Brandon Todd Golf
Leave it to Brendon Todd to solve the mystery of his missing game in Bermuda of all places.
Planes and ships that famously vanished in the Bermuda Triangle were less lost than Todd, a 34-year-old PGA Tour journeyman, who suffered through a stretch of missing 37 cuts in 41 starts between 2016 and 2018 and plummeted to No. 2006 in the world at the start of the year. But on Nov. 3, Todd capped off a remarkable comeback by playing 9 under in his first 11 holes en route to shooting a final-round 62 to win the Tour’s inaugural Bermuda Championship by four strokes over Henry Higgs.
Jul 22, 1985 Brendon Todd’s best moments from the 2019 Mayakoba Golf Classic Round 4 Brendon Todd rebounds from poor front in fourth round of the RSM Classic Brendon Todd makes birdie putt on No. Todd played his junior golf at Prestonwood Country Club in Cary, North Carolina and Green Hope High School.He won the North Carolina High School 4A classification individual championship in his freshman, junior, and senior seasons at Green Hope, including winning the title as a freshman in 2000, the first year of the school being open after a fire destroyed its campus in 1963. Jun 28, 2020 Some brand continuity with his wedges as he carries two Titleist Vokey’s before opting for a Fourteen Golf RM-Proto lobwedge. And the 34-year-old rounds off his set with a sixth different brand. Todd uses a Sik Pro C-Series putter the same brand of putter that Bryson DeChambeau has in play. Brendon Todd WITB 2020. Jun 28, 2020 June 28, 2020 5:03 pm PGA golfer Brendon Todd was playing some great golf all weekend at the Travelers Championship. With just seven holes remaining, Todd found himself in second place and just two. Jun 30, 2020 Brendon Todd is an American professional golfer who currently plays on the PGA Tour and the Web.com Tour. Been professional in golf since 2007, Todd has always managed to have the best results in major championships including 3 PGA Tour wins, 2 Web.com Tour wins, 1 NGA Hooters Tour wins and 1 eGolf Professional Tour win.
“I went and found the wrecked ship and put it back together,” Todd said ahead of the Mayakoba Golf Classic, where he makes his first start Thursday since returning to the winner’s circle.
When asked to recall how his game went south, Todd can identify the exact moment it began to spin out of control. He was playing in the final pairing in the third round of the 2015 BMW Championship after shooting 66-63 and on the fourth hole he blocked a 4-iron 50 yards right that landed one hole over in a bush. He took a drop for an unplayable lie, made a triple bogey and shot 76, but that was just the beginning of his travails.
“I started seeing this right shot in my head and I couldn’t shake it,” he said. “The damage to my mind was done.”
Todd developed the nasty affliction known as the yips, an involuntary loss of control that typically affects a player’s nerves on short putts. Todd suffered from the full-swing yips.
“It’s really not using your mind the right way,” Todd explained. “Your fear takes over and blocks your instincts from doing what comes naturally. Once you see the bad result you have a fear of the same outcome until you fix it.”
This wasn’t the first time Todd had endured the loss of his game. In 2010, he missed the cut in all 13 of his starts on the Korn Ferry Tour and didn’t earn a check. But by 2014, Todd won the PGA Tour’s Byron Nelson Championship and climbed into the top 50 in the world. This slump, however, proved to be a longer journey into darkness.
“All of us as pros who knew him felt so bad for the struggles he went through,” said Matt Kuchar, the defending champion of the Mayakoba Golf Classic. “He went down to the bottom. He wasn’t just missing cuts. He was struggling to break 80.”
Todd sought answers from multiple teachers, but nothing seemed to help. That is until David Denham, a teammate from Todd’s 2005 National Championship squad at Georgia, suggested he consider working with Bradley Hughes, an Australian who won seven tournaments around the world as a pro before becoming an instructor. Todd bought Hughes’s $9 instructional e-book “The Victors,” and read it at the beach on family vacation and called him for a lesson.
“He didn’t want a paint-by-numbers (swing,) as he called it,” Hughes said. “He wanted to trust that the club was going to do what it should do.”
Around the same time, caddie Ward Jarvis suggested Todd read another book to help the mental side of his game, “The Phenomenon: Pressure, the Yips, and the Pitch that Changed My Life,” by former pitcher Rick Ankiel.
