AUGUSTA, Ga. — Jack Nicklaus, the man with more green jackets in his closet than any golfer in history, often spoke of eliminating one side of the golf course.
Bryson DeChambeau, the man who is now the betting favorite to slip on the green jacket this year after opening rounds of 69 and 67 put him one back of Justin Rose’s 36-hole lead, is on a similar quest.
Unlike Nicklaus, famous for his left-to-right fades, Bryson’s stock is a right-to-left draw. If left misses were the bane of Nicklaus’ existence, right misses are DeChambeau’s. And this week, he’s on a maniacal quest to make sure it doesn’t happen.
DeChambeau hit more practice balls than any player in the field leading into the tournament: 659 balls over three days, not including his two practice rounds and par-3 contest round. He added another 210 to his tally on Thursday before and after his first round. The goal throughout was singular: Eliminate the right miss.
“It was my iron play, I’m trying to get my stock draw in there,” he said after his second round Friday. “I felt like I was leaving the face open a little bit. So worked on some sequencing stuff, some face angle stuff.”
Stephen Denton
Finding the Flaw
The issue for players eliminating a certain miss is that it’s really hard to do. Watch a pro on the range and you’ll see why. They could stand there for 30 minutes hitting largely the same shot. Then one shot, out of nowhere, flies (relatively) sideways. How do you spot the minute differences between that swing and all the others as the club travels upwards of 120 mph?
The answer, for Bryson, is to use AI.
AI is playing a growing role in the golf space, and Bryson has partnered with a company called SportsBox AI, which uses AI to measure how various body parts move during the golf swing. Bryson has filmed and entered thousands of swings into the system, effectively creating a massive data set of golf swing data unique to Bryson. The system then uses AI to decode and, crucially, correlate all that golf swing data with the outcome of the shot. So, when he sees that right miss he doesn’t like, the AI peers into the system and sees what happens on those golf swings compared to the others.
Bryson’s right miss, he quickly discovered, was the product of his upper and lower body staying too stacked on top of each other at the backswing and downswing. When he allowed his lower body to drift slightly ahead of his upper body—a matter of just inches—the right miss went away, and the draw came back.
Of course, making sure your lower body stays a specific amount ahead of your upper body is only the first step. The essential next step is matching it with a feel, so you can actually do it.
Finding the Feel
A golfer’s feels are the rosetta stone which translates all manner of technical swing cues into stuff players can actually use. And Bryson, by his own admission, has no shortage of them.
“If I’m really trying to find my golf swing, I can go through a hundred pretty easily,” DeChambeau says. “I’m telling you, like 15 to 20 on one range session, easily. Maybe more if I’m really trying to find something. I’ve got a lot going on up in there.”
Stephen Denton
This week, he’s settled on one that works.
“It’s like the feeling of an uppercut or like a topspin shot in ping-pong,” he said. “That’s just what I want to feel in my golf swing.”
That feeling of uppercutting the golf ball prevents Bryson’s upper body from staying stacked over his lower body. It lets his lower body move forward, and tilt his upper body back. The result is a power draw, no right misses—and maybe even a green jacket.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
