According to Dan, he did not leave the putting green for the first several months. He told me 8 months, but on his blog I read 5 months. Either way, he did nothing but putting during that time.

Its funny, i'd be in the mindset of 'holy crap, he's gotta put in a lot of time, how do i make this as fun and interesting as possible for him??' LOL, this guy throws him on a putting green... Good job, coach.

Dear lord. I would bet he will have trouble ever breaking 80 competitively. What a great marketing gimmick he created though. If he said he was just trying to break 80, it wouldn't get the press. Saying his plan is to turn pro and make it through Q-School draws attention, even from the naysayers like myself.

The more I think about this, the more it is a complete f*c*ing joke. I know guys who are such superstars that have had trouble making it through Q-School. These are guys who were #1 on their college team and won amateur tournaments.

And of course he will say it is about the journey because anyone with a moderate knowledge of what it takes to compete at the highest scale knows he doesn't even have a .00000001% chance. He has no chance.

I don't even find it that special or unique. There are a ton of guys at my club that took up golf later on in life and play non-stop. 99% suck. There are a few that get really good, but light years away from being at a pro level.

I think everyone agrees here that there is literaly a 1 in a trillion chance of him making the PGA tour (no im not exaggerating). The question is, what handicap do you see him plateauing at and why?

As I said, my guess is a 3, mostly because i dont think his coach is teaching him the right technique.

Great thread.

The only thing I find tilting is comparing overall athleticism to the golf swing. The two are not related imo. Sure there is some overlap, but not a lot.

Curious why you think overall athleticism doesn't translate to the golf swing. I don't know many good golfers who aren't also decent at other sports and I think you can see in the rising generation on Tour.

I think it translates a little, but not at the level that people suggest. You can take the best athletes in the world, and they may not have the ability to put together a great golf swing regardless of instruction (see most retired NBA/NFL/MLBers). Conversely, there are plenty of great swings on tour owned by guys who suck at other sports (see Woods, Tiger).

I think the two are unrelated. Being an athlete doesn't mean you have "golf athleticism" and vice versa. I do agree that it's easier to be one without the other, but only slightly.

I don't understand. I have no idea really if Tiger sucked at other sports(did he even pay any seriously past the age of 10?) But Tiger is definitely very athletic.

I'm just kind of shocked that if you took 100 randoms that picked up golf and 50% were "athletes" and 50% weren't, you don't think the "athletes" would have a huge advantage?

I am pretty sure Tiger is a good all around athlete from what I hear...why do you say otherwise? I know he is good at tennis, track, swimming and basketball. Ping pong too if you call that a sport.

I think you guys are being too harsh on the whole putting for months thing - I started golfing a bit over 2 years ago and I've made good progress, but I never worked hard on putting and now I think I am a really bad putter, and its frustrating because I have a lot of bad habits that are hard to break. If Dan ever wants to even get to the scratch level he certainly will have to be a strong putter and it sounds like he has good habits, a nice stroke, etc.

It also was probably an easy and valid way for the instructor to see if Dan really was committed to the 10k hours idea, in the grand scheme of things the hours he spent practicing putting will not be a huge % of his total practice time, and it taught him how important the short game is for good players, even though he wasn't a good player yet.

What a lot of people here aren't taking into account is the mental effect this specific process of learning has. When 99% of golfers learned to golf, they grabbed the big stick and went to the range and figured it out how to make contact with the ball on their own. THEN they (if at all) went to get instruction. Not many people show up to a golf lesson having never swung a club before.

Dan played with doc the other day and doc said that his mechanics and mindset were pretty darn good. It seemed like he was missing experience. No one but doc has really mentioned that the score he shot was done having hit driver like, a handful of times and had never even touched his 3wood before. I can see where it would take a bit to get the feel for a longer club. Hell, I go to the range and warm up with a wedge and if I go straight to the driver, skipping some middling club in there, I can't always dial it in right away. It usually takes a few balls to "get it". Now imagine having never had time to get acclimated with a driver after basically ONLY USING A WEDGE FOR A YEAR AND A HALF.


