23. Greg Norman & Mark Broadie: Why Golf Beats an Orgasm and Why Data Beats Everything

0:00Finding the music you love shouldn't be hard. That's why Pandora makes it easy to explore all your favorites and discover new artists and genres you'll love. Enjoy a personalized listening experience simply by selecting any song or album, and we'll make a station crafted just for you. Best of all, you can listen for free. Download Pandora on the Apple App Store or Google Play and start hearing the soundtrack to your life. It's smart to always have a few financial goals. And a really smart one you can set? Earning cash back on what you buy every day. And with Discover, you can. Get this. Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year.

0:37Seriously, all of it. And we trust you to make smart decisions. After all, you listen to this show. See terms at discover.com slash credit card.

0:53If you're a Freakonomics Radio listener, you might already know that I'm obsessed with golf. Here's Stephen Dubner. I am obsessed with how obsessed you are with golf. That is my obsession. I love, you are, you're nuts, Levitt. I mean, let's face it. I do love golf. I love golf more than any normal person could. I think I love golf because I really wanted to be good at it as a kid, and I completely and totally failed. And much of my adult life has been devoted to trying to undo the mistakes I made as a child.

1:33As a teenager, the one thing I wanted more than anything else was to be a professional golfer. Reality, however, was not kind to that adolescent dream. Forget about turning pro. I wasn't even good enough to play college golf. I quit soon after. Almost 20 years had passed when, on my 40th birthday, I hatched a preposterous plan. I decided I would take up golf again with the objective of finally realizing my childhood dream of turning pro, this time on the Champions Tour for golfers age 50 and over. That gave me exactly 10 years to go from below average to world class. Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt.

2:16I'm 53 now, and it probably won't surprise you that I never made the Champions Tour, despite investing an absurd amount of time and effort into the pursuit. It was, however, one of the most enjoyable escapades I've ever been on, but much less interesting and successful than the golf journeys of the two people I talk with today. My first guest is Greg Norman, the shark. He was the number one ranked golfer in the world for more than six years. Only Tiger Woods has held that top spot longer. And it's fitting that this episode airs on the weekend of the Masters Golf Tournament because for many golf fans, the most enduring memory of Greg Norman's career is the grace with which he handled the repeated misfortunes that denied him that championship.

2:59My second guest, Mark Brody, has achieved enormous success in golf, pursuing a very different path than Greg Norman. Mark is widely acknowledged as a world's expert in golf analytics. Through the thoughtful use of data, he's transformed the way just about everyone, including me, thinks about golf. My biggest challenge in today's conversations is to find a way to make them interesting to people who don't care about golf. When I first had the idea for a golf episode, I was confident I could do it. Right now, as I'm about to conduct these interviews, I honestly feel like there's a pretty good chance I'm going to fail in that regard.

3:43so i think people forget how good you were at golf it's unbelievable if you had to divide the credit for your success between natural talent hard work smart choices luck like what kind of percentages would you apply to those different traits from natural talent i didn't know i had it because first started off, I had a 27 handicap and got it down to scratch in 18 months. And about five years later, I won my first professional golf tournament. So natural talent was there, but I had no idea. I think a lot of my abilities came from my work ethic because I'm very much a determined individual. I'm a compartmentalized type of guy.

4:23So I stay extremely focused on things that I do. And I have a great saying called din and dip, do it now and do it proper. But I was a really good surfer. And I truly believe surfing and golf are very close in a lot of ways. And what I mean by that, Steve, is the proprioception in your bodies, right? You got to know where your body is in any given time on the surfboard. There's a lot of variables coming at you, the size of the wave, waves crashing down on you, wind pushing you around, the speed of the wave, but you're always planted. You're always stationary on the board, but the rest of your body's got to relax.

5:01No different to some degree with golf. You plant your feet on the ground and your upper body's got to be relaxed and you've got to have great rotation. And it's a perception as that board's moving around underneath your feet, you've got to feel that. So you've got to make these minute little corrections with what? Your abs, your glutes, your hamstrings, whatever. With a golf swing, it's the same. When you get to the top level, you can change your golf swing by a quarter of an inch on the downswing if you feel a little bit out because of your proprioception. You're very aware where your body is in space at any given time.

