GolfSpy MPR

Intro will be up shortly, but I'm looking forward to having an interesting angle on this. My current putter was also an MGS review: the Edel EAS. Should be fascinating to compare two giants of the torque-balanced putting world.

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Smoked pulled pork on toasted ciabatta, shredded pepper jack, red onion, cilantro, BBQ sauce and horseradish.

We'll be watching a bit later this afternoon. But for the morning, Kirke's donning his green jacket:

One photo update: from yesterday, we made a copycat recipe for Chick-Fil-A chicken, with buttermilk biscuits. We added strips of bacon, and then maple syrup mixed with chipotle hot sauce. They were incredible!

Opening day here is likely within the next couple of weeks. Was able to stop at a course a little less than an hour away yesterday and hit balls outside for the first time this year. Took some video of Kirke but not of myself. This is from my garage last night. In general, I'm pleased with where my swing is right now as the season approaches. Would like to tweak it a touch so it's a little less laid off at the top. Two reasons: it would allow a touch more speed (bigger arc of the clubhead) and it gives a touch more time/room for shallowing in transition. PXL_20240413_011551162~2.mp4

There are several I could name, but I think topping the list will be Tales From Q School by John Feinstein. I've enjoyed everything by Feinstein that I've read, but TfQS tells what are, in my opinion, the best stories of the most dramatic pivot point in golf. So many of the guys profiled in the book are at the point of their careers in which they either make the Tour or start pursuing a different course of life. A great read.

At 8, my advice is: allow her to enjoy the game more or less the way that she wants to enjoy the game. It is, fundamentally, a game. It is entertainment. If she seems to enjoy hitting balls on the range, if that's fun for her, that's great. As a parent of a few children who enjoy the game at various levels, there may come a point, closer to high school, in which I would press a child of mine who might be able to open some doors with golf to make responsible use of his talents, but until then: enjoy the time with your child, and make things fun.

For golf nuts, the Masters is like a holiday, but one that stretches over (now) a little more than a week. I think we can say that, at the very least, Masters week now begins with the final round of the Augusta National Women's Amateur and it extends through the final round of the Masters. So the question: how would you rank all the days of Masters week+? Saturday¹: @anwagolf Final Sunday¹: @DriveChipPutt Final Monday: people arrive? Tuesday: Practice, Champions Dinner Wednesday: Par 3 contest Thursday: Ceremonial tee shots, Rims 1 Friday: Round 2 Saturday²: Round 3 Sunday²: Final round, Green jacket ceremony My ranking: 1. Sunday²: the best, for sure. Appointment viewing, enduring memories. 2. Thursday: getting up Thursday morning is like Christmas for golf. 3. Saturday¹: the first time each year we get to the see the course. 4. Sunday¹: I'm biased, because my kids participate, but I love the DCP final round 5. Wednesday: the Par 3 contest, especially with all the kids, is just a lovely thing. 6. Saturday²: moving day at the greatest golf tournament. 7. Friday: I'm watching, for sure, but not quite the same punch as the other days. 8. Tuesday: Masters on the range is fine, interviews are sometimes interesting, I like the Champions Dinner picture. 9. Monday: I'm glad people have come. So what's your ranking?

Sounds tasty, but unless you're doing some serious cooking this upcoming Sunday, this isn't quite the question of the thread. I think we've got threads about what your champions dinner would be. This is, what are you actually eating as you watch the Masters this Sunday?

Got any food plans for the upcoming weekend? For the past few years, our family has made a tradition of making things from the Masters menu for our final round viewing. Mostly, our main course has been either fried chicken sandwiches or pulled pork sandwiches. This year, our current plan is to make chicken biscuits on Saturday morning (church on Sunday makes breakfast prep less an option). So we'll start watching moving day at Augusta with our best attempt at a Chick-Fil-A chicken biscuit, likely with bacon and a maple/hot sauce drizzle. To be consumed with a good mug of home-roasted, fresh ground coffee. On Sunday, we'll do pulled pork BBQ sandwiches, probably with red onion and cilantro. Side of potato chips, washed down with Georgia's own Coca-Cola. For desert, we're going to make peach ice cream sandwiches and caramel pecan popcorn. So that's our plan? What's yours? Nothing special? Ordering pizza? Buying the Taste of the Masters package?

Big, big fan of the GrooveIt, but I had the same problem. Especially for rounds when I took a cart, it would go in a pocket rather than on the magnet. But last year, I ended up buying myself the GrooveIt mini. No water spray, but the brush itself is supper tiny (and therefore doesn't weigh enough to get jarred off the magnet). It should be my go to for a long time.

