Sky Sports talks with short-game guru Dave Pelz about his early life at NASA and the keys to better scoring.
Sky Sports talks with short-game guru Dave Pelz about his early life at NASA and the keys to better scoring
Sky Sports: Dave, you have been playing golf your whole life. By the time you went to University in Indiana, it was supposed to be a four-year golfing scholarship that prepared you for the European Tour. By the time you came out of it, you had decided Physics was your game and you would be more successful in the lab - tell us about this decision?
Dave Pelz: My intent was to go to school on a golf scholarship. I played my first tournament as a seven-year-old, I played a 77-year-old man. It was a key experience, I thought it was magic, I thought I was a golfer, destined to be the greatest. I played junior golf relatively well, not good enough to get a scholarship. By the time I got out of college I knew there were college players I couldn't beat. I played against Nicklaus and Weiskopf, and I thought if I can't beat these guys, what's going to happen against the real pros? Of course, at the time I had no idea how good they were, they just beat me pretty badly, and I thought I better go earn an honest living. I was very fortunate - I got a job at Goddard space flight centre for NASA. I worked 14-and-a-half years doing space research, really applying my Major in Physics. I had learned the principles of 'Pure Research,' where you change one variable at a time and do all the analysis, but it wasn't until I got to NASA that I was able to apply this. When you send a probe from Earth to Venus, it's got to be right; the measurements have to be very accurate. I enjoyed NASA tremendously, sitting at my console, looking at satellite data, and conducting research. But I realized that every year when the Majors came round, I was taking vacation to watch the tournaments. I am a golf nut. I realized I am a golfer that loves physics rather than a physicist that loves golf. So, having heard life lessons such as 'it will never be work if you love' and 'do what you have passion for,' I decided to try golf. My boss at NASA, my division chief, happened to be a golfer. He said to me, "We have an advanced education programme, a leave of absence for a year, I can either send you for an advanced degree of physics, or I can send you out in the business world, and you can try golf." By then I had several patents in golf, as I had been doing research of my own, throughout the time I was at NASA, and I had found a couple of things and patented them. I thought, I could make a living in golf, and that maybe it would be even more fun than NASA. So, I got into golf, and lost everything, because I am not a businessman, I am very poor at business. If it wasn't for my wife I would still be in the poorhouse now! I lost everything I had in the first four years. I re-mortgaged my house and cars, borrowed or was given money by tour players. I made my money in golf finally when I got out of producing golf equipment and into teaching when I started using my research to help golfers improve their games. I recently built a new home, pooling 30 years worth of earnings into one home. The Wall Street Journal recently called It the greatest back yard ever built. I have eight greens in my back yard. I can hit every shot imaginable within 100 yards, 30 seconds from my living room. I can be hitting any short game shot in golf within one minute of whenever I want to, I can practice at any time of day or night. I still work for a living, but I am really getting excited about my own game for the first time in a long time. I'm also helping to design different people's backyards. I have been developing a grass, with a company called SYNlawn, that is really a good replication of a fairway lie. It carries directly to the golf course, unlike the old synthetic grasses that were not really any good. Now we have developed a good fairway, a good rough, a good fringe, and wonderful putting surfaces that are as good as bentgrass or Bermuda greens and they hold shots. I can practice my honest to god golf game in my own backyard, then I can go to the golf course and apply it and it carries over.
Sky Sports: You've spoken about your research, take us back to when you first started to do that research, how you gathered statistics?
Dave Pelz: Fifteen years after joining the NASA centre, I realized, I have enough information to make better golf equipment, so I'm going to spend a year doing golf business and see if I love it. I loved it, I loved it when I was losing money, so I started to wonder what it would be like once I started to make money. I had three kids at the time, so I took a chance. I started making a living, and I said this is the greatest thing I have ever done, as I'm enjoying every day, doing the research, and yet I still can't work golf out. As much as I've played, I don't understand how a man like Gay Brewer, who had a terrible golf swing, won the Masters. I said 'Pelz, you have to study how players like Brewer, Palmer and others who have awful golf swings mechanically', can beat players like Gene Littler who has a wonderful mechanical golf swing. So I started measuring every shot in the game, and I found that the short game is the key to scoring. It's not how you hit the ball off the tee, you have to hit it reasonably well, but what matters is if you can hit your wedge shots close enough to one putt rather than two putt. That's the main difference in the game. That's why Lee Westwood is a great player, who will win a major, but he hasn't yet because of his short game. If he had Phil Mickelson's short game he would have won 10 majors, as good a player as he is. Thirty years ago people didn't understand this. Every Tour player now works on his short game, every club is building short game practice areas. When I was younger, if I was caught hitting a wedge onto a putting green at my club I was fined, and threatened to be kicked out. Right now, the biggest thing I could do for amateurs, and one of the things I do at my school, is teach them to hit 8,12,14 yard pitch shots. When you miss a green, the most popular pitch shot is a 14 yard carry, you want to carry it 14 yards and make it bite and roll to the pin. If you can't do that accurately, you can't be a good player. Everybody misses greens, even the pros, pros miss five, six greens a round, amateurs often miss them all, so they are hitting greens with wedge shots, not 4 irons, you have to learn the wedge game.
Sky Sports: Give us the golden eight - from two feet to 10 feet is the crucial putt. Tell us the numbers, as some viewers may be surprised by them.
