How Justin Ray became golf’s go-to data dude

Social media can be a bleak place, riddled with the hottest of takes and all kinds of toxicity.

There are, though, plenty of exceptions to that grim rule.

Justin Ray is a particularly good one.

The 39-year-old has attained cult status amongst golf-mad users of what Elon Musk calls X thanks to his encyclopedic knowledge of golf trivia.

Who was the last player to do X, Y or Z? If Ray doesn’t have the answer, it’s a safe bet nobody does. But rest assured he probably will.

Ray’s journey to becoming “The Golf Stats Guru” happened more by chance than design. He studied journalism at the University of Missouri with designs on becoming the next Dan Patrick or Mike Tirico. “Unfortunately, when I got there, I saw that there were about 700 dudes just like me, all with the same goal,” he laughs.

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During his studies, he interned at ESPN in the research department, a position he made permanent after graduating. That’s when he started to carve his niche.

“I’ve always been a huge sports nut,” he says. “Basketball, football, baseball – all the traditional American go-tos. But I kind of realised pretty early on that they didn’t have a lot for golfers.

“There’s all this information available, especially for baseball, college football, the NFL, basketball, international soccer. But there was a gap in golf, so I got to work on that.”

Over the next five years, Ray wrote a regular stats-based column for ESPN.com before, in 2014, the Golf Channel came calling. After five years there, he joined the Twenty First Group – formerly 15th Club – in 2019.

“I’ve always had a deep interest in the ‘why’ and using statistics to explain it. I was the kid who kept his baseball stats on his dad’s computer in Microsoft Excel. It’s just something that has always really interested me and I’ve been fortunate to somehow build it into a career.”

At the heart of Ray’s work is a giant library of data he built himself and maintains manually on an ongoing basis.

“The first thing I did, probably around 2010 or 2011, was create a database of every major winner ever in the men’s game,” he explains. “Age, nationality, position by round, stuff like that. Then, at the end of every season, I try to think of something I wish I’d had that year but didn’t. A good example would be from seven or eight years ago. I decided I wanted to build a database with every top-10 finish in every major championship going back to the 1860 Open.

“It came in handy because that was the year before Sergio Garcia won The Masters, so I was able to tell you who had the most top-ten finishes before their first major win, who had the most top-five finishes in majors without a victory since World War II or 1900 or whatever. It’s all just contained in a big Excel document. I have tonnes and tonnes of things like that now.”

Inputting all that data, Ray admits, is an arduous process and one made all the more intense by a need to be completely, 100% accurate. One mistake and the whole thing collapses.

“Accuracy is the most important thing of all,” he says. “Sure, speed is important, because you want to be timely. But if you’re not accurate? I mean, you could get 200 things right but if you get one thing wrong, your trust is broken in terms of the public. You need to have real attention to detail.”

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Trusted by Stacy Lewis to provide the intel for her Solheim Cup sides in 2023 and 2024, Ray’s timing has been exceptional, his career as golf media’s No.1 authority on stats dovetailing perfectly with the analytics wave the sport has been riding for the last decade or so.

“I don’t think they’re gonna make a movie about me and put Brad Pitt in it, but it’s been interesting to see the rise in popularity and use of it,” he smiles.

“I remember at the 2011 Masters, I was working on SportsCenter, on-site at Augusta National. I tried to get a Strokes Gained: Putting graphic into the show. They looked at me like I had six heads. Like, ‘What is this nonsense, get it off the screen.’

“So, it’s nice that it’s become more and more accepted. This more detailed statistical storytelling is becoming more and more mainstream, which is awesome.”

The wealth of information at Ray’s disposal does, of course, beg the question: what’s his favourite golf stat of all?

“I’m a sucker for a lot of really cool historical corollaries between players,” he laughs. “So, I guess I’d have to go with this: the last time Jack Nicklaus played in each of the four major championships – so the 2000 US Open, the 2000 PGA, the 2005 Masters and 2005 Open Championship, Tiger Woods won each time.

“The first time I came across it, I was like, ‘There’s just no way.’ I had to go and check it five times. But sure enough, it’s real.”

Follow Justin on X: @justinraygolf

Michael McEwan is the Deputy Editor of bunkered and has been part of the team since 2004. In that time, he has interviewed almost every major figure within the sport, from Jack Nicklaus, to Rory McIlroy, to Donald Trump. The host of the multi award-winning bunkered Podcast and a member of Balfron Golfing Society, Michael is the author of three books and is the 2023 PPA Scotland 'Writer of the Year' and 'Columnist of the Year'. Dislikes white belts, yellow balls and iron headcovers. Likes being drawn out of the media ballot to play Augusta National.

Deputy Editor