In our world of golf, we finally have some proof of what most of us have thought for years….the key to lower scoring is distance, not putting! There is a great book out by Mark Brodie, a statistician, who has evidence that the correlation to your position on the PGA Tour’s money list is linked closer to Driver Distance rank than to putting rank.
The last 6 winners of the Straightest Driver on the PGA Tour… lost their Tour Card the same year.
We need to use our knowledge about Angle of Attack to help us maximize our driver distance. The following is a sample of optimum Launch Angles and Spin Rates that correlate to 3 different Angle of Attacks, -5, 0 & +5… with -5 equating to hitting the ball on a path that is 5 degrees downward. Zero would be flat and +5 is hitting the ball on the upswing.
If you’re going through a driver fitting, it’s imperative that the fitter knows your angle of attack. As you can see from the graph above, the launch angle for 85 mph varies from 9.3* up to 14* while the corresponding spin rates drop from 3,110 to 1,964. This is a huge variance that needs to be taken into account.
