It’s supposed to be bad luck if a black cat walks across the path in front of a person. But what if the Black Cat in question is none other than NBA great Michael Jordan?
Black Cat Ventures is the golf technology fund founded by Jordan and managed by his partners Ken Weyand and Darren May, the general manager and golf coach at The Grove XXIII in Hobe Sound, FL, respectively. On Tuesday, they announced that they had closed a round of funding to invest in V1 Sports, which markets professional and consumer video analysis apps to improve your swing, and GPS and stats app with auto shot tracking intelligence to improve your score.
Jordan’s passion for golf is legendary, and V1 has become an important tool in his eternal quest to improve. Grove XXIII, the club Jordan founded in 2019, is one of the only places that has a training program that measures Strokes Gained for practice.
“We show the membership what they need to work on and how to work on it,” said Day, who teaches PGA Tour pros Keegan Bradley and Ben Taylor. “It’s practicing and training with a more intense pressure because that’s what you’re going to feel in a big moment when you tee it up on a golf course.”
While V1’s video analysis software for capturing, reviewing and analyzing athletic movement initially attracted Jordan’s group to invest, May is quick to point out that what they plan to offer has “a lot more to do with just filming people’s swings and drawing lines on it.”
May takes a holistic approach to coaching, and has developed an eight-step program that will be built into the V1 practice platform.
“The amount of data available to athletes today is vast, but we want to help athletes, from professionals to enthusiasts, interpret that data in a way that actually helps them perform better,” said V1’s CEO Brian Finnerty, an entrepreneur and former professional soccer goalkeeper in the National Professional Soccer League.
May’s eight-step process for training aligns with how Jordan went about improving his game on the hardcourt.
“A lot of the conversations that I’ve personally had with Michael, those steps are what he intuitively took his skills through to get it to the point of execution. They just have slightly different names and one’s called golf and one’s called basketball,” May said. “He’s adamant that you have to make the training harder than the playing. An establishment or training facility like Grove XXIII is really about taking people to the point of failure. You’re really only coaching someone if you can get them to fail in training. Because they’re going to fail in competition. That’s what we call someone’s mental load or someone’s learning sweet spot. Everyone’s different but it still creates the same feeling of being on the precipice of failure or success. You have to do that in training because every shot in competition feels like that within reason.”
In short, for golfers, there may never be a better time to be like Mike.
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