I'm already upset when I find my ball in the bunker I'm really upset and when I find my ball in a fried egg fried egg fried egg fried egg fried egg fried egg fried egg fried egg

fried egg lie I'm about ready to run off the golf course Oh, All right, we welcome on Ian Fillmore, an economist with a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago and assistant professor at

Washington University in St. Louis. Ian, welcome on. It's great to be here. Thanks

for having me.

Ian, I got to say that you're a little bit different than our typical golf crazed guest, but you've done considerable research in sports and specifically tennis you and

Jonathan Hall wrote a paper that I've become just entranced with called technical logical change and obsolete skills,

evidence from men's professional tennis.

So I wanted to have you on just to kind of talk about your paper and I think there's some really interesting parallels with it to golf in the current kind of state of the game that everybody talks about with kind of where

technology is going with our game and how it's affected our game.

So first off, tell us about, you know, how you stumbled onto this topic and wrote this paper with Jonathan.

Yeah, so I actually grew up playing tennis.

As a kid, I got playing competitively and I was played in the Missouri Valley area and played a little bit in college and my whole family was a tennis family and my brother played as well and played in college.

And so I kind of steeped in the tennis world and knew about that and I ended up going to

graduate school in economics and you know wanted to write you know write about what I knew and I knew a little bit about tennis of course and so I said

well you know there I knew about from talking to my dad and playing tennis growing up.

He would often talk about playing with a wood racket and he had some of his old wood rackets and about how hard it was and and he would always say like yeah you

couldn't you couldn't even hit the ball you know it was just it took so much

practice to just even make contact with the ball he said said the new rackets are so much better.

And so I sort of knew that, right? The new rackets are better. But then as I got looking into it, more I realized it's not just that they made it easier to play, but they actually

changed the way that people played the game.

And if you go back and you can find a video of guys like Ken Roosevelt or Rod Labrin,

you can watch them play on kind of this grainy black and white video from the late 60s. And the pace of the game is so much slower.

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