When the celebrations following Danny Willett’s Masters victory had subsided, along with the headache from an epic all-nighter, he tweeted a number of public thank yous – to friends, sponsors, his caddie and, intriguingly, a British analytics company called 15th Club, for helping him “prep better for course strategy”.
A year ago 15th Club did not exist. Now it has a major champion on its roster. For good measure the company is also helping Lee Westwood, who finished joint runner-up at Augusta, and Darren Clarke, the Ryder Cup captain, with Europe’s preparations. The 15th Club Twitter page reveals its mission statement: “We help professional golfers win by applying intelligence and context to performance data.” So far it seems to be working.
Blake Wooster, 15th Club’s chief executive, speaking from his smart office in London’s Hatton Garden, stresses that he does not want to overplay its role in Willett’s success. But he is convinced that analytics leads to gaining small edges that can bring major results.
Jacob Nichols, 15th Club’s head of golf intelligence, illustrates this with a simple fact. If a professional is able to lower his shots per round by even half a stroke, he will increase his earnings potential by 73%. “By coincidence, that’s how much Danny’s golf has improved since we started working together,” adds Wooster.
Willett’s public acknowledgment is a sign of the game’s growing analytics revolution. Not so long ago professionals used to rely on statistics such as greens in regulation and putts per round to assess their game. That changed when Mark Broadie, a professor of business at Columbia Business School, used an analysis of four million golf shots on the PGA Tour between 2003 and 2012, to show these numbers could be misleading.
The first chapter of his book, Every Shot Counts, published in 2014, rips apart assumptions long regarded as sacrosanct, including Bobby Locke’s famous maxim: “Drive for show, putt for dough”. As Broadie points out, US PGA tour professionals average 29 putts per round, which makes people overly stress its importance. Yet nine of those putts occur within two and a half feet, where pros make the hole 99.5% of the time. And how many putts over 21 feet does a tour golfer sink in a four-round tournament, he asks. “Five? Seven? The average is only 1.5.”
In fact long driving and iron play turn out to be more important. Broadie illustrates this with a startling example: “If a low-handicap golfer had Tiger Woods do all of the putting, the gain would be about 2.2 shots per round,” he says. “But having him hit all shots over 100 yards would lower the score by about 9.3 shots per round.”
Inevitably this will bring comparisons with Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s tale of how Billy Beane improved the fortunes of the Oakland A’s using better analytics to scout and analyse players. And Broadie has also popularised Strokes Gained – a measure that allows a golfer to understand better where he gains or loses ground with his peers compared with traditional statistics. Say, for example, a golfer one-putts from eight feet. The US PGA Tour average from that distance is 1.5 shots. So a one-putt gains 0.5 strokes, while two-putt loses 0.5 strokes.
As Nichols explains, Willett’s victory at the Masters, which was played in 14.6 strokes better than the field, was based on success in two key areas. “It was largely achieved with superior performance on putts (+5.6 strokes gained – 6th best) and approach shots (+4.9 strokes gained – 3rd best),” he says. “However, his performance gained strokes on the field on all types of shots (drives, short game, approach shots, and putts).” Jason Day ranked as the best putter in Augusta (+10.3 strokes gained) but his approach shot play did not measure up well against the field. So much for putts for dough.
How might data have helped Willett at the Masters? Understandably 15th Club, which is an offshoot of the leading football analytics agency 21st Club, does not want to give away all its secrets. But both Willett and his caddie, Jonathan Smart, use its software, which can help improve decision-making on the course, and Wooster gives a hypothetical example. “Say, after a good drive at a par-five, a player was unsure whether to lay up or go for the green,” he says. “We can give some probabilistic data – based on the ball’s lie, wind and the strength of the player’s hitting – which might say 60% of the time golfers who go for the green on this hole score lower than those that lay up from a similar position to you.”
Before Augusta Willett and Smart also asked for help improving their decision-making. As Nichols explains: “They wanted to know how the field had played certain holes last year, and in particular which areas to play the ball to when they got into difficulties to give the best chance of recovering. Based on past data we were able to do that and help shift the odds in their direction.”
It appears to have paid off. Willett ranked a respectable tied-18th in birdies or better (13) at Augusta but was a long way behind Spieth who hit 22 birdies or better. But on the flip side Willett made only eight bogeys all week. To put that into context, the field made bogey or worse on almost 26% of their holes; Willett on only 11%.
What makes this story more remarkable still is that 15th Club did not exist until very recently. An old friend of Wooster’s, Duncan Carey, who was the head pro at Astbury golf course, where Clarke was also an ambassador, suggested the pair should meet. Wooster did not expect much from the meeting but, when he showed Europe’s Ryder Cup captain the work that 21st Club had done for some of Europe’s leading football sides, Clarke replied that he had to have something similar.
After researching golf analytics in more depth, Wooster discovered that many of 21st Club’s methodologies from football could be adapted to golf. He told Clarke he was ready to help. They came up with a name and built a team of analytics experts and soon had their first test, at the Eurasia Cup in Malaysia in January. The match was expected to be tight. However, Clarke trusted 15th Club to help choose his pairings for foursomes and fourballs based on how the data suggested the players could complement each other, and was rewarded when Europe romped home by 18½ to 5½.
Clarke, who had spent his downtime over Christmas poring over a 48-page pre-tournament document compiled by 15th Club, was lavish in his praise afterwards, saying it had “everything you could imagine: the golf course, pairings, performance under pressure, consistency, which order the players should tee-off in, who drives the odds, the evens, the best fourballs, the best foursomes – everything conceivable”.
It was in Malaysia that 15th Club also met Willett and began what has proved a very fruitful partnership. As Wooster explains, “Beneath that happy-go-lucky exterior he is very determined, focused, precise and methodical. At the Eurasia he was in the gym every morning and watching what he was eating. And he was the only player who had his own fitness coach with him. Clearly he takes his performance very seriously and is focused on embracing information that he feels can give him an edge.”
15th Club is growing fast and now works with 30 golfers but Wooster insists the company is not getting carried away. “Like in football there is no silver bullet with golf analytics,” he says. “99% of it comes down to how the player is able to execute the shot. But our data can help them make better decisions and nudge the odds in their favour. And small advantages can reap enormous rewards.”
