Golfing News & Blog Articles

Bryson on "nothing burger" incident with cameraman

"People are going to make a big deal out of nothing, that's all it is. A nothing burger deal" pic.twitter.com/FP7mYZdQjC

— LKD (@LukeKerrDineen) July 6, 2020

So much for someone whispering in his ear, remember those cameras show you and the logos people pay you to exhibit.

Following Saturday’s bizarro Bryson DeChambeau beef with a cameraman filming the action as he’s obligated to do, the 2020 Rocket Mortgage champion took to Twitch following his Sunday win to answer questions. He continued to express his issue with television coverage invading his space, privacy, or something in that realm.

Thankfully for us geezers, Luke Kerr-Dineen posted the Twitch video (embedded above) and Christopher Powers transcribed DeChambeau’s doubling down on his view that cameramen are only suppose to shoot at select times and mind-read the rest of the time.

“I just felt like a minute long for videoing me was kind of a little weird, but we talked it out and it was all great, no issues whatsoever. So, I appreciate what they do, appreciate everybody that works hard out here to provide great entertainment.”

By the sound of it, he still didn’t quite get what irked some folks who were critical of his comments, but again, the news cycle moves quickly. Most of the discussion topics on Monday morning have revolved around DeChambeau’s game.

It doesn’t move as quickly when you double and triple down, however, which is exactly what DeChambeau did during a Twitch stream on Sunday night.

“The guy was videoing me for a minute after a shot,” DeChambeau said, “like a full minute. That’s just, it’s just obsessive. It’s not the cameraman, it’s nobody’s fault, there’s just got to be a little bit of respect, that’s all.”

Move Paul Lawrie high up the list of pros who have stepped up during the COVID-19 pandemic to help out the sport’s aspiring players.

As Martin Dempster writes, the 1999 Open Champion may be doing his best work yet for Scotland’s up and coming players, with some tremendous courses stepping in to assist as well: Royal Dornoch, Carnoustie and St Andrews where the New and Jubilee courses will be used. As will Devenick Course at Lawrie’s golf center (for a Par 3 Championship).

Six 36-hole events on the Tartan Pro Tour will offer a place for male and female pros to compete while travel restrictions and cancelled events reduce opportunities in the Home of Golf.

Dempster writes:

Scottish golf owes another debt to one of its favourite sons.

Of the many positive things he’s accomplished for the good of Scottish golf over the years, Paul Lawrie’s latest venture has to be the best of the lot.

Put it this way, the new Tartan Pro Tour, a series of six 36-hole events around the country in August and September, could make the difference between a Scottish-based pro going on to blossom in the game as opposed to being lost to the sport forever.

Well it’s a start, but the (ongoing) sad state of affairs at America’s top collegiate course and most affordable membership option in the area seem likely to be addressed.

Sadly, at Yale Golf Course during the pandemic—one of the few sad stories of neglect—will take time to fix. In such a short season, even the latest news below does not exactly make me optimistic for C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor’s masterful design. But at least the current Athletic Director seems concerned. This is progress.

Thanks to all who forwarded this.

Now that spectators have been ruled out for The Memorial, the back-to-back weeks at Muirfield Village will be delineated by contrasting course setups (Rex Hoggard reported three weeks ago).

Get ready to hear a lot about Stimpmeter speeds and rough heights. Oh, that’ll lure in the young people.

Also, the field for this week’s Workday Charity Open will consist of 156 compared to 120 for next week’s Memorial. 72-holes of stroke play for both. Scintillating.

The Workday provided an opportunity to inject something fresh onto the schedule while retaining the Memorial’s luster. Remember all the pre-pandemic talk about the need to slip in more variety on the schedule and offer alternatives to 72-holes of stroke play? I know, seems like decades ago.

Here are some options that would undoubtedly have required too many Zoom meetings and players inevitably offering their buzzkilling two cents.

The Memorial Tournament was supposed to be the first event with spectators, but officials have changed their minds.

Let’s ignore the fan vote component (Rory inevitably opens as the 3-1 favorite!) and instead enjoy the R&A’s fresh approach to pandemic “content”. The Old Course! A tournament! On national TV! Better than most!

For Immediate Release…

THE R&A TO MARK ‘OPEN WEEK’ WITH CELEBRATORY BROADCAST OF ‘THE OPEN FOR THE AGES’

6 July 2020, St Andrews, Scotland: The R&A is inviting golf fans around the world to take part in a very special celebration of golf’s original championship following the cancellation of The Open this year.