Still, as 2018 neared its end, Todd met with his financial adviser and discussed pursuing other careers. He looked into opening a pizza franchise. In November, he shot 61 to qualify for the RSM Classic and posted four rounds in the 60s. He put the pizza plans on hold. By April, the fog had lifted and Todd’s confidence in his swing reemerged. Regaining his playing privileges through Korn Ferry Tour Finals was big, but Todd had grander ambitions. Hughes recalls Todd looking him in the eye and declaring he was going to win again.
“Mate, I have no doubts,” Hughes said. “There were a lot of doubters but neither of them were us.”
Todd’s victory earned him the security of a two-year exemption, berths in the Sentry Tournament of Champions and Players Championship, but not an upgrade on his flight home.
“I either had a beer or a phone in my hand texting from the minute I won, so all of a sudden I was walking on the airplane and I was like, ‘I wonder what seat I’m in?’ And I looked up and there I was 16E, middle seat. You know what? That stuff matters so little to me. I’ve been flying to and from Monday qualifiers for the past three years. Do you really think I care about sitting in the middle seat on the way home from my second victory?”
Not when his game is flying high again.
Commonly associated with the twitchy two-footer, the yips strike fear into golfers of all abilities. So what would you do if it started to affect your full-swing? Find out how Brendon Todd recovered from this to claim PGA Tour glory
It’s a word that keeps golfers awake. Even those who don’t suffer from the yips shy away from its very mention – fearing it’ll manifest itself out of nowhere. It’s bad enough for the casuals but imagine going through this turmoil when it’s your livelihood. That’s what faced Brendon Todd, who’s just won the Bermuda Championship and Mayakoba Golf Classic within three weeks of each other.
So what happened? Todd can pinpoint exactly when the problems began.
He entered the third round of the 2015 BMW Championship in the final group and, after finding the fairway on the fourth, the next swing would send him into a spiral lasting the best (or worst) part of three years.
“I hit this 4-iron 50 yards right past the bushes, into another set of bushes and I made a seven. It just shook me a little bit.
“Then the shot kept reappearing throughout the fall schedule. I lost golf balls. I was hitting in hazards and hitting it right. A lot of it was mental, some of it was the fact that I changed my swing and I basically battled that scary yip right feeling all of ’16.
“Even if I had a tournament where I didn’t hit it, I was so scared of it I would hit it left and chip and putt my way to 72 and missed a thousand cuts.”
In 2015-16, Todd made only four cuts. Having been in the world’s top 50, he fell outside 2,000. He considered calling it quits at the end of 2018.
Brendon Todd Golf Shoes
How did he recover?
A former college teammate told him to read ‘The Great Ballstrikers’, written by ex-tour player Bradley Hughes.
“It has a lot of pictures and drills and models in there. That resonated with me as a feel player, somebody who doesn’t really want to go try and paint lines with my golf swing, I want to kind of feel a pressure or a force and that’s what he teaches. So the book really hit home with me, and I went and saw him.”
Todd took a six-week break at the end of the 2018 season, working on drills in his basement to address mechanical issues.
The American still had to overcome his mental demons. Coincidentally, former Korn Ferry Tour caddie turned performance coach, Ward Jarvis, reached out.
“(He said) I think I know what you’re going through. I’m a stutterer, I have the same sort of mental breakdown you have. I think there’s a way for us to work through it together.”
Jarvis had Todd read a book by former major league baseball player Rick Ankiel.
“Rick Ankiel is famous for being one of the most talented young baseball players. He basically just fell off the map with pitching, had to reinvent himself as an outfielder. It was a book about the yips. I read it, it kind of helped.”
The American started to see signs of life. A 61 at Monday qualifying earned him a spot in last year’s RSM Classic where he made the cut before regaining his card with a 7th-place finish in the year-end Korn Ferry Tour points list.
Brandon Todd Golf Coach
Fast forward and after winning his battle with the golfer’s oldest enemy, Todd has just won the last two PGA Tour events he’s entered. Next up? The RSM Classic, where his renaissance began. He couldn’t, could he?
Have you or do you know anyone that’s suffered from swing yips? I’d be interested to hear from you, so let me know in the comments or tweet me.