Prepare to be enthralled as James Day, a pivotal personality in London's golf scene, walks us through the fascinating world of Urban Golf with its perfect marriage of vintage aesthetics and cutting-edge simulation technology. Discover the art of selecting golf equipment that not only optimizes your game but also resonates with your soul, as James advocates for an authentic, self-empowered approach to golf. Throughout the episode, we challenge industry norms, exploring the emotional landscape of the sport and how personal ownership over one's golfing journey trumps the seductive allure of quick technological fixes.
James Day's insights illuminate the complexities of golf club fitting, the nuanced dance between technology and skill, and the potential pitfalls of an industry often more focused on selling than on genuine performance enhancement. We delve into how the Shaft Max system's 15-year legacy offers a detailed understanding of shaft dynamics, and how a unified approach to golf mechanics can revolutionize the game. Amidst an industry rife with confusing marketing tactics and data manipulation, this conversation serves as a beacon for those seeking clarity and a deeper appreciation of the game's heritage and mechanics.
As we wrap up, we celebrate the shifting culture of golf, where younger players are increasingly skeptical of grandiose marketing claims and are rediscovering the charm of vintage and custom clubs. Sharing personal anecdotes about club selections that enrich the joy of the game, James and I reflect on how the right equipment can intuitively guide a golfer towards improvement, emphasizing that sometimes, the most effective training aids are the clubs that have been with us all along. Whether you are a seasoned pro or a newcomer to the green, this episode is a masterclass in finding balance, enjoyment, and performance on the course.
Prepare to be enthralled as James Day, a pivotal personality in London's golf scene, walks us through the fascinating world of Urban Golf with its perfect marriage of vintage aesthetics and cutting-edge simulation technology. Discover the art of selecting golf equipment that not only optimizes your game but also resonates with your soul, as James advocates for an authentic, self-empowered approach to golf. Throughout the episode, we challenge industry norms, exploring the emotional landscape of the sport and how personal ownership over one's golfing journey trumps the seductive allure of quick technological fixes.
James Day's insights illuminate the complexities of golf club fitting, the nuanced dance between technology and skill, and the potential pitfalls of an industry often more focused on selling than on genuine performance enhancement. We delve into how the Shaft Max system's 15-year legacy offers a detailed understanding of shaft dynamics, and how a unified approach to golf mechanics can revolutionize the game. Amidst an industry rife with confusing marketing tactics and data manipulation, this conversation serves as a beacon for those seeking clarity and a deeper appreciation of the game's heritage and mechanics.
As we wrap up, we celebrate the shifting culture of golf, where younger players are increasingly skeptical of grandiose marketing claims and are rediscovering the charm of vintage and custom clubs. Sharing personal anecdotes about club selections that enrich the joy of the game, James and I reflect on how the right equipment can intuitively guide a golfer towards improvement, emphasizing that sometimes, the most effective training aids are the clubs that have been with us all along. Whether you are a seasoned pro or a newcomer to the green, this episode is a masterclass in finding balance, enjoyment, and performance on the course.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Measured Golf Podcast, where I, michael Dutro, have incredible guests from around the world.
Speaker 1:And today we really are digging in around the world and finding some cool guests, and we have been fortunate enough to get the amazing James Day to join us on the podcast, who is kind of a pioneer in the London golf scene and has been doing some indoor golf stuff for about 20 years now and really has an interesting perspective on the game of golf and how it's played and how it's enjoyed. And if you're watching right now, you can see James has a lot of golf clubs sitting behind him from a older era and that's kind of what his speciality in NAC is is that James is the Procure of all golf clubs, old and cool. So we're going to have an amazing conversation about not only how the golf ball affects things, but also how the equipment affects things and how we don't necessarily always have to go chasing optimization. So I think James brings a really cool perspective and a really unique perspective into the industry, so I'm excited to have him. So, without further ado, james, you want to say hello to everybody.
Speaker 2:Hello, Thanks Michael. Yeah, that's very nice intro.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean well deserved. I was fortunate enough to be at Urban Golf. That would have been what Last year around the open and dude, it's a cool spot, man. Like I think I have a cool spot, but yours is cool in a completely different way, like it's a classy, london-y kind of a cool spot, man. I hope, if you haven't seen it, definitely check out Urban Golf on Instagram or you can go on my Instagram at the ForcePlay guy and check out the video. But it's a cool spot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it hasn't, I mean, I would say, only the last year. I've really kind of decided that we're going to pour a huge amount of love into this particular site, the one that you came to, which is in Smithville, which is near St Paul's in London. We've been in the business for 20 years and at one time we had three sites and we had one that didn't work and another one which we we've saw out our lease on 15 years and we couldn't, we weren't able to renew the lease because somebody else wanted it and that was quite emotional. Walking away from that one which was in the West End, which was the first one we did, and you know, ever since then, just having one and that was quite lucky that that happened in a way, because that was just before COVID, but just having one now, it just feels like I really kind of want to make it part, you know, an extension of my home really, yeah, and you know, I think, as long as Well, you're like me.
Speaker 1:you spend more time there than you do at home, I'm sure so.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, well, certainly awake, but you know we've got some really nice stuff here. We're always trying to do things a little bit differently. We don't have partnerships with golf brands purely because you know, if we're going to do nice sets of hire clubs for people to use in the sim, for example, we'd rather make them here in our workshop and have that kind of stamp of approval on them than have them come out of a factory where you know it's just the run of the mill stuff. So we're just trying to take things up a notch and indoor golf is finally taking off.
Speaker 1:It's finally happening right, like Schmucks like me, are making it work, so it must be pretty easy to do. I think what you're talking about, though, james, is I don't walk into urban golf and feel like I'm there having a golf experience, like there's an environment, there's a culture, there's a sensibility to it all, and it has like kind of a club and kind of an old school kind of vibe, and it definitely fits the motif of where it's located there in London. I mean, it's just a really cool spot, and it's like you've done an amazing job of kind of taking the feel and the love of the game that you have and transferring that into a vibe at the facility. Man, I mean it's really a cool spot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, thanks for saying that. I'm actually more proud of it today than I have been, and I was very young when I started the business and that was a bit of a rollercoaster ride. But you know, now I am really proud of what we've got down here. And thanks for saying that. You know we've got great technology, and when I say great technology, I mean it's a good example of what you were saying earlier, which is that you know, when it comes to golf simulators and ball tracking in general, the best technology for what we do here is the technology that you can really play golf on and the tech that you can kind of that enables you to hit all of the shots.
Speaker 2:And I think that's one of the things that gets missed sometimes when people are just sort of trying to take a launch monitor and turn it in, you know, attach it to a graphics package and turn it into a simulator, is that. We know this from development work that we were working on 15 years ago. You know it's actually very hard in an indoor environment to be able to be accurate on all the weird shots that you need to play in a round of golf. You know, I'm sure there's plenty of launch monitors now that can do a good job on the standard shots, but can they get curvature before it reaches the screen on a lob shot, things like that? You know, it's all those quirky things. So the simulators that we use with the ball tracking we have, they really are. You know, you can hit all the shots you can putt. You can hit a chip and run that checks up. You can do all that stuff.
