56 / JANUARY 2018 / GOLFDIGEST.CO.ZAI
n 2011, golf statistician Peter Sanders
arrived, briefcase in hand, at a
house rented by Zach Johnson in St
Simons Island, Georgia. At Johnson’s
invitation, Sanders was to show trends
and anomalies buried amid Johnson’s
600-plus performance stats measured
by the PGA Tour’s ShotLink system.
Then, incorporating measures of his own
creation – the “secret sauce,” as Sanders
puts it – he would recommend playing
and practice strategies that would give
Johnson and his seven-member team
an edge as he entered the midway point
of his career.
“My presentation began at 8pm,” says
Sanders, the founder of shotbyshot.com,
a statistics-analysis firm that serves tour
players as well as golf instructors, coaches
and amateurs. “At midnight, I was still
answering questions.”
Johnson, it turned out, liked stats
homework. He enrolled at Drake
University in 1994 aspiring to be an
actuary, and upon turning pro and
joining the mini-tours after graduation,
tracked what numbers were available.
When he hooked up with teacher Mike
Bender in 2000, he found a man who
was even more analytical than he was.
When Sanders came on in 2011, the
team became among the first to
weaponise performance stats.J
ohnson, 41, almost cheerfully
confesses to being a light hitter. His
2017 driving-distance average of 286.5
yards ranked 140th on tour. But Johnson
also is accurate, ranking in the top 10
in driving accuracy for eight of the past
11 seasons. He argues that it’s a decent
trade-off. “If you put me in the fairway
at 170 yards, I’ll wear out the guy who
is 110 but in the rough,” he says. Adds
Sanders: “Every player on the PGAINFO SEEKERS
HOW ZACH JOHNSON LEARNED TO WEAPONISE HIS STATS.
BY GUY YOCOMTour averages under par when playing
from the fairway. That applies even to
players who miss the cut.”
So Johnson knows his focus must be
the fairway. To support this, Sanders has
one-upped ShotLink by factoring in the
severity of Johnson’s misses. Drives are
broken down to consider whether he
was able to advance the ball normally, if
he incurred a penalty for driving into a
hazard or unplayable lie, or if the ball
was lost or out-of-bounds. “It’s part of
the secret sauce,” Sanders says.E
very week, Sanders sends the team a
report card noting performance high-
lights, lowlights and trends. Early in 2012,
Sanders emailed Bender that Johnson had
fallen to 87th in strokes gained in putting.
“We’ll fix that,” Bender replied. Within a
month, Zach won at Colonial, won again
at the John Deere and by late May had
risen to No 1 in that stat.
Central to the varied putting measures is
three-putt avoidance, which on the surface
seems too broad for meaningful takeaways.
But Sanders has created a unique equation
of three factors: (1) distance of the first
putt; (2) distance of the leave – the length
of the second putt; and (3) whether the
first putt reached the hole. Sanders says
reaching the hole with the first putt is
key because the player obviously will hole
more long ones. He also notes that John-
son’s superb distance control means fewer
three-putts even if he occasionally scoots
the first putt four feet by. Johnson is better
than tour average in three-putt avoidance,
and in 2015, the year he won the Open at
St Andrews, he ranked eighth.
At that initial meeting in 2011, Sanders
suggested that Johnson, who has always
excelled with his wedges and won the
2007 Masters despite not going for any
par 5 in two, bomb away with his secondshot on the par 5s rather than lay up to his
pet distances. This brought a spirited protest
from Damon Green, Johnson’s caddie,
who knew well his player’s skill from 70 to
100 yards. He relented only after Sanders
installed a caveat to his advice. “I told them,
if the green complex has a lot of danger,
like the water on 13 and 15 at Augusta, by
all means he should lay up,” Sanders says.
“Otherwise the stats say he should go for
it, because the quality of his short game is
such that he’ll be closer to the hole after a
pitch or bunker shot than he’d be with a
wedge from 70 yards.”T
hen there’s where he plays. An exam-
ination of Johnson’s results reveals that
in his 14-year career, he has played Pebble
Beach and Torrey Pines only three times
each. “I love those courses,” Johnson says.
“But you can’t play everywhere, and I leave
them off because I don’t putt very well on
Poa annua greens.”
Sanders has included grass types when
compiling his year-end presentations for
the team, and Bender considers even more
course-related factors. “If you look at
Zach’s history, his wins have come mostly
at tournaments where the winning score
is 15 under par or better,” Bender says. It’s
true; all but three of Johnson’s 12 tour wins
were on shorter, faster layouts where he’s
likely to have his deadly wedge in hand
more often than a middle iron. “Zach is
very aware of this,” Sanders says. “One
challenge is the trend towards courses
being stretched out. Choosing courses that
suit Zach’s strengths can be a challenge.”
As time passes, there are fewer surprises
in Sanders’ reports. And as telling as the
revelations are, Johnson is quick to say that
stats are but one piece of a larger picture.
“First and foremost, I’m an athlete and
a competitor,” he says. “Stats are not the
be-all, end-all. There’s conditioning, diet»BIG »D ATA»
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