JOHANNESBURG \u2014 Bryson DeChambeau hasn\u2019t always been great at, to borrow an old phrase, bringing the hay down where the goats can get it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been over a decade now that golf fans have tried understanding the physics lessons DeChambeau offers every time he and his caddie have a conversation about club choice. (As someone who has witnessed it plenty, they speak a different language than us!) And throughout some of those years, DeChambeau has been more inclined to brush over the more complicated stuff \u2014 think Coefficient of Restitution<\/a> \u2014 rather than dig into it, particularly in press conferences.\u00a0<\/p>\n But when pushed for more, when there\u2019s clear runway to dive into the details, it can be hard to get him to stop. As evidenced this week in South Africa, where DeChambeau teased out that he\u2019s driving it great, hitting his irons well and putting solid. The last frontier for his game before the Masters is \u201cdialing in\u201d his wedges.<\/p>\n \u201cKinda like I did back in \u201923 when I was just testing a bunch of drivers at the end of that year and then I found the driver I\u2019m using today,\u201d DeChambeau said. <\/p>\n And the driver he won the U.S. Open<\/a> with.\u00a0<\/p>\n What has become so incredibly clear is that dialing in equipment probably means more to DeChambeau than it does to the average Tour-level pro. It matters for everyone, but with DeChambeau the not-right fit can teeter on the edge of chaos. So what does \u201cdialing in\u201d wedges actually look like? I lobbed the question his way, laid out and, unsurprisingly, he spoke for the next three minutes.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a great question,\u201d he began. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot about strike point and how much turf is getting in between the face and the grass and mitigating that, managing that strike, and how you manage that strike is dependent upon how soft the turf is. If it presses into the ground a lot, if it doesn\u2019t, if it bounces off the ground like in Australia, it was really firm ground so it bounced off quickly. So I could throw it behind the ball quite a bit and then hit low on the face. If it\u2019s soft here, you hit just the same spot and it goes right under; you hit high on the face and it comes out with more spin and shorter and deader.\u201d<\/p>\n Considering the absolute dumping of rain that Steyn City has received in the last 24 hours, DeChambeau is right about the softness of the turf. Long strips of turf will be flying through the sky in South Africa. And that almost surely won\u2019t be the case in Augusta in a few weeks.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cSo trying to find a bounce that works for me, number one, that plays like firm conditions because I\u2019ve always played pretty well in firm conditions,\u201d DeChambeau continued. \u201cI\u2019m learning from [my teammates]. I see how they strike it. I see what they do, and I\u2019m learning a lot from my team, even though I\u2019m not necessarily asking because they\u2019re tired of me asking about wedges. They\u2019re just like, go to shorter wedges and normal clubs, which I\u2019ve tried, and I still suck with that.\u201d<\/p>\n DeChambeau has played one-length irons and used longer wedge shafts than normal for years. It works for him \u2026 but it\u2019s absolutely atypical. Those teammates sat next to him while he spoke and nodded their heads knowingly.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cBut I\u2019ll tell you that it\u2019s nice seeing how they strike the ball, the forward shaft lean, and where they\u2019re striking on the face is important,\u201d he continued. \u201cSo I think leading edge height to bounce is very, very important, depending on how soft the turf is.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the surface friction on the face is really important, how rough it can get. Funny enough, when the face gets rougher, it actually starts to spin less at a certain point, to the legal limit. Then, once you go past the legal limit, it starts spinning more and more. There\u2019s like a bell curve with it. It\u2019s kind of wild.<\/p>\n \u201cThen you can get scenarios where it\u2019s super slick face and then it\u2019s wet and slides and doesn\u2019t spin at all, and it has to spin.\u201d<\/p>\n Let that be a window into what DeChambeau\u2019s testing sessions ultimately look like. They go so far as to try to understand the weird bounds by which face friction starts to revert on its purpose of maximizing spin.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI unfortunately mis-hit my wedges quite a bit just because maybe I don\u2019t have the right bounce configuration,\u201d he continued. No one was interested in stopping him. \u201cMaybe the shape of the grind is a little different.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m trying some new wedges. They\u2019ve got almost a bubble on the bottom and it\u2019s been helping quite a bit. It helped last week.\u201d<\/p>\n Those new wedges are Bettinardi HLX 6.0 wedges<\/a>. He\u2019s 1-for-1 in converting victories<\/a> with them in the bag. But it sounds like he might change them out for new ones at any point. There are apparently plenty of options in play.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cGot a little more head weight on the wedges. We\u2019re cutting away things that have not worked for me, whether it be a softer shaft, shorter wedges, different type of torque in the head for contact, different types of grinds, lighter heads, no grooves to grooves to friction on the grooves. We\u2019re just going through everything as much as possible and trying to isolate the biggest problems in my wedge game and cutting those out as much as possible so I can be \u2014 shoot, if I\u2019m 5 more percent consistent, I have a better chance than what I did last year at the Masters.\u201d<\/p>\n Ah, yes. The 2025 Masters, forever remembered for Rory McIlroy\u2019s Grand Slam completion, and sneakily slept on that DeChambeau played in the final group and faded so quickly into the background because his iron play was not up to standard. Now he apparently has that mostly figured out, and the wedges are getting a proper moment under the magnifying glass.<\/p>\n \u201cI took that last Masters as an opportunity to learn how to become a better iron play and a better wedger,\u201d he said, coming to a close. \u201cI feel like most of it was there. Just a couple fine-tuning moments and continue to ball strike it the way I have and hopefully I give myself a good chance.\u201d<\/p>\n We\u2019ll see what that looks like in a few weeks.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n “><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"JOHANNESBURG \u2014 Bryson DeChambeau hasn\u2019t always been great at, to borrow an old phrase, bringing the hay down…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":548859,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,755,85],"class_list":["post-548858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548858\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/548859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}