Speaker 2:And you know, sometimes I think with technology it's easy to get wrapped up in the status quo and to kind of miss the bit that it really needs to do. And I think to your point coming down here, it's not, you know, it's not all technical, it's not all modern. There's a lot about, it's all about the game really, and the fact that we're able to use this technology when we're in central London and we're all miserable and it's raining outside and the golf course is two hours away. You know it's nice that we can do that in these environments, but for me it's still. You know, all the technical stuff is great, but it's still all about playing golf. You know, it's all about being.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't think that you would ever trade, you know, if I gave you the choice to where you could either play indoor or outdoor the rest of your life, like that's, that's a non non starter for you. That's pretty easy.
Speaker 2:But the weather is doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right For sure. So at the end of the day, I don't think that simulator golf is ever going to truly replace the experience of going out and playing a real golf course in the real environment. I do think that there are certain simulators that have done a lot better job of trying to connect us more with the environment in which we actually play. Right, because there's a lot more factors that go into hitting a golf shot than just knowing the distance and hitting the golf ball. That distance, like there's a lot of elements that go into that, as you know, and you know, that's kind of what I really love about coming over there and playing golf with you boys is, you know, it's a lot more elixir, it's a lot more real. It's a lot less about hitting a perfect, optimized shot and it's a lot more about figuring out a way to get it to stop close to the hole, and those two skills are like very different skills.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? You know, I know we've talked about this before, but it's a bit that that that particular type of golf that we have over here stops that kind of one's one size fits all model of, like you say, hitting a stock shot and hitting your number and hitting your spin rates and everything. It stops that from working.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Not to say, you know, on a calm down, a link score, so that can't work. But there's a lovely bit of the game that gets missed sometimes, which is the ability to be flexible and hit different shots. And you can. You know, I can correlate that through the way that equipment's gone, in terms of how the craft of making equipment has gone. But it'd be a shame to lose that stuff. It would be a shame to lose that stuff because you lose a big bit of the sort of character of the game and a big bit of the nuance and the skill. I mean, I'm sure you, I'm sure you weren't expecting our great friend David Ford to be as good a player as he was, Absolutely expected David to be a great player, and it's.
Speaker 1:it's fun. It's a great player in a different way, though.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the question of that is, if you just saw him hitting in the bay, you wouldn't put any money on it, all as good as when we went outdoors, right, correct?
Speaker 1:And that's what I think. That's where the point is right Is. I think you know I'll use myself as an example, but I remember I was high school I was about, you know, junior senior in high school and I would go out in the summers and play early morning golf every day in the summertime before I had to go work for the day and then I'd come back to the golf course later. But besides the point, I would play with this old guy every single morning and this old guy would routinely beat me and he hit it about half as far as I did and like he just kind of bunneted it around the golf course and always got it up and down and always got it up and down and the guy could get up and down out of a trash can and the guy would always beat me, even though I'm hitting way better golf shots I'm obviously a better golfer in terms of hitting a shot than he is this guy would routinely beat me and I remember getting really frustrated about it and he would constantly remind me he's like you're so worked up and hitting these golf shots that get close to the hole, but then you can't even make the pot.
Speaker 1:He's like you can't lose sight of the fact that it's not just about hitting long drives and hitting it close to the hole. Like you can't do that every time, it's not sustainable. So at some point, like you have to learn how to score and how to get up and down and that's really what the game of golf is, and when we talk about that, you have so many different lies and you have so many different ways of doing that. And that's really where the artistry is. And it's, to your point, kind of sad that it seems like we're doing everything we can to try to move away from that as fast as possible and try to say that if you see X, do Y.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, I have this mantra, which you probably heard before, which is the golf industry has built unplausible stories which capitalize on human frailty. You know, I think that's one of the things, one of the challenges of this game, and you know, all of us know, it drives you mad and it hurts. You know, I play in tournaments when I was a kid and you know, all I wanted to do was leave school and play golf. So obviously I wanted to do well in the tournaments and you know it did hurt. You know, when it all goes into meltdown and it starts going backwards or you choke or whatever, you know those are pretty painful experiences and so, as human beings, we have this natural reaction to that which is, and especially as adults, you know, we look for a way that means that we won't make mistakes. You know, we look for somebody to tell us something which is you know, I'll be on the front of a golf magazine, I could cure your slice or whatever. You know I hit it 15 yards further. But we all kind of want to hear that that's exactly what we want to hear and obviously, you know, sometimes that makes things easier to believe, because it's what we want to hear and this idea that you can kind of learn a swing and then you can walk out and you just walk it around the course and you walk up to the ball and it's that's not how the game is and I the problem is, I think trying to pursue it in that way actually takes you further away, especially in the early stages. You know, it's a bit like if you took you know I would kind of say this about certain approaches to swinging the club.
Speaker 2:You know, when you get these really regimented, position based approaches to swing in the club, the reason that works with tour players is because if you take a tour player right there, always going to pound it right, they've been hitting balls since they were six years old. Whatever happens, you know they're just going to pound the ball right. But if you take somebody who maybe has only played the game for a few years and they haven't got any smash yet, they've got no pound and then you get them to swing it that way, very conscious hitting positions, kind of ignoring the forces of the club. They never pound, they will never pound it. You've literally locked them in a prison of no pound. It's like it's. They're just never going to smash the ball, and so that's where those things don't quite correlate.
Speaker 2:And they work for play because it gives them structure. You know, it's like, oh great if I'm doing the same thing all the time and I've got this P1, P2. I'm going to override that when it comes to pounding it, but that gives me this certain structure to work to. And guess what, if I'm a few shots better per month, you know, over the number of rounds we've played a month, that that leads to quite a lot more money. So this thing of like play what the pros play, do what the pros do, act like the pros play, not only is it not very good for us guys, necessarily it also removes this big chunk of the joy from the games, which is the real crime feel.
Speaker 1:You are, you are speaking to a man that really believes in that. I'll be perfectly honest. You know, growing up playing competitive golf, it is it's soul crushing when you don't do well, but then the highs that you get when you do well and you win are also incredible as well. The thing is is you know, where I think we've missed the boat with technology is that if I can use technology to help somebody figure something out or learn something faster, that's a great use of the technology. But if I use the technology to only explain how they are different than average, that's really going to hurt more people than it helps. So where I think we need to use technology is we need to use it to help us better understand Questions that we bring from the golf course and the environment in which we actually play.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I, I was. I used to teach. I still teach friends. So I did my PGA qualifications when I was no. I think I was fully qualified with the PGA when I was 20 or 21.
