Golfing News & Blog Articles

Scotland-based Shotscope may be the worst secret-keepers in golf. Today is officially embargo day for the company’s new V3 GPS and data collection watch. The Shotscope V3 GPS watch is a mega-leap forward in terms of technology and especially appearance, but with thousands of units already in the field (thanks to an existing customer pre-sale), today’s launch may be a bit anti-climactic.

If you haven’t seen it, or if you’ve been turned off by previous Shotscope models, V3 is most worth a look. It just might change the way you think about shot tracking, data collecting, and what you should expect from a GPS watch.

Shotscope V3: Significant Shrinkage

From day one, Shotscope changed on-course data collection. The company developed technology that lets RFID club tags communicate automatically with a wrist band to capture shots. However, the wrist band itself was a problem. Shotscope’s original V1 band featured no GPS functionality, just data collection. It was also roughly the size of one of Her Majesty’s aircraft carriers.

Shotscope V2 was a considerable improvement, incorporating a fully functional GPS watch with shot tracking. Unfortunately, while considerably smaller, V2 was still the size of a Royal Destroyer.

The Shotscope V3 GPS, however, is about the size of an Apple watch. That’s roughly 60 percent smaller than V2.

From this week’s Golf.com Confidential, caddie and contributor John Wood on Bryson DeChambeau’s game following the Rocket Mortgage Classic win:

John Wood, PGA Tour caddie for Matt Kuchar (@Johnwould): Bryson seems to have broken the code for Bryson. And I think he has transferred what has been done at the long driving competitions for a while now to highly competitive golf. I couldn’t be more impressed. I was watching today and thought how economical this type of game is to practice. You practice drivers, wedges, chips and putting. He won’t often have to hit mid-irons, ever. Maybe a couple a day to par-5s. But for the most part, playing the game like he is playing it, and how courses are allowing him to play it through setup, why would you spend the time on fairway woods and hybrids and long/mid-irons when they will be used so seldom.

Will Gray at GolfChannel.com featured several of DeChambeau’s comments and summed up the whirlwind week at Detroit Golf Club, including this.

To that end, he’s looking to parse every possible advantage in a game where each player starts the week with the same score from the same teeing ground.

“I think the most important thing is that I’ve shown people that there’s another way to do it, and there’s going to be other people trying to come up and do it that way,” DeChambeau said. “For me, I think there are going to be people trying to hit it a little harder, some of them, but at the end of the day, it’s going to take a generation for all this to evolve into something different.”

Fox Sports’ Joe Buck penned an uplifting serenade to five years of Fox handling USGA events and namely, the U.S. Open.

While he has fond memories of everything coming together for both parties at Pebble Beach, including a fitting Tap Room finish, only one thing really bugs the broadcaster. Not getting to call a Tiger win, or at least, contending U.S. Open week.

Regarding Tiger: We never got to see THE MAN do his thing. (MC, DNP, DNP, MC, T21 in our five years.) And that kills me.

Buck also offers this about golf on TV.

But I wouldn’t trade our five-year run for anything, because of the people I worked with (starting with our producer, Mark Loomis), what we experienced together, what we learned. Here are some quick lessons: Let the players and caddies talk. Less is more. From the field is better than from the booth. And the Fox Sports production-side innovations will become a big part of TV coverage elsewhere. Drone shots and more ball-tracers already are.

Bryson DeChambeau flashed some of his newfound power en route to a Rocket Mortgage Classic victory.

He'd been close since adding pounds and distance. And he still had to answer all the questions about his methods. His win at the Rocket Mortgage Classic should take care of all that once and for all.

One of several CBS graphics highlighting DeChambeau’s dominant driving

The numbers are eye-popping and impressive. So is the dedication and precision displayed by Bryson DeChambeau in winning the 2020 Rocket Mortgage Classic.

Not so great: his mood on Saturday and the resulting brand hit in whining about protecting his privacy.

He finishes a four-week run 67 under par and will leave the golf world debating about what we just saw.

A few stats of note:

Bryson running a little hot. Caught up with him on 7 where he took a Sergio slash at the sand after splashing out of a greenside bunker, muttered an expletive after missing the par save and spent 60 seconds in a...testy discussion with a cameraman on his way to 8 tee. pic.twitter.com/ENjQt1U689

Bryson DeChambeau was seen giving a television cameraman covering round three of the Rocket Mortgage Classic some and was asked about his outburst by GolfChannel.com’s Will Gray following a third round 67.

So he gave the cameraman grief for, what, you ask?

Keeping the camera on Bryson…too long.

Yep. His privacy was invaded. His brand tainted.

Fan favorite Hosung Choi has won tournaments, earned sponsor’s invites and even taken his moves to the greens.

But The Fisherman dropped anchor while playing Korea Professional Golf Tour’s Busan Gyeongnam Open according to GolfChannel.com’s Brentley Romine and because his ball had not advanced past tee markers, was able to retee this drop-kick whiff.

Nice mask though.

Hosung noooooooooooooooooo pic.twitter.com/vlND55T7Mt

Matthew Wolff had a roller-coaster round that went well enough Saturday to give him a three-shot lead over Ryan Armour and Bryson DeChambeau in the Rocket Mortgage Classic at Detroit Golf Club.

