Sal Syed Has Lots Of Good News About Your Game

His company, Arccos, has amassed a trove of detailed performance data on the weekend golfer, and what you’ll learn from it will greatly enhance your play (but not, alas, your lame driving distance).

- Michael Bamberger & Jeff Ritter

Salman “Sal” Syed, golfing futurist, dreams of a day when you, with your 16.3 index and your 88-mile-an-hour club-head speed, will actually know how far you hit your 8-iron. Because Syed’s company, after looking at about 100 million regular-joe golf shots since 2014, has figured out the single biggest difference between them and us: The Tour players are realists, and we’re dreamers.

“They know what their clubs will do,” says Syed, born and raised in Pakistan, educated at Ohio Wesleyan (math major, tennis player) and the Yale School of Management. “We idealize our best shots.” It’s a far, far better thing to know that your true median 8-iron goes 132 yards, and to accept that the 8-iron you stiffed from 161 in your last round is, in fact, an outlier. “The Tour pros are an inspiration, but they play a different game,” Syed explains. The rest of us, he says, need to “overcome our cognitive biases.”