Speaker 2:And I trained in that very traditional way of giving golf lessons. So you go through fault. Finding sequence back then is what it was when we did our coaching exams. They wanted you to like stick to. The major thing was they didn't actually care if you got it wrong. The actual lesson and the guy hit it was the girl it was whatever. What they cared about was that you went through the correct sequence.
Speaker 2:So you start with grip, you go to a club, you do the stuff and then I think what happens is you know that's the sort of traditional form of a golf lesson, which is you've tells, you find you figure out two, one or two things that somebody's doing wrong and you try and fix it. And I know things have moved on from that now. But I think there's a difference between developing skill and giving somebody ownership. So I've got a big thing about ownership. I remember when I first started teaching, you know, I I probably thought that the main function of the golf lesson was to get somebody to hit it good in the lesson. You know, until I was just teaching this is 25, 30 years ago, so I'm just teaching a driving range, just no technology, nothing. So I thought the main function better. So I'm going to try and tell this guy some things that get him hitting it good and then hopefully he's going to book in next week and somebody would book in next week and we might work on something different. We might just evolve it, because I felt like I had to give that person something different to work on and there was no value and so in that situation there's no ownership for that person.
Speaker 2:That is like a codependent thing. You know they, they have to come back to you and Hopefully you'll sprinkle some magic or it's again and they'll start hitting it good, but they don't build any knowledge and I think that's one of the things that gets me about. You know certain, we know the whole spectrum of golf lessons and different things work for different people, but I feel like there should be some ownership, like people should come away with this feeling of like. Okay, well, actually I understand. I think that's what's great about what you do actually is that you can tell somebody categorically. You know kind of where they need to be, how they need to be moving in a general way, and I know you get very into it, you get very, but that I'm sure a lot of people come to you and they go. Oh, actually I was completely unaware that I should have been on my left foot at this point or my right, with whatever, and that general understand that's now something they can own and something they can keep.
Speaker 1:No, I mean my big, my big past, I always feel like, is it's so easy for a coach to over coach, and the thing that coaches generally forget is that the person you're talking to doesn't actually know what it feels like to do it the way you're asking them to do it. They've never done it that way, so they don't have that feel so like Got.
Speaker 2:There's a disconnect, isn't there between?
Speaker 1:massive, massive, right. So what I kind of think is okay. If there is this massive disconnect between feel and real, okay, well, like, what are? If, like, I actually showed them what I want them to do in totality and like, let them see that and feel that and go, yeah, you're right, that does allow me to do those things I want to do. Then, all of a sudden, it's like, okay, great, obviously, this is where we want to be long term. This is where we want to get to.
Speaker 1:We want to learn how to make this adaptable to the environment so we can play golf with it outside, but right now we got to get on the ship that's heading that direction. So my job is to take the one thing that's going to help the most the get us there the farthest and make sure that when you get to your car after this coaching experience, when you sit down, you go all right, cool. I got one thing I really need to focus on the next couple weeks to start get me where I want to go, and I know that it looks like this, I know it feels like this, and now I know what I want to see when I'm working on this over the next couple weeks, but I got to get them one thing, man, because, to your point, we can only really handle so much, especially the worst. We are with our score overall, like that guy really needs a simplified and, to your point, sometimes are just not aware of even what's really happening.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that, yeah, I agree with you completely. And I think this is this other thing, which is I always say, the gosh, it's not me that says there's a friend of mine who's a pro actually in the US, so he calls it the tidal wave bullshit. And if you can, if you can establish certain things which are okay, I truly believe that this is. This is something that I will. You know, people give tips and they swing thoughts, work for a week and then they stop working or whatever, but these are the things that, like, these are the things I know. Well, actually, if you can pin, if you can say these are the things I know in an absolute way, you can knock out massive chunks of that tidal wave, which means that you're not going to get pulled in all different direction.
Speaker 2:And I always say this about equipment you know the reason I work with equipment, the reason I started working with equipment. I'm just I'm obsessed with all things golf, but I love kit. You know I love the stuff. As you can tell I do.
Speaker 2:When I was growing up, playing and trying to be a better player, I felt like equipment was just this random thing where I would just have to try loads of clubs. Some of them would work, some of them wouldn't. Some of them I'd really want to want them to work and I stick with them for way too long, even though they probably never going to work. And the thing that got me going with clubs just wanted to know why was just wanting to pin down about like okay, that's the thing that I like about this club, and I think that within a golf club, you've probably got let's call it, you know 10 factors that make a perfect club and typically, when if we're just doing that thing of trying stuff out, the clubs that we like have probably got three or four of those key things working Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:You're absolutely right. What's great about me? When you really nail it and you get a club, that's perfect, all of it's right. But you and it's that obsession with trying to understand how those things work and the type of things that so I agree with you right and and you're spot on right.
Speaker 1:So remind me, I got something to show you here in a minute. But I kind of feel the same way, but less from the gear perspective and more from the the human movement perspective, right, and kind of to your point. Like there's certain metrics that you're going to find that all the golf clubs you've loved over time kind of share. Well, you're going to find that with all the different goofy things you think you're doing that you know change your golf swing, there's really a couple of things in the ground that really set it all up to work for you. And if we can't create stability with the lower body, we're never going to create good mobility with the upper body, like that's just kind of how human beings work.
Speaker 1:So I truly feel that using technology to help people kind of understand the feeling they need to feel in the ground and with their body is always going to be super helpful for what they do with the golf club, because the golf club produces way less force than you do pushing against the ground. Therefore, you're always going to really be beholden to what you feel in your feet and that's why I love doing the force plate thing, as you've seen me do, is it allows me to connect you with what you're actually feeling in real time, and when I show you the pressure shift and I show you how you're moving on your feet, nobody's ever argued and said, well, that's not me. But when I've shown people video in the past, they go that's not me. So what do we feel and what do we connect with?
Speaker 2:Video is still probably probably very bad for understanding of the golf swing. It shouldn't have been. You wouldn't have thought it would be, but I think it probably has been. I don't think it's been good, that's for sure, and then it's. I think what happens is and I would even see this on you know, when they do a swing analysis on the golf coverage of the PJ Tour or whatever, A lot of times people would do an analysis of the swing and they would analyze each position and talk about it in this way, which is as if the player is doing that, and it's like hang on a minute that club's pretty heavy.
Speaker 2:It's on the end of a long stick. It's swinging pretty fast. You know a lot of what he's doing is in opposition to that. Absolutely it's not. You know he's not kind of guiding it through space and a lot. If you listen to swing analysis they would still talk about the golf swing in that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're talking in a very static manner, for sure, they never talk in a dynamic way. Yeah, yeah, and that's kind of the shame of it, because I think that to your point. You know, what I see is mostly people who are interested in, like an American golf right, like the only thing people really want to do right now is like hit bombs, like they want to smash drivers. They don't care about chipping, putting any of that, they just want to hit bombs. So I get a lot of people who come to me with the pure intention of hitting the golf ball farther. So in my space, like I use the force plates to help them generate more clubhead speed.
