#ICYMI - Golf Tech and Astrophotography, with Jimmy Walker and Neil Tyson

In case you missed this episode on the Playing with Science channel…. Golf technology and astrophotography – these worlds collide as hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice sit down with professional golfer and astrophotographer Jimmy Walker, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Matt Plumb, former Global Product Line Manager for Nike Golf Clubs. Photo Credit: TourProGolfClubs [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm Gary O'Reilly.

• 0:02Chuck Nice?

  And I'm Chuck Nice.

• 0:03Gary O'Reilly?

  And this is Playing with Science.

• 0:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Today we explore the universe with the 2016 PGA Championship winner, Jimmy Walker. And if you ever wondered where geeks and jocks collide, you are in the right place because it's right here and it's right now.

• 0:22Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and check this out. Jimmy Walker has his own personal telescope in the Atacama Desert, trained on the stars. So when he's not sinking putts, he's shooting stars because we can let him hook up with our best friend, as you know him, better as your own personal astrophysicist, Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 0:47Gary O'Reilly?

  But it's not all about amazing astrophotography. Jimmy draws us into the golf tech that's reshaping the clubs, the courses, and even the players themselves. Plus, giving us the inside knowledge on golf tech is former global product line manager of Nike Golf Clubs and now Nike Golf Shoes, Matt Plumb. Yep, it's going to be one of those shows and yes, you are going to love it. All right, Chuck, let's introduce our guest.

• 1:15Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. He's the 2016 PGA Championship winner. He's a six times on the PGA Tour so far. He's been selected to two Ryder Cup teams and one President's Cup team. I believe that's where we talked about Jeff Ogilvy. Yeah, yeah, on that same team. And one of the PGA Tour star players, literally and figuratively, which I can't wait to get into that because we'll find that out in a minute.

• 1:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, it's none other than Mr Jimmy Walker. Jimmy, welcome to Playing with Science, sir. How are you? I'm good. Thanks for having me on today, guys. Oh, you're welcome.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Six wins and basically counting, so that was good.

• 1:59Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:59Gary O'Reilly?

  We're not writing you off.

• 2:01Chuck Nice?

  We never write you off, my friend.

• 2:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Now, we have the good doctor with us, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. And you, and this one, I can't say surprised, but intrigued me. You're an astrophotographer, sir. That's amazing. How on earth did you get into that?

• 2:18Speaker 02

  I think it all stemmed as a kid, I had a telescope and looked at the moon. And I got older and our first child was being born. And it was kind of one of those deals where I was always interested in it. My wife said, "Hey, what do you want for Christmas?" And I said, "How about a telescope?" So it started there. And then I was fascinated with all the pictures and stuff that I'd seen that everybody had been taking, especially from amateurs. And I said, "Man, that'd be pretty cool. Let me try that in my backyard." Well, I figured you couldn't, I learned that you couldn't do that very well from the city lights. And so it just turned into an obsession to get to darker and darker places. And I got better and better equipment.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  And that's how it just, that's how it all started.

• 3:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I got nothing against golf. I'm only here because of your astrophotography. I just want you to, in this interview.

• 3:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  I appreciate it. It's been an incredible...

• 3:16Gary O'Reilly?

  You're not getting a free round of golf there, Neil. You know you've talked yourself out of that.

• 3:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all right.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  It's been an incredible experience. I've had so much fun doing it.

• 3:24Chuck Nice?

  Jimmy, I have to ask you, because I'm on your site.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he's got a website.

• 3:28Chuck Nice?

  Yes, I was about to say.

• 3:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is not just a private, secret avocation. Right? Plus, I have to say something.

• 3:34Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 3:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He referenced amateur astronomers. An amateur astronomer is an expert in the night sky.

• 3:40Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do not confuse amateur astronomer with amateur neurosurgeon.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or some profession where you would not go to them if the word amateur showed up on their door.

• 3:51Chuck Nice?

  By the way, that's why I have no feeling in my left leg. Amateur neurosurgeon.

• 3:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So amateur astronomer is actually a badge of honor in our field. These are people who live for their access to the night sky. And it made it a hobby like none other. And they're the ones who can get you around. And just ask them about their telescope and they'll talk to you for the next hour.

• 4:14Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's...

• 4:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jimmy, what do you pack?

• 4:16Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 4:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me, I got them now.

• 4:18Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you pack? What do you have?

• 4:21Speaker 02

  I'm using a 16 inch Ritchie Kratian and it's a pretty good size.

• 4:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you're not.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  A good sized scope.

• 4:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's called a non-portable telescope.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  It is.

• 4:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  You know, I actually, uh, I actually just got it set up in, uh, the Atacama Desert in Chile. I mean, literally like three days ago. So we shipped it out from California and it's, it's literally in Chile right now.

• 4:45Gary O'Reilly?

  You just lost your amateur status.

• 4:49Gary O'Reilly?

  You know that, right?

• 4:50Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  I don't do anything half ass.

• 4:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Chuck, Chuck is checking out your website and I'm sort of, uh, rubbing necking it.

• 4:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait. One other, I got it. Wait.

• 4:59Gary O'Reilly?

  It's awesome.

• 4:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One other thing. The Atacama Desert?

• 5:01Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 5:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Look it up in the Guinness Book of World Records. It is the driest place on earth.

• 5:06Gary O'Reilly?

  It's never rained, is that right?

• 5:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It has never rained and the little bit that it was raining, I think somebody was peeing at the time.

• 5:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, TMI.

• 5:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and rain comes from clouds. So it's basically one of the cloudless.

• 5:17Chuck Nice?

  It's a cloudless.

• 5:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cloudless places on earth. So he knows of where he puts his telescope.

• 5:21Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, 300, 320 clear nights a year.

• 5:26Chuck Nice?

  320 clear nights a year. That's a pretty good run, I gotta say.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  It's a good run.

• 5:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Shut up now.

• 5:31Chuck Nice?

  No, no, it's, it's great to see you so excited. Jimmy, you're like, we've never seen him this excited to have a guest on.

