How Bomb & Gouge Broke Golf | The Game Plan | Golf Digest

Distance. It’s one of the hottest topics of debate in the world of golf these days. How far is too far? Should you chase it? Does it actually matter? In this episode of The Game Plan, Golf Digest Senior Editor Luke Kerr-Dineen dives into the ever-popular strategy of Bomb & Gouge to discover whether or not those extra yards off the tee are actually worth the risk for pros and amateurs alike.

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In September 2020 and Bryson Des Shambo has just sent a shock wave through the golf world by bombing and gouging his way to a US Open victory at the famed wiford is usion at wi at the end of the previous season Bryson had made a bold declaration he said that golf fans

Wouldn’t recognize him in a few months that he was going to get so big and so strong that people wouldn’t believe it this Bryson boldly declared would lead him to the best golf of his career and then the world shut down breaking news stay at home that is the order tonight I

Think the world change starting on Wednesday night Augustin National has postponed the masters with no tournaments to play Bryson went home and spent his days eating lots of food working out a ton playing video games and speed training twice a day he did all of this for one reason to build more

Strength so he could swing faster and gain more distance because distance he believed was the simple key to shooting lower scores and winning more golf tournaments and turns out he was right The Bowman gouge era had officially taken over once and for all and it was all because of one meticulously designed game

Plan there’s actually a really interesting little known fact about Bryson’s Wingfoot win that a lot of people don’t know about but we’ll get to that first it’s time to understand why Bryson decided to bulk up and to change his strategy to go from accuracy robot machine to blunt force caveman golfer

Distance it’s everywhere all the time all at once why is distance so important it was never seen as a kind of catchall solution to everything like it is now in the past distance was important yes people said but so is hitting Fairways and chipping and puttting dry for show

And Putt for dough and all of that and then one one day this guy came along an economics professor from Colombia called Mark Brody this guy is one of the smartest men in golf today and we talked about his short-sided formula in our previous game plan video right here so

Check it out when you’re done with this video Brody discarded the crude all stats of the past things like total driving and Fairways hit and he developed a slate of advanced analytics just for golf and then he began telling the world what they were revealing that putting is overrated that distance is

King and that the best strategy is one that is very very aggressive off the tea bombs away because the math it’s on your side for pros and amateurs alike to understand why this is true just imagine for a second two golfers first there’s golfer a who ranks in the top third on

Tour in accuracy and the bottom third in distance and then there’s golfer B he’s the opposite he ranks in the bottom third on Tor in accuracy but the top third in distance let’s say they both play the same hole 10 times let’s call it a 450 yard Par Four gol for a will

Hit his ball into the Fairway six times and then into the rough the other four times from about 160 yards in the fairway four of those six shots will finish on the green to an average of about 26 ft two of his four shots from the rough will find the green for an

Average of about 29 ft and of the four shots that miss the green he’ll get about two or maybe three of those up and down put it all together based on rates and three putting rates and things golfer a will play this Hall somewhere between even and one overpar the longer

Hitting golfer B on the other hand will hit his ball into the Fairway five times and the rough five times but from 20 yards closer about 140 yards he’ll hit about four of those five shots onto the green to an average of about 20 ft then

He’ll hit half of the shots from the rough onto the green two to an average of about 26 ft so even though the longer golfer is hitting one less Fairway than the shorter golfer he’s hitting the same number of greets and hitting it closer to the hole from both spots all because

Of that 20 yard distance gain added all up the same way and golfer B is playing that Hall between even and one underpar a small Advantage sure but that adds up over time this line shows the average driving distance on the PGA tour over the last 30 years a significant rise

Reaching nearly 300 yards for the first time in 2022 meanwhile the opposite was happening in accuracy dropping from 68% in 1994 to less than 58% in 2024 hitting that one extra Fairway just doesn’t get you much compared to that 20 extra yards in order to get the equivalent gain from

More accuracy golfer a would need to hit his ball about the same length but hit closer to 80% of his Fairways which is just really really hard to do side note on this that’s what made Calvin Pete’s game just so incredibly cool you can check out our video on Pete’s amazing

And underrated career right here this isn’t just a pro golfer thing it’s a principle that is even more true for amateur golfers like me and you one recent analysis by golf stat tracking firm Aros found that an average of 10 extra yards off the tea regardless of accuracy can automatically lead to one

Stroke Less on your scoring average simply put it’s the easiest and fastest way to get better that’s because amateur golfers are more inconsistent even from perfect lies so all things equal it’s just better to be a little closer to the hall this would be true even with older

Equipment golfers like Ben Hogan and Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicholas and Greg Norman and Tiger Woods they were the best players of their era and just look at how hard they swung at the golf ball they were doing this we just didn’t have any stats to realize it at the time the

Only way this really stops working is when when golfers start hitting lots and lots of foul balls because they’re trying to swing harder and by that we mean they hitting it behind a tree or into a bunker so deep that they can’t get out of it or into a water hazard or

Out of bounds sometimes you’ll actually see courses try to capitalize on this stuff a place like TPC Sor grass or one of my favorite courses in the world Harbor Town will pinch in Fairways with trees and OB and they’ll stick water and bunkers everywhere it sort of forces players around the these claustrophobic

Little corridors on courses like that longer hitters can just drop back and start hitting shorter clubs off the tea while shorter hitters may be forced to roll the dice and hit more drivers think about tiger Royal Liverpool hit two drivers all week if he didn’t hit the

Ball as far he wouldn’t be able to do that it’s why you see golfers nowadays lifting heavy weights to bulk up and intentionally trying to make faster back swings and wider back swings and ditching their back swing pauses and lifting their left heel and pulling more drivers on holes and switching to longer

Driver shafts and doing lots of speed training sessions all of this is in the pursuit of getting longer because it plays to the one ultimate truth in golf that The Closer you are to the hall the more likely you are to hit your next shot into the hole that’s true at the

Pro level and it’s especially true at the amateur level which brings us back to Bryson D shambo’s win Winged Foot Bryson had declared at the start what he was going to do he was going to get big and strong he was going to get wild and

He was going to win because of it he launched his drives into or near the Fairway and then nudged it towards the green and tried to make the putt he did this all week over and over and over again and even since he’s slimmed down in recent years it’s a strategy he still

Uses just look at the way he shot 58 on the Liv tour last year it’s close it’s incredible absolutely incredible [Applause] 58 almost instantly the debate about distance and how valuable it was was settled and it mainstreamed what for some was a hard accepted fact that like

It or not distance was that important a lot more important than accuracy the more of it the better always and for everyone and yet golf is never quite that simple which brings us to that little known fact I promised about Bryson’s win while we were all distracted by his driver that week Bryon

Finished inside the top three in Strokes gained approach and strokes gained around the green then on Sunday he led the field and strokes gained putting his driving strategy grabbed the headlines but it was his other clubs that week that brought his win over the finish

Line so yes distance is King in Gulf you listening to this you should work really hard to get more of it even a little bit would go a long way but golf is just too wonderful and complicated and weird game for that to be the only thing that

Matters the green RI has played host to a weekend of golfing Genius