Part IV of Brian Sommer’s look at launch monitora
The irony, of course, is that the better our measuring devices become, the more obvious their limitations become. Not technical limitations. Philosophical ones. TrackMan has improved. GCQuad has improved. Bushnell. Garmin. Rapsodo. Shot Scope.
Every generation measures golf ball numbers with greater precision than the one before it. Yet golf stubbornly refuses to become easier. If information alone produced excellence, this should be the greatest era of golf ever witnessed. Every driving range would be filled with scratch golfers.
https://spikeongolfandtravel.com/why-launch-monitors-cannot-save-golf/
https://spikeongolfandtravel.com/the-priesthoof-of-numbers/
https://spikeongolfandtravel.com/the-curious-business-of-key-statistics/
Every simulator bay would produce another touring professional. Every lesson equipped with a launch monitor would outperform the lesson given with nothing more than a bucket of golf balls and an attentive coach. Plainly, that has not happened.
Something else is going on. Perhaps the machine has simply been answering a different question from the one we have been asking.
The Management of Golf
One of the great unnoticed shifts in modern instruction is that golf has quietly become an exercise in management. Every club is assigned a precise yardage. Every wedge owns a number. Every launch window has an optimal range. Every spin rate has a target. Every practice session becomes another exercise in optimization. The golfer increasingly resembles an accountant conducting an audit. This is not accidental. Management has become the dominant metaphor of modern coaching. Manage your swing. Manage your emotions. Manage your expectations. Manage your statistics. Manage your dispersion. Manage your routine. Manage your confidence.
Soon enough, one begins trying to manage golf itself. The curious consequence is that very little golf remains. Management is not participation. Administration is not awareness. Optimization is not learning. A golfer can become extraordinarily skilled at managing variables while becoming increasingly disconnected from the living experience of playing the game.
Golf, unlike accounting, has the irritating habit of refusing to obey spreadsheets. The wind does not consult your launch monitor. The rough has never once checked your smash factor before deciding how the club will pass through it. A tucked pin remains blissfully indifferent to your attack angle. Reality continues behaving with its customary disrespect for our theories. That is not golf’s flaw. It is golf’s greatest virtue.
The game continually refuses our attempts to reduce it to a formula. It insists upon participation.
Verification Replaces Observation
Watch a modern practice tee. Not the technology. The golfers. The sequence has become almost ritualistic. A golf ball is struck. The golfer’s head immediately falls. The screen glows. Numbers appear. Judgment follows. Impact. Screen. Verification. Only occasionally observation. One begins to wonder whether golfers are still seeing their golf shots at all. Or whether they are waiting for permission from the machine before deciding what they experienced.
This is a subtle but profound reversal. The launch monitor was designed to support observation. Instead, observation increasingly serves the launch monitor. The golfer no longer asks, what did I notice? What surprised me? What was the golf ball teaching me? How did the strike sound? What did the turf reveal?
Instead, the machine supplies the answer before the golfer has even finished asking the question. Reality arrives second-hand. Not because the technology demanded it. Because we surrendered it. The Shot Scope LM1 did not ask to become an authority. Neither did TrackMan. Neither did GCQuad. They simply measured faithfully.
It was we who quietly promoted measurement from witness to judge. There is an important difference. One informs. The other governs. The machine has done precisely what its engineers intended. The older mistake belongs entirely to us.
What I Am Actually Trying to Learn?
People occasionally ask me what information I am looking for when I practice. The answer has changed dramatically over the years. I am no longer primarily interested in producing certain numbers. I am interested in discovering certain relationships. I want to know what happens before the measurable. What kind of attention preceded that shot? What was I actually aware of? Did I really see the target? Did I notice the breeze moving across the fairway? Did I sense the firmness beneath my feet? Was I responding to the golf course? Or was I responding to a memory? Was I creating a golf swing? Or allowing one?
Those questions rarely appear in instruction because they cannot be expressed as graphs. Yet they seem remarkably close to where golf actually lives. Launch monitors measure impact. I remain interested in what produces impact. They measure consequences. My curiosity remains with what precedes them. That is a very different inquiry.
The Most Dangerous Substitution
None of this makes me anti-technology. Quite the opposite. I enjoy launch monitors. I enjoy club fitting. I enjoy engineering. I enjoy understanding equipment. Curiosity is one of golf’s great pleasures. I shall continue experimenting with every interesting piece of technology that appears.
The Shot Scope LM1 will undoubtedly help many golfers. TrackMan deserves its reputation. GCQuad is a remarkable instrument. Bushnell, Garmin, and Rapsodo all represent extraordinary engineering. The problem has never been the technology. The problem begins when we quietly transfer authority to it. The launch monitor was supposed to become another source of information. Instead, it increasingly becomes the final authority. The coach was supposed to help the golfer see. Instead, the golfer begins seeing only through the coach. The routine was supposed to prepare the
golfer. Instead, the golfer begins believing performance depends upon the routine. Confidence was supposed to emerge from experience. Instead, it becomes another thing to manufacture.
This numbers pattern extends far beyond golf. Human beings have an extraordinary talent for allowing supportive things to become primary. Once they do, they cease supporting. They begin replacing. Perhaps that is the oldest mistake we ever make. The numbers map quietly replaces the landscape. The explanation replaces the experience. The system replaces the golfer. The launch monitor replaces observation. Not because any of those things intended to. Because certainty has always been more seductive than awareness.
Golf Still Refuses to Become a Spreadsheet
Perhaps that is why golf remains so endlessly compelling. It stubbornly refuses to become reducible. It refuses to fit neatly inside a launch monitor. It refuses to become a numbers spreadsheet. It refuses to become a swing model. It refuses to become an optimization problem.
Golf continues insisting that something immeasurable remains at its center. Call it awareness. Call it perception. Call it participation. Call it reality. The name matters less than the experience. The finest golfers have always possessed something deeper than technical knowledge. They possessed availability. They responded instead of rehearsing. They participated instead of administering. They encountered the shot instead of managing it.
That is not anti-science. It is simply remembering the proper order of things. Technology should illuminate reality. Never replace it. Data should inform awareness. Never substitute for it. Knowledge should deepen experience. Never stand between us and it. The launch monitor has done nothing wrong. It has measured faithfully. It has revealed precisely what its engineers intended it to reveal.
It is we who have committed the older mistake. We have mistaken measurement for understanding. Description for explanation. Management for mastery. And, perhaps most importantly, information for relationship. The purpose of golf has never been to produce beautiful launch monitor sessions. Nor perfectly optimized gapping charts. Nor ideal spin rates. Nor immaculate data sets. Those things can all be useful. None of them is primary.
The purpose of golf is still the same as it has always been. To stand before an uncertain shot. To meet it fully. To respond honestly. To discover something about the world. And perhaps, if we are paying close enough attention, to discover something about ourselves. Everything else launch monitors included should remain in service of that reality. Never its replacement.