One year ago, Golf Channel analyst Johnson Wagner did something at Pinehurst that even U.S. Champion Bryson DeChambeau couldn’t.
In the darkness after play had finished, Wagner dropped his ball a foot from the same spot in the bunker DeChambeau had effectively secured his second major from just a few hours earlier. DeChambeau was left with a nervy four-footer at the end of it, though. Wagner didn’t need that stress. With the cameras rolling, the U.S. Open trophy in sight and the champion watching on, Wagner splashed the awkward, long bunker shot onto the front of the green, then watched it skid, spin, and stop to within a foot of the hole.
It was a confluence of good golf and good content that sent Bryson DeChambeau’s arms flailing into the air. He handed Wagner the trophy and Wagner turned to the camera, beaming with pride.
“Everything went black the moment I hit it,” Wagner said. “I still can’t believe I hit that shot.”
It was the high point of the second act of Wagner’s career in golf, which has undergone a radical transformation. The under-the-radar journeyman with three PGA Tour wins under his belt is now golf’s jolly Everyman—the architect of must-watch television during golf’s biggest weeks.
Wagner’s analysis of the game is smart and underrated. But his schtick is irresistible: After every major round, Wagner retraces the steps of a player’s pivotal shot. He’ll talk about it a little, then tries to recreate it.
For a few moments, you forget that you’re watching a highly accomplished professional golfer. You’re drawn into the drama of the unknown—whether you’re about to witness a golfer like you administer a miracle and pull it off, or drive his car off a cliff.
In the weeks leading up to the one-year anniversary of Wagner’s heroic shot, I wanted to give Wagner’s segments the treatment they deserve: Some deep, statistical analysis.
Ben Jared
Since Wagner began his headline Live From segment at the 2024 Players Championship, he’s hit 99 shots across nine different venues. I analyzed video footage from each of them, cross-referenced the results with ShotLink, then provided the data to the team at DataGolf, who ran the Strokes Gained numbers on each shot.
But first, some important context:
- Wagner is no longer a PGA Tour player (his handicap currently hovers around +2), yet the Strokes Gained stats compare him to current PGA Tour players. It’s an unfair standard to hold anybody to. Performing close to an average PGA Tour player in any category would be a phenomenal success for 99 percent of golfers.
- Wagner is also attempting some of the most difficult shots on golf course, in major championship conditions. The data can’t really account for that added layer of nuance difficulty, so again, keep that in mind.
Regardless, treat this as a kind of loose statistical science experiment. If Wagner is our golf guinea pig, how’s he doing? What’s going right—and wrong? What can the rest of us learn from his performance?
“This is fascinating that you went down this rabbit hole,” Wagner says as we go through his stats. “First off, thank you, and also I hate you for doing it.”
Fair. Let’s break it down.
The Wagner Formula 
Warren Little
By luck or by design, there’s a kind of science to Wagner’s formula.
In addition to the aforementioned challenge of cherry-picking the most difficult shots on the course to recreate, Wagner’s biggest challenge is that he’s walking into many of these segments cold—such is the nature of Live TV:
“I’m generally sitting out there for 45 minutes to 90 minutes, and I kind of refuse to hit any shots because I don’t want to make divots or preserve some uniqueness of hitting the shot for the first time. I’m basically just stretching a little bit,” he says. “Sometimes people ask me, are you intentionally trying to get bad shots? The answer is, absolutely not.”
The combination of all these things gives Wagner a high variance, which is where the drama comes from. The average standard deviation of all his shots is 0.58 strokes, meaning at any given point, he’s likely to hit a shot more than half a shot worse or better than average. That’s a lot—it’s the difference between a five-handicap hitting a 100-yard shot inside 10 feet, or dunking it in a nearby bunker. But almost 30 percent of Wagner’s shots occur on either side of that range. For every shank, skull or chunk is a stuffed bunker shot, hero recovery, or holed putt.
Much like golf, it’s the mix of great amid the terrible that keeps you coming back.
The Bad: An Overview
Wagner’s chipping yips have been a big subplot throughout his year-and-a-half run—we’ll get to that—but statistically, his worst performance is actually on the greens.
Compared to a PGA Tour pro, Wagner loses on average -0.54 strokes every time he hits a putt. That would rank him 167th on the PGA Tour.
Wagner has hit 11 putts with an average length of 35 feet, and his resulting average proximity is just over 16 feet. Wagner has de-greened 36 percent of those putts—usually by putting onto the fringe, though one of those putts rolled into a bunker. Had he not dropped Tiger’s point-it-into-the-hole Valhalla putt from 2000, his average Strokes Gained: Putting would’ve clocked in at -0.69. Simply put, Wagner needs more work on the greens.
And then, of course, the chipping.
On chips inside 30 yards, Wagner’s SG: Around the Greens and proximity is actually better from the major championship rough than fairway lies. From the rough, his average SG is -0.39, with a proximity of 20 feet. That drops to less than 15 feet when you remove his whiffed chip from the rough at the Presidents Cup.
From the fairway, his SG: Around the Greens jumps to more than -0.53, with an average proximity of 35 feet. The cause is a technical one, he explains.
“I feel like I flinch on the downswing when I get really close to impact,” he says. “I’m trying to have looser grip pressure, and a huge key for me is keeping that loose grip pressure as late as possible into the downswing. But sometimes, I still tighten it up.”
Another issue, Wagner says, is too much wrist hinge on the backswing. That causes his backswing to get too long on short chip shots, forcing him to decelerate into the ball and causing contact errors that cost him shots.
