My Date with The Trackman

The Trackman has become a ubiquitous character on the golf landscape. From YouTube instruction videos to network broadcasts of PGA events, it can be seen churning out data you never even knew you produced.

Swing doctors use this Trackman data to tweak players and clubs alike; all in the search for the best strike possible.

But what can it tell your average golfer?

Long story short. I was sent a gift certificate to a national club fitting chain. I won’t use their name (They did not send it to me and I was not compensated in any way).

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I will tell you it was a very impressive place and I felt like a kid in a candy store. If you’ve ever wanted to test drive every club under the sun, this is nirvana. I firmly believed that – among the thousands of possible head and shaft combinations – my perfect driver lay somewhere among these racks.

Like most of you, getting off the tee in good shape is the difference between flirting with the low-80’s or running headlong into the mid-90’s. I knew I was losing strokes every round by being wild off the tee.

Today, I felt, was the first day of the rest of my golfing life.

The first step was to get a baseline off my Taylormade Original Mini Driver. I am a fan of this club. It’s really helped my tee game and I haven’t lost any yardage from my old M4. It’s smaller, has a smaller sweet spot, but really rolls out and has made my bad misses a little more palatable.

The first depressing stat the Trackman threw out was my sloth-like swing speed – 91 mph. This means that even with the perfect club head and shaft fitting, I will never hit a ball further than about 245 yards. It’s physics. I’ll need a serious tailwind, a big hill, a sprinkler head, or some combination thereof, to hit a Tour-length drive.

That’s a little depressing.

But, as they say, the numbers don’t lie.

So after hitting Taylormade, Ping, PXG, Callaway, and two different Titleist drivers which one stood out?

None of them. Not a single one.

My numbers with all of them were completely interchangeable. I liked how the Epic Flash felt, but that didn’t mean extra yards. I did not like the PXG at all, but it went just as long (or short in my case) as the others.

I felt bad for my club fitter. He thanked me for not scuffing the middle of a single clubface. That was the nicest thing he could come up with. I also had the good fortune of being next to a guy who was pumping 280-yard drives into the net. He was old enough to be my dad.

At the end of my session, we pulled up every swing from the last hour. Having only a cursory understanding of what the numbers meant, I knew one thing for certain: that golfer sucks.

My shot dispersion looked like a fat guy with measles. I was certain I was a sweeper but found I had a slightly descending blow. I thought I was an outside-in swinger, but that too was dispelled by the data. In short, I had been practicing all year to fix faults I didn’t have. Or perhaps I had fixed them, but now my new swing was worse than my previous bad one.

Who knows? Clearly, everything was a mess according to the data.

Optimism had me believing at least one of these setups was better than the others. Just give me a couple more yards and bring my dispersion into double digits. Not a huge ask.

Alas, modern golf technology couldn’t fix me. I am a golfing Humpty-Dumpty.

The final blow was delivered with the sad kindness of a country vet telling you your three-legged goat, who just got caught up in a thresher, might be at the end of his days.

“I think your best bet is to find a teacher and spend some time with them. Then come back and we’ll get you sorted out.”

Go into the light, Tripod Sam.

And so I will.

Next week I’ll be back to the range in the early dawn or the fading twilight. That – as Ben Hogan famously grumbled – is where the secret to the perfect swing lives. It’s in the dirt, not the Trackman.