Speaker 1:And the funny thing is is that a lot of people that I work with will gain an excess of 10 miles an hour of clubhead speed in a single session.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying that they're going to do that forever, but I can show them how to do that by better taking advantage of what they already do.
Speaker 1:And that's kind of the thing that really bums me out is that most people think that they just kind of move as the way they move and that's as good as it can be, and if they hit it off the middle of the face that that ball is going optimal and it's not in most cases, because most people create more speed than they actually transfer to the ball. So that's where I think your kind of world steps in really cool, because I think people were often like, given the old bait and switch and it's like hey, here's a new driver, gain a bunch of yards. But because you understand how golf clubs work and I understand how golf clubs work we know it's all marketing gimmick. And once you understand the gimmicks and you understand what actually works well for you, then you get to kind of start going back and digging into some of the old clubs and really pulling out some of the relics and in my opinion are as good, if not better, than a lot of the stuff today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, my thing is club interaction. So what are the bits of the club that we interact with, which, for me, is length, weight, shaft, lion goal? And it's the exact thing that you see. We walk into a shop, we pick up a club, we waggle it. It's exactly what we're doing. We, we, we all gravitate to a certain type of way and a certain type of. I guess the thing is is when you talk about, feel if you're a real kind of data science guy. They just hate that.
Speaker 1:They hate talking about feel, but you have to because it's such a key, important part of that's where I get frustrated is because you can't live in a vacuum and you can't purely live in a world where you know nothing either, like there's. You have to have a combination of the two, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that that feel for me is attached. It's attached to a certain memory of what clubs that were great, that we loved and that worked really well felt like in the past. You know, I think that's what we're doing when we do that, but there's just if you get those things right, if you get those things in the sweet spot, so the right shaft profile. So I showed you when you came down but I use this shaft max system, which is a whole long story about how I ended up with it and was kind of through trying to develop simulate golf simulators and somebody I met through that. But it's based on this old shaft lab system which True Tempore developed. And True Tempore really developed it because they were trying to figure out. You know, true Tempore's big issue for years and years, to be honest with you, has been how do we find a shaft that people like more than dynamic gold, and you know. So they were trying to figure out the type of shaft profile. So when you talk about shaft profile, how stiff is it in the butt, how stiff is it in the middle, how stiff is it in the tip? Three sections what type of shaft profile would work for people and they developed this technology which at the time was strain gauges attached to a shaft and wires hanging off all over the place.
Speaker 2:And it's way back in the early 90s and they were testing how golfers load and work the shaft, how they work the shaft during the swing, basically. And they did this thing and nothing ever came of it and it kind of got mothballed. And that was what the system that I now use came out of, which is called Chaff Max, which is now it's wireless connects to a transmitter on your wrist. But I get information about. You know, what's the shaft doing at the top, what's the shaft doing halfway down, what's it doing through impact? And you can kind of relate that directly to the shaft itself and what I've seen over the years of working with that and I've had this system for 15 years and you know I don't do that many fittings I fit because I just I like to to be honest with you. I just think it's really it's really selfish endeavor to be this obsessed and not really kind of share it with anyone. So it's just it justifies.
Speaker 1:I think that's. I think you just described my business model for coaching.
Speaker 2:It justifies giving this amount of headspace to something so meaningless, I guess. But so when I, when I use that system of people because I've used it for 15 years I've got a pretty clear like the moment I see it, I'm kind of I've got a certain shaft profile in my head or whatever. But what we see is and where I'm going with this is, even if you gave somebody the right shaft flex but you gave them a different shaft profile to the one that's optimum to them, they won't just hit worst ball flight, they will hit it worse right. They won't hit the middle of the club as much. They won't generate as much as good energy transfer, they won't generate as much. So the problem with this is and it speaks to the point of like data's great, but if you haven't got all of it and if all of it is not measurable, it's kind of worthless. So when you go back to like Let me throw this one at you.
Speaker 1:Why are you just looking on that?
Speaker 2:No, no, somebody goes, wait a sec, Somebody goes for a fitting and they make all the bad shots on themselves. So the thing with this is it's like you will hit it better with this club. So if you make that connection, so if you're saying to somebody you will hit more good shots with this club, because, generally speaking, what people do is they separate the clubs. They go that was me, I hit that one bad, that was me, that was me, that was me, I hit one good. Okay, well, this club works. Therefore, when I hit a good shot, it's the right club for me. That's not true. There are clubs that you will just hit it better with, not just better ball fight, not all the stuff that comes out of a launch moment.
Speaker 1:You swing it faster, you have more confidence.
Speaker 1:There's a direct correlation there, like I agree. And the thing that really drives me kind of bananas is there's, without a doubt and you've seen me talk about this before, but there's without a doubt, a forward towards a target and away from the target push during the golf swing, right, I push towards a target and then away so I don't fall over. But there's also this anterior, posterior breaking force where I'm working from my heels towards my toes. And the thing that really drives me wild is when I went out and got to view the machine to test all these shafts for everybody, that machine is sitting on the ground and that machine doesn't produce any kind of shearing effect. So the thing that's really wild to me is like a lot of the claims that they make and the way that they test these shafts and the way that the engineers are kind of viewing it all is not even really from a complete set of data. It's really looking at it from a couple planes of motion and not really factoring in how a human actually loads and unloads that club shaft.
Speaker 2:Well, I don't want this to be just a total negative kind of soapbox session but, to be honest with you, I've worked with, I've been pretty up close with, a lot of the shaft companies. I've got to know a lot of the really good club makers and fitters and I've just been around that stuff quite a lot Not really as part of my main business life as Urban Golf and I'm not a player in the equipment business, I'm just into it. But if you take shaft companies and I won't name any they find it very difficult to know what to make in terms of shaft profiles and all of this stuff. The reason for that is because if you put, if you took, 20 of the world's best club fitters in a room, no one would agree on anything. So it's like there's no, it's.
Speaker 2:The weirdest thing in golf is that there's a massive lack of accepted wisdom. I know I've listened to your pod a bit and the stuff you did with Dan, and because we've got so much better technology now I think there's a big, the new generation of thinkers which I think is probably you, not me You're coming through and you're much more united in saying, okay, this is this and that's that. These are the areas that we are still exploring, but we accept these certain things, and so I think that's great. But the equipment industry is so fractured in terms of there is no accepted wisdom, none.
Speaker 1:And I agree with that. I mean it's really bad. I mean we've talked about this a great length and it's I get it like a lot of the club companies are publicly traded companies now and they have to produce numbers every quarter but it's just in a commercialized sense. Man, we've really gotten away from actually trying to help golfers. I think I think we're in it to sell products now, not actually like improve the enjoyment of golfers. I think what you said earlier was spot on. If I'm telling you that this driver makes you better and you come into a fitting and it doesn't make you better, then you feel like you did something wrong. But in reality we didn't know if that driver was actually gonna make you better, because perhaps you optimized your old driver and they're not actually changing that much year to year. So I mean there's a lot of bait and switch.