“The fluffy ones I just play like a bunker shot, so I find them much easier to hit because I can accelerate more,” he says. “It’s a struggle out of tight lies to keep the acceleration up because I’m terrified of contact.”
The good news is that Wagner is aware, and working on it. And there’s more good news: The technical issues causing him headaches around the greens are turning him into a hero elsewhere.
The Good: An Overview
Johnson Wagner is, in a word, fantastic from bunkers.
His SG from bunkers is -0.15 compared to tour average. But those include ridiculous shots from Royal Troon’s famed coffin bunker. When you throw those out, his SG average improves to almost exactly PGA Tour average (-0.04), which, for a 45-year-old retired player-turned-TV analyst, is pretty fantastic.
“Brandel Chamblee says I need to quit hitting out of the fairways; you just need to stick to bunkers,” Wagner says. “The sand in Scotland or Ireland especially. It feels bottomless. I can just get so aggressive hitting down into the shot, and the ball comes out soft. I love it.”
The stats prove it out. Seven of Wagner’s best 10 shots, by Strokes Gained, were bunker shots. At Royal Troon last summer, four of his seven bunker shots finished inside six feet.
Wagner’s Worst Shots, by the Stats
Four of Wagner’s worst six shots, by the stats, ended in hazards. It’s a good lesson for the rest of us: Hazards are the undisputed statistical scorecard killer for golfers. As much as you think you’re trying to avoid them already, try even harder.
The worst of his tenure so far came from dunking his shot from the drop zone on TPC Sawgrass’ 17th hole into the water. That one swing would’ve cost him two shots on the field.
“I had shoes that didn’t really have spikes, they’re kind of like teaching shoes,” he explains. “It had gotten dewey, and I just completely slipped and fed that one in the water.”
His second-worst shot, by the stats, was this attempted recovery shot from trees on TPC Sawgrass’ 7th hole. Attempting hero shots like these are generally a pretty terrible idea, because the number of bad outcomes heavily outweighs the good ones, especially with hazards around.
Rory McIlroy advanced this shot into a bunker; Wagner into the water.
“I never in a million years would’ve attempted that shot in competition,” he says. “I would’ve pitched that back out to the fairway and wedged it on the green. The shot he hit was so incredible—it landed in the bunker and skipped out, so I wanted to try that.”
Wagner’s worst non-penalty shot was this putt into a bunker from Pinehurst’s 5th green, which would’ve cost him -1.72 shots.
This shot, to be fair, was more of a scientific experiment. Wagner says he was trying to make the putt, but also trying to be aggressive with it to illustrate the dangers of Pinehurst’s fall-off areas. Another lesson here for the rest of us: Trying too hard to make putts is generally the worst way of making them.
“I wasn’t trying to intentionally putt it off the green, but I definitely wanted to get it just past the hole if I didn’t make it, to see if it would stay,” he said. “It didn’t.”
Wagner’s Best Shots, by the Stats
As we stated up front, Wagner has had his fair share of heroic outcomes, too.
His best shot, somewhat surprisingly, was dropping Tiger Woods’ 25-foot birdie putt on Valhalla’s 16th hole. Just like Tiger, he pointed it in. And just like Tiger, he gained somewhere in the vicinity of +0.93 SG: Putting because of it.
“I actually refused to hit any practice putts from there, because we didn’t have much time,” he said. “I kind of winged it, and made it on the first try.”
(Side note for golfers: Notice how the Strokes Lost are worse on the bad shots than the Strokes Gained are for the good ones. Bad shots are more harmful than good shots are helpful, and lots of bad shots come from bad decisions.)
In another surprise, Wagner’s second-best shot was his recreation of Scottie Scheffler’s recovery shot from the trees on TPC Sawgrass’ 10th hole. This shot gained +0.66 shots, per DataGolf, and the reason why is because stats on recovery shots like these are weighted differently.
Most golfers pitch out sideways, which drags the statistical floor and ceiling down. Wagner went the hero route, and by advancing more than 220 yards through a narrow tree opening into a greenside bunker, he hit the jackpot.
“Had it been one yard to the right it would’ve drilled the tree in front of me and kicked behind me,” he said.
Wagner’s Bryson bunker shot recreation came in third, gaining more than +0.5 shots.
My personal favorite was this from Royal Troon’s coffin bunker, Wagner’s 11th-best shot. Back against the bunker wall and feet in an awkward stance, Shane Lowry was lucky to keep his shot on the green from here. Wagner, quite incredibly, nipped it to four feet.
“I fell back into the wall, looked down and I’m like ‘Oh my gosh, I have room now to hit the shot,'” he said. “A lot of guys from that position are protecting against thinning one over the green. I didn’t have to worry about that, so I just tried to hit it as high and just to thump it as clean as possible, and it came out perfectly with spin.”
As for Wagner’s favorite shot? It was this one, a recreation of Collin Morikawa’s chip shot on TPC Sawgrass’ 5th hole. For a part of the game that has tormented him so much over the past year-and-a-half, this one only ranks 14th-best by the stats but lives long in the memory.
“It was the best chip I hit this year,” he says. “I nipped it so perfectly with some spin, and hit it to four feet. I love that one.”
Who knows where Wagner’s shot recreation journey will lead us next, but we’ll all be watching intently when he does. Whether we’ll witness magic or mayhem, nobody’s quite sure. Not even Wagner himself.
You can check out the full spreadsheet of all Wagner’s shots (so far) right here.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
