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Earlier this summer while playing golf with my friend Mike, a player in our group failed a crucial test.
We had just met minutes earlier, so on the first green I asked our partner the polite question: “Do you prefer the flagstick in or out?”
When the golfer said he wanted it kept in, Mike quietly stewed.
“Doesn’t anyone read?” he muttered.
The reaction had nothing to do with our round. Mike is Golf Digest senior equipment editor Mike Stachura, who in 2019 wrote about an extensive study that explored whether or not to pull the flagstick when putting. Conducted by a former Cal Poly mechanical engineering professor named Tom Mase, the results of the test were unambiguous: We should be taking the flagstick out 99.9 percent of the time. As Mike might say, leaving it in suggests you either don’t care about making putts, or just can’t read.
That many, better-informed golfers still cite Mike’s report underscores how easily we become immersed in certain nerdy golf discussions. I was a mediocre high school science student, but I’m a sucker for a good pseudoscientific golf study. We’ve done a bunch in my time at Golf Digest: on the effects alcohol and weed have on your game, on whether trees are really 90 percent of the air, even on if putting Vaseline on your driver face helps you hit straighter drives.
Those stories are generally done in the service of informing our readers, but they usually start with a question we’re itching to answer for ourselves.
The most recent version of this exploration is a new series called Mythbusters in which we sought to tackle common golf questions through a series of crude tests. As Golf Digest associate editor Drew Powell explained in the first installment about whether tee height affects distance and accuracy, our process falls short of Cal Poly standards, but we still arrive at helpful insight (subsequent stories have been about whether clean grooves really matter, and if carrying your bag hinders scoring). Where we feel we have an answer, we say so. Where we feel we’re still unsure, we say that, too.
Strange as it seems, the gray areas are welcome, too. When Mike provided a clear answer on flagsticks, that ended the discussion.
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