Episode 30: Golf Tempo, Ryder Cup History, And A Dominant PGA Win

This episode of the Birdie Board Podcast continues the new segmented format, covering professional golf, practical tips, and the stories behind the game.

In Tour Talk, Corey breaks down a dominant performance at the Cadillac Championship, where Cameron Young ran away with the field in a rare six-shot victory. He also looks at how the FedEx Cup standings are shaping up and what it says about consistency versus big wins.

In Weekend Wins, the focus shifts to one of the most important and often overlooked parts of the golf swing: tempo. Corey shares a recent breakthrough in his own game and explains why tempo can matter more than mechanics. From simple swing cues to real on-course examples, this segment gives you something practical you can immediately apply.

Back Nine Stories dives into the 1999 Ryder Cup, one of the most iconic comebacks in golf history. Down four points heading into the final day, Team USA delivered a historic performance to secure the largest comeback in Ryder Cup history.

Finally, Clubhouse Updates covers what’s been happening with Birdie Board, including growing usage beyond friends and family and a personal update on joining a competitive golf league.

If you’re looking for a mix of golf insight, practical improvement, and the history that makes the game great, this episode brings it all together.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

The Birdie Board Podcast is brought to you by the Birdie Board app, the easiest way to track matches, scores, and handicaps with friends. Now, here's your host, Corey, with another episode of the Birdie Board Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Welcome back to the Birdie Board Podcast. So on our last podcast, I did a little bit of a different format. I broke up the episode into four different segments, and I've gotten some good feedback for that. So I'm going to go ahead and do that again. We're going to do the same four segments in this episode. So we're going to start with tour talk, which is just a general PGA update, what's going on. We're going to then go into weekend wins and we're going to talk about the tempo in a golf swing. The next section after that, we're going to talk about some back nine stories. So this is just kind of going over golf history, and we're going to go over what happened in the 1999 Ryder Cup. And then finally, just like the last episode, we're going to close with some clubhouse updates, which are just some general updates for Birdie Board. So last weekend we had a pretty exciting tournament, the Cadillac Championship. So this was a pretty dominant performance. And if you haven't seen it, the winner was Cameron Young. He won with a minus 19 score in the end. The take home pay for that was 3.6 million. For comparison, this tournament actually pays pretty well. The Masters tournament paid the winner like $4.6 million. So we're talking only about a million dollar gap between a major championship and this one. That's a pretty strong one. What was most significant about the outcome of this tournament wasn't that Cameron Young won with a minus 19, but it was what was in second place. And what was in second place is significant was the score was only minus 13. So Cameron Young won with a six-stroke gap. That is incredible in golf and very rare to win with such a big gap between first and second place. So it really shows how dominant Cameron Young was through this tournament. But no surprise, the second place person was Scotty Scheffler. He's the one who had minus 13. He was the sole person in that position. And then for third place was Ben Griffin at minus 12, and then there was a three-way tie at minus 11. A lot of times you'll see ties at second and third place too, but I think that even shows how much more dominant of a win that this was for Cameron Young. That if it wasn't for Scotty and Ben Griffin at minus 13 and minus 12, he beat the entire field by eight strokes. So minus 19 versus my minus 11. Like that it really shows how dominant Cameron Young was in this tournament. Because of his win, he actually jumped up to third place in the FedEx Cup standings. Uh, right now, Scotty Scheffler is at first place. Uh, he only has one win on the season, but he has so many top ten finishes that he's just accumulated so many points. So he's at 2,431 overall. Second place is Matt Fitzpatrick, who won last week with his brother at 2,394 points. So just a little bit behind Scotty. And then Cameron Young in third place, mostly because of this tournament win, he got 700 points up to 2,371. So if you're not familiar with the pointing, uh every tournament has a set of number of points. First place always gets an uh huge number of points compared to everyone else. It's usually like seven or eight hundred, second place will get like three or four hundred, third and on will get like a hundred or less. Uh so first place can really make a significant jump. But as you can see, as the season goes on, uh the leaderboard really start to shake out and stabilize. So think about it in the beginning of the season when we only had a few tournaments played, 700 points could easily push you up to first place. Um, but now we're looking at maybe some of the bottom guys in the ranking. If they won a tournament, they would have to do it two, three times to get to Cameron Young or Matt Fitzpatrick or Scotty Scheffler. Just think about it like this like 700, 7x3 is 2100. Um, so they would win have to win like three tournaments in a row, and they still wouldn't be in the top three. That wasn't the case in the beginning of the season just because there's not as many people had as many points, but at this point in the season, we're starting to finally see who are the best golfers of the season, who is the ranking the most consistently. Uh Scotty Scheffler, I don't think was any a surprise to anyone, but I don't think uh second and third place would have been guessed right now that it would have been Matt Fitzpatrick and then Cameron Young. Now, Cameron Young, like I said, a big reason he's there is because he just finished uh at with a win, so that jumped him up from I guess beforehand, he was at like uh 1600 points or