the future. Why, as an instructor, would you ever again just use your eyeballs?” Lee says. Speaking of instructors and eyeballs, Sean Foley had both of his keenly fo- cused when he signed on the dotted line to invest in Sportsbox AI. Foley is one of the more well-known instructors in the game, but he’s also something of a free thinker. Want to know why you are pulling the ball with your 9-iron only? Foley can tell you, but he might also add things like, “How is AI ever go- ing to know that to take the next step, a pro like Michael Kim is going to have to read a specific chapter of Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk To Freedom ? In Foley’s opinion the golf swing is usually poorly taught, so AI stands to help. “We never had the ability to mea- sure what was actually going on. Now we do. AI allows golf teachers to get a lot better a lot more quickly. You’re not guessing.” I asked Foley if he thinks there’s any danger that AI will one day make his job irrelevant. Never, he said. AI is a great tool, but “AI can’t see what’s needed beyond the mechanics. It’s go- ing to be about how we use it, and it’s never going to make reps unnecessary.”
WHERE AI IS GOING TO SHINE IN THE FUTURE WILL BE WHEN REFINEMENTS ALLOW FOR VERBAL DIALOGUE BETWEEN PLAYER AND APP.
SWING TIPS AI assistance with strategy and mental game are potentially valuable, but you still must swing the club. I tested some AI swing analysis tools at the Stanford Golf Course, which winds through the deep valleys and high hills of the Santa Cruz moun- tains. At certain points you can see the ochre-tiled roofs of the campus buildings and the spires of downtown San Francisco. Golf Digest has a business relationship with Mustard, so I tried its app first. Mustard started as an athlete-analysis tool for baseball pitchers five years ago, co-founded by former MLB player and pitching coach Tom House. The company spent two years developing its golf app with help from investors Justin Rose and Mark Blackburn – voted No 1 on Golf Digest’s 50 Best Teachers in America – and other experts in motion analysis and coaching. I filmed one swing video and in about a minute, got an assessment of my swing with “scores” in various areas, not raw data. The app uses something called computer-vision tech- nology to locate all the major joints in the body and track their movement. Then, it taps AI to compare the data against tens of thousands of 3-D swing models. Most of the advice it offered on how I could improve seemed manageable, or more manageable than finding a teacher. “Every great coach has frameworks they use to analyse play- ers,” says Mustard co-founder and CEO Rocky Collis. “We spent thousands of hours with golf’s best coaches and turned their frameworks into algorithms, so that Mustard personalises in- struction the way a top coach like Mark Blackburn would.” I also tried Sportsbox AI, where, similarly, you upload a smartphone video of your swing within an app and get results in about a minute. The company was founded in 2020 as a breakaway from Voicebox, the company that provided natu- ral voice recognition for Samsung. Jeehae Lee, Sportsbox CEO, played on the LPGA tour and has an MBA from Wharton. “It’s not about what a good swing for Rory is,” Lee says. “We want to find the patterns to tell a person what a good swing is for them.” Lee may not be telling people how to swing like Rory, but she is telling Bryson how to swing like Bryson. An ambassador for the company, DeChambeau used Sportsbox during his 2024 US Open win at Pinehurst. He worked with Lee directly to decode how his swing angles were off at some microscopic level. “We’ve been doing this with Bryson before every major. To me, this is
YOUR GRAND- CHILDREN’S GOLF
What of the philosophical and ethi- cal considerations of golf mixed with AI? Don Harrison thinks about these things, partly because he’s a single-fig- ure-handicap in the Palo Alto area, but also because he happens to be Google’s president of global partnerships and corporate development. “I don’t lose sleep over AI replacing human intelligence,” he said from the Googleplex in Mountain View, which is a 20-minute drive from the Stanford Golf Course. “Whenever something has limited data, like golf, then AI ab- solutely has the ability to absorb that data into a single model. It will opti- mise the swing for any kind of body or
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