• 5:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Especially, especially a sports guest.

• 5:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 5:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, you've got to talk us through Dark Skywalker, cause it sounds like half Sky at Night, half Star Wars. So you better explain for a novice like me.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, I'll take credit. I came up with it all by myself. It was just a nice play off of, you know, Dark Sky and Skywalker and Star Wars and just tying it all together. And, and, uh, I was actually shocked that the domain name was available when I, when I looked for it. But, uh, that was it. I just thought it was a good play on words and it was, it, you know, it just kind of, Dark Skywalker. Oh, you can, two different ways. So it was good. I loved it.

• 6:17Chuck Nice?

  So Jimmy, I'm looking at these images and for those of you interested at home, it's darkskywalker.com, alright? And you'll see Jimmy's images. These are so stunning and they're so professional. I have to admit.

• 6:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, they're, they're so amateur.

• 6:37Chuck Nice?

  They're so amateur. Yes, I take that back.

• 6:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In my field.

• 6:41Chuck Nice?

  Right. That's the good, that's the, that's the biggest compliment is the.

• 6:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Most professional astrophysicists can't do that.

• 6:47Chuck Nice?

  Can't do that.

• 6:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They don't know how to do that.

• 6:48Chuck Nice?

  They're so amateur and they're so professional.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:53Chuck Nice?

  I honestly, I honestly thought you took these off of nasa.com and just slapped your name on it or something, but how do you process these? How do you, how does, what is the process of coming up with this final image? I'm just, I'm just curious. It's gotta be, it's gotta be intense. You don't have to get into the weeds.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Photoshop gets such a bad name today because everybody thinks it's, it's correcting flaws and people's faces and the whole Hollywood deal, but Photoshop is actually an incredibly powerful software program and that's what all the Hubble images are put together on. It's what all the Mars rover stuff and it's all spliced together, all using Photoshop. It's an incredibly powerful program and that's what I use. So when you take a picture of something in the middle of the night.

• 7:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not paid by Adobe.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  I'm not, I'm not. It should be, it should be.

• 7:46Chuck Nice?

  That's funny.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  But, I mean, it's just like, it's, it takes a lot of time. It takes hours and hours, hours of data to get a good signal. You gotta think when you're shooting into the middle of the dark sky, there's nothing there, you have to accumulate a lot of light and a lot of soak time on a picture. And then, so I use a monochrome camera, so I have to go red, green and blue and shoot for each color and then I do a, a black and white for all the detail. And by the time you get done with it, a lot of these pictures have over 24 hours worth of data and you just use software to stack the pictures on top of each other and increase the signal. And that's how you get a really clean, pretty image that's not noisy.

• 8:25Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  So like when you take a picture and you take a picture in a dark room with your cellphone camera, you can't do it. It looks all pixelated and nasty and, and so that's, imagine that in the middle of the night in space, trying to take a picture of something that you can't see. So it takes hours and hours and hours and hours to do it.

• 8:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's going on there is, in a very low signal, the picture you get is mostly noise, actually. And you see, as Jimmy was saying-

• 8:51Chuck Nice?

  And for those who are uninitiated, noise would be distortion.

• 8:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, not distortion. Well, there's just, it's, it's, well, it could come from many different places. It could be just the temperature of the camera. When you take a picture at the beach, this bright sun and the exposure is a thousandth of a second. All the light you need is there in that fraction of a second. As Jimmy said, if you look, if you're photographing something your eyes can't see, you're just told it's there, you gotta open up the shutter and just leave the thing open, or accumulate enough data, and what happens is, as you accumulate data, the thing that's there builds, and the noisy, when I say noise, this is visual noise. So the noise that's there, sometimes it's up, sometimes it's down, that ultimately cancels out. But the signal that you're after builds.

• 9:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you increase your signal relative to the noise. And he's stacking, when he says stack, he's got all these images that have noise going in every direction, but the thing he's after-

• 9:47Chuck Nice?

  But the signal is always the same.

• 9:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's always there.

• 9:49Chuck Nice?

  It's always remains.

• 9:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And as he stacks them, the signal rises up, out of the firmament.

• 9:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he gets his beautiful pictures that he does. And one other thing, he just said it, but I gotta like emphasize it. You're taking black and white photos through color filters. It's still a black and white photo, but it's what the sky would register coming through a color filter. You take the RGB, black and white pictures, put them together through RGB light, and you get a full color photo.

• 10:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's how we do it. We don't use color film.

• 10:23Chuck Nice?

  No, yeah, that makes sense.

• 10:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 10:25Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. You're building element by element.

• 10:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, you are.

• 10:27Chuck Nice?

  That's great.

• 10:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 10:28Gary O'Reilly?

  So Jimmy, I mean, you, we just went through your list of honors there, and that's a dream for just about any sportsman, let alone a golfer.

• 10:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, how much money the man made.

• 10:36Gary O'Reilly?

  No, no, that, we can do them.

• 10:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You made a couple of dollars in there.

• 10:38Gary O'Reilly?

  No, no, no, we don't monetize-

• 10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No wonder why he's flying his telescope to Atacama.

• 10:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Don't monetize this conversation.

• 10:45Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean.

• 10:46Chuck Nice?

  There's a man's smile on the man's face.

• 10:47Gary O'Reilly?

  He's happy.

• 10:48Chuck Nice?

  We've got him over Skype right now.

• 10:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, he's happy as.

• 10:50Chuck Nice?

  He's like. Just your cat's smile.

• 10:52Gary O'Reilly?

  For sure.

• 10:52Chuck Nice?

  All right, what?

• 10:53Gary O'Reilly?

