a bogey.

But the key is I lost my tempo on that hole.

I tried to push my drive.

I tried to get a lot of effort into it.

And in reality I didn't need to swing that hard.

The first hole of the day I had just a normal tempo drive and I drove it 285.

I could have just done that again on this hole and been fine.

But I didn't.

I tried to force it.

Another aspect of this is there was water on this hole.

So I felt like I had to force it to make sure it went far enough.

So I actually was walking away from that hole feeling like, okay, I did what I needed to

do.

But in reality I didn't even notice that I had lost my tempo and then you could see

what happens on the next two holes and the subsequent holes after that.

The tee shot on the next hole required an iron and I chunk it.

It still goes 150 yards or so.

So it was still playable.

But again, I kind of lost my tempo on that.

Next hole after that was a par three.

I take a nine and kind of a similar thing happens.

I just kind of off with my tempo and I chunk it again.

So for me personally, when I'm off with my tempo, I get chunks and I need to be a lot

more aware of that.

The hard thing is though is fixing your tempo while you're playing.

So that's where going back to a saying like back pause through or just some sort of tempo

saying can really help.

Some people also like just counting one, two, three and some people like doing different

segments.

So both of those segments are like one, two, three.

So backswing, top through swing.

Some people just like to say two like smooth backs, smooth through.

So whatever works for you, but having that tempo at something you can say can really

help with overcoming some bad tempo in your golf game, but also just general practice.

So that was it for that section.

The next section is back nine stories.

So what I really like learning about and talking about in this podcast is just some

history of golf and one tournament that I wanted to talk about is the 1999 Ryder Cup,

because this was had a historical moment in the history of Ryder Cup.

So the 1999 Ryder Cup, it was the 33rd ever Ryder Cup match.

It was played in September of 1999 at a country club called the country club in Brooklyn,

Massachusetts.

So it was in the United States this year.

And what was very interesting about this format is the outcome on the third day and we'll get

to that in a second.

But here's a little bit more of this setup.

So the format for this Ryder Cup was a three day match.

On Friday, there was a four ball, better ball matches in the morning and then four,

four some alternating shots in the afternoon.

On day two, Saturday, there was four, four some matches in the morning and four, four

ball matches in the afternoon.

And then on Sunday, you see the typical single matches or 12 single matches going on.

Just as a side note, a lot of this format is a big motivation behind why Birdie board

even exists.

So if you're ever interested in trying one of these formats, I'm just going to do a shameless

plug for Birdie board.

Give it a shot.

You can play a lot of these formats that I just mentioned.

So I'm not going to go over the exact team makeups of each, but I'll call it a couple

of recognizable names.

For team Europe, you had a couple people like the Westwood, Sergio Garcia, were some of the

biggest names on that team.

And then team USA, no surprise at this time was Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson are two of

the bigger names on team USA.

So after Friday's matches, the morning four sums finished two and a half to one and a

half points.

You're not familiar.

It was match play in Ryder Cup.

You get points based off of who won the whole ties.

Don't get you any points.

So that's how you can finish with like Europe having two and a half points to us as one

and a half.

So that was the morning for some section in the afternoon for ball section.

We started to see Europe take an actual lead.

Europe finished that day or that session with three and a half points versus the US

section of one and a half.

What was interesting was that Westwood actually played against Tiger Woods in their group.

And Europe actually ended up beating them in that group.

So that brings the total to Europe having six and United States having just two points.

So already a four point gap going into the second day.

The gap was pretty much maintained on Saturday.

The morning four sum started with a Tiger Woods playing, which he actually got a point

up on Europe in that group.

And the day finish or the morning started I should say two to two, but the day finished

or that session finished eight four overall.

So Europe was maintaining its gap in Saturday's morning group.

The afternoon on Saturday was a four ball match and we saw Mickelson playing and we saw Garcia.

Again the match was halved to two.

So Europe maintained that four stroke lead at 10 to six overall.

So you can see that most of the points that Europe earned was still from the first day.

So the first day they gained that four stroke gap.

But Saturday they weren't able to extend it and United States were able to hang on.

So the momentum was shifting a little bit on Saturday.

So what was interesting historically at this point was that no team had ever come back

from being down more than two points on the final day of Ryder Cup.

The United States at this point was down four points going into the last day.

So going into the last day we saw a dominant performance from the United States.

United States won almost every match play session that was played in singles.

There were only three that they didn't win.

Some of the biggest wins of course was Phil Mickelson winning five to three.

Tiger Woods winning three to two.

Jim Fierick winning four to three.

So overall United States earned eight and a half points on the final day to Europe's

three and a half points which gave the United States the win in the 1999 Ryder Cup with

14 and a half points to Europe's 13 and a half points marking the largest comeback

in Ryder Cup history.

So that was it for this section of back nine stories.

Hopefully you guys are enjoying some history of this.

And the last section here is just clubhouse updates.

You might have noticed I haven't posted a podcast for about two weeks now.

It was simply due to some work travel.

I just was busier than I normally am.

In the past when I have traveled for work I've been able to keep up with both social

media and recording podcasts and the evening and stuff.

Unfortunately this time around I just wasn't the case.

So I was able to finally get back to it today.

I'm glad to get back into it.

Miss talking about just golf in general.

So it was good to kind of just get back into the flow of things.

Birdie board is doing well.

I have been still keeping track of the metrics and everything.

I noticed that there was one match that is starting up by someone which is one of the

I'll be honest one of the first big usages of Birdie board outside of just friends and

family which was exciting to see.

So hopefully it goes well if you're listening to this podcast, reach out if anything doesn't

work as you expect it.

I'm happy to help.

Last thing I want to talk about is just an exciting personal thing is that a golf league

I joined is starting up tonight.

It's a nine hole golf league.

I'm really excited about it.

It is formatted like the PGA so you can earn in certain number of points per match and

it accumulates to championships and playoffs at the end of the season.

The points are awarded in two brackets either net bracket or gross bracket.

You can earn points in both.

I think it does favor probably the gross golfer a little bit better gross golfer a little

better but I'm still excited to just be involved.

The last time I did a golf tournament I learned so much about golf and I improved a lot through

the process.

So I'm excited to just see how that all plays out again and I'm just excited to be competitive

again.

So that was it for this episode of the Birdie board podcast.

Thanks for listening.