JUST AS MICHAEL LEWIS’S MONEYBALL CAPTURED BASEBALL AT A TECHNOLOGICAL TURNING POINT, BRETT CYRGALIS’S GOLF’S HOLY WAR TAKES US INSIDE GOLF’S CLASH BETWEEN ITS BELOVED ARTISTIC TRADITION AND ITS ANALYTIC FUTURE.
The world of golf is at a crossroads. As technological innovations displace traditional philosophies, the golfing community has splintered into two deeply combative factions: the old-school teachers and players who believe in feel, artistry, and imagination, and the technical minded who want to remake the game around data. In Golf’s Holy War, Brett Cyrgalis takes readers inside the heated battle playing out from weekend hackers to Tiger Woods.
At the Titleist Performance Institute in Oceanside, California, golfers clad in full-body sensors target weaknesses in their biomechanics, while others take part in mental exercises designed to test their brain’s psychological resilience. Meanwhile, coaches like Michael Hebron purge golfers of all technical information, tapping into the power of intuitive physical learning by playing rudimentary games. From historic St. Andrews to manicured Augusta, experimental communes in California to corporatized conferences in Orlando, William James to Ben Hogan to theoretical physics, the factions of the spiritual and technical push to redefine the boundaries of the game. And yet what does it say that Tiger Woods has orchestrated one of the greatest comebacks in sports history without the aid of a formal coach?
But Golf’s Holy War is more than just a story about golf—it’s a story about modern life and how we are torn between resisting and embracing the changes brought about by the advancements of science and technology. It’s also a story about historical legacies, the enriching bonds of education, and the many interpretations of reality.
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Praise for Golf’s Holy War
“Brett Cyrgalis has written a highly entertaining, very smart book about a maddening, very stupid game. You should read it.” —James Patterson
“A sophisticated and timely state of the game. . . . Rarely has a golf writer been as illuminating.”—Jaime Diaz of Golf Channel
"This fascinating book is an obvious hole-in-one for golfers and their coaches." —Publishers Weekly
“Golf’s Holy War shows and tells how and why with rare, true depth.” —Michael Bamberger of GOLF Magazine
“Golf’s Holy War is a fascinating read for anyone who cares about the state of the contemporary game.” —Tom Doak, golf course architect with four original designs ranked in Golf Magazine’s Top 100
“Golf’s Holy War describes this battle like an entrenched journalist describing a war.”—Brandel Chamblee of Golf Channel
Adapted Excerpts
The story goes that Ben Hogan had a “secret.”
In 1953, Hogan agreed to be interviewed for an article in a three-year-old magazine called Golf Digest. This was his first telling of the “secret,” a twenty-minute practice routine he did every morning.
“With his feet close together, the Little Man clamps his arms tight against his stomach [and] starts a short swing of a few inches, arms still close,” wrote the author, Lawrence Robinson. “Then he gradually lengthens the backswing a foot at a time. He does this for twenty minutes each day until he is taking a full swing, all the while from the close-to-the-body position.”
From there, the “secrets” kept coming.
Being Tiger Woods’ coach always held the mantle as the most important and distinguished instructor in golf. So when Sean Foley held that title in 2012, he gave a presentation to the Illinois PGA at a sleek convention hall outside Chicago. Joining Foley on stage was James Leitz, a lumbering man of Creole sensibilities, living his whole life hard against Lake Pontchartrain.
Foley had called Leitz out of the blue less than a year earlier, having seen a video on YouTube where Letiz explained the dense idea of the “D plane.” It helped to understand complex ball-flights laws, like why the divots always went left and the balls went straight when a young Foley would go set up camp behind the short par-3 15th hole at Glen Abbey during the Canadian Open. These laws had come to the forefront with the advent of omnipresent TrackMan machines, and one sat in Leitz’s garage hitting bay back at Pinewood Country Club in Slidell, Louisiana, under his desk that was piled high with four computer monitors and every other assortment of technology one could imagine.
“If someone hit it,” Leitz said, “I’d cry.”
As golf became a more quantifiable game, a strange word emerged into the lexicon: own. Tiger Woods famously said that only two players in the history of the game owned their swings — Ben Hogan and Moe Norman. But how can a person own a motion?
The connotation is of an ingrained and unbreakable confidence in mechanics. It is the reaching of the point where no outside influence — say, a coach — is needed.
And yet in this age of science and technology, which took a huge jump forward after Woods won his first major championship as a professional at the 1997 Masters, the golf swing evolved from being thought of as a malleable part of each person’s nature, to being envisioned as an entirely blank canvas. Golfers became programmable machines, and their hardware and their outside programmer — the coach — were considered the largest determinants of their success.
Amazing how just one word entering the lexicon can speak volumes. Even more amazing how that mind-set began — with one of the best baseball players ever.
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