The statistics behind Scottie Scheffler’s incredible season

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It started with a tweet. Curtis Strange was up late one night at his home in Morehead City on the North Carolina coast. He couldn’t stop thinking about the destruction left by Hurricane Florence last month. Trees down everywhere. Floodwaters that still hadn’t receded. Blue tarps covering homes that no longer had roofs. Families that had lost absolutely everything. Strange felt helpless. “Honestly, I’ve been through many hurricanes, but this one was the worst for me,â€� he says. “You want to help because you have power, you have a house, a roof above your head and so many don’t.â€� So he took to Twitter to tell people he was going to use his house as a distribution center. Send cleaning supplies and toiletries and paper towels and rubber gloves. Strange would make sure the boxes got to the relief effort. Please just open your hearts and help. Strange even included his home address in the tweet. “My son gave me hell the next day,â€� Strange says with a chuckle. “I said, you know, it’ll take you 60 seconds to find everything about me on Google. So what difference does it make?â€� Three days later, boxes started arriving. Sometimes a dozen a day, sometimes 20 or more. All of which Strange loaded onto the bed of his truck or into the back of the SUV and took to the distribution center at the First United Methodist Church. “It’s been overwhelming,â€� Strange says. Almost every time a shipment came, the two-time U.S. Open champion would take pictures of the boxes left on his front porch and tweet it out. It was his way of saying thanks to the many, many  strangers who heeded his call.  Strange and his wife Sarah actually weren’t in North Carolina when the storm hit. Six months earlier they had made plans with friends to go trout fishing in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. So they “battened down the hatches,â€� Strange says, and headed west – and not too long afterward mandatory evacuation orders came for Morehead City. “It was hard to relax and enjoy yourself when you’re watching this thing bear right down on your community,â€� he says. Florence made landfall near Wrightsville Beach, which is about 90 miles south of Morehead City, at 7:14 a.m. ET on Friday, Sept. 14. The unwelcome visitor, which had maximum sustained winds of 90 mph, lingered for days, sucking up moisture from the Atlantic Ocean and moving slowly east, causing massive flooding across the eastern part of the state even weeks later. Strange wasn’t able to get home until the following Tuesday. All the nearby airports were closed so he had to fly into Charlotte and then take a circuitous route to get home, finding back roads that would let him skirt the many flooded areas. While Strange and his wife were in Wyoming, friends sent photos of their home and it appeared to have escaped relatively unscathed. As it turned out, there was significant water damage to the ceilings and drywall. Strange knows he was lucky, though. “Two houses from me, they’ve gutted the entire house and so mattresses, their sofas, their chairs, their belongings are in a pile of rubble in front,â€� he says. “That hits home, when you don’t have a place to lay down.â€� The fury of the storm became strikingly evident the day after Strange got back from Wyoming when he ventured over to Morehead City Country Club. “There were 30-inch diameter oak trees or bigger and pine trees that were actually twisted because tornadoes coming through there,â€� Strange says. “The debris was just like a war zone. … “Mother Nature, man, she wins every time, she really does.â€� Strange and his wife eventually canceled a trip to Paris for the Ryder Cup. The 63-year-old, who played on five teams and captained the 2002 U.S. squad, says there were just too many things to take care of at his house where workmen were visiting almost daily. “You can’t go over there and enjoy yourself and be a part of something like that knowing that you have mildew growing at home,â€� he says. As he got involved in the relief effort, Strange marveled at the first responders and other volunteers who saved so many lives and are now helping to put them back together again. “It’s been so overwhelming and people forget about where do these people stay?â€� Strange says. “They’re sleeping in the fire station, on the concrete floor. They have cots put up in these kind of homes away from home, tented villages. “These people work in 19-, 20-hour days to get power on and help people and it’s been amazing.â€� Some semblance of normalcy is slowly beginning to return to the eastern part of North Carolina. But this is just the beginning. It will be months before homes are repaired and rebuilt. Although boxes occasionally still arrive, the makeshift distribution center at the Strange household is now closed. Instead, he refers people who want to help to the Red Cross and Salvation Army. When told he should be proud of what he’s done, Strange doesn’t hesitate. “I didn’t do anything,â€� he says. “I put out a tweet and people are very, very generous and I can’t thank them enough. “They’ve helped so many people. They just don’t know how much a box of supplies, how far it goes. And I think we all think the box, I just won’t do it. It’d be a box. “Well, it all helps and when you start piling them up in the church and see what they’re doing — it really makes a difference.â€�

