In early December of this past year the United States Golf Association (USGA) and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews (R&A) sent out press releases regarding their intention to begin limiting the distance that a golf ball can carry. The contention of golf’s two major ruling bodies is that the golf ball goes too far, golf courses are becoming obsolete, and a roll back of the current specifications for golf ball manufacturing need to be reined in.
To hear the engineers of the USGA and the R&A put all of this in layman’s terms, the eventual impact would be felt at golf’s highest levels. For top notch professionals and amateurs of note, they would end up hitting the golf ball with their driver some 13-15 yards shorter off the tee. For women golfers at the highest levels, the overall impact would be some 5-7 yards. For the average recreational bogey golfer with a swing speed of 90 miles per hour, their golf balls would fly some five yards or less according to the released data.
Way back in 1970 when I was a caddie at the PGA Tour’s Western Open, the electronic score board behind the 18th green listed Jack Nicklaus as the circuit’s longest driver of the golf ball. His average drive on tour in 1970 flew 271 yards. Nowadays we see the likes of Rory McIlroy leading the PGA Tour with tee shots averaging 326 yards. Keep in mind that this is the average. Some of Rory’s mis-hits only go 300 yards while the occasional nuked-drive lands some 350 yards off the tee. Think of it this way. On a 450 yard par four, Nicklaus would hit his average tee shot and still have 180 yards left to the green. He would then have a four or five iron to the flagstick. When Rory hits it 325 yards, he will have 125 yards to the green, meaning he’s probably hitting some sort of a wedge to the pin. Distance has always been an advantage in golf regardless of whether we’re talking about Walter Hagen in the 1920s, Sam Snead in the 1950s, or Tiger Woods at the turn of the century. Driver-wedge makes the game a whole lot easier than driver-five iron.
To some golfers in the know, this rollback of the golf ball makes perfect sense. Jack Nicklaus has long advocated for the game’s rules officials to try to contain the distance the golf ball flies. When the USGA and R&A information sheet came out, Jack was quoted as saying, “I’ve been preaching about this. It was 45 years ago I first went to the USGA. They can’t keep burying their heads in the sand.” Rory McIlroy would agree. He said “I realized that hitting it longer wasn’t going to make me a better golfer. Speed work was detrimental to my swing.”
Yet one of Nicklaus’ contemporaries had a different outlook on all this. Lee Trevino was quoted as saying “I just think that they should leave a good thing alone.” Trevino blamed the distance debate on the fact that the top golfers nowadays have better equipment and they are much better athletes. “The big hitter is still going to hit it farther.” Brandel Chamblee of the Golf Channel weighed in by stating, “Not only are they (the USGA and the R&A) out of touch with the game they govern, but the people that play it.”
This decision by the USGA and the R&A will take effect for those top notch competitive golfers in 2028 and for the rest of us it will find its way into the rule book in 2030. USGA engineers have even acknowledged that it will have little impact upon the average golfer and that some golf balls currently on the market won’t need to be rolled back. I suppose that means that those Noodles and Top Flites in your golf bag can stay there while your Pro V1’s may have to go.
So exactly how valid are Trevino’s points about athleticism and equipment. I’m not sure I buy into the idea that the current game is filled with better athletes. While the likes of Tony Finau and Brooks Koepka are impressive from the athletic standpoint, I think it’s easy to point out that golfers like Sam Snead and Arnold Palmer were well muscled and extremely athletic. We could go 25 years beyond that to point out golfers such as Greg Norman who were also athletically superior to the common man. Plus as Rory McIlroy stated, hitting the ball great distances isn’t going to make one a better golfer. There was nothing physically imposing about Gene Sarazen in the 1920s, Gary Player in the 1960s, or Zach Johnson in the last decade. They won major championships because they knew how to put the ball into the hole in less strokes than the others. And speaking of the modern athlete, it’s hard to believe that any of today’s pros worked any harder to be in tip-top shape than Sam Snead or Gary Player.
However there is no doubt that equipment has a big impact upon today’s game. Perhaps I mis-stated that last line. It is fair to say that equipment has always had an impact upon the game and the end result has been greater distance. At the game advanced into the 20th century, the improvements in the design of the golf ball from the feathery to the gutta-percha made an immediate impact. In the 1930s the big equipment advancement was the introduction of the steel shaft. Right about then Sarazen and his newly devised sand wedge was also a game improvement device.
When Jack Nicklaus was accumulating his 18 major championships, he was doing so with persimmon woods, balata golf balls, forged blade irons, and clubs anyone could buy off the shelf. Move on to the Tiger Woods generation and we’re suddenly talking about fitted clubs that included metal woods, drivers that measure out to 460cc, exotic blended golf shafts, and cavity backed irons with U grooves. On top of all that, the science and engineering behind the equipment were such that the Pro V1 when hit with a driver on the upswing impacted over spin upon the golf ball. While hitting down on it with a short iron, the end result was backspin.
All of this leads us to a bunch of questions. Can manufacturers change their factory equipment to make all this work? Do they even want to? How much will all this add to the cost of the golf ball? Does any of this make sense with golf’s growing popularity among the younger generation who are suddenly new to the game? And finally, is all this merely a temporary band-aid since all of this supposedly has so little impact upon most golfers?
There is no way to expand traditional courses like the Olympic Club that is in a constricted metropolitan area. Another former U.S. Open site, Erin Hills, has massive acreage and could expand its 7,500 yard course to over 10,000 yards. When all is said and done, this is perhaps much to do about nothing. My 215 yard drives will only travel 212 yards in the future.