Speaker 2:Exactly, really. And the worst one of those really and it's so simple and so straightforward is that most golf equipment is sold on a demo day. Everyone knows the drivers have been on the limit for the last 10 years longer, so that's why drivers in the shops that you'll pick up in the stores will have a 46 inch shaft. Well, if somebody goes for a demo day and they just middle one that probably go further than their old driver because it's 46 inches long. The problem is the others are gonna be catastrophic. So if you took it on an average of 10 shots it wouldn't be better, but they hit the one good one and all the bad ones were not involved. Here's what kills me man.
Speaker 1:Like anytime you throw a math out there, james, like anytime there's math involved, right, there's always somebody that learns how to use it to an advantage. And the golf industry's figured it out really well. And what they do is they keep flipping back and forth between what's important and what isn't. So, just from a real simple sense, they love to talk about total and they love to talk about carry and they love to flip them back and forth all the time. So people are generally confused as to what should be paid attention to. And here's what happens.
Speaker 1:So I live in Michigan and it tends to be pretty soft and you don't get a lot of roll. And maybe in the summer you get 10 yards of roll out, if you really catch one pretty good and spend it like 2,500 or less. So it doesn't roll much here. So the thing is is, guys, to your point, go to demo day and a 17 year old kid fits them on a track man and goes hey, man, your total was 280. And the guy's like what really? And he's like yeah, and the guy's like all right, I only had mine 260. I'll take that one Right.
Speaker 1:So now the guy goes out to his golf course opening day and it's still a little wet because it's springtime, and there's a bunker sitting there at 250, right, and he used to comfortably carry that bunker. Well, he goes off and hits one big hitter, the llama, and, wouldn't you know it, he's expecting that thing to be 20 yards by that bunker and it lands 10 yards short. And the reason for that is because every simulator, every launch monitor I should say not simulator every launch monitor is going to assume optimal rollouts about 35 to 40 yards, and you don't get that in certain environments like here. So they're Robin, peter to pay Paul and totally bait and switch in this guy and confuse him on what's important, which is carry, because carries all you're ever gonna get in this environment.
Speaker 2:Well, do you know where I think all these problems come from?
Speaker 1:Lack of education.
Speaker 2:No, it's maybe, but it's separation. So the moment that you get lots of separation. So if you know, for example, tour players now would have the psychologist, the personal trainer, the swing coach, the short game coach, the putt and coach. You know, they've got all these loads of people with different areas of expertise. And similarly you might have somebody that comes from an engineering background that goes into a golf equipment company but you know, maybe played a bit when they were a kid or something, and I think that you have to have like a base level of expertise to do anything in golf. So you've got to have a broad knowledge of I think you've got to be able to hit it. To be honest, I mean, when I see certain coaches, one might be related to a very famous coach who you know really can't hit it at all. I think alarm bells should be ringing at that point. You do, man. If you're done with a golf lesson, you should probably be able to shoot under 80. And you know I had.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to name names because I don't want to get in trouble, but I recently had a guy come in and they brought one of their children for a golf lesson to me, right, and they proceeded to kind of like more or less big time me the whole time. They were in my facility and told me how like, if I keep plugging away at it, eventually I'll be coach of the year, teacher of the year, all this stuff. And he's telling me that his child plays pretty good golf and his child has a positive attack angle with their seven iron Like what did?
Speaker 1:they hit it like? What do you think they hit it like? With a positive attack angle, with a seven iron?
Speaker 2:pretty good off a tee, I don't know, but yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean dude, you're not wrong man Like that's your child. Okay, so that's who you're going to put your most effort in time into and you can't even get that one right Like how is that a sales pitch for you?
Speaker 2:But all of a sudden you know you'd have somebody that's done a degree in sports psychology and they come to golf and they kind of learn. They look at what they do is they take the status quo, so whatever the kind of accepted stuff is, and plug that into their thing. That's a great narrative.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's all confirmation bias games. That's the problem with the industry is everybody only sees what they want to see. Yeah, and it's that, because we shouldn't be that way. Man, You're right. In my opinion everything is siloed and we know that all the magic is in between the silos. But we can't ever get the silos all broken down to where, like we can get everybody to kind of share the good stuff and we can actually like make a difference.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think the unfortunate thing probably is that what the internet and kind of social media and stuff does is it just creates more stuff. I think if you go back to like if you took, if you went back 50 years and you were on the range at Tor event, you'd have people walking around that range. You know the coaches at the time, the club makers, all the people they would just be like on a level you know, you kind of wouldn't be in that through unless you had probably been a certain type of player at a certain time and there would just be this kind of expertise that really didn't go any further because you didn't have. You know, somebody might write a book or, you know, maybe later on make a video or something like that, but that information that went on at that level didn't really go any further. Right, you know, when you get some of the stuff that you know like funny little ways of playing shots around the greens and you know that type of information that would just get passed around at that time, and the same with equipment, you know different sole grinds and you know Jack Nicholas likes a straight leading edge with this much offset.
Speaker 2:But those conversations aren't really taking place anymore. They're actually these days we think we're so clever with all this technology, but it's actually much more dumbed down than that, certainly from an equipment perspective on tour. And the unfortunate thing is is if you could have just taken all of that knowledge and expertise that was quite organic and quite it was about. It was built through, you know, before Trackman they were divots. You know they kind of have a look at the divots so reading the tea leaves. But you know, if you could have taken that kind of knowledge and expertise and amplified that with today's technology, got videos going out on YouTube and social media, it'd be brilliant. But unfortunately what's happened is there's now so much information that that stuff just gets drowned out.
Speaker 1:Which is quite interesting. I think that we forget, like the main thing right, which golf is a game, by and large, for 99% to play it and you know, 99% of the people, man, wanted to show up and play a game, like they don't want to learn all that stuff and like that's. That's really where where I think it gets tough, because I've said this before but bifurcation I think needs to happen between golf the game and golf the sport, because the two things are not related.
Speaker 2:The resistance to doing that is so well. It's irrational, it's. I can understand the base reason why the commercial entities don't want it, but it's so short-sighted.
Speaker 1:I mean it's if you could say that, but that's the industry in a nutshell. It always has been. It's never been about growth and long-term development of the game. It's always been about squeeze every nickel out of it that you can.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I think it's it's it's also squeeze every nickel out of it in the next two to three years rather than the next 10 years. Because, oh, absolutely 100%. And non-conforming equipment is kind of I wouldn't say it's taken off or it's boomed. But you, there is a decent amount of non-conforming equipment that is on sale in Japan. It's a more. I don't know how much you know about the way that equipment is sold in Japan but, like you know, tailor-made have to make a higher quality product in Japan than they make for us, because the customer is a bit more in Japan. They're very discerning, they care about what it's made from and where it was made and they just they're willing to pay more. So I'm sure it's very profitable for equipment companies. But it's amazing I've been lucky enough to go there a couple of times just going into a golf shoot especially secondhand shops. It's incredible Some of the stuff you find it's really fun.