5:37It blows my mind that you went from a 27 handicap to scratch in 18 months. At the age of 40, I had a midlife crisis. I hadn't picked up a golf club in 15 years and I decided that I would try to make the champions tour and I spent the next I don't know seven years of my life for a guy who's got other jobs and stuff pretty single-mindedly trying to be a good golfer and I was able to get down to a three handicap by going down about two to three strokes a year the thought that you could go down 20 strokes in a year is there any other person on the planet who's ever accomplished that look I just know that I was very focused and getting my golf swing into a place where it was controllable number one manageable number two and there was a power swing too my coach said to me in the beginning great hit it as hard as you possibly can hit it and then we'll figure out how to hit it straight so most people try and hit the ball straight and then they want more power and they try and get the power out of their equipment instead of having the power already predetermined or pre-loaded in your system and then you scare yourself back so when i played the game even though i was one of the longest drivers in the golf ball, very rarely did I go at it 100%.

6:45When I look at the old footage of myself now, you can see that I was always at about 85%, never above 90 unless I really had to turn it on. And when I needed that extra distance, I could do it at the drop of a hat just by the rotation of my body. A lot of academic work has gone into studying practice and optimal approaches to improving at something. When you started, how did you maximize the feedback to improve so quickly? I think I probably just approached it, like I said, in compartmentalizing. If I felt something was not right with the technique, I would focus on that until I got it right. And if it took 10 ,000 hits, then it took 10 ,000 hits.

7:27If it took me four or five swings to feel, okay, I got it, then four or five swings and my confidence level was there. I never had any drills per se. I had my coach, obviously, when I was a professional, but I didn't have an entourage of people just trying to mentally get me prepared to be a professional or anything like that. I read a lot. I kept a lot of notes, referenced my notes and my improvements on my negativities with my goal swing and physicality and mentally. So I was always trying to climb a ladder to get to the top, but I never really wanted to get to the top because once you're there, there's only one way to go, and that's down.

8:07Now, practice must have been really important, obviously, as you were getting better. You're known for having practiced so hard, even when you were number one in the world. Was practice that important once you'd gotten that good? Oh, no, practice was the key. I estimate I've hit about 5 million golf balls in my career. I practiced more than I actually played. Occasionally, I'd go out and play 18 holes after I hit balls, but most of the time, I was just so tired from hitting 1 ,000 balls a day, plus that I didn't want to go play. Next was basically maintenance of your body afterwards. My practice routine was very regimented, very controlled.

8:44It was almost like a third, a third, a third in a lot of ways. A third of it was the middle irons to the scoring irons. A third of it was your longer irons to your three wood to your driver. And the last third was your short game. And I always balanced every single one of those segments out to make sure there wasn't anyone that's going to be a little askew because I didn't spend the time and effort on it. So when I played a round of golf in a tournament and I hit a poor five iron from a hanging lie, I go find a hanging lie on the driving range and hit 50 to 150 golf balls to figure out why I did it.

9:21You raise an interesting point there because most people's practice, certainly amateurs, all comes at a driving range off of perfect lies. But, you know, we're always in the rough. Did you spend a lot of time putting your balls under trees and hitting up from under trees and stuff? Or did you mostly, like others, hit off driving ranges with good lies? No, you hone your skills off a flat lie. But yes, I would practice out of divots. I'd practice out of downhill lies. I'd practice short swing from underneath the tree. I'd practice on my knees. I'd practice left-handed shots, one-handed shots. I'd practice in the rain.

9:54I'd practice in really high wind. You had to prepare yourself for whatever you may experience on the golf course. And I remember one of my early stages of my career, actually I was an amateur, to tell you the truth, there was a gentleman called Sommie Mackay, and I was on the driving range hitting balls, and he came up to me and he just picked up like 10 or 15 balls, and he just kept throwing them in the rough, or throwing them in a divot, or throwing them some funky lie. He says, you're never going to have a perfect lie on every shot, except if you're on a tee of a par three. So that's how I started.

