It was an interesting three days of golf for me last weekend. On Friday, I joined my son Nick along with Ed Slevin and Dr. Brian Grey at Roddy Ranch in Antioch for the playing of the inaugural North Coast Section Scholarship Tournament. The NCS tourney was a fundraiser to help the region”s high school athletic section raise money for college scholarships. I”m always willing to play in these types of events although I quickly learned that Roddy Ranch is one very tough test of golf.
On Saturday and Sunday, Nick and I teed it up in the inaugural Lake County Alternate Shot Tournament at Buckingham. Unlike the other teams in the tourney, Nick and I have played in some form of alternate shot on a competitive basis annually since he was 11 years old. He”s a lot better than he was some eight years ago and I am nowhere near the linkster I was back then, but it still works out for us. He”s the power player. I”m the iron master. He”s the master of the 5-foot putt and I have the creative short game.
For those of you unfamiliar with the physical status of my 19-year-old son, he”s 6-foot-1, is very thin, and has a compact three-quarter golf swing. He claims to weigh 140 pounds although I think that number is based on the time he weighed himself while carrying his golf clubs on his back and while holding onto his fully loaded shag bag. He looks like a walking 1-iron although I am showing my age because the 1-iron is basically an obsolete club in the era of the hybrid.
Anyway, regardless of his visual thinness and his backswing that is nowhere near parallel, Nick hits the living snot out of the ball. It doesn”t sound like a crash or a boom coming off the clubface, but it travels distances that are hard to fathom. On Roddy Ranch”s second hole, Nick”s tee shot flew into a greenside bunker, some 290 yards off the tee. The wind was crossing and in his face. On the ninth hole, he hit his drive down the right side of the fairway and it took a few hops until it came to a halt in the rough alongside the green. His tee shot traveled a mere 402 yards. It went on that way all day. On the 420-yard 16th hole, he hit a typical — for him — drive up the middle. He had 90 yards left to the hole, some 330 yards off the tee. The 16th also doubled as the tournament”s long drive hole. Nick”s ball was 25 yards short of the eventual long drive contest winner.
Two days later on Buckingham”s 470-yard par-5 16th hole, Nick launched a drive down the left-side rough line. As it was an alternate shot tourney, I had to hit the next shot. I played the shot to the green, a mere 130 yards away. In our pairing that day was Brels Solomon, an All-Conference golfer from Kelseyville High School”s class of 1997. Solomon swings a whole lot harder than Nick, but he also plays inferior equipment. His Titleist 975 driver is vintage 1997 and the head of the club looks like a modern-era 5-wood. Brels was 15 yards ahead of Nick in the heart of the 16th fairway.
There have always been long ball knockers in the world of professional and amateur golf. Most of golf”s greats, from Bobby Jones to Sam Snead to Jack Nicklaus to Tiger Woods, have always been able to hit the ball prodigious lengths. Walter Hagen and Byron Nelson and Arnold Palmer could crush the ball the way Phil Mickelson does nowadays. Golfers such as Ben Hogan were sneaky long, perhaps not carrying the ball in the air as far as contemporaries such as Snead and Nelson, but by altering ball flight and curvature, Hogan was able to be way out there alongside the big hitters.
Every era has had its obscenely long drivers of the golf ball. Nowadays, it”s the good-ol”-boy network of Bubba Watson and J.B. Holmes. They grew up watching John Daly go 15 inches past parallel and they too grip it and rip it. They are the modern day version of Daly although they don”t have to deal with the alimony and the rehab. Nonetheless, Daly was not a pioneer. In golf”s golden era, the long ball knockers were men such as George Bayer and Mike Souchak. Of course, in many ways George Bayer was like Dustin Johnson and the rest in that he seldom could find the center of the fairway.
Speaking of the modern era, while Nicklaus was longer than everyone else in his prime and Gary Player was the shortest hitter among the top professionals, the difference between the longest and the shortest was about 40 yards. On a 400-yard par-4, Nickalus would hit it about 270 and then have a 130-yard 9-iron into the green. Player would hit it about 230 yards and would be left with a 5-iron from the 170-yard mark. Player was at a disadvantage, but it wasn”t all that profound.
Today, Robert Garrigus leads the tour with an average driving distance of 316 yards. Brian Gay averages 266 yards off the tee, a very long 50 yards behind Garrigus. If you think of all the 525-yard par-4s out there nowadays, like the 10th at Augusta National or the 18th at Whistling Straits, Gay can only get about halfway there and still has another 260 yards left following his tee shot. Perhaps the days of Player, Ben Crenshaw, Corey Pavin, Dave Marr and others is long gone. Justin Leonard is the closest to that style of play on today”s tour and outside of his British Open win in 1998, he has been a stranger to the major championship leaderboards in the last decade.
Finally, decades are the most interesting driving distance stat of all. In 1980, the average driving distance on the PGA Tour was 256 yards. It was 262 yards in 1990, 273 yards in 2000, and 287 yards in 2010.
Everyone on today”s PGA Tour hits it a country mile. For that matter, so do Nick Schaefer, Brels Solomon and most notably Jonathan Carlson among Lake County amateurs. From my perspective, it makes for jaw-dropping launches from the tee markers. It also makes for a whole lot of golf holes that are nothing short of obsolete in today”s world of the long ball knocker.