If he's allowed to start using all his clubs and continue to get instruction like he has, I foresee this guy breaking 80 very soon depending on the Atlanta weather allowing him to continue at this pace.

I got side tracked there, but the point I was trying to make is that I feel the heart of the experiment is to approach learning the game in a different way. Dan is learning to score with a limited number of tools. As he adds more tools (and he becomes better at using them in general as time goes by), he will be able to score better. His brain will be set on scoring, not "outdriving" or getting in any other sort of pissing contest with his fellow competitors. I'm very interested in how this method affects his mental game.

Ping pong is more of q sport than track and swimming.

Trying to find the video of Tiger playing basketball back in 98 or so. He was pretty horrible by rec-league standards let alone anything else.

NWC, I'm not saying 100 athletes wouldn't have an advantage over 100 non-athletes. What I'm saying is that 100 randoms vs. 100 athletes would yield similar results given the same circumstances. I just think there the golf swing calls for a different type of athleticism than other sports.

I gotta say I agree and disagree with you on this one.

I heard Notah Begay say Tiger was "awful" at basketball - actually that's the censored version! I've never seen him play, but I've heard it's not pretty. That being said, I've also heard great athletes say Tiger is one of the best pure athletes they've ever met.


On this, though I have to disagree. I'm fortunate to teach & play with a lot of ex-athletes, and it is really amazing how much better their overall motion is than the average person with the same amount of experience. I know everyone points to Barkley, but I think he's the exception (fwiw, I played several rounds with him when he first started & his swing was much better then). While many of their swings may not be "technically" great, they have a great knack for getting the ball to go where they want. I would dare to say, if you took an NFL quarterback and they spent the amount of time on golf that they did with other sports they would be very successful. I know it's been discussed in other threads, but the trend is definitely to see more "pure athletes" moving towards golf as their primary sport, but I would also agree that it is one of the few sports that size, speed, and strength has less of an impact on performance.

The idea that athleticism doesn't translate to the golf swing is a fraud on which a multi-billion dollar industry is based.

The golf swing is an athletic action that requires excellent motor skills, core strength, and hand eye co-ordination to be successful. Natural ability contributes to all of these. Further to this, temperament contributes the ability to set up repeatedly i nteh same position over the ball and swing with a consistent tempo. This also relies on natural ability.

Tell me how you feel about that after you spend 5 months , 6 hours a day restricted to a putting green. You've gotta take into consideration the fact that the same point could have been proven by doing it for one week, and also .. how much is enough??

The instructor turned it into his own experiment rather than Dan's experiment. There's a difference.

If anyone following this thread is interested, you can see a couple good shots of Dan's current swing on his latest video blog. Go to www.thedanplan.com and at about 1:55 into the video there's some clear shots of his swing. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised, for a guy who has only been swinging a club for around 9 months, it's a pretty solid action.

Thought I'd share if anyone wanted to see his "action."

Great thread. Right up my alley as I didn't start real golf until I was 25. I sorta did the Dan Plan, not by choice, but out of necessity. So here it is. No conclusions. Just facts.

I'd played about 8 full course rounds up until I was 25 and had sporadically played par 3 courses as I grew up which I really enjoyed. I played a number of the par 3's in England in the late 70's some of which were damn amazing and didn't mind in the least a kid from Canada going rd and rd all day. A par3 located right in the city of Torquay in the south of England was groomed like freakin Augusta, perfect white sand and all. With a wedge a and putter I was always around par at that point but had almost no exp with any longer clubs.

A serious hip injury while playing hockey ended my tennis playing/teaching days (call myself a state level player) and it brought me out to a par 3 a few months after my injury. At first swinging a wedge hurt but within a year was up to swinging about 95 mph hitting reasonably consistent 3 woods. The first year I almost played exclusively at par 3's and executives. (usually 9's with a few short par 4's) and 3 or 4 over would the norm. Next season I started full courses and my first handicap was a 12 and by seasons end an 8 and to 5 the next season to finally to 2.5 the season after that.

