Bryson DeChambeau’s reputation as golf’s Mad Scientist is nothing new. He’s been going down rabbit holes for years between his single-length clubs and more recently his irons with bulge and roll. But the original story of DeChambeau being obsessed with his equipment is how he would check his golf balls in a bathtub in Epsom sale to make sure he was using a balanced one.
It was a practice that Ben Hogan did before him and DeChambeau picked up and copied. In the video here, DeChambeau’s longtime coach Mike Schy explains the process and the method to the madness.
On Saturday, one day before he won the U.S. Open in dramatic fashion, DeChambeau explained the back story behind his “salty balls.”
“I put my golf balls in Epsom salt. I’m lucky enough that Connor, my manager, does that now. I don’t have to do it. But essentially we float golf balls in a solution to make sure that the golf ball is not out of balance.
“There was a big thing back in the day where golf balls are out of balance, and it’s just because of the manufacturing process. There’s always going to be an error, especially when it’s a sphere and there’s dimples on the edges. You can’t perfectly get it in the center.
“So what I’m doing is finding pretty much the out-of-balanceness of it, how much out of balance it is. Heavy slide floats to the bottom, and then we mark the top with a dot to make sure it’s always rolling over itself.
“It kind of acts like mud. If there’s too much weight on one side, you can put it 90 degrees to where the mud is on the right-hand side or the mud is on the left-hand side. I’m using mud as a reference for the weight over there. It’ll fly differently and fly inconsistently.
“For most golf balls that we get, it’s not really that big of a deal. I just try to be as precise as possible, and it’s one more step that I do to make sure my golf ball flies as straight as it possibly can fly because I’m not that great at hitting it that straight.”