There's the ongoing Bryson DeChambeau experiment. Webb Simpson and Matt Wallace are coming off complicated weeks. And there are the young guys, Viktor Hovland and Matthew Wolff, again making noise.

The Indian Open event on the European Tour was canceled on Saturday because of the threat posed by the coronavirus pandemic.

After a short hiatus, Rod Morri, Mike Clayton and yours truly discussed a nice array of topics with the 2006 U.S. Open Champion.

The should be available wherever you get your podcasts, or you can listen below.

The Apple podcast show link.

Chris Kirk shot a 7-under 65 on Friday to take the second-round lead at the Detroit Golf Club, and Webb Simpson later shot a 64 to pull into a tie atop the leaderboard at 12-under 132.

He has a share of the lead at the Rocket Mortgage Classic after two rounds. But it how far he has come in his personal life after taking seven months to deal with depression, anxiety and alcoholism that matters most.

Golfers looking to play in the PGA Championship next month must first test negative for COVID-19, one of many requirements or recommendations laid out in a digital handbook sent to players and obtained by ESPN's Bob Harig.

Depending on who you listen to, Cannabidiol (aka CBD), is either a miracle elixir, snake oil, or something in between. As an industry, CBD is a wild, wild, and totally unregulated world. That can lead to outlandish claims, occasional charlatans, and marketing hype that makes the golf industry look like a church bake sale. Kanibi – a higher-end maker of CBD oil – is looking to change that.

Kanibi, among others, is taking a long, slow approach to building a sustainable, profitable business. MyGolfSpy’s CBD Buyer’s Guide was our first attempt to help you separate the wheat from the chaff. That piece went into great detail on the pros, cons, myths, and realities of CBD, as well as what to look for when researching CBD. The purpose of this article is to share with you Kanibi’s unique, and self-described boring, approach to the industry.

Kanibi – The Boring CBD

“We’re okay being boring,” says Peter Van Newhyzen of Kanibi CBD. “We don’t need to see huge wins immediately. Our whole approach is that we’re kind of crazy about every aspect of our business. We want to be the best in every single phase.”

Pop culture has always been rife with miracle cures. Back in 1885, pharmacist Charles Alderton sold his new soft drink, Dr. Pepper, as a digestive aid that “restores vim, vigor, and vitality.” In the 1950s, Geritol was the cure for “iron-poor, tired blood.” And what your Mom told you about carrots being good for your eyesight? Yeah, carrots have vitamin A, but British Intelligence concocted the eyesight story during World War II. They leaked that RAF pilots were shooting down more Nazi bombers thanks to their love of carrots. Better that than to let the Nazi’s know the real reason: the RAF’s new Airborne Interception Radar system.

Is it possible for putting practice to be fun?  Is it possible for a training aid to make you want to spend extended time “practicing”? Can an affordable putting simulator offer you realistic feedback on your golf game?

When we say affordable, we mean cheaper than some of the current drivers on the market now.

ExPutt is an at-home indoor putting training aid and simulator that provides golfers the kind of data that previously required really expensive, enterprise-grade equipment. Can a more budget-friendly putting tool give you the same type of experience?  We are going to let four of you tell the MyGolfSpy community.

Testers Wanted

We’re looking for FOUR golfers who are motivated, detail-oriented, and committed to providing a thorough review to put the EXPutt to the test.

Eastside Golf isn't just making a fashion statement; it's making a statement that everyone can play golf.

With purported campus-wide restrictions on work hours and staff leaving several university courses closed, there certainly are greater problems facing America’s institutions of higher learning. That said, as feared last month when word surfaced that arguably the finest university course in the land was not open and losing key staff members, it seemed Yale’s tortured relationship with his C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor gem would not be helped by the pandemic.

Sure enough, things have deteriorated quickly based on these images posted by Daryl Brereton:

Good bye Yale golf course. @gil_hanse @fried_egg_golf @golfersjournal @golficity @insidetheleatherpodcast @nolayingup @csgalinks #golfheadz #yalegolf #charlesblairmacdonald #sethraynorsociety #sethraynor

The university intends to host students and faculty this fall on campus. The ones who like golf will not have a functioning, maintained course to return to.

Global Golf Post’s Ron Sirak looks at the still-stunning USGA media rights reversion to NBC after Fox decided to eat a sizeable portion of the bloated price they paid in 2013.

He noted this on the timing, suggesting it was strictly a deal between the networks.

The first conversations took place during the spring but gained momentum in the past two weeks.

According to multiple sources, as discussions about NBC taking the 2020 broadcast evolved and NBC Universal showed willingness to assume the deal, Fox Sports executives Eric Shanks and Larry Jones brought the idea of transferring the rights to USGA chief executive officer Mike Davis earlier this month. Davis was apparently unaware of the impending change until the time of that presentation.

Executives within the Fox Sports golf team were not made aware of the potential change until last Thursday. The rest of the crew, including announcers Joe Buck, Curtis Strange, Paul Azinger, Brad Faxon and others, were not informed until Sunday afternoon.