Part III of Brian Sommer’s four-part series on launch monitors
Every generation invents its own priesthood. Once it was theologians. Later it became psychoanalysts. Today, increasingly, it is data interpreters armed with iPads. Observe almost any modern lesson. The golfer hits a poor shot. Nobody asks what the golfer noticed. Nobody asks what changed in the relationship between golfer, target, wind, and intention. Instead, everyone gathers reverently around the glowing screen.
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https://spikeongolfandtravel.com/why-launch-monitors-cannot-save-golf/
The numbers verdict arrives. Club path. Dynamic loft. Face angle. Attack angle. Spin axis. Peak height. Carry distance. The diagnosis has been delivered. Whether the diagnosis actually explains anything remains curiously unexamined.
This is the quiet genius of modern data. It provides explanations so rapidly that we seldom stop to ask whether they are explanations at all. Description and explanation quietly merge into one another. The distinction disappears. It should not. There is another curiosity worth noticing.
The old priesthood interpreted Scripture. The new priesthood interprets numbers. The function is remarkably similar. Each reassures us that reality has already been explained. Each spare us the discomfort of genuine inquiry. Each provide certainty where uncertainty once existed. The vocabulary has changed rather more than the psychology. Golf has not escaped humanity’s oldest temptation – t has simply digitized it.
The Great Category Mistake
Imagine asking a thermometer why someone is unhappy. The thermometer functions perfectly. It simply cannot answer the question. Launch monitors occupy much the same position. They are extraordinary instruments for measuring impact. We increasingly ask them to explain learning. Those are entirely different categories of inquiry. Learning is not merely the accumulation of information.
If it were, every golfer carrying a TrackMan would be scratch by Christmas. 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 occurring. Golfers now possess more information than any generation in history. Yet many remain astonishingly disconnected from their own experience.
They know their dynamic loft. They cannot describe what they noticed before swinging. They know their spin axis. They cannot describe the quality of their attention. They know their face angle. They cannot tell you whether they truly saw the shot they intended to play. This is not because they lack intelligence.
Quite the opposite.
It is because explanation has quietly displaced observation. Knowledge has replaced relationship. The map has begun masquerading as the landscape. That may be the great category mistake of modern instruction. We have mistaken what can be measured for what matters most. Launch monitor numbers tell us what occurred at impact. Golf asks a rather older question. What produced the impact? The answer does not live inside another number or series of numbers Nor another graph. Nor another optimization. It lives somewhere else entirely.
The Information I Am Actually Seeking
People occasionally assume that because I question launch monitors, I must dislike them. Nothing could be further from the truth. I enjoy them enormously. I shall continue using them. I shall continue experimenting with them. Technology is fascinating. It satisfies curiosity. Occasionally it reveals something genuinely useful.
The Shot Scope LM1, for example, will undoubtedly help golfers understand their carry distances, establish sensible yardages, monitor trends over time and even expose patterns they might otherwise have overlooked. Those are genuine strengths. They deserve acknowledgement.
But if I am honest, the information I am actually seek rarely appears on the screen. I am not primarily interested in whether my clubhead speed was 108 miles per hour or 109. I am interested in what kind of attention produced the swing. I am not primarily interested in my attack angle. I am interested in whether I was available to the shot. I am not primarily interested in smash factor. I am interested in whether I was responding to the golf course or manufacturing a golf swing. I want to know whether I noticed the breeze. Whether I sensed the firmness beneath my feet. Whether uncertainty remained alive. Whether curiosity remained alive. Whether I trusted what I actually experienced instead of what I remembered from the previous shot.
No launch monitor has ever measured any of those things. Not because the engineers failed. Because they cannot be measured. And that realization changes everything. It suggests that the most important part of golf begins long before impact, in a place no radar has ever reached, and no camera has ever photographed. Technology has become extraordinarily good at measuring consequences.
My curiosity remains with what precedes them. Because that is where learning lives. Not at impact. Not on the screen. But in the relationship that exists before either of them.