‘The Open for The Ages’ will bring together many of golf’s greatest champions for the first time to compete against each other over the Old Course at St Andrews in a compelling and innovative three-hour broadcast production. 

This exclusive edition of The Open features 50 years of archive footage expertly edited and woven together with modern graphics and new commentary to imagine a Championship contested by the legends of the sport including Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Seve Ballesteros, Tom Watson, Sir Nick Faldo and Rory McIlroy.

‘The Open for The Ages’ will culminate in a final round programme that will air on Sunday 19 July when it will be broadcast globally to fans around the world on TV, TheOpen.com and The Open’s social media channels. The broadcast is being supported by HSBC and NTT DATA, both Patrons of The Open.

Anticipation and excitement for the final round programme will build up from Thursday 16 to Saturday 18 July when coverage of the first three rounds of ‘The Open for The Ages’ will be provided by in-play clips, live leaderboards and end of play highlights across The Open’s social media channels.

The winner of ‘The Open for The Ages’ will be determined by a fan vote, which has registered more than 10,000 responses, and a data model developed in partnership with NTT DATA that utilises player career statistics alongside the input by fans to calculate the Champion.

Martin Slumbers, Chief Executive of The R&A, said, “Golf is one of the very few sports where this concept can be created and brought to life. The way in which the sport is filmed allows us a truly unique opportunity to reimagine history and bring together the greatest players from many different eras on a scale which has not been done before, either in golf or in other sports.

“We are all keenly feeling the absence of The Open from the global sporting calendar this year and so we hope that this broadcast will generate real interest and enjoyment for the millions of golf and sports fans who closely follow the Championship every year.”

Laurence Norman, VP Sports Technology at NTT DATA UK, said, “Technology is synonymous with modern sport, helping athletes compete at optimum performance levels. What’s even more exciting is the new emphasis on technology being utilised to enhance fan experiences.

“Building stronger fan engagement through technology is the future of sports, and while it will never replace the thrill of live events, The Open for The Ages demonstrates how technology can keep pushing the boundaries of what it is possible in sports broadcasting."

The R&A’s international TV broadcast partners, including Sky Sports in the UK, NBC Sports and NBC Golf Channel in the United States of America, and TV Asahi in Japan, will televise ‘The Open for The Ages’ to fans all around the world.  It will also be made available via TheOpen.com and The Open’s YouTube and Facebook channels.

Commentators, including Ewen Murray, Nick Dougherty, Butch Harmon and Iona Stephen, will bring the Championship to life using a compelling narrative that will provide a fascinating spectacle at the Home of Golf.

‘The Open for the Ages’ will be supported by a digital and social media campaign featuring ‘in-play’ clips, leaderboards and statistics in the lead up to the final round being played when the outright winner is revealed.

The trailer:

Bryson DeChambeau is now favored to win the Masters at Caesars Sportsbook after his victory this past weekend.

“I never learned anything from a match that I won.” – Bobby Jones

Golf is an inconsistent game by nature and scores will always fluctuate, but what’s guaranteed is that every round is a learning opportunity for long-term improvement. Too many golfers don’t spend enough time reflecting on their rounds, to highlight the things that they did well, or to look at situations and shots in the round that exposed their weaknesses. This often comes back to mindset – an ego oriented “fixed” mindset is more concerned about results, placings and how that result made them look and that’s all that matters. Mastery or “Growth” mindset golfers look deeper into the performance to find out what was learned and what can be improved. A proper post round review process can help you nurture a growth mindset, increase your self-esteem as a player and learn from every round.

Using A Performance Journal

Studies show that writing things down in a journal is a highly effective way to reflect and learn from an experience. It gives you the opportunity to make sense of what happened during your rounds and what you were feeling in different situations. This can help you identify what about your process is working, what areas of your game needs work, and it will allow you to reconcile with the round so you can move on.

Even though writing on paper is most effective, most of my students use an online performance journal that shares their entries with me. Entries can be written down on paper and uploaded as a photo or typed directly into the app. But most importantly, it’s about what you write down after a round. In this module, I’d like to share the template that my students use.

A Simple Post Round Review

“There’s no such thing as failure, you either succeed or you learn.”

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

— Will Gray (@WillGrayGC) July 4, 2020

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

— Brendan Porath (@BrendanPorath) July 4, 2020

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.