  So, all of those things that must have given you such a professional buzz as a sportsman. But what was the biggest thrill going with the telescope? Because there's a lot of detective work, a lot of time, as you've explained. What was the biggest thrill? What was the one photograph you sat and looked at and go, I am so proud of that one?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  I think some of the, I think some of the deep galaxy pictures that I've taken. And it's not just the foreground galaxy that I've, uh, that I've gone after. It's being able to pull out the background stuff and get rid of the noise and be able to show stuff uh, from an amateur side that's billions of light years away. Being able to, you know, when somebody looks at one of my pictures and there's five to 10,000 galaxies in one picture. Uh, to me, that's, that's a real accomplishment for an amateur astro photographer. It's easy to take a picture of the moon. It's easy to do a picture of Orion, pretty much, but it's so bright and it, the color just explodes.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Uh, being able to dig out that stuff way in the background on these deep galaxy pictures are, that's my favorite thing to do.

• 12:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Can you talk about this in the locker room?

• 12:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 12:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Can you talk about this in the locker room with the other guys and not get looked at in a really strange way?

• 12:08Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man, here comes Jimmy. We're gonna have to talk about galaxies again.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  I'm never the one that has to bring it up. Everybody usually brings it up to me. So, uh, it's, it's pretty interesting. Guys, I've had guys ask for artwork and I've hung some stuff with some guys home.

• 12:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  So as I'm, as you, as you look at this website, there's a progression of my history with astronomy and earth, how I process data. And in the very beginning, it was very bright and oversaturated and my color balances off. And as I get down towards the bottom, I think my. The skills have gotten a lot better. There, I've had a bunch of astronomy pictures of the day from NASA and those guys. Uh, so that's a big honor.

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So there's a website, APOD.

• 12:50Chuck Nice?

  Alright.

• 12:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, and it's a, uh, every day, there's a beautiful picture from somewhere in the universe. And you can submit one of your pictures for it. I got one.

• 12:58Chuck Nice?

  A P, A P O D, and even, I've worked this one out.

• 13:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, astronomy picture of the day.

• 13:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. And many people have it as their screensaver, or the, it's their first thing, it's, or, or the, the homepage you come up to on your, uh, on your screens. Why do you have to look at your own website every single time, right? Why don't you look at something that changes every day? So congratulations on getting some APOD action. I have one APOD. It was, uh, Manhattan Henge. Well, they put that up once. I got a Manhattan Henge one.

• 13:21Chuck Nice?

  Oh, very nice.

• 13:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they're really after it's stuff for Jimmy's.

• 13:23Chuck Nice?

  I wa-

• 13:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  I think, I think I've got seven or eight, Neil, so you've got some work to do.

• 13:27Chuck Nice?

  Oh!

• 13:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Called me out.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  And it's, it's, it's-

• 13:32Chuck Nice?

  Oh!

• 13:33Speaker 02

  It's, I'm only gonna keep getting more with this move to Chile, I think.

• 13:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 13:37Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. That's fantastic. So let me ask you this. There's, uh, this is a silly question, but if you could hit a golf ball to any galaxy, which one would it be?

• 13:48Speaker 02

  If I could hit one at it?

• 13:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Shoot. I don't know. Andromeda's pretty cool. I've, I've actually, you can, if you get into a dark enough spot, you know, it's, that, it's so big and it's so close. You can actually see it with your eyes. Uh-

• 14:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  I've done it in a couple of places in New Mexico, been able to see it. You actually see it from my home sometimes if the sky's really transparent.

• 14:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Andromeda is the-

• 14:10Speaker 02

  But, uh, it's a cool-

• 14:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  It's, it's a hard galaxy to shoot because the core's so bright. You have to do HDR type exposure real long and then you can get the, you go deep, you can get all the crazy stuff on the outside. And then you've got to shoot tight for the core. And I've got a couple of really good pictures of Andromeda on there.

• 14:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, he's talking about how bright something is that you otherwise can't see unless you're in a very dark place. That's how good his photography is.

• 14:33Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 14:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just so you know.

• 14:35Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 14:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, so Andromeda is the farthest object visible to the unaided human eye.

• 14:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 14:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh! It's two million light years away.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Is it really?

• 14:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. The single farthest object.

• 14:43Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we can, we can see it.

• 14:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We, yeah, with the naked eye.

• 14:45Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 14:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's talking about hitting a golf ball to a, a ga- a galaxy. But wait a minute, we have other, like, golf, you know, golf has been around the ga- the solar system, you know? You realize this? And-

• 14:56Speaker 02

  That.

• 14:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, but the, uh, so Jimmy, it's fun when you always hear they talk about landing, um, putting landers on Mars.

• 15:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By traveling all these many miles over these many months, leaving Earth, which is a moving target, to Mars, which is a moving target, so you have to send it to not where Mars is, but where it will be in nine months, where they then intersect. And they always reference golf when they do it.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Do they?

• 15:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just like a hole in one over however many, because they land it within like a five kilometer circle on Mars. And they, and they, it's a better hole in one than any all that ever hit. So I, I was always jealous that

• 15:32Speaker 02

  I can't imagine.

• 15:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was a sport that was always used. I never played golf, but it was always the reference for how accurate the NASA missions are when they land stuff in craters on Mars.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  Gotcha.

• 15:42Gary O'Reilly?

  I was going to ask you, Jimmy, I mean, we know you have quite a fascination with the, the universe. Has that sort of translated itself into an interest in science? And as so, has that involved itself in your game as a player?

• 15:58Speaker 02

  You know, it's hard to say. You can kind of get wrapped up in your own little world when you're out playing and, but there's, there's times in your life when everything kind of seems to slow down and you realize, hey, man, it's just a game. And, you know, when I sit there at night and look up in the sky and see how big it is and what's out there and the vastness of it, uh, you know, it's like, man, when you get over a hard golf shot sometimes, it's like, it's a little ball floating around out here with all that going on, you know, it doesn't seem real important, you know? But at the same time, it's, you know, when your kids are born, it's the same way. Everything is so right here and so right in your lap. And that's the most important thing. And all the other stuff just kind of washes away. So you can go both ways with it.

• 16:40Chuck Nice?

  So are you, are you saying that you have discovered a golf cosmic perspective?

• 16:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a golf, that's what that sounds like to me.

• 16:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. And exactly what you need as a golfer, you don't get too high, you don't get too low, you don't let a missed shot phase you. You just, yeah, that's cool. I can deal with this.