Speaker 1:Sounds like we need to make a trip, my friend.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, it's very hard to play golf there, though. That's the only problem, but the reason I'm saying that is that they, they, there is a non-conforming equipment by the. They were, and it's mainly based on wedges that spin like crazy and drivers that go miles, and you know it's. It's not for me, but it would. It would sort of set things free a little bit, and I think what it means is that if you for all of Japan that are for you, there you go.
Speaker 2:I've got a couple of those here. But for all of the moaning about how this will, how this will stop development and oh wow, that's great, yeah, look at that, I've got. I just got it this week from Japan. I've got a couple of those in the cupboard. I know you do, but for all of the moaning, I'm not sure what they would do, I mean, other than make drivers go a bit further. Um, you know, if you really wanted to make drivers easier to hit for the average golfer, you're going to hit them 44 and a half inches.
Speaker 1:You're not wrong. You're not wrong at all. Honestly, though, I mean, make the equipment that conforming and all that out of it. You know. Okay, like, let's just say, we're going to stay where we're at in terms of the way the equipment and the ball is uh, because I I don't see if the PGA tour decides to play by the USGA and the RNA uh ball rule, which it sounds like they're going to, if they decide to do that, if I was live I would immediately say, okay, we're not doing it. Yeah, like, you know what I mean. And if, if you're a golf ball manufacturer and all your peers are selling balls more than you but they're the conforming ball and you still can make these and people want to buy these, I'm making these. Like I'm not going to be beholden to rules. If I'm a golf ball manufacturer, like that doesn't. Like the. The idea that the RNA and the USGA still drive the industry. I think it's just a time of past. It's not true anymore. Capitalism and economics drive the industry of golf.
Speaker 2:There's two things there really. One is uh, when live came along, it blew apart the this thing which was uh, the governing bodies, the important people in the decision making process, were always going to move in step with each other. You know, they were going to discuss things first and they were going to make joint statements and they were never going to break that sort of brother that they had, which is USGA, rna, the Augusta National Golf Club and the USPGA, and live just smash that. So it happened like overnight. It was so now destructive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so now nobody kind of knows what, um, what each other are going to do. But the other point that you made there, which I feel quite strongly about, is that if, um, it is sort of incumbent upon USGA and RNA to take a long-term view over the game of golf, so to try and take a view which is the game's absolutely brilliant, best thing ever it's been around for years.
Speaker 2:Loads of people love it. Um, let's not compromise it. Let's try and make sure that the things that make it great are always going to be there. So in order for them to do that, they have to take a longer term view. You could say it's 10 years, you could say it's longer. If you take that away and all of a sudden it goes to whether it's tour or whether it's equipment companies, or it all becomes self-regulating. What happens is everything is restricted to a three to five year view, and that usually doesn't really make things better. Uh, it makes. It means that it kind of eats itself, and so here's what I love Like.
Speaker 1:I love that, though, I deal with a lot of people who are under the age of 20, like I have a lot of youngsters that I'm constantly around and a lot of people give the younger generation a hard time about a lot of things. But one thing that I kind of appreciate about young people is they kind of have pretty good bullshit detectors and they tend to kind of like see through things. And one of the things that I think is really interesting is that, you know, golf is kind of moving into a precarious spot it's never been in, to, where, like, if you tell somebody under the age of 30 that that driver is going to go 20 yards farther, they're going to ask you how. And now, all of a sudden, the equipment isn't prepared to answer that question because, quite frankly, for years it's been lies. So now I think what you're seeing is that, like I just had Todd Dempsey on the podcast earlier today, who's really kind of become known for making modern persimmon golf clubs, and then behind you is just a wall of older golf clubs that aren't ancient golf clubs but are rather really good golf clubs that you routinely take out and still play golf with.
Speaker 1:And we're seeing more and more people that I think are kind of revolting against the wearing your Sunday's best, listening to loud music and showing up to the golf course and having no ability to play. And you're starting to see people get back into it and fall in love with it for maybe reasons closer to us and there may be a little bit more into the vintage equipment and not necessarily spending tons of money on brand new stuff that doesn't work any better than the old stuff. I mean, I think it's cool, man. I like this kind of push into a different approach.
Speaker 2:And look, mate, there's. There's a couple of things there as well. You know I do. I'm lucky enough, I get to play golf in the US a little bit and you know we have caddies and stuff and you know, very often especially less so here but when I come over there they'll look at my driver. So I'm using a 2006 TaylorMade Super Quad and they'll be like oh well, you know they'll talk to me on the level of like you're definitely giving something up by using this club and I'm like no mate, I feel like I'm for all the kids listening.
Speaker 1:That's what Gade is using. Oh, that's a quad, that's not a super. I'm sorry, you're right. You're right, I'm not the wrong one.
Speaker 2:It's never far away, Duke.
Speaker 1:There it is.
Speaker 2:This is a bit of a niche one, it's a 282, which with the Taurus shoe, head lower spinning but failurely, went boring. But yeah, they kind of talked to you on the level of you definitely giving something up by using this club. I'm definitely not Right. And the other thing is I'm definitely up because I know I've tested it and I've I've got to. I think the best drivers at the moment if I somebody comes in and they, a lot of people just want the modern stuff, so I probably would fit them with a bit. The only modern drink the only up to date driver I'll sell is the tightest tears, so it's the only good, the only one. And I got a T s R for recently. I do this fairly regularly, you know I've like, okay, you know I start to get affected. I'm like okay, yeah, fine, fine, I can see things must have moved forward a bit. And I got this T s R for and I built it to my exact spec. So I love this shaft, the old, hazardous, this one's all beaten up when I use. I've got loads of those because they don't make them anymore. And I put, build it to exactly the same spec and look, I hit this thing pretty good. But I didn't really hit it any further and I felt like I just was not getting any pleasure out of it. You know, it just felt a bit dead to me.
Speaker 2:But the other thing is the you know, if you go, if you're a car enthusiast, obviously cars, you know constant progress. They've got Apple car playing them and all this stuff now. But if you're a real car enthusiast, a lot of times you know you probably kind of like you might have a sweet spot Transmission maybe. Yeah, you like the Porsche 911s from the late 90s and you know that's where things like Singapore's come out of its. You know Singapore's, I don't know people was bit niche but whether, whether anyone knows about this, but basically they customize what they consider to be the best Porsches.
Speaker 2:So the late 90s ones, the air cooled ones, and they customize them and they make everything just as good as it can be, but not techy. You know, everything is still analog. Everything is just beautifully crafted. I guess, like you know you might say a Muur Iron, a great Japanese forging or whatever. And car enthusiasts appreciate cars from the past because there's something that you can't quite measure. It's like I get from A to B quicker in today's 911 or today's Ferrari, but you're gonna. This is the best way I know how to describe it.
Speaker 1:Here's how I got, and somebody that's really a lot smarter than me explained it to me.
