If you want to learn about golf — watch Team Sweden, the Olympics odd couple

SAINT-QUENTIN-EN-YVELINES, France — You’re learning about different sports right now, and isn’t it fun? Archery is scored in sets, just like tennis. Who’da thunk it? Horses dancing in a courtyard can win a gold medal for their country. Do they know that’s going on? That how-do-you-even-begin-playing-this-sport is part of the Olympics charm. And golf is here, too.

If you’re a frequent reader of this website you know the sport, but even the smartest among you know there’s always more to uncover. So if you really want to learn something about golf, watch Team Sweden. Almost every aspect of this wacky sport is embedded in the contrasting Swedes competing this week: Alex Noren and Ludvig Åberg. 

Åberg is 24, 6-foot-3 and chiseled. Noren is 42, 5-foot-10 and grizzled. Åberg is indoor volleyball — above the net, power, speed. Noren is more beach volleyball — placement, finesse, craftiness. Digging out pars. The former is golf’s future while the latter is determined to remain part of its present. Just don’t tell him that he could soon be part of its past. 

“I’m learning. I’m learning,” Noren said 10 days ago after a good finish at the Open Championship. “And I’m trying. I haven’t slowed down. I should get better. I’m only 42.”

He’s right — only 42 — but he plays a sport increasingly hellbent on prioritizing youth and flexibility. The average age of top-ranked players has been decreasing for years. Despite that trend, our man is experiencing a late-career renaissance with all that learning he’s doing, bagging 12 top 25 finishes this season and squeaking his name onto major championship leaderboards. Lurking, even, under the radar. Analytically, it’s the best Noren has played since he won the French Open at Le Golf National in 2018, and then the Ryder Cup on the same course that fall. DataGolf ranks him 24th in the world. He just doesn’t make it look easy. 

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If Noren is famous for anything, it’s that he practices like the next ball he hits is a potential winning lottery ticket. It’s precious because who knows — it could be worth more. On the eve at the PGA Championship, he was the second-to-last golfer on property. On the night before the U.S. Open in June, he was working through a 6 p.m. putting session. Young pros are advised against doing this, because they’ll tire theirselves into poor form. But this? For Noren? It’s actually an improvement.

“He’s actually gotten better,” his caddie Kyle Morrison said during the Open. “He started playing better in the fall and got a lot more confident, so he doesn’t have to spend that much time practicing. But he just loves doing it.”

Ask around and everyone will say something similar. That Noren has a passion for this sport that his peers struggle to match, or even explain. Morrison likens him to Padraig Harrington, one of the game’s legendary pursuers. During the Open, Noren found a place in his rental home where he could make full swings, just in case an idea struck at 10 p.m. 

Two years ago, I had the embarrassing task of asking Noren if I could take pictures of his hands. Why? Because all those swings and all those days on the range have created two of the ugliest palms in pro golf, with calluses on top of calluses, sticking up like golden mountain ranges of dead skin. But there’s always another shot worth hitting, another feel worth finding. So he’ll wear two gloves, sometimes during a grind session. Or cut the thumb off a glove and use Leukoplast medical tape to help ease the pain of whatever remains. 

Åberg, meanwhile, makes golf look casual. He makes effort look minimal. In the span of 15 months, he graduated from college and immediately began contending on the PGA Tour. European Ryder Cup captain Luke Donald immediately compared his arrival to Rory McIlroy. There was something different about his strike — you just had to see it to understand it.

You have to go digging for a meaningful stat of his that ranks below average. Darn, only 118th in proximity from the left rough! He plays a game that coaches push their pupils toward — hit it high and hit is as far as you really can. (Literally only two Tour pros average a higher apex on their tee shots.) When you add that he’s mostly as accurate as the guys who hit it a lot shorter, there’s your ultimate recipe for modern golfing success. He doesn’t have calluses on top of calluses.

If it weren’t for a bum showing at the Open Championship, Åberg would have as many wins as a pro — 2 — as missed cuts. His promise is so enticing that one of the game’s best caddies, Joe Skovron, jumped ship from the bag of a another phenom, Tom Kim, for what appears to be an all-time talent … who carries himself like one.

“Yes, Strokes Gained everywhere, he’s great,” one caddie told me a couple weeks back, as Åberg was leading the Scottish Open. “But the difference is he’s the leader in Strokes Gained: Attitude. When he hits a bad shot, it’s Oh, well. When my guy hits a bad shot, he thinks about it for three holes.”

Therein lies a cheat code for Åberg, and one you can see on. He has such little scar tissue. When it comes to disappointment, he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. Noren has a career of technical golf thoughts kicking around his head — thoughts on wrist placement and forearm turn tossed his way by various swing theorists. On the range and even on the course, Noren routinely rehearses a low-hands, hip-turn half-swing, pausing right around the contact position. It looks odd to the TV viewer as he contorts his knees and over-emphasizes shaft lean, but as a career-long cutter of the golf ball, it is simply forcing the opposite feel of his miss: a hips-sliding slice. The maneuver that makes everyone pause is just his way of avoiding chaos. Toward the end of his own career, Åberg may have something like that, too. It is what it is.

Perhaps most compelling about the Swedes — here at the Olympics, an individual competition begging for an altered or additional format — is that they’d complement each other fantastically as teammates. If you could smash their skillsets together you’d have something close to the best golfer in the world. Noren feels young and thinks he can still get faster. Åberg is young and fluent in nearly everything, but wants the crafty short game of an older man. (Noren ranks 7th in Strokes Gained: Around the Green.) On Tuesday, just before their pre-tournament press conference, they found themselves competing in a game of of ’21’. The short game test is simple: players pitch five times to four different targets, gaining points for how close they get.

“I think there’s things that he can teach me around the greens,” Åberg said with a smile.

It sounded like he got spanked. But that all checks out. Noren’s Instagram feed is filled with videos of him nipping flop shots from impossible lies, impressing anyone willing to watch the skills fashioned over decades. Åberg’s IG is filled with him holding up trophies, posing for sponsor activations — an elite pro on the rise. Their scoring average this season tells a funny story about this sport, though. Both weigh in at 69.4 strokes — exactly the same.