• 16:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. It's a stabilizing force

• 16:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  on the field.

• 16:58Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, Jimmy, sort of bring it back a little bit more terrestrial here. The number of developments with golf clubs, where are we at right now in terms of what's new as far as the tech's concerned?

• 17:11Speaker 02

  So the governing bodies have, have put a limit on how fast a golf ball can come off of a club face. So we're kind of limited on distance. Um, but Scientists and engineers can kind of tweak that and now it's about the aerodynamics of the golf ball and always changing and trying to figure out new ways to put the dimples on the golf ball so they can make golf balls that different certain covers and different layers of hardness inside and the way those react to each other they create more spin, they create less spin, some balls fly through the fly into the wind better. So there's all

• 17:51Speaker 02

  kinds of little tricks that the companies are trying to do to get in heads because by law a ball can only come off so fast.

• 18:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jimmy, why are they limiting how fast a ball can come off the golf? Suppose I'm just a really fast swinger. I don't understand why.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  So it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how fast you swing it. You know, if you swing it at 130 miles an hour, there's some math formula that the ball can't come off any faster than this. It's called coefficient restitution, the C O R, and that's the number.

• 18:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's of the ball itself. Okay.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 18:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it's a property of the ball. So I get that.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  I think. I think. I mean, it's the formula is it can't come off any faster when they've got a testing machine that they hit the faces and if it comes off at .257, that's the max legal limit. If you go over that, the club's considered damaged and it needs to be taken out of play. So we're limited on that. We're limited on the grooves.

• 18:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If people are inventing different kinds of balls for different purposes, does that mean you can go in there with a portfolio of balls for specific kinds of shots that you take?

• 19:11Speaker 02

  Exactly. So say you've got a golf course that you know is going to play really hard and firm and fast and when a ball lands on the green, it's going to have a hard time stopping. You can actually go to a golf ball that is going to the club will be able to grab it more with the grooves and put more spin on it. And a lot of guys don't really do that, though. It takes a while to get. Acclimated and accustomed to a golf ball to know exactly what it does in every situation with the wind. And so guys don't really do that. You try to find a golf ball that's great all around her.

• 19:40Chuck Nice?

  Hmm, absolutely. And do, do, so for somebody at your level, these things, I mean, the, the level of competition is so high, it makes sense for these things to, you know, give you an edge.

• 19:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, small things are big things.

• 19:54Chuck Nice?

  Small things are huge things, you know, when you're at a very high level of competition. So for the regular guy who's listening right now, who likes to get out on a Saturday and, you know, he's playing a public course and do, do any of these things actually make a difference?

• 20:07Speaker 02

  They do, I think. I think the most important thing you can do for a player is actually getting properly fitted for a set of golf clubs. Going to a fitter, finding a, finding a shaft that works good for you. And then the shaft is really the engine of a golf club. And then it, and then it goes down to looks. You know, when you look down at a golf club, you want it to look good and that, you know, there's a lot of, of confidence that goes in getting something that you like.

• 20:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, you can diss someone else's golf club?

• 20:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can, you can diss?

• 20:36Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 20:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can diss somebody else's golf club? Walk by, you got some ugly club.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 20:42Chuck Nice?

  Didn't even bat an eye. He's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 20:45Gary O'Reilly?

  We do it all the time. We do it all the time. Some serious trash talk.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Like, man, you're just like, boy, I sure hope that club feels good, because it's ugly.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Hope it feels good.

• 20:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I missed that scene.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  Like when you say when somebody has a pair of shoes that are ugly, like, God, I hope those are comfortable.

• 21:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, you must be saying that a lot, because there's some ugly shoes out there.

• 21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the famous golf movie with Rodney Dangerfield?

• 21:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Caddyshack.

• 21:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Caddyshack.

• 21:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 21:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I missed that scene. They, they needed that scene in Caddyshack.

• 21:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dissing someone's golf club.

• 21:13Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, Jimmy, before we have to let you go, and sadly, sadly, we will have to let you go, the guys are coming out now, they're punching 400 yards. There's talk of guys being able to drill it past 500. I- is that the future of the game? Or are we looking at still the best of the best of the best? Not just the power guys?

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Oh, the power guys out here don't hit it that far. You're talking about the guys that just do long drive competitions. There, there is going to be a new class of player out here that's, and it's already kind of starting to hit. You've just got better athletes playing golf and. I'm not gonna say better athletes. What has happened with the equipment is it's allowed kids and to these clubs have become so forgiving that they can swing at them harder and harder and harder. So the kids are learning how to hit the ball harder every year and the clubs are letting them do that. So I think that's a big thing that you see on the increase in distance. Back when you were playing a wooden club and you didn't have the graphite, when you

• 22:17Speaker 02

  missed one of those, they didn't go very far at all. So you really learned how to hit the golf ball properly every time. And if you wanted to really step on one, you had to, you're gonna have to pay a consequence if you missed it because it would really go offline. Where today, these kids learn how to just smash it and there's not as much consequence if you just completely go at one. So you're gonna see kids hitting it harder and harder and harder and harder.

• 22:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you sound a little bit like the old man telling them to get off your lawn. Okay?

• 22:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These kids today.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  I am forty now, but I still hit it about as far as anybody, so I'm okay.

• 22:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Good for you. I'm okay. See, he didn't fail to remind us that he's still hitting it as good as anyone.

• 23:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 23:04Gary O'Reilly?

  That's it, because that's what pros do, they're competitive. If you're gonna go in a conversation line where maybe it's not good, they're gonna just bring you back and remind you just how good they are. Jimmy? Hey, man. Thanks so much. That's us. Thank you. Jimmy Walker there, six PGA Tour wins and counting. And counting. And a man whose eyes are fixed not just on the prize, but way, way into the universe and some of its furthest past. So to Jimmy Walker, thank you, sir.

• 23:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 23:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Bless your luck.

• 23:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Thank you, guys.