Speaker 1:So I have CD like I'm old enough, right, like I have a ton of CDs still at my house somewhere in a box, but like I also have vinyl right Like full on vinyl, and I have a turntable and I have really nice speakers at my house and here's the really cool thing I can listen to any album I want on vinyl and then I can also listen to it on my phone and they sound almost identical.
Speaker 1:But here's what happens when you have the ability to have everything all at once in the newest thing and I don't have to carry it around and it's just in my phone on demand, they have to compress that thing to make it fit with all the other stuff that they make available to me. So when you compress things, especially music, you actually lose entire instruments in the background. So it's kind of wild that you know. Yes, this is super easy, but I would say that this is super convenient. But I would say that if you actually want the best listening experiences, it's going to be on vinyl every time, over me streaming it through my phone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that comes back to this thing, which is we were not always better. But also we're told, if you pick up a golf magazine, if you're new to golf, if you look at YouTube videos, you got to go pretty deep before you get told anything different. And what we're told is the way to approach the game, is the way the pros approach the game. And it's like, wait a minute. Even you know I love the game. Whether I'm highly competitive on it, I don't know, I'm probably not. But you know I don't really like losing and I want to be as good as I can be. I still work on my game. I still have my hands are screwed because I had too many balls in the bay here. But you know I hit balls every day here trying to be better.
Speaker 2:But I don't necessarily want to give up the pleasure of playing the game. I don't necessarily and I'm not saying you have to give up the whole pleasure, but I don't really want to give up any of it, because all of the stuff that I'm being told to do, I mean it could be, you know, some psychologist telling me to basically lobotomize myself, put myself into a trance as I'm going around the course. It could be a stats guy telling me I should be aiming at the middle of every green and, you know, only hitting one shot. All of that stuff. I'm just that's, that. I'm not going to do that bit, because I still love it and I still do it because I love seeing a ball in flight and I love hitting shots.
Speaker 2:So it's it's. We are able to make these choices, as long as we're able to just slightly extricate ourselves a little bit from the, from all of the stuff that is in golf magazines and that's in YouTube videos, and just go. You know, really and honestly, what does it mean to me? And I guess you know for me. I was very much in the golf industry until I was 24. And, to be honest with you, I didn't really question anything up to that point. I was young, I was in it.
Speaker 1:Me too.
Speaker 2:Me too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm glad that I'm not the only one that ever is honest enough to say that I drank a cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then when I started this business, I two things happened. The thing that happened first was I didn't have to go and play in these horrible pro Ams, which you know I'm not saying pro Ams are horrible, but the prams I was playing him were horrible, right, they were on red for golf courses. I had no status I'm talking like regional PGA stuff in you know Buckinghamshire and nothing wrong with that county or anything in England but it's not great. It's not exactly a golfing hotspot. Let's say, yeah, we were playing, and we weren't even playing the best courses. So we were playing terrible golf courses and, to be honest with you, I did lose the love for the game. And then when I started this business and all of a sudden none of that really mattered I was still teaching a bit but I wasn't going to play to all of them. So I was living in London, I really got the love back for the game and I just played and I played for 12 years. From that point onwards, I played for 12 years without market of scorecards.
Speaker 1:It's just a golfing, no matter. That's where I'm at, man. Like, honest to God, like I love Todd so much. Todd Dempsey, he's just an awesome human. He's building me some persimmon. You see, I've got the super quad here. I'm debating on maybe bringing that to London to play golf with you here in a few weeks. But like, honestly, man, I'm done. Like I have a QI 10 on the or the new QI 10 on the way to.
Speaker 1:But like, at the end of the day, man, like I want to go out there and start playing golf to have fun again.
Speaker 1:And like, try to hit shots and try to score.
Speaker 1:And you know, this year I'm going to have some persimmon in the bag and I'm going to have some short sets and I'm going to do some different things.
Speaker 1:But at the end of the day, man, it's to your point, it's at the end of the day, the scores never really made me that happy. It's normally made me angry. So like, instead of going out there and worrying about the score, which is only going to frustrate me, like I'm going to go out there and focus on, you know, hitting the shots to the best of my ability and really falling in love with that process again and I've been doing a little bit of that over the past year or so and it's really helped a lot. But I totally get what you're saying with trying to find joy in the game again, because if you take this super, super kind of vacuumy approach to everything and it's all binary and ones and zeros and pass fell, it really does it. It starts to really take the joy out of the game, for I think a lot of people yeah, and I think that's so.
Speaker 2:Add pleasure to the matrix. You know, and I I say this with about equipment is I still haven't found a situation where the pleasure and the performance do not meet. The only time there's a disconnect is when you have the illusion of performance and that driver, that Q10, that you've got right. There's no greater example than that. I mean, there's you what you give up with that particular club. So the high MOI story, I get it right.
Speaker 1:I do 10K, just so you know I'm not like one of those 10K nuts. I don't think that's the answer for I don't think you are at all.
Speaker 2:but it's a really good example because I played with the front of mine who took one out the other weekend on a Saturday morning and it was kind of funny because he's a friend of mine who I haven't spoken to for a little while. And the reason I haven't spoken to him is because he was a very good friend of mine that we're starting making it. He was very he loved golf equipment and it's a bit of an insatiable appetite for golf equipment and I was making so many clubs for him but I wasn't. I was charging him costs because he's a pal and he just got a bit too much and then we ended up having a little bit of an argument and we didn't speak for a few years. So the reason I'm telling you that is that I turned up on this Saturday morning, having not spoken to him three years, and I looked in his bag and they were just like. He still had the mirror blades I've made him, but all the other clubs have been changed and obviously I just tore into every one of them. But he had the Q10 driver and I was just I'm like, ah, do you remember that TP Taylor made TP 425? Never made you. Wouldn't you like to have that right now?
Speaker 2:But it's true. You know that that Q10 it doesn't. You put it this way? If you. The way I would describe it is if you blindfold somebody and ask them to hit some shots and they hit them out of the middle with that Q10, they would not have any clue where they went. They would have no idea. They'd know they might know that they hit the middle of the club, less so than maybe with certainly a pessimist or something like that but then if you just gave them the Supercorder or 425 or something like that, they would be able to tell if they were good enough player. They'd be able to tell you where it went.
Speaker 1:I don't disagree at all with that. I think that's very true. I mean, you know, I would say that one of the lowest points of my life as a golfer and my enjoyment of the game was I was playing a set of titleist TMB's and you couldn't tell where you hit that thing anywhere on the face and you know it was chasing numbers and performance at all costs and totally getting away from what I liked and what I felt good and what I kind of wanted to do. And to your point, man, like, even though the numbers were better, the results were worse.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's where you know if you missed a point. So, going back to this thing of what happens with you know everyday golfers like us, like we are now we if you take soul grind, soul grind on clubs is a really good example. So that titleist TMB, massive rounded Bulbas soul Okay. So on a catastrophic duff that soul will perform a little bit better. But you're not really trying to make the most out of a catastrophic duff. What you're trying to do is stop hitting catastrophic duffs.
