A few weeks ago, Soly put a call out on the Refuge for a list of listener questions for Dr. Sasho MacKenzie. We got some fantastic responses and what was planned as an add-on to a Sunday pod became more than enough material for a standalone episode. From his research on putting to the Stack wedge program and advice on improving during the cold weather months, they covered a ton of ground.
Not listening unless someone can confirm he was asked the bonk thread question.
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*this is satire
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Listened to it, no such questions were asked
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Thanks for asking my question @Soly.
I appreciate Dr. MacKenzie not going all Captain Ramius on me. The information that followed was really enlightening.
thank you @Soly for challenging his answer about the rollback issue.
i enjoy him as a pod guest and appreciate what his business does for golf, and he’s way smarter than me i’m sure… HOWEVA, his analogies and points of view i find idiosyncratic.
for instance, comparing clubhead speed to pitching fast. a guy off the street can swing 120, but no one off the street can pitch 98 mph. well, yeah. these are entirely different sports and this is a huge false equivalency.
changing course setup. adding maple trees? is he serious? just start putting tee boxes behind trees?
referencing cycling and selling bikes/regulations. while i think that’s better than some of his other references, cycling is the dirtiest sport in the world and the weight and aerodynamics of bikes are regulated at the professional level. amateurs can use batteries now! so that one is an airball too.
he references how he doesn’t think in a capitalist society a governing body should have authority… isn’t the exact reason why a governing body should manage a sport? to have the sports best interest in mind vs. profit? whether or not they do a good job of that will always come and go… but a sport or league governed seems like a good idea? otherwise the rules would just be to the profit of the equipment companies? and the “training” companies…
soly nailed it, sasho is smart and insightful, but his business is built on people swinging as hard as they can with limited risk due to technology. he should have admitted that before he continued with his perspective as he came across far from objective.
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He seriously said this?
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Something to that affect. I don’t want to mischaracterize but i thought so.
Listen for yourself to get the full context.
“My biggest problem is they don’t really have any skin in the game” on the usga and r and a
“Wild situation in a capitalistic society that that can even happen”
Also the whole bike analogy was about bike manufacturer business
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I know I missed the pod, but real question - will the nest member stack system promo come back?
Going out of my to try to explain where I think he’s coming from here but…
What he probably means is, it’s wild that a “governing body” that isn’t a financial regulator, can have a massive financial impact on a lot of companies, some of which are publicly traded. And they’re not really regulating the fairness of the practices of the companies, or the way they report, or the way they conduct business. They’re simply saying the game we regulate isn’t being played in the way that’s the most appealing, in our opinion.
The comps here in the sports world get pretty tricky, and it does seem pretty unique to golf.
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That’s great additional context.
And the stuff about the ncaa and tewer and liv taking their ball (literally) and going home was spot on insight. The governing bodies could lose their grip on their leverage pretty quick.
He also deserves the benefit of the doubt that he was asking questions on the fly and would maybe say it differently.
He’s an interesting guest. The data and his findings are super interesting, I just find each time he also offers analogies that are preposterous to prove his narrative. Last time it was comparing putting heads up to shooting a free throw with your eye closed. This time it’s planting maple trees, talking about bicycles being regulated (which they are in races…. Cycling as a hobby is as “bifurcated” as it gets), and not owning his bias in the distance debate.
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This is just my opinion and may not be a common one, but I did pay to be here, so …
When I fired up a pod entitled listener questions with Dr. Sasho to distract me during a cold run this morning, I did not expect 26 of the 71 minutes to be spent on the distance debate. I just don’t care that much. Surely there were other interesting questions that could have filled that space.
I wasn’t expecting it to take up that much time either, but it was a listener question and there are no short debates around distance.
And it is quite challenging to cater the podcast to the individual wants and interests of hundreds of thousands of people!
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I’m sure the unexpected length of time it took to talk about that topic is the only reason why the hard-hitting questions such as, “if you were a hot dog would you eat yourself”, “who would you hypothetically bonk”, and “what’s your favorite fruit” did not get asked.
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Your post is EXACTLY what I was thinking listening. The course set up stuff especially
The “plant a maple tree on the tee box to block people” is where I audibly laughed out loud. Then I laughed again with the “o they will just swing harder the next day.”
His argument 100% seems targeted towards people who don’t understand the problem. His “o there is just a simple solution, course set up! Why isn’t anyone solving the problem there” is ripe to appeal to people who don’t realize how much is already being spent on course set ups.
Also the whole straw man argument of “why are they trying to make the game harder” is NOT the primary problem the usga & r&a is trying to solve. They have explicitly stated thay problem is the scale, cost, and sustainability of the golf course footprint that they are trying to rein in! Without checking distance, every golf course within an urban city will become obsolete… even the private ones that continue to stretch out year after year.
Im so sick of the “well golf will be harder” argument, just move up a tee box (or better yet superintendents can move them up)
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At risk of turning this thread into the distance debate (which half of the audience probably doesn’t want) I also thought his example of 18 at TPC Sawgrass was anecdotal at best. Sure, there might be some holes where there’s literally only one landing area/ideal distance, and so if you roll the ball back and now short hitters cant reach it and long hitters can that would not be ideal. But I’m not sure the amount of those holes on tour or in competitive golf outnumbers the amount of holes where the “ideal” place to hit it off the tee from a SG and risk perspective is as close to the green as you can. Basically any hole where everyone is hitting driver, which seems like a lot of golf nowadays.