• 23:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you to Jimmy Walker, the 2016 PGA Championship winner and of course, our very own personal astrophysicist, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, taking us through astrophotography and golf technology. Right, we are gonna take a break. When we come back, we are gonna drill deeper into golf tech with Matt Plumb. He is the former Global Product Line Manager of Nike Golf Clubs and a man who is now Global Product Line Manager of Nike Golf Shoes. And I can tell you, this interview is unbelievable. Do stick around, we'll be back shortly.

• 24:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Welcome back to Playing with Science. Fabulous, fabulous interview with Jimmy Walker and you have to check out Dark Sky Walker. He's not just a guy with a telescope pointed at the stars, he's a guy that takes the most amazing photographs and brings them into the public domain. Right, from one guy who's heads in the stars to a guy who is definitely based here on Earth. Got his feet on the ground. Yeah, he was Global Product Line Manager for Nike Golf Clubs. He is now Global Product Line Manager for Nike Golf Shoes.

• 25:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Both of those sentences are vital to golf itself, so Matt Plumb, welcome to Playing with Science, sir.

• 25:10Speaker 04

  Thank you, thank you.

• 25:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Welcome. All right, let's take a brief trip back through history. We know it was wooden and it's the whole thing. So where did we go? I mean, from that kind of getting the irons, getting everything sophisticated, to where we are now. If you give us a quick journey, that would be perfect for our listeners.

• 25:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, wood to steel was the big revolution. As we moved from wooden golf clubs to steel golf clubs, we were able to specifically get the faces hotter and start to make the heads bigger. And then, you know, the big thing was about how can we move those golf clubs quicker? So moving from steel to graphite in the shafts was a huge move. Being able to, you know, take golf shafts that had traditionally been north of 125 grams and get those sub 100 grams. And now we see some shafts sub 40 grams. And then in the heads themselves, the big thing was being able to move from steel to titanium. And now continuing to explore, you know, all sorts of alternative materials,

• 26:12Speaker 04

  whether it's carbon fibre or other alternative materials to lighten the golf club in certain spots, which in effect allows us to make them bigger, move the weight around and have them fit more people.

• 26:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Amazing, because I think Chuck, if you go to titanium, you're just gratuitously improving the price.

• 26:33Gary O'Reilly?

  So it's interesting, because you've touched on very lightly on the physics, because you've got all of these pivot points throughout a golfer's physique. Then you've got the momentum and speed. Is there much more you can do outside of the weight of the club?

• 26:48Speaker 04

  You know, it's funny. I think that the biggest revolutions going forward for, you know, the average golfer and/or the tour player is going to be in terms of matching that equipment to them. And so, you know, if you look at kind of the rules and regulations that are set by the USGA and the RNA, in some way, shape or form, we've all touched one of the corners of those boxes. We've made the golf clubs as big as they can be. We made them as fast as they can be. You know, we've started to touch each one of those corners. And so with each product that comes out from every manufacturer, they kind of choose a lane. You know, in my previous role as a product manager for golf clubs, when we would brief in a product or we would create a product, we would say, okay, what are we trying to accomplish here? Are we trying to make this one extremely forgiving?

• 27:32Speaker 04

  Are we trying to make it low spinning? Are we trying to make it real fast off the face? Or some combination thereof. But with manufacturer, we basically touched all those corners. And so the biggest gains for people are going to be finding what ails them in their golf swing and finding the right product that matches to them. I think that's where you're going to start to see these huge gains that people talk about.

• 27:52Chuck Nice?

  So you're kind of talking about like bespoke golf clubs, like you're finding a way to custom tailor the club to the game that already exists, instead of having the player kind of alter their game so they can use that type of club?

• 28:10Speaker 04

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 28:12Gary O'Reilly?

  So Chuck, do you remember the guys at the long drive? Yeah. Competition we went to and, you know, you needed a telescope just to see where that ball landed. That was way off in the distance. Now, if I put one of those light clubs in one of those bruisers, or maybe some, you know what, one of the DEs off of the NFL who's 270 pounds and can swing it, would that be like putting a V12 engine in a little mini? Something is bound to go wrong.

• 28:38Speaker 04

  Absolutely, absolutely. I think it's that, so there's durability concerns, but then there's also, you know, if you've got players who are high speed or high spin, you know, matching them to product that is designed to lower their spin rate, or matching somebody to a product that's designed to draw the golf ball when they fight a slice. That's where I think the average player is going to see the biggest gains.

• 29:00Chuck Nice?

  So let me ask you this, when you talk about like matching players to clubs, and I'm talking all players, not just professional players, we're talking, you know, golf is a hugely popular sport, and you see people out, especially this time of year, all over the country. So, what can you tell about your swing based on, let's say, like the divot that you leave, and then what would that do in terms of clubs and what you want to do with what type of club you would like to have? I only ask, maybe there's guys out there right now listening, it's just like, that they might be able to pick something up from you as a tip. So, just from the divot that I leave, would I be able to find something out about my swing, or what kind of club I need?

• 29:45Speaker 04

  You can find a ton out about the divot. That's, you know, in my experience with fitting, that's how we fit people, is we read their divots, and it's a little bit of kind of matching that art and that science. So when you look at the divot, it's kind of a blueprint of what happened during that golf shot. Because the divot on a well-struck shot starts after you've struck the golf ball. If you look at a divot and you see it a little bit longer on the toe side of the golf club, specifically with an iron, you've got some indication that potentially that golf club was either swung over the top, or also your golf clubs may be too flat for you, in terms of the lie angle measurement. If you see that the golf, the divot is a little bit longer on the heel side, potentially that golf club was swung from the inside, but also potentially could be a little bit

• 30:28Speaker 04

  too upright. So the divot combined with what we saw in the shape of the shot, will often tell us a lot about if those golf clubs fit or match to that consumer, that professional.

• 30:37Gary O'Reilly?