Like Trout I was an 85% high school athlete but was highly competitive and almost always the team leader excelling in any hand-eye game. The racquet sports were money for me but also got to top of local levels in hockey, rugby, darts, pool, pinball, foosball whatever I could get my hands on.

Even when I was at my best I was 20 yds behind avg drivers and only could hit consistent yardages up to a 6 iron. The 5, 4 and 3 were hardly ever hit straight. My woods although short were reasonably consistent. Without my injury and starting earlier I feel a + handicap would have been achievable, beyond that who knows.

In good golf speak (scratch or better) I was a menace from 130 yds and in with my putting drawing compliments almost every time I stepped on the course. I was avg from 160, well below avg at 185 and about the same at 210. I'd be in the 30th percentile of drivers or worse.

One interesting thing about my game that I never could figure out was that I almost always hit the center of the clubface no matter what. It was the path I could never get right with the longer clubs.

@Everlastr you could have probably useda proper clubfitting with the long clubs.

Haven't even followed this thread, but I can tell you it definately does, coordination, balance, reach, feel, etc. Helps if you are tall too. I've played sports my entire life, basketball , football and baseball(college).......I probably have terrible golf technique in the eyes of golf pros out there, but I've always been able to drive the **** out of the ball but just teeing up and letting rip, I tribute that to being long 6'3 and having good athletiscim

Steven Levitt from Freakonomics just wrote a blog on Dan.

http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/01/...-the-pga-tour/

His take on starting Dan out putting is pretty much the same as most people in here.

"I understand the basic logic of starting close to the hole (most shots in golf, after all, do occur close to the hole), but to my economist’s mind, this sounds like a very bad strategy for at least two reasons. First, one of the most basic tenets of economics is what we call diminishing marginal returns. The first little bit of something yields big returns; the more you do of something, the less valuable it is. For example, the first ice cream cone is delicious. The fourth is nauseating. The same must be true of putting. The first half hour is fun and engaging. By the eighth straight hour, it must be mind-numbing. I just can’t imagine a person could focus that single-mindedly on putting, not just one day, but for months and months on end. Second, my own experience suggests that there are spillovers across different aspects of golf. Things you feel when chipping help inform the full swing. Sometimes I can feel what I should be doing with a driver, and that helps me with my irons. Sometimes it is the opposite. To be putting and chipping for months without any idea what a full swing is – that just seems wrong to me."

As a solid golfer moves towards scratch, by necessity he/she is required to shave strokes from somewhere. As the index moves closer and closer to zero, from where will those strokes be shaved?

His pubes.

I can see how that might make someone a scratch golfer.

This is poorly reasoned.

The problem of diminishing marginal returns is ever so poorly exemplified with an ice-cream analogy that isn't applicable to the circumstances of the golfer. The fourth ice-cream cone is nauseating because of one's natural stomach capacity or blood sugar levels.

This author tries to compare this with the concentration levels of the golfer whom he assumes is putting for eight hours straight. All this statement does is make clear that the author of this comment hasn't read the text which this experiment is based on and that the author has a poor understanding of the concept of 'deliberate practice'.

The golfer isn't simply putting for 8 hours straight as obviously anybody would be unable to concentrate for this period of time (the problem stated by the author). The golfer in this experiment is training in short sessions of a maximum of 90 minutes as is suggested by the 'deliberate practice' concept.

Diminishing returns aren't a problem for the golfer. Diminishing returns mean that exponentially more time must be devoted to gaining skill and results when one's own skill level are higher, which is exactly what the golfer is aware of and addresses in his blog. If there were no diminishing returns then everybody would be able to improve infinitely based on the time that they practice.

The fact that diminishing returns exist in golf only help the golfer because as the skill levels of the rest of the field converge, the idea is that the additional time the golfer puts in (10,000+ hours) will provide measurable returns that separate him from the rest of the field as an outstanding performer.