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If you think putter shafts don’t matter, don’t bother telling that to Nick Hardy. At the World Wide Technology Championship at Mayakoba earlier this month, PGA TOUR player Nick Hardy reeled off eight birdies in a row during the final round en route to a T21 finish. The birdie run came just a week after Hardy started using a new custom Swag putter at the Butterfield Bermuda Championship. For Hardy, the story of his new putter starts when he was in college at the University of Illinois. About eight years ago, Hardy said he started using a custom Bettinardi BB1 style putter, equipped with a stepless steel shaft and an orange grip. A couple years ago, however, he had to replace the original steel putter shaft, which sent him down a long road of searching. Although seemingly nothing had changed with his putter – he was still using the same exact putter head and grip – something was off with the shaft. It just wasn’t performing or feeling the same anymore. “I never believed shafts made much of a difference in putting, but I lost that feel,” Hardy told GolfWRX.com on Tuesday at The RSM Classic. Eventually, after a long period of exploration, Hardy tasked Nate Brown, the Director of Tour Operations for Swag Golf, to help him figure out what was wrong. Prior to working for Swag Golf, Brown was a longtime Tour rep for Bettinardi, and he worked closely with Hardy for nearly a decade on all of his putter needs. Brown was able to identify that Hardy’s original Bettinardi putter was equipped with a steel shaft that is no longer in production. Hardy couldn’t find the shaft he needed because it doesn’t exist on the current market. Brown wasn’t letting up easily, though. Motivated to find a stock of those specific shafts, Brown got in touch with one of his contacts to see if they had any of Hardy’s old stepless shafts. As it turns out, Brown’s guy had a box of them in his garage. “I would call it the box of destiny,” Brown told GolfWRX. “An old dealer had a box of the shafts in his garage room. He had no use for it, so he gave it to us.” The box of destiny is now locked away in a safe spot at Swag Golf headquarters in Northbrook, Illinois. Hardy has his old shaft back. “For a couple years, I was on a shaft witch hunt,” Hardy said. “It was like Cinderalla finding her shoe.” The reason the shaft feels and performs so differently is because it has a significantly higher frequency (frequency is calculated by the amount of times per minute that a shaft oscillates on a flex meter). Hardy’s new shaft measures nearly double the stiffness of standard steel putter shafts. In addition to the shaft, Brown also worked with Hardy to design him a new putter head that was built to his exact look, feel and performance needs. Brown initially sent Hardy a stock Swag Golf “The Handsome One” putters to try out, and afterwards they got to work on the prototyping process. Hardy says that he prefers a “squared off” style head, but he doesn’t like the putter to have “too much toe swing.” To fit Hardy’s eye, Brown worked with the Swag R&D team to dial in the look. With each new 3D-printed prototype that Swag designed, Brown would send photos to Hardy via text for his feedback. After several rounds of 3D prototypes and text messages, Brown and Hardy found the perfect look. “We changed the length of the hosel to give it less face rotation and moved the middle section of the bumpers in further. It has more of a Newport 2 look in bumpers, rather than a Newport look with rounded bumpers. And it’s different than the 009 bumpers, where they drop right down. …It’s bead-blasted, torched, and oil-quenched, and it’s made of 303 stainless steel. It’s also 360 grams, which is a heavier head than he used before.” Since switching to the putter for the first time in Bermuda, Hardy is a collective 25 under par for eight rounds, finishing in the top 25 in both Bermuda and Mayakoba. “The putter is money,” Hardy said. “The way it swings and the feel of it. It feels like home, like I’m using something that has a comfortable feel. I birdied eight straight at Mayakoba, so it’s nice that the results show.” But wait, what exactly is the shaft model that Brown found? Inquiring minds must know. “I prefer to keep it top secret,” Brown answered, with a wry smile. “They’re in a box that says ‘Nick Hardy. Don’t touch it.’” Fair enough.

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