This is a cousin to this golfer rule: when flying in a window seat, your goal is not only to look for golf courses, but to try to figure out the routing.

Counterbalanced at 37", with heavier headweight. ACCRA Black shaft, Garsen Quad Tour 17" grip. 69° lie angle, though I need to dig a bit more there to confirm.

I currently own both a SkyTrak+ and a Mevo+. Both companies have been very good to work with and have, in different ways, been very generous to me and our family. At some point, I intend to do a head-to-head video review of both devices. But cutting to the chase: if I were sentenced to a desert island and could only take one, I'd just flip a coin. I suspect that's a really frustrating answer, but they're both great devices, and each has strengths (and weaknesses) in ways that make having both really worthwhile. For the Mevo+ (with Pro Package and Face Impact upgrades): ALL THE DATA! I love this aspect of the Mevo+. If you know what all the data points mean and how to use them, the Mevo+ just gives you way more information than the SkyTrak+. Here are the data points that (at this moment) the SkyTrak+ gives: And here's the Pro Package, to which you can had the Face Impact location: The Mevo+ supports no-ball speed swings, including full integration to the Stack System app. The ability to swing and immediately have your speed in the app without doing anything else is a little thing that, once you have it, you'd never want to give up. The native FlightScope software is incredibly full-featured for analysis: multiple windows (on PC) with different data, swing videos, integration of force plates and FocusBand. Being able to set target ranges for specific data points is a sweet feature as well. For those with kids: having a radar-based LM that sits behind the hitting area is good for peace of mind. My SkyTrak+ has already been hit by several less-than-ideal shots (grateful for the protective case), including one that sheared a plastic screw off the case. Radar is definitely an advantage here. FS doesn't charge subscription fees! You buy the Mevo+, you have access to all the features at the level you purchased from that point forward. I love this. As for negatives: the Mevo+ is fusier to set up than the SkyTrak+. It obviously requires far more space, with 8 feet behind the ball and 12 feet of flight. When I plop the SkyTrak+ down for a session, I'm normally within about a degree or so of it being correct just setting it next to the hitting mat. The Mevo+ needs to be in the right place behind the ball, angled the correct way, with the kickstand out the right amount. It's just more tedious; almost always, if I just have a few minutes and I want to hit balls, I'm going to grab the SkyTrak+ for this reason. Putting isn't good on either device, but it's worse on Mevo+ (at least for me, at least right now). There's a bug in Mevo+/GSPro in which putts over, say, 20 feet will launch 75+ feet. A little static electricity in your sim area can really throw it off. Again, the SkyTrak+ isn't awesome for putting either (I almost always play autoputt with both devices), but it's more usable than the Mevo+. The Mevo+ is a little more finicky about picking up shots from my little kids. So while it's less likely to get hit by a stray ball, we also have a lot of "oh, it didn't pick that one up, try again" moments. The SkyTrak+ seems to be more friendly about those poorly struck little shots. For the SkyTrak+, obviously some of these are already suggested above: Having face and path data makes it a massive upgrade over the OG SkyTrak if you're trying to improve your game. The native SkyTrak app is much more user-friendly and simple than the FS app. If you subscribe (more on that), the range easily lets you define a target green and then randomize how far away it is with a range of distances. I probably do this more than any other one thing in my garage: set the SkyTrak+ down, correct, ask for greens from 25-100 yards, and practice partial wedges. The simple competitive games (closest to the pin, target golf, long drive) are easy enough. The skills assessment is also a staple of my practice, and the bag mapping and wedge matrix are also well-executed. The depth of the FS software isn't there, but the simplicity and polish is very good. As I mentioned above, the SkyTrak+ seems to work better picking up shots from my youngest children. For me, this is a big plus: I like when they're having fun. Again as mentioned above, putting on SkyTrak+ is better than Mevo+. I think it gets the speed right almost all the time. Occasionally, it reads really odd pulls or pushes; we have some mini golf putting courses in an app (Creative Golf/Golfissimo), and they would be a little more fun without these idiosyncrasies. On the negatives, I don't love subscription models, though I understand the benefit. For the SkyTrak+, you're going to want to plunk down the $130/year for the package that unlocks all the features of the ST software; otherwise, all you can do is hit balls on the range and see the results (no sim software, no movable targets, no skills test, etc.). So there's (at least) some of my thoughts on these two devices. If you have any specific comparison questions, ask away. I think they're both great devices, and I recognize that it's a crazy privilege to own both, and I'm grateful for it.