so, which would be more middle of the pack, so he jumped up with that. Matt's Fitzpatrick, though, has been impressive. He has three wins on the season. Uh, I don't think people would have expected that. And if three wins is actually the most out of anyone, that's more than uh Cameron Young, it's more than Scotty Scheffler. Now, Scotty's up there because he's had so many top 10 finishes, uh, but it's been impressive with how how consistent Matt Fitzpatrick has been this year. He's he's playing very, very good golf. Alright, so next section of this podcast is Weekend Wins, and we're gonna talk about the tempo in a golf swing. The reason that I wanted to bring up the tempo is because I think it's actually something that has helped my game out the most recently. I watched a YouTube video recently about chipping, and the reason I watched it is because I'm at the beginning of the season, like everyone, those fuel shots are harder to get back. So I just needed like a refresher, some tutorials, something like that to get my chipping back a bit. One of the videos that I watched that really resonated with me is uh putting in the importance of rotation into your chip. What this helped with is just making sure my hands didn't get lazy or that the chip was all just my arms. So, what the tip was in the video was when you do your chip, uh sheathe the the club. So the idea of this is just simply to make sure you get your full rotation. But the the practical things and the practice thing that you would do is after you take your chip, you sheathe it like it's a sword. So you try if you're a right-handed golfer, you try to get the club to your left hip and you sheathe it. And the only way you're gonna do that is if you have full rotation. So this was helping me, and I was going through the process and practicing this, and what I realized was starting to happen is because I was getting this full rotation of my chips, I was starting to do that with my iron swings and my driver. Uh, and what happens when you do something like that with your iron swings and driver is you actually end up creating a good tempo because the only way you can do something like that is to have good tempo. So the core message here is most golfers swing too fast and they definitely do that under pressure, or they are trying to make a big swing or a distance swing. I'm sure we've all been there. But the the key thing is that tempo is always gonna outpace the mechanics of a swing. Uh, you can have a flawed swing with good tempo, but you can't have a good swing with bad tempo. That's essentially the takeaway here. Some of my best rounds I've ever had, and definitely a time I had a nine-hole stretch where I was essentially plus one, it wasn't because I was swinging mechanically pure, it's because I had the best tempo rhythm that I could have ever had. Now, for me, when I'm really playing well and I have good tempo, I'm not thinking about it too much, which helps a lot. That always helps in a golf swing. But to get into a good tempo rhythm, you have a couple things you could do. So, what a good tempo looks like is like a nice smooth takeaway. You're not rushing at the top, you're letting your hips kind of turn before you start your downswing, and then you have a nice smooth controlled down swing. A simple cue that has helped me in the past is back pause through. So, what that's doing is you start your back swing, you're taking a slight pause. It's not a mechanical pause, it's just letting your club naturally rest, and then you bring it through. This tempo, though, of saying back paws through, back paws through can really help you build that tempo that you need for a good golf swing, and it can help you kind of regain control if you're feeling like you're having a bad round. This happened to me yesterday a little bit when I golfed. I was playing 18 holes at a local golf course, and I started off really strong. Um, I've first like four holes, I was bogeing well, I was staying consistent, um, and I just felt like I had good tempo. And then I got to hole five and it had a drivable par 4, which is always tempting. And I drove it and I had a long drive because I was trying to reach it there, so I got it up there like 275 or so, 280, which was about how long the hole was. Uh, but it was far to the right, it wasn't quite a slice, it was just a push to the right. I was able to um chip it up on the green and walk away with a bogey, but the key is I lost my tempo on that hole. I tried to push my drive, I tried to get a lot of effort into it, and in reality, I didn't need to swing that hard. The first hole of the day, I had just a normal tempo drive and I drove it 285. I could have just done that again on this hole and been fine, but I didn't. I tried to force it. Another aspect of this is there was water on this hole, so I felt like I had to force it to make sure it went far enough. So I actually was walking away from that hole feeling like okay, I did what I needed to do. But in reality, I didn't even notice that I had lost my tempo. And then you could see what happens on the next two holes and the subsequent holes after that. The T shot on the next hole required an iron and I chunk it. It still goes 150 yards or so, so it was still playable, but again, I kind of lost my tempo on that. Next hole after that was a par three. I take a nine and kind of a similar thing happens. I was kind of off with my tempo and I chunk it again. So for me personally, when I'm off with my tempo, I get chunks, and I need to be a lot more aware of that. The hard thing is though, is fixing your tempo while you're playing, but that's where going back to a saying like back pause through or just some sort of tempo saying can really help. Uh, some people also like just counting one, two, three. Uh, some people like doing different segments, so both of those segments are like one, two, three, so backswing, top, through swing. Some people just like to say two, like smooth back, smooth through. So whatever works for you, but having that tempo uh at something you can say can really help with overcoming some bad tempo in your golf game, but also just general practice. So that was it for that section. The next section is back nine stories. So, what I