10:36I assume you must have loved golf at the beginning. Was that a love affair that lasted or faded by the time you were at the top? Was it fun? Oh, yeah, it was fun. Hitting the perfect golf shop is better than having an orgasm, right? I mean, it really is a great feeling because if you've got 187 yards and if you want to be really precise, you've got 187 and a half yards and you hit it flush in the middle, you hit the perfect trajectory, you landed at 187 and a half yards and you go, wow, how cool did that feel? And look, even in my heyday, if I hit three to five perfect shots around, I was really happy.

11:16And that's including putts and everything. You have a 90 foot putt, for example, it's very difficult to hit a perfect solid 90 foot putt. And when you do and you get it in the sweet spot and the timing with your hands and the rotation of your shoulders and the stillness of your head and the quietness of your brain and the softness of your body, it is really a great, great sensation. And so it was always that, to me, you were just chasing more orgasms, I guess, is probably the best way of going because it was such a wonderful feeling. Did it feel better to do that in front of a crowd of 20 ,000 people or were you just as happy to do that alone on the range?

11:54alone on the range is just the same right because when you're playing in front of 20 ,000 people you don't see 20 ,000 people you just see the shot and you just want to execute that shot the best you can possibly execute it and so you stay in the moment and you really don't see anybody that being said I'd much rather play in front of 20 ,000 people than play a tournament with nobody because you feed off the enthusiasm and the excitement and the energy of the people who are following you It's interesting you say that because in my obviously, you know, quixotic attempt to be a professional senior golfer, I got better and better.

12:32And I actually had a critical moment that changed everything for me. So I was playing in the BMW Pro-Am at Conway Farms and I got paired up with Steve Stricker. And on the front nine, everything just came together for me. And the pinnacle of it was we were on this short par four and it couldn't have been more than like maybe 275, 280 yards. It was a kind of green up on a little hill with some sand traps guarding the front. So I hit the ball and about, I would say 10 seconds after I hit the ball up at the green, there's all this noise going on. And Tiger Woods was playing in the group in front of us.

13:04So we thought Tiger must be doing some of the next tee. And as I walked up to the green, it turned out that my ball had hopped over the trap onto the green and then took this huge arc rolling down and rolled to within maybe two and a half feet of the hole, almost for a hole in one on the par four. and the crowd was cheering for me. The strangest thing was, it was one of the worst moments of my entire life. I hated every second of it. And I realized that I hated attention on the golf course. I hated the fact that I had to put a two foot downhill butt for Eagle in front of, you know, a thousand people.

13:38Now, thank God I made it, but I had worked for something for seven years and I ended up shooting, I think 32 or 33 on the front night. I fulfilled every dream I'd ever had. And I realized I hated it more than anything that I wanted to be alone on the range. somehow for golf for me is very personal and i felt very exposed people were calling my name like for most people it might have felt good for me it felt awful look steve i've known a lot of players over my career players have actually reached the number one spot in the world for a short period of time and actually didn't want the limelight didn't want the additional attention i've seen that happen numerous times so people you know like yourself you have a comfort zone of where you want to be and you're just happy to be there.

14:20It takes the select few, I guess it's the best way of saying, who really want to push the envelope to extract the most value you can out of your life. And there's times when I've been out there too. When I first won in 1976, the fifth tournament I ever played in, I was an introvert and I couldn't get up in front of the microphone and speak. When I went into the clubhouse to be with the members of the golf club at the end for presentation, I was a shy kid standing in the corner. And I actually said to myself, if I want to be a great golfer, I have to change the way I feel right now. It was a snap decision I made because I had to get up there in front of, I don't know, 50, 100, 120 people inside a clubhouse, all celebrating.

15:09And right there and then, I pulled myself out from being an introvert into being a public figure. Greg Norman never won the Masters, but he came oh so close, finishing second three times and third three times. And the way in which victory was repeatedly snatched away from him adds to the heartache. In 1986, an aging Jack Nicklaus went an incredible seven under par over the last ten holes to beat Norman by a single stroke. A year later, in a sudden death playoff, his opponent holed out from 47 yards to beat him. And most painfully, in 1996, exactly 25 years ago, he squandered a six-shot lead heading into the final 18 holes, but famously handled it with grace, concluding that last round with a big hug of his opponent.