After an uncharacteristic patch of warm weather up here, winter came back from the last few weeks. So today, with the temperature up near 50°, I took the opportunity to get into the garage to get in a bunch of practice. I started like I normally do: setting up SkyTrak+ with random yardages, 25-100 yards. It's my favorite warmup, and keeps my wedge game as the best part of my game. Eventually, my 6-year old daughter joined me, and she's really developing a nice swing: After she got in some swings, Kirke joined me for nine holes of a pitch and putt course. I finished the back nine (after he went to play basketball) on a tear, shooting nine under for nine holes (auto-putting, which obviously makes a huge difference). I then did my Stack session for the day, which ended up being pretty meh. Just wasn't feeling it; dropped from a Stack speed of 110 and 108 in the past two sessions to 103. Probably should have called it at that point, but decided to try some driver (no ball) swings to see if I could find some speed. I did: this is Mevo+ recording my fastest ever swing with a driver: The key feel I ended up finding: getting my hands much, much higher in the backswing. Wrapped up my practice hitting some balls on the Mevo+, wanting to see if that backswing would translate to a normal golf swing. Took a few attempts to get everything together, but then hit one of the sweetest SW shots I've ever hit: The forecast around here is looking promising: highs around 50° for the foreseeable future. Really looking forward to getting in a bunch of practice the next few weeks before opening day up here.

In an ideal world, I think most of us would prefer to do a full putter fitting, brand agnostic, static body measurements, SAM Puttlab, Quintic, etc. The putter would be custom-built, we'd have 10 weeks to test on course, it could be brought back for tweaks or an overhaul. And it would all cost $20, putter included. But let's wake up, despite how nice that dream is. For most of us, buying putters is a process that falls, to varying degrees, short of this ideal. So this is a two-part question: what's your normal process right now for buying a putter, and what's your process for testing and deciding what putter is going in your bag? For me: I've had a single putter fitting, for my Edel EAS 4.0 test here. What I was most happy about, in that fitting, is that the fitter confirmed most of what I had found out about myself through years of trial and error. I'm very settled in to a 34" putter length. I aim to the right and pull putts back online. I tend to like my putts on the heavier side. I prefer slightly large putter grips that have clear "feels" of square. Because I'm pretty confident of these things, I feel OK about buying putters online that fall within certain ranges, with the expectation that they'll be reasonable for me. The last putter I bought (an Odyssey 2-Ball Ten) was of this sort: pulled the trigger when I saw a deal. As for deciding which putter goes in the bag, my putter testing includes the following: I'm big on using both Blast and HackMotion to see what my tendencies are with any putter. In the very near future, I should be receiving an ExPutt; that will definitely become part of my putter testing, pitting putters against each other to see which is producing better results. Once the course opens, using the putting section of the Stack app to see which putter, over time, produces the best SG numbers. And then the acid test: on course performance, especially from inside 6' (tracked by Across, putt distances entered manually). Loosing strokes on short putts in the quickest way for a putter to go from in the bag to back in the basement rack. All this to say: what's your most common process for choosing/buying and putter? And how do you choose which putter goes in your bag?

Kirkland Signature would have this giant indoor range called Costco. But for some reason, you'd be asked to leave when you use their wedges to hit the range targets, which look like giant plastic bins of cheese ball snacks. EDIT: After posting the above AI image, I noticed the very awkwardly placed wedge on the golfer. Apparently, a worker behind him is taking drastic action to end the destruction he's causing.

Every day you go to the Ben Hogan range (called The Dirt), you have to start by looking for a sign: open, closed, under new management.

XXIO and Honma would team up for a range called "Lighten Your Pockets." The entire range would be suspended from helium balloons to highlight just how lightweight their products are. And it would cost $250 an hour for a bay.

PXG's range would have golfers at both ends, firing at each other. Former Marine Bob Parsons insisted that this would make the range more xtreme. EDIT: I forgot to name PXG's range, but I can't improve on this name suggested on Twitter:

So @Shankster's somewhat contrarian Top Golf opinion got me thinking... In his post, he alluded to his dislike of Callaway. Obviously, Callaway owns Top Golf (indeed, it appears to be the most profitable part of their business). TaylorMade has Drive Shack. So if other OEMs had similar venues, what would their names be and how would they differ from Top Golf/Drive Shack? I'll start: I'm thinking that PING's version would be the Golf Vault. And in a nod to the user-friendly reputation of PING's clubs, the targets would be like bumper-bowling, with guides that funnel your balls into the targets.

I, for one, appreciate the curmudgeonliness of this post.

I could go both ways. I miss far too many short putts, and the most nerve-wracking are the short sliders. Having a way to practice those, at least for me, would be pretty valuable.

I think he'd agree!