  That's amazing, because I hadn't, now you say that, duh Gary, that's obvious. But until you go, divot, well that just means you're hitting the ground, not the ball, you fool. But now, now you've got so much, I mean, this is really cute data analysis. Where you're saying, you know what, this minimal part here at the at the swing end is a major disruption at the far end where the ball lands because it's taking it off into the trees, wherever it is, the water hazard. So yeah, it's it's it's an interesting thing. I mean, all right, go back to the data is because every sport now has an avalanche

• 31:16Gary O'Reilly?

  of data analytics. Has has that had an effect on club design? Has that had a massive effect on golf and players and such?

• 31:26Speaker 04

  Hugely, hugely. I mean, if you you walk up and down a PGA Tour event nowadays, you don't see many players hitting shots or hit or practicing without some sort of data capture device behind them, whether it's a TrackMan or a Flight Scope or or a GC Quad. You're seeing all these players wanting to know data about each one of their shots and being able to adjust whether it's for conditions, whether it's for the way they're swinging that day. And for for us on the manufacturing side, to be able to to measure and calculate all of that data starts to show trends and themes and and areas where we can create improvement.

• 32:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Ah, how far up? You've just given me an idea, Chuck. You know what this means. My brain hurts. Right? How far are we away from the perfect one size fits all golf club that will adjust itself? Is that just me having a fantasy moment? Or is that possible?

• 32:15Speaker 04

  I mean, one size fits all, I think, is maybe a bit of a fantasy moment, but it's it's a nice north star for people to start to think about. I think one size fits you. You know, you've seen some companies start to explore the single length irons and the single length so you can, in theory, bring one swing and and have all 14-year golf clubs or 13-year golf clubs fit.

• 32:37Gary O'Reilly?

  That's Bryson DeChambeau.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Yep.

• 32:39Gary O'Reilly?

  He may not be one of yours, but he is a golfer that's done exactly that. Yeah.

• 32:44Speaker 04

  Absolutely, absolutely. So I think, you know, one size fits all, maybe not so much because you look at, you know, Mrs. Habercamp at 68 years old and, you know, the Really good, young 18-year-old player who's playing at Sage Valley. You've got some varying physical attributes that maybe one size fits all is a little bit extreme.

• 33:03Chuck Nice?

  So, one size fits you. It seems kind of like that when I think about what you just said earlier. Is it that you guys are now looking at clubs in such a way, and once again, I'm talking for the average player, okay? Not your Tiger Woods, which, by the way, congratulations to Nike, along with Tiger. Because as Tiger goes, so does Nike. You guys are kind of married together in a wonderful union. So, congratulations.

• 33:34Speaker 04

  Thank you. We like to say, as Tiger goes, so the golf business goes. I mean, people talk about moving the needle. Tiger is the needle in terms of the golf business.

• 33:43Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. But, from what you said earlier and what you just said about, you know, Mrs. Whoever and the young 18-year-old, are you guys now looking at clubs in terms of taking the player's game and then making the club to kind of, I don't know, compensate for player deficiencies so that you can actually find your correction in the club? Is that what I'm hearing you say?

• 34:08Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I mean, you know, the old adage goes golf's a game of misses, right? And it's making your misses better is generally what we're all about. Whether you're, to your point, talking about the tour caliber player, you're talking about the average player. We all have miss tendencies, and if we can make those misses, certain percentages better, you know, when we get to the golf course, we get away from the driving range, we get on the golf course. If you can miss 15% less right, or if you can miss 15% longer than you normally would have missed, we've potentially made you better, and ultimately, shooting lower scores is what we're after.

• 34:41Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 34:42Gary O'Reilly?

  So, the club takes away the player error?

• 34:45Speaker 04

  It can.

• 34:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Not removes it completely, but reduces?

• 34:49Speaker 04

  Reduces, absolutely.

• 34:51Gary O'Reilly?

  That's interesting, because, you know, we've all seen it, the angry golfer who bends the club over his knee and then throws it into the lake. All the time blaming the tools, and rather than himself. But, you've taken the other point where we can reduce the need for you to bend that over your knee, or wrap it around a tree.

• 35:12Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 35:14Chuck Nice?

  Well, no, you won't be able to do that. Now you'll have a player, like you've seen a player like fling the club into like the water hazard. Now they'll do that and go, oh my God, I'm so sorry. Oh, please, please come back. Oh, I'm so sorry. Oh, I'm so sorry.

• 35:30Gary O'Reilly?

  So what technology is there left that you could utilize to take it to another level? Or are you at the level possibly unless something brilliant comes along?

• 35:43Speaker 04

  I mean, I think there's, you know, we used to jokingly call it unobtanium, right? There's, there's gotta be some material out there that nobody's experimented with or hasn't, hasn't been created yet. So.

• 35:53Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm stealing that, by the way. Thank you. I'm stealing that.

• 35:58Speaker 04

  You know, I think the idea, it's funny when you think about, you know, everybody loves to talk about drivers. But when you think about a driver head, at the end of the day, it's, you know, 200 to 205 grams of something at the end of a 45 and a half inch long graphite shaft. And so until that equation changes, which it's, it's probably not going to change drastically. When you, you, you speak with the engineers and the designers and the people behind creating these clubs, it's basically a 205 gram ball of clay. And they can, they can mold and shape and adjust that 205 gram ball of clay any way they want. The one thing they can't do is they can't add clay to it and they can't take clay away. And then you start figuring out, okay, the USGA and the RNA have set rules.

• 36:42Speaker 04

  It can only be 460 cc big. It can't have anything that passes through it or create any open holes in it. There's regulations about where the hozel must be placed and how the shaft can go into it. And then you've got your, you know, regulations on moving parts and how they have to lock into place and things like that. So at some point, the, the equation is defined for us. And it's, it's about finding creative ways to, to solve for that equation, if that makes sense.

• 37:06Gary O'Reilly?

  How do you check? Cause like in a hockey stick, you have pivot points.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 37:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Do you play with those along the shaft of the golf club?

• 37:15Speaker 04

  Absolutely. So the shaft companies are fantastic. They they use a lot of things. They call them EI curves or bend curves.