16:00as i prepared for this interview i asked a bunch of people who were golf fans what they thought about you and what came up over and over is that you were amazingly gracious in the face of defeat and it's interesting that you managed to turn the occasional failure among the many victories into a lasting legacy of respect. Do you have advice for people? How did you pull that off? It's sport. Really, it's as simple as that. Golf is just a game. You can't live by it and you can't die by it, right? So I always felt that if somebody beat me on a given week, no matter whether it was a chip in or beat me by a stroke, they're trying to do that.

16:45They want to win just as much as I want to win. And if I get beaten, I'm going to say, hey, did somebody beat me on that day or that week because they were better than me that week? Or was it luck? Or was it I failed? Or I played poorly? Or I didn't concentrate? At the end of the day, I can blame myself for many losses, but I also can say congratulations to other players who actually fair and squarely beat me with great golf. You make that sound easy, but you're such a tough competitor and you spend five hours on the course pushing as hard as you can to win and then suddenly it's over and there's this void and you're supposed to go and talk to the press taking inane questions.

17:32I think you're underselling how hard that task is. It just came naturally or did you have to work hard to be gracious in a setting like that? No, Steve, I didn't have to work hard at it all. I think it was just naturally my mindset. And my father always instilled in me, he said, Greg, if somebody asks you a question, just tell them the truth. It'll never get you into trouble. So if I go into the media room and, hey, why did you hit that really funky-looking seven eye that you made a double bogey on? Why? Well, you know what? I didn't concentrate. I picked the wrong club. Whatever the reason is, you tell them it, and then you can drop the ball and move on and just say, hey, I'm done.

18:13I can't add any more to it. Now, I get the feeling you were wound up pretty tight when you were younger, but I think you seem to be a lot more relaxed now than you used to be. Has that been a conscious investment in your part, in philosophy or in a belief system, or is it not right? Is it something that just happened with age? Look, I think it's just from experience, yes. Yeah, sure, I was wound up at times. There was times when I was fighting a lot of things internally, like people probably didn't believe in me and I wanted to prove people wrong. Over a period of time, as your success does to generate momentum and your delivery mechanism, whether it's on the golf course with your ability to hit a golf ball from point A to point B, or being a brand ambassador to Reebok or whoever you're endorsing, to being the brand owner to where you are today, being the living brand.

19:08You have to evolve. You have to make adjustments. You You have to be learning to be better for whatever reason. You're listening to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt and his conversation with renowned golfer Greg Norman. After this short break, Steve will return to talk with golf analyst Mark Brody.

19:36Finding the music you love shouldn't be hard. That's why Pandora makes it easy to explore all your favorites and discover new artisan genres you'll love. Enjoy a personalized listening experience simply by selecting any song or album, and we'll make a station crafted just for you. Best of all, you can listen for free. Download Pandora on the Apple App Store or Google Play and start hearing the soundtrack to your life. It's smart to always have a few financial goals. And a really smart one you can set? Earning cash back on what you buy every day. And with Discover, you can. Get this. Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year.

20:14Seriously, all of it. And we trust you to make smart decisions. After all, you listen to this show. See terms at discover.com slash credit card. Hey, it's Tim Howard, former U.S. goalkeeper. You know it takes a lot to get to the FIFA World Cup. You start young, give up every weekend, eat only boiled chicken, learn to yell at the refs in Portuguese, French, and German. But apparently, all it takes to get closer to the FIFA World Cup 2026 is to be a Verizon customer. You could get free tickets, pitch side access, or a chance to meet me. I'll bring the boiled chicken. So switch today and bring your AT &T or T-Mobile bill to Verizon for a better deal.

20:49Must provide very recent postpaid consumer mobile bill in the name of the person redeeming the deal. Additional terms, conditions, and restrictions apply.

20:58I have to say one thing I will never forget from my conversation with Greg Norman. is his response to my story about my lone moment of golf glory where I realized I'd been pursuing the wrong golf dream. Did you catch what he said? That I shouldn't feel bad because there are many people like me who can't get the most out of life because we're afraid to move out of our comfort zone. Well, no doubt he's right, but how often does somebody body slam you with the painful truth directly to your face in front of hundreds of thousands of listeners? Luckily, I don't take myself too seriously. I suspect the conversation I will have with Mark Brody will be very different.

