Be more Bryson
Understand what matters, measure it, adapt it and improve
There’s no shortage of sporting stories from which to mine business learnings, or ‘inspiration’, if you prefer. Many will be familiar with rowing’s ‘Will It Make The Boat Go Faster’ and the ‘accumulation of marginal gains’ of British Cycling / Team Sky; but the newest story concerns US Open winner Bryson DeChambeau, and it’s possibly the most interesting.
The central part of DeChambeau’s story concerns his ‘big hitting’, derided by some as a brute force approach to golf. But DeChambeau didn’t start out as a big hitter. Length has always been important in golf, and as golf courses were designed with ever narrower fairways he reasoned that length was going to be more important than accuracy and set about turning himself into one. It began by adopting a ‘single plane’ swing from a book written in the 1960s called ‘The Golfing Machine’, which was calculated to deliver the most power. He then put on weight, going from 89kg in 2017 to 108 kg by the end of lockdown in August 2020. At practice he uses pressure plates to measure his weight transfer, and is one of the only pros always to take a launch monitor to the driving range to measure ball speed and distance. And he’s almost always the last to leave. The result was that from being an average length hitter he turned into the second longest driver on the tour, averaging over 320 yards.
What is less known about DeChambeau is the scientific approach he adopted to the rest of his game. Uniquely, all his irons have the same length shaft – 37.5 inches – ensuring identical swing weight, with lie angles 10 degrees more upright than normal. In putting, he eschews the traditional, (and romantic) ‘feel’ approach in favour of vector putting, which uses maths to compute the break and roll of the ball depending on the slope and grade of the green. From 157th best putter, he went to 12th. He’s also known to measure his brain impulses while watching movies, with the aim of staying calm during stressful scenes.
There are downsides to DeChambeau’s game. His calculations can result in painfully slow play. But the greatest compliment comes from the sport itself, which is asking questions about how courses can be set up to ‘defend themselves’ from his style of golf. The problem for the authorities is that DeChambeau’s game is based not just on power or science, but adaptability. As his coach pointed out: ‘you can change anything you want, and Bryson will still find a way to win’. That’s something for all of us to be inspired by.
With thanks to Chris Perell for the details.
Note:
At Bedroq, we try to be more like Bryson. We are fully signed up to the theory that “what gets measured gets done”.