• 37:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:21Speaker 04

  So you can have shafts that kick higher up the shaft or lower up down the shaft. You can have create stiffnesses in certain areas, which will produce certain feels and certain characteristics in terms of ball flight of launch and spin.

• 37:35Chuck Nice?

  Is there anyone that you might be able to know that, you know, you've fitted for a club and you've done this whole process that we just discussed? And then they saw like a dramatic change in their game, professional or otherwise,

• 37:50Chuck Nice?

  preferably professional, because then we would know who it is.

• 37:54Chuck Nice?

  Or or am I just being a little too big with, you know, the way this works?

• 37:59Speaker 04

  You know, it's it's funny. You you have these mini wins and you look at all the the people who work out on the PGA Tour and and support for the different equipment manufacturers. And every week, that's their job. They're there to to do what we would call emergency surgery. You might find a player who has missed three cuts in a row and is just fed up with their driver. And they're going to come to you on Monday morning and they're going to say, hey, I need a new driver. And, you know, time and time again, they'll get a new driver. They fall in love with it and they'll start making cuts or they'll they'll have a win. So you hear stories like that every single week. Where, you know, sometimes it's just confidence. The player's lost confidence in that golf club or a set of golf clubs. Sometimes it's truly finding something, you know, with it with a huge distance gain or a huge miss correction.

• 38:44Speaker 04

  Where, you know, you've got a got a player who's made a swing change and all of a sudden they're they're not able to hit the golf club the way they used to. And you see these these crazy changes where, you know, an athlete grabs a new golf club and all of a sudden they're they their fairways goes up, their fairway statistic goes up by 10, 15, 20%. And that's the difference between them making a cut or or finishing top 10 or even winning a golf tournament.

• 39:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Do you have a department to study the science of superstition?

• 39:11Speaker 04

  We don't, we don't, but you know, the old adage goes, you'd rather be lucky than good, right?

• 39:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Right, so knowing sportsmen and women.

• 39:18Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, but by the way, in, in medicine, you know, sometimes placebos can be the most effective medicine you can ever prescribe, because there are people who will take a sugar pill and, and their body cures themselves, but they think, they think it's the pill, you know?

• 39:33Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 39:34Chuck Nice?

  So, yeah.

• 39:35Speaker 04

  I have had a, had a time, I was working with one of our players over in Europe, and his wedge play hadn't been very good, and he, he came into the PGA Tour trailer and he said, he said, "Matt, will you take a look at my wedges?" And I said, "Sure, what's going on?" And he said, "Well, I've just spent an hour with my coach, and I know it's not my swing, I've just spent an hour with, with my body, and I know it's not my body, so it's gotta be the equipment that's making my wedge play not be good." And it's just that mentality of the fact that you go through and you, you check his wedges and, and you look at him and you say, "There's, there's absolutely nothing changed or wrong with your wedges, they're the same they were yesterday when you, you were good." And so it's, it's that placebo effect, sometimes it's just, just putting him in the loft and eye machine, checking him, double checking him, and handing him back to the player and saying, "You're all good," it gives them that confidence to go back out there.

• 40:17Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, take, I mean, that, that aside, which, having been around enough athletes, I know exactly how you feel, has a golfer come to you and said, "Look, this is what I want you to do with this club," because they know, they know exactly what their swing is, they know it for this particular course, this particular moment, and they've gone, "That's how I want it set up, that's the solution I'm looking for in the club, can we do that?" And they've been 100% right, or do you have to steer them in another direction?

• 40:46Speaker 04

  No, I, we've, we've, we've definitely had that, you know, you, we've got athletes that we refer to as, as almost freaks of nature, because they've got that, that hyper-touch. You know, you've heard all the stories about Tiger being able to feel bubbles underneath the grip of his, his driver shaft and things like that, but you've got athletes that, they're so, so hypersensitive to what they, they feel and do with their craft, that they can give you really clear direction about what they're looking for. We talk about it all the times. You see athletes on kind of both sides of the spectrum. You see those that are very tuned into their equipment and can tell you everything about every spec of their equipment and really want to know all the details. And you see others that just, you know, it's it's kind of like bat and ball, like just this is my tool and I use it to hit and I leave it to to the equipment experts to help make sure it's going to do what I need it to do.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  And then it's you tend to find some of those that are that are stuck in the middle that tend to get a little bit lost because they're not sure which way they want to be. So the best athletes are the ones that are on either side of that spectrum from from my experience.

• 41:42Gary O'Reilly?

  How interesting because we this goes back to the race car driver Chuck that is at one with the machine. They know when a tire is got a couple of pounds less. They know when something's on, something's off. And it is that magic, that intuitive magic that they have with the course, with the club. They know everything that's going on as well as they got a a really good caddy behind them. It's about them when they go up and they they start to address the ball. All right, let's let's move away from golf clubs and and focus on where you are right now. Because Chuck and I could go onto the golf course and Chuck's far better at golf etiquette than I am. I'd turn up in my sneakers and my denims and I'd be thrown out immediately. But you're all about the golf shoes now.

• 42:28Gary O'Reilly?

  And without being grounded, the whole physics and rotation of a golf of a golf swing can't be there. So how much of the physics has found its way into shoe design for you?

• 42:39Speaker 04

  Oh, it's it's been unbelievable. It's been cool to take, you know, a lot of that very scientific thinking that we had with with golf equipment and apply it to our golf footwear. You know, we we look at golf footwear in kind of three ways. You look at the fit of that golf shoe, the ride of that golf shoe and the traction of that golf shoe. And all three components really are things that are necessary that that maybe your trainers or your your running shoes wouldn't allow you to have to hit a hit a proper golf shot. So you think about the way that we set the athlete up, the height they are off the ground. Because when we introduce, you know, the plate on the bottom of that shoe plus some spikes, you're actually getting somebody higher off the ground. The amount of of drop or offset, those are terms that people that that were running shoes would understand as

• 43:21Speaker 04

  well, but the the difference between the the height of your heel versus the height of your toes. We can, that can manipulate not only a golfer's setup position, the positions they're able to get into during the golf swing, but also potentially the fit of their golf clubs. If you get an athlete that is dropped too low on their heels, their hands are going to sit lower and all of a sudden their golf clubs are going to be more upright and they might hit some hooks.

