It doesn’t really sound so difficult. A perfect lie in the fairway, 125 yards from the hole, gap wedge in hand and a backstop that will funnel anything up to 10-ish yards long back down toward the cup. There’s hardly any breeze; maybe a breath of left-to-right wind.
Pretty easy right? PGA Tour pros average 20 feet, 2 inches on their approaches from 125 yards, hitting the green at an 80 percent clip, according to Shot Scope, which has tracked more than 400 million golf shots.
None of those 400-plus million data points, though, account for the fact that this seemingly simple, 125-yard shot is the approach shot into the 18th hole at Augusta National and par is required for our “hypothetical” player to win the Masters and complete the career grand slam. On his 11th try. That’s right, our not-so-hypothetical player is actually Rory McIlroy, whose average proximity from 125 yards in the fairway is just more than 22 feet.
As you know by now, McIlroy’s approach on the 72nd hole ended up about 60 feet from the hole in the right greenside bunker and he failed to get up and down to save his par and ended up in a playoff with Justin Rose. There are no mulligans in professional golf, but McIlroy more or less got one on the first playoff hole, when his tee shot came to rest in nearly the same spot as it did in regulation, 125 yards from the hole. This time, McIlroy hit it to roughly two feet and finished the job with a birdie.
That’s what the data says was probable, right? For a tour pro, sure. But how about for a scratch golfer? A 15 handicapper?
A scratch player will hit the green 62 percent of the time from 125 yards, with an average proximity of 38 feet. That’s probably good enough to make par, but even a scratch player three-putts about a quarter of the time from 36-40 feet, according to Arccos data.
A 15 handicapper hits the green a hair less than a third of the time from 125 yards, averaging about 72 feet from the hole, per Shot Scope data. They need nearly four strokes, on average, to finish the hole from that spot in the fairway. And when they miss the green, they get up and down from greenside bunkers just less than one in five times. That number rises to about 37 percent for scratch players, but it’s still a far cry from tour average, which is just less than 59 percent. McIlroy, to close the loop here, averages better than 65 percent from greenside bunkers.
So, yeah, you could hit the shot that set up Rory’s triumph, but it’s much more likely you’d hit the one that almost cost him the green jacket.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