really like learning about and talking about in this podcast is just some history of golf. And uh, one tournament that I wanted to talk about is the 1999 Ryder Cup because this was what had a historical moment in the history of Ryder Cup. So the 1999 Ry Cup, it was the 33rd ever Ryder Cup match. It was played in September of 1999 at a country call club called the Country Club in Brooklyn, Massachusetts. So it was in the United States this year. And what was very interesting about this format is uh the outcome on the third day, and we'll get to that in a second. But here's a little bit more of the setup. So the format for this Ryder Cup was a three-day match. On Friday, there was a four-ball better ball matches in the morning, and then four foursome alternating shots in the afternoon. On day two, Saturday, there were four foursome matches in the morning and four four-ball matches in the afternoon. And then on Sunday, you see the typical single matches or 12 single matches going on. Just as a side note, a lot of this format uh is a big motivation behind why Birdie Board even exists. So if you're ever interested in trying one of these formats, I'm just gonna do a shameless plug for Birdie Board. Give it a shot. You can play a lot of these formats that I just mentioned. So I'm not gonna go over the exact team makeups of each, but I'll call out a couple recognizable names. Um, for Team Europe, you had a couple people like Lee Westwood, Sergio Garcia were some of the biggest names on that team, and then team USA, no surprise, at this time was Tiger Woods, um, Phil Mickelson are two of the bigger names on Team USA. So after Friday's matches, uh the morning for some's finish two and a half to one and a half points. So if you're not familiar it with match play in Ryder Cup, you get points based off of who won the hole. Ties don't get you any points, so that's how you can finish with like Europe having two and a half points to US's one and a half. So that was the morning foresome section. In the afternoon four-ball section, we started to see Europe take an actual lead. Europe finished that day uh or that session with three and a half points versus the US section of one and a half. What was interesting was that uh Westwood actually played against Tiger Woods in their group, and Europe actually ended up beating them in that group. So that brings the total to Europe having six and United States having just two points. So already a four-point gap going into the second day. The gap was pretty much maintained on Saturday. The morning foursome started with um a Tiger Woods playing, which he actually got a point up on Europe in that group. And the day finished, or the the morning started, I should say, 2-2, but the day finished, or that session finished 8-4 overall. So Europe was maintaining its gap in Saturday's morning group. The afternoon on Saturday was a four-ball match, and we saw Mickelson playing, and we saw Garcia. Again, the match was halved 2-2, so Europe maintained that four-stroke lead at 10-6 overall. So you can see that most of the points that Europe earned was still from the first day. So the first day they gained that four stroke gap, but Saturday they weren't able to extend it, and United States were able to hang on. So the momentum was shifting a little bit on Saturday. So what was interesting historically at this point was that no team had ever come back from being down more than two points on the final day of Ryder Cup. The United States at this point was down four points going into the last day. So going into the last day, we saw a dominant performance from the United States. There were only three that they didn't win. Um, some of the biggest wins, of course, was Phil Mickelson winning five to three, Tiger Woods winning three to two, Jim Fuhrk winning four to three. So overall, United States earned eight and a half points on the final day to Europe's three and a half points, which gave the United States the win in the 1999 Ryder Cup with 14.5 points to Europe's 13.5 points, marking the largest comeback in Ryder Cup history. So that was it for this section of Back 9 Stories. Hopefully, you guys are enjoying some history of this. And the last section here is just clubhouse updates. Uh, you might have noticed I haven't posted a podcast for about two weeks now. Uh, it was simply due to some work travel. I just was busier than I normally am. In the past, when I have traveled for work, I've been able to keep up with both social media and recording podcasts in the evening and stuff. Unfortunately, this time around, I that just wasn't the case. So I was able to finally get back to it today. I'm glad to get back into it. Um, I've missed talking about just golf in general. So uh it was good to kind of just get back into the flow of things. Uh Birdie Board's doing well. I have been kind of still keeping track of the metrics and everything. I've noticed that there is one match that is starting up um by someone, which is one of the, I'll be honest, one of the first big usages of Birdie Board outside of just friends and family, which was uh exciting to see. So hopefully it goes well. If you're listening to this podcast, um, reach out if anything doesn't work as you expected. I'm happy to help. Last thing I want to talk about is just an exciting personal thing is that uh a golf league I joined is starting up tonight. It's a nine-hole golf league. I'm really excited about it. It is formatted like the PGA, so you can earn a certain number of points per match, and it accumulates to uh championships and playoffs at the end of the season. The points are awarded in two brackets, either net bracket or gross bracket. You can earn points in both. Uh, so it I think it does favor probably the gross golfer a little bit a better gross golfer a little better, but I'm still excited to just be involved. The last time I did a golf tournament, I learned so much about golf, and I improved a lot through the process. So I'm excited to just see how that all plays out again. Um, and I'm just excited to be competitive again. So that was it for this episode of the Birdie Board Podcast. Thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

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