• 43:42Gary O'Reilly?

  They're going to go under the ball, they're going to come underneath and it's going to go all over. Do you do with the shoes the same that the soccer players do and the high-end athletes do and bespoke the footwear or is it, do you know what, yours are in that box over there?

• 43:56Speaker 04

  You know, we've, we've gone through kind of both versions. We've got about three players on our staff right now that we, we bespoke their footwear for and it's generally out of need, not out of anything vanity. So you, so you look at, you may have a player who's got an abnormally wide foot. You may have a player who's had an injury and may need something different. We've got some players that wear a full-size difference between their left shoe and their right shoe.

• 44:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, not unheard of, yeah.

• 44:21Speaker 04

  Not unheard of and uncommon, but so we'll bespoke some of those. But as a whole, we've got about 95% of our players wearing shoes right out of the box.

• 44:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow.

• 44:30Speaker 04

  That was, that was a big thing for us that we've made in a change in the last couple of years.

• 44:34Gary O'Reilly?

  So what's, what's the thinking? Because to do that, you've got to be really in tune with the footwear and the needs and how you find that sweet spot for the broad spectrum of, of, of the shape and size that feet come in. You know, you've got, you've got, you've got feet like Barney Flin, you know, Fred Flintstone, you've got a feet like a hobbit and then you've got this slender ballerina's foot that comes along. So how do you find that area without there being a problem?

• 45:06Speaker 04

  It's, we do a lot of, lot of testing, a lot of consumer testing. So our, our journey, you know, currently right now we're working on footwear out as far as 2021. So I've I've looked at our summer 2021 line and we know kind of what's going to go in that. Through that process, through that basically 24 month process, we'll do consumer testing with, you know, upwards of 150 consumers. And in each one of those, we're asking them to wear it for eight to 10 to 12 rounds. And so not only consulting with just our tour players to make sure that their stuff's right, but it's it's working with that variety of consumers across the globe.

• 45:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Because that's where your market is. Your market is the consumer across the globe, not so much the PGA Tour guys. Are you borrowing ideas on footwear from other sports?

• 45:54Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely.

• 45:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Ah, are you are you going to tell us anything?

• 45:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. One of our, you know, unbelievable abilities here at Nike is that, you know, things that work in one sport may have an application in other sports. It may be, it's very cool. The way that we've kind of set our lineup, we've got one area of footwear that's directly built around that. We call it our icons. And it's bringing shoes that you know, like an Air Max, or like a Roshe that you probably have in your closet, taking them and maybe changing that last 10% for what's what's needed for golf, putting traction on it, putting stability elements in it and things like that. And then we've got other areas where we may take something like our React foam, which has been really prominent in our running shoes right now, and applying that to golf in the right spots to provide

• 46:40Speaker 04

  cushioning, because we spend so much of our time on our feet when we play a round of golf. You know, you're at minimum four hours and sometimes upwards of five, six, seven hours if you warm up and do some of the things that you do before the round. And so, you know, we talk about a lot of times what the golf shoe needs in the swing phase of it, but it's also in the walking phase that it's incredibly critical. You think about a PGA Tour player playing a tournament, they're going to play four competitive rounds, they're going to walk six to seven miles in those, each one of those rounds. They're walking more than a marathon worth of, worth of miles in a given week. And the expression you have right there, that's, that's different, right? You, you don't think about PGA Tour players.

• 47:18Gary O'Reilly?

  But it's obvious. It's, it's obvious, but you have to be led to that point to see, wow, that's obvious. Why didn't I think of that before? And then you say, well, that's why we put this foam in there. That's why we structure. That's why we have to have a wellness attitude for our athletes.

• 47:36Speaker 04

  Absolutely. If you were to make the perfect golf swing, golf shoe to swing in, it would be stiff as a board and have carbon plates everywhere and be, be, be really, really stiff. If you were to make the perfect.

• 47:46Chuck Nice?

  And you'd have blisters on your feet by the time you got to hole 12.

• 47:50Speaker 04

  Exactly. It's not a walking shoe. And vice versa, if we made a really good walking shoe, it wouldn't be stable enough to swing in. So it's finding that healthy balance between the two.

• 47:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow. If you, if, if you knew before, I think you'd realise you didn't know before because he's just given us an awful lot of insight, Chuck.

• 48:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 48:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Not just club tech, but the shoe design and where they're going. Matt Plumb. Oh, product line manager at Nike Golf Shoes. You have been a star for us and you know what? We, we're going to dial your number again in the future and have another chat if you don't mind.

• 48:23Speaker 04

  I'd love to.

• 48:24Chuck Nice?

  Thank you, brother.

• 48:25Speaker 04

  Thank you, guys.

• 48:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Been a pleasure. All right, Chuck. Man, that's our show. Thank you to Matt Plumb, global product line manager for Nike Golf Shoes that was former Nike Golf Clubs and has moved sideways into shoe design. And I'm so pleased that we have the access to that. And Jimmy Walker?

• 48:44Chuck Nice?

  What a, what a great interview that was. That, that guy's amazing.

• 48:49Gary O'Reilly?

  I've never seen a golfer nerd out like that before.

• 48:52Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm impressed, I have to say. And, and his, and if you ever get the chance, people, make sure that you get to his website and check out his work because it's fantastic.

• 49:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, please do. Dark Sky Walker. For those of you who weren't big golf fans before, I think you realise that there is so much science to be had and not just the physics. So I hope you've enjoyed our little trip down the fairway. It's been a lot of fun, Chuck, has it not?

• 49:18Chuck Nice?

  It has been.

• 49:19Gary O'Reilly?

  It has. Right. This has been Playing with Science. I'm Gary O'Reilly.

• 49:22Chuck Nice?

  And I'm Chuck Nice.

• 49:23Gary O'Reilly?

  And we will be with you with a new episode very, very shortly.