Martin Hall has been on Golf Magazine’s Top 100 since 1994 and on Golf Digest’s Top 50 since 2000. He is one of the top golf coaches in the country. We recently sat down with Martin to discuss technology in golf and how Blast Golf is helping his students:
“Technology is easy to add to your game these days. But you better make sure that the information you are getting is good information. I tell people that bad information is worse than no information. We know it’s good with Blast. Blast tells us what the best players do. It takes the ‘seems as if’ out of it.
For example, we know that Brad Faxon is a good putter. But until recently, we didn’t know the whole story. But because of Blast, we know why he is a good putter, and that is because his timing and repetition is impeccable.
When you look at someone who’s a really good player and they are elegant and it all looks so natural and free, there is always more to it. If you can actually lift up the hood and see what they’re doing and see where their deficiencies are, that is how you make a great player even better. But by being able to identify what the top players do, you can guide the not-as-talented players on what to work on to help close the gap.
Technology also takes guessing out of the equation. You don’t want to guess if it’s your livelihood. You don’t want to guess when you don’t have to. Standing next to Seve Ballesteros all those years, if I would have been able to see his data points and see mine, I would have been able to see where I was behind him. What do I need to do to get better? What metrics did I need to improve? And then I could improve them. With technology like Blast that works on every club in the bag, I could have easily captured these metrics and improved.
I do think that everybody has a talent ceiling. But to be really, really good at something you have to be talented and motivated. Talented means it’s pretty easy to do for you. Motivated means you’ll work your tail off at it. Now if you got someone who’s talented and motivated, then they can be really good. And with technology, we can take someone who is motivated, but with average talent, and show them where their determination could take them.
In management they say if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. That’s why I love Blast technology, because you are able to measure your progress. Blast gives you a good baseline reading to see if you are where you think you are. Because if you’re not, feel is not real. Sometimes you have to feel the pace is a bit quicker on the back swing for a putt, chip, or pitch, and sometimes you need to feel a bit slower. It’s a way of recalibrating your golf swing and making sure that you’re not far off it. It is the north star for your golf. It keeps you headed in the right direction and makes sure you can’t get too far off line.
You can see patterns if you look at enough accurate data. Patterns become very evident and everybody has patterns. People think the best players are just really, really consistent. They are consistent and they are consistent in their pattern. And the pattern isn’t bold stark zero. Spin access zero. Tempo 0.6:0.3 forever. It’s not what it does, so you need to know when you’re off, where you’re off, so you can turn around and just head back in the right direction. Again, that is why the data that Blast provides is so vital.”