21:35What I find intriguing about Mark is how remarkably successful he's been in getting his data-driven approach adopted, to the point where he's transformed the way just about everyone thinks and talks about golf. How in the world did he pull that off? Maybe there's some lessons there for people like me, who are also trying to change the world through data, but mostly with a lot less success. mark what's more fun teaching at a business school or being the undisputed king of golf data analytics you can be honest you have tenure i can't do anything about that no i think it's more fun to see ideas being used in practice so i like everything i do i like teaching i like research and i think doing golf analytics has exceeded my wildest expectations as far as the impact that it's had.

22:22So I'm guessing your initial forays into golf data were motivated probably by a desire to improve your own scores. Is that right? Not really. I knew there were questions in golf that could be answered with the analytical tools that I had, but there wasn't any data. So I was trying to answer, if a player could hit the ball 20 yards further, how would their score change? How many strokes would come off their score? Or what's the difference between an average PGA Tour player and a great PGA Tour player like Tiger Woods? Just to anchor people before we get into what you have developed, the sorts of statistics that the PGA Tour collected before you were around were really simple.

23:07Things like number of putts per round or driving distance, things of that nature. So can you explain what features of those statistics are unattractive for someone who wants to do real analytics? So those are easily collected statistics because they're primarily counting statistics. How many putts did a player take? How many fairways did a player hit? You can just count them. And that's been done for decades, but it's horrible to understand performance because a putt that sunk from three feet counts the same as a putt that sunk from 60 feet. They're both one putt, but they're very different performances because most players can one putt from three feet and not many players can one putt from 60 feet.

23:59So counting them the same doesn't make any sense. Same thing for something like fairways hit. you could miss a fairway and just be in the first cut of rough, where you could be a couple yards off the fairway, or you could be in the woods or in the water or out of bounds, and they all count as a missed fairway, but they're very different performances. You devised a metric called strokes gained or lost. Could you explain, just in the simplest possible terms, what that metric is? well strokes gained is measuring performance relative to a benchmark and i tell people that they already have a good intuitive notion of what strokes gained is because they know what is a good shot and what's a bad shot and so the way it would work is if you sink a one foot putt you're equal to the benchmark because the average performance from one foot is to get the ball in the hole in one stroke.

24:57From 30 feet, the average performance is to get the ball in the hole in two strokes. So if you one putt from 30 feet, you've done one better than the benchmark or your strokes gained as plus one. And that's why it's so intuitive because if you get the ball in the hole in fewer strokes, you know that there are good shots involved. And if you get the ball in the hole in more strokes, there are worse shots involved. And so you've lost strokes. And so strokes gained is just taking drives and approach shots and putts and putting them all in the same unit of strokes so you can measure the difference between a 300-yard drive and a 320-yard drive, not in terms of 20 yards, but in terms of how many strokes do you gain.

25:42So your example for putting was pretty straightforward, but let me take the concept back to the tee. So the idea is, let's say there's a hole and on average, it takes the pros 3.9 strokes to get the ball in the hole on that hole. So you're standing on the tee and you expect it to take 3.9 strokes. Now you hit your drive and it's a fantastic drive. It's long and it's straight. And then what you would do with your metric is using econometrics, you would compute if the average pro had hit their drive to where you hit your drive, how many strokes would you expect it to take them to get it in the hole from there?

26:19So let's say it was a really great drive. So from that spot, you'd expect it to be 2.5 more strokes to get it into the hole. Then you already took one stroke to get there, then that would mean that your expected score in the hole would be 3.5. But when you stood on the tee, it was 3.9. So the fact that after your drive, it's gone down to 3.5 means that you gained 0.4 strokes via your drive. Is that a good description of what you're talking about? That's exactly right. And just continuing with your example, in one stroke, an average shot would get you one stroke closer to the hole. So you'd go from 3.9 on the tee to 2.9, say in the fairway or the rough after your shots.