Data adds polish to young players
CROMWELL, Conn. – Luka Doncic, the star guard for the Dallas Mavericks, lead the NBA in scoring this season at 35.7 points per game. He’s 22. The Atlanta Hawks’ Trae Young finished the season ninth in scoring (29.4 points per game) and has led his team to the NBA’s Eastern Conference finals against the Milwaukee Bucks. He’s also 22. The Bucks’ best player, Giannis Antetokounmpo, is now 26 and has already won two Most Valuable Player awards.
There is a youth movement afoot in the NBA, with young players arriving in the league ready to be stars. They are more polished than rookies of the past, both on the court and off. In addition, many study advanced analytics, take their nutrition seriously and have extensive media training to help them sound and behave more professionally in interviews.
Golf has always had phenoms, players who become stars in an instant. Last year, Collin Morikawa won the 2020 PGA Championship at age 23. Tiger Woods won three U.S. Amateur championships before he turned pro at age 20 in 1996. By the end of 1997, he had won three PGA Tour events, including the 1997 Masters. At age 20, Phil Mickelson won the PGA Tour’s 1991 Northern Telecom Open while he was still an amateur and playing for Arizona State University. Go back even further and you will see that Jack Nicklaus was just 20 in 1960 when he finished second to Arnold Palmer at the U.S. Open. Two years later, in his 17th start on the PGA Tour, Nicklaus beat Palmer in a playoff at Oakmont Country Club to win the 1962 U.S. Open.
Adam Scott, who won the 2013 Masters, is now 40. He has had a front-row seat to the youth movement on the PGA Tour for almost a decade. The Australian who is now based in Crans sur Sierre, Switzerland, turned pro at age 20 in 2000. Today he is a star, but his first year on the PGA Tour was not atypical for the time. He played in six events in 2000, missed the cut in five and finished T-55 at the Air Canada Championship.
While he sees each passing generation improving over the last, the current crop of young players has a significant edge over their predecessors in Scott’s eyes.
“I think that over the last 10 to 15 years, the data has been analyzed and been passed on to kids in college, juniors and good amateurs,” he said, referring to advanced golf statistics. “That has accelerated that finished product, to give them the ability to play like a pro. When I turned pro, it was fairly accepted that over the next five yours you would learn how to play (high-level) golf when you get on Tour. Now, guys come out and you all have the same information. You don’t have to learn, you get told what to do. It’s quite easy to follow some of these recipes that have been cooked up, and I think that it helps them a lot.”
Every shot in nearly all PGA Tour events is tracked by a stats-gathering system called ShotLink. The data it collects is passed along to players and coaches, and over the past several seasons, elite golfers have gained a better understanding of what separates the good players from those who contend and win. Likewise, coaches and up-andcoming golfers study Tour data to see what they need to improve and how they compare to the world’s top players.
Stewart Cink is 48 and has seen the unrelenting wave of young players arriving on the PGA Tour every year. To him, their experience at high-level junior events and college tournaments improve their decision-making skills.
“Young guys used to do things and people would say, ‘Oh, that’s a rookie mistake.’” Cink said. “You don’t hear that term anymore, because it really doesn’t exist. Players come out here already knowing where not to make mistakes.”
While power and distance off the tee have been a hot topic in golf, Scott also thinks that young players today chip, pitch and putt better than pros did in previous years.
“When I turned pro, I didn’t even have a short game, it was disgusting compared to the levels that are out here now,” Scott said with a laugh. “There is no doubt that their short games are much, much better. I think there has been a big focus at the teaching level on short game over that period.”
Jordan Spieth was 22 in 2015 when he won the Masters, won the U.S. Open and nearly won the British Open. He is now 27, but in eight full seasons on the PGA Tour, he has never finished a season ranked worse than 49th in strokes gained around the green, a measure of a player’s advantage over the average player based on chipping, pitching and bunker play. Justin Thomas, currently ranked No. 3 in the world, turned pro at age 21 and has been in the top 25 in strokes gained around the green four seasons out of six.
The average of the top-10 players on the Official World Golf Ranking right now is 28.2. A decade ago, it was 31.7 and in 1991 it was 33.8.
Young talent ready to win means the PGA Tour has a pipeline of stars waiting to shine, but it could make life hard for golfers who have been on Tour for a while.
Stewart Cink turned pro in 1995, but this season, at age 48, has won twice on the PGA Tour. To compete successfully with players who, in some cases, are half his age, Cink changed his approach and started playing like the kids.
“I’ve learned a lot from young players by taking on some of their mentality about decision making on the golf course,” Cink said. “I’m hitting different clubs off the tee than I used to hit and playing courses different than I used to play.”
To increase distance off the tee, Cink has adjusted his swing to maximize carry distance. That allows him to take more aggressive lines off the tee than he has in the past. He is also breaking down golf courses analytically more than ever.
For instance, Cink used to hit a 5wood or 7-wood into the bend of the dogleg-right ninth hole at TPC River Highlands. That left him a 135-yard shot to the hole. This year, at the Travelers Championship, his son, Reagan, who has a caddied for Cink this season, asked why he wasn’t hitting a driver. Not able to come up with a good reason, Cink hit driver every day at this year’s tournament, cut the corner more aggressively and left himself shorter pitch shots into the green. The result, two birdies and two pars.
The youth movement will not slow down, so to keep up with the kids, the old dogs need to learn a few new tricks.