Dave Pelz, who left his job as a scientist at NASA to study the short game of golf, a detour that would make him a celebrated guru of putts and wedge shots, died on March 23 at his home in Dripping Springs, Texas, near Austin. He was 85.
David Pelly, Pelz’s stepson and the chief executive of his company, Dave Pelz Golf, said the cause was prostate cancer.
While most golfers focus more on how to drive long distances, Pelz concentrated on the short game — shots from within 100 yards, including putting and chipping and blasting out of bunkers with a wedge. In his early statistical research, he found that 80 percent of shots lost to par occur within that distance, and that putting makes up 43 percent of the game.
“Golfers think that their first two shots are the game,” he said on the PBS talk show “Charlie Rose” in 2010. “They drive almost every hole. They hit to the green almost every hole. But what they don’t think about is that after you hit those first two shots, and you don’t hit the green, there are two, three or four more shots.”
Pelz, recognizable in his trademark broad-brimmed sun hat, became a major influence on the short game. He developed training aids and created clubs (he had about 20 patents); wrote instruction books; had his own Golf Channel show; opened schools for amateurs at golf resorts; and coached professional golfers.
In his backyard, he built his version of a golf laboratory: He practiced putting, chipping and pitching on a mini-course of seven famous greens, like the one at the arduous 12th hole at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, home of the Masters tournament. The 12th is known for its fickle wind patterns and for a pond that guards the front of the green.
“The whole effort here,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2012, “is to produce every shot in golf that I care about, so that I can practice them.”
Three weeks before Pelz’s death, Patrick Reed, the 2018 Masters champion, practiced in that backyard lab. In a tribute posted on Pelz’s website after the death, Reed wrote that over the course of 10 years, Pelz “never doubted a theory or an idea I had, he taught me to test it. He never doubted my ability, he challenged it.”
Pelz’s many other clients included Phil Mickelson, Tom Kite and Vijay Singh.
In 2004, after winning the first of his three Masters championships, Mickelson praised Pelz’s wedge wisdom. Mickelson said after his victory that his practice time with Pelz had paid off with a pitching wedge shot on the 14th hole of the final round that led to a birdie and a tie with Ernie Els. (Mickelson went on to beat Els by a stroke with a birdie on the final hole.)
“It landed right where I wanted it, checked up and ended up a foot away for a tap-in,” Mickelson said after the round. “Those hours of work and having that proper direction, I ultimately knew or did not ever lack belief that I would ultimately win.’‘
David Todd Pelz was born on Oct. 8, 1939, in Indianapolis. His father, Edward, was a traveling salesman for the National Biscuit Company (the family also lived in Lexington, Ky., and Willoughby, Ohio); his mother, Lilias (Stone) Pelz, oversaw the home and also painted. Both parents were golfers, and they began teaching Dave the game when he was 6.
He played through high school and received a golf scholarship to Indiana University, where he majored in physics and also studied mathematics, astronomy and philosophy. But all along, he was more interested in playing golf.
While competing in the Big Ten Conference, he met an obstacle: Jack Nicklaus, then a student at the Ohio State University, who beat Pelz in all 22 of their meetings.
In “Putt Like the Pros” (1989, with Nick Mastroni), Pelz wrote that he was frustrated at losing serially to Nicklaus — who would win a record 18 major tournaments as a professional — but that Nicklaus was the “catalyst for my early motivation to learn all I could about the science of putting.” He concluded that Nicklaus’s greatest virtue as a golfer was that he putted better than anyone else.
Pelz did not complete his Russian-language course — it conflicted with his golf schedule — and did not graduate. But Indiana University would award him a bachelor’s degree in 2011 based on the books he had gone on to write.
Recognizing that he was not likely to succeed on the PGA Tour, Pelz went to work in 1961 at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., a suburb of Washington. In his nearly 15 years there — during which he also played in amateur golf tournaments — he studied planetary atmospheres and rose to the position of senior scientist, with oversight of satellite programs that sent probes to Venus and Mars.
He left the space agency in 1975. He had come to realize, he told The Los Angeles Times in 2007, that “I’m a golf nut who loves physics, rather than a physicist who loves golf.”
By then, Pelz had created a device that taught him how to hit his putts on the sweet spot of the club, and, with a partner, developed a putter called the Teacher, which two dozen members of the PGA Tour began to use. It was eventually outlawed by the United States Golf Association for being an illegal playing aid.
“I think it’s the greatest thing ever invented to help the game of golf,” Bert Yancey, one of those golfers, told The Kalamazoo Gazette in 1975. The club had two prongs that extended from the face of its blade, enabling the golfer to frame its sweet spot.
Pelz’s passion for improving the mechanics of golfers’ short games led him to create dozens of training devices designed to improve putting aim and alignment, measure the break and speed of balls on greens, and reduce the fear of three-foot putts. He made wedges — a club for short, high chip shots — that let golfers hit the ball with a higher loft.
His many books include “Dave Pelz’s Short Game Bible” (1999) and “Dave Pelz’s Putting Bible” (2000), both written with James A. Frank, and “Dave Pelz’s Golf Without Fear: How to Play the 10 Most Feared Shots in Golf With Confidence” (2010), written with his son, Eddie, and Dave Allen.
Pelz opened his first school for the short game in 1985 in Abilene, Texas. It now offers three-day courses at 18 resorts in the United States, Europe and the United Arab Emirates. The schools were run for many years by his second wife, JoAnn (Pelly) Pelz, who became the chief executive of Dave Pelz Golf.
Pelz started his long run on Golf Channel in 1995 as the creator and star of “The Dave Pelz Scoring Game Show.”
In addition to his stepson, his wife survives him, as do two daughters, LauraKay McLoughlin and Katherine Pelz; his son, Eddie, from his first marriage, to Helen Kay Haydon, which ended in divorce; a stepdaughter, Elizabeth Mueller; nine grandchildren; and his sister, Sherry Hurley.
Recalling his decision to preach the short game, he told Charlie Rose that the world didn’t need “another player trying to be a great player.”
But he added: “What the world needs was honest-to-God research in golf that had never been done — measure things that had never been measured, which I had learned to do at NASA — maybe I could help the average golfer play better. And maybe the world needs to play golf better to enjoy it more.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades. More about Richard Sandomir
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