Speaker 2:So if soul grind is one of the things like, if you, if you give somebody a sensible soul grind where they can actually pinch the ball between the club and the turf, they'll learn to hit, they'll learn what a great strike feels like and they'll learn to chase that feeling and they'll become a better ball striker. But if you give them a big bulb was rounded soul, where they never get that feeling but it does tidy up the catastrophic duff, you're sort of condemning them to never getting there and I think that's where that it doesn't always join up and that's the thing where I can get quite worked up about. Is that it's not no famous wedge.
Speaker 1:This is interesting because a really famous wedge coach or not wedge coach, but a really famous tour coach that I speak with sometimes recently put a video up where a company had made him a custom wedge with no groups Right, and he was using that and like having players hit shots and they were producing the same amount of spin without the group. So it was kind of cool. But I asked him. I said, hey, you should get a wedge with zero bounce. And he's like, why? And I was like Because you should take hacks that are no good with a wedge and give them a wedge with zero bounce and tell them that they're not allowed to get a normal wedge until they stop taking divots. And you would actually teach people to be pretty good wedge players.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that is it, that's. That's the bit where, and that's where Chevy Chase might have been right when he said the shortest distance between two points was a straight line in the opposite direction, because that's definitely true and you can, I'm, I'm really fascinated by what you can get people to do with no instruction through different equipment specifications. It's unreal, it's unreal.
Speaker 1:The best training aids I've ever used bar none always are golf club related and always totally like blow their minds it for like okay, like I really like Martin, Chuck, Okay. So I want to be up front and say, Martin, I think you're the man. I really appreciate what you do. I was not the biggest fan of the tour striker and the reason that I wasn't the biggest fan of tour striker is because people didn't learn that they had to get their pressure left to create a descending blow. Instead, people were still hanging back on the right foot and just leaning the shit out of that thing to get the face on the ball.
Speaker 2:And then in their minds that I oh, that's clearly what I've got to do, but actually it's not. That's just right.
Speaker 1:But it's a myth. You have a well thought out idea, right. It's just unfortunate that people constantly misuse that thing. But once again, like if you gave the tour striker to a competent guy who can get pressure left, now that's a really good training aid for him, because now it's actually encouraging the thing we want. So that's kind of the problem that we tend to have is that, to your point, we're often told do what the tour guys do. But then when we try to do that, they're like no, no, no, no, no, you got to feel it this way. Well, if you're not a tour player and you've never done this, how are you supposed to have the feeling already to know how to do it? And that's where I think like data can really step in and be used to quantify feelings and help people develop, feel. But when we start trying to replace that feel with data, that's always a recipe for disaster in my mind.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree with that completely. I don't, I think, where. Where I'm going to focus my attention in terms of the simulator world and the technology side of what we do is in a few areas, but relative to our discussion today, it's about skill gaming built around skill development.
Speaker 1:Correct. So, by the way, real quick, we're getting tight on time here. So I don't drink, as you know, but I've started collecting vintage things instead of wine. I've started collecting vintage golf balls and I would like to show you. I might bring some with me, but look what I have.
Speaker 2:I see your talk of the answers.
Speaker 1:Come on, I can keep going. What do you got?
Speaker 2:I'm gonna have to get out of the other room.
Speaker 1:Well, I had some fun.
Speaker 2:I had some exciting to say oh my God, all right, give me two minutes, wait there.
Speaker 1:All right. So for those of you that are watching this and I hope you do, if you're listening normally do yourself a favor and check this video out on our YouTube page at measured golf, because you can see now in the camera some of the golf clubs that James has, and the cool thing about that wall is that there's no junk. Everything in there is like super cool, super specced out, super rare, and it's just if you grew up playing golf in the 90s and early 2000s like he kind of has the wish list that everybody had, because it's definitely all the clubs all the cool kids had, for sure, what do you got? I can't say something, so it goes big. Say something.
Speaker 2:Even earlier. These are the ones that are really good these are the liquid centers.
Speaker 1:They're squishy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the 90s. And then I've also got these, which are very niche. Ooh, what's that? Mcgregor championship? Quality Golf balls, brand new, god knows, look at that High energy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do you have a listen to this? If this doesn't sell golf ball, I don't know what does hang on. Where's the set? Liquid center Wound technology for workability, soft feel and control.
Speaker 2:So I used to when I was a kid. There was two things I used to. One was my dad. My mom and dad would be having Sunday lunch at the golf club. I'd wait, you know. We would come up. My brother and I was just hanging around, probably about 10 or 11 years old, and as the afternoon went on, you know, dad would have got more and more stuck into the red wine. And there was just this perfect moment to come and ask him for 10 pounds and you could get a packet of tour ball artis for six. I think there was six, 96 pounds, 95 then. And of course you've got this packet of balls. That's in the packet, but you open them up First time. You take them out.
Speaker 2:You're so scared of thinning one, you know, because the moment you thin one, the balls they're lying in it. I mean it's bad that you'd be worried about losing it, but when you just think, oh God, you thin one, you get out there and you have a look. And the other thing was I used to hang around on the 18th green at Wentworth when the Volvo PGA which is now the BMW was on and I was one of those kids that'd be like can I have your ball? Can I have your glove, you know, and they'd give you balls and stuff and I would end up using those balls because I don't sign it.
Speaker 1:I'm going to use this thing later.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that and that was ultimate pressure of not cutting one.
Speaker 1:Oh, my God, that's great man. So so, if you've enjoyed this at all, james is obviously great and does some cool stuff on Instagram so you can check out the amazing facility, urban Golf in London over in Smithfield Street Really cool spot. You can check that out online at Urban Golf. You can Google that and find it and then he's on Instagram at Urban Golf as well as Urban Custom Clubs and you can see some of the sweet like Max Fly, australian blades and all those cool things that he's got over there. So, james, I really appreciate having you on man and I'm really looking forward to seeing you here in a few weeks.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so and you're, we should say you're coming over, yeah, it's going to be fun.
Speaker 1:I'm going to be back in the bunker which is 20 yards guaranteed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 20 yards guaranteed for my man, no problem, we'll work that right in. So, no, it's going to be good. I was over. Like I said last year, james has an amazing facility and has a private room in the back called the bunker, which you can run out for private events. But we're going to go back there, set up some force plates and get some coaching going on in London and try to make that kind of a regular thing to where I'm getting over there and working with some players via some video conferencing software that James has put in. So I think it's going to be great.
Speaker 1:Man, I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, me too. Yeah, so if you're interested in coming over and hanging out with James and myself in London, I'm going to be there between March 27th and April 1st, so feel free to reach out to us about setting up an appointment. I think we have a few left. So thanks again to James, always a great guest and very gracious with this time. So thank you so much to him and make sure to download and subscribe to this podcast anywhere you download your podcast already and, as always, until next time, keep grinding.