Why are we so quick to penalize distance?

[munichop]

Trilerian is right. The club and ball makers do a lot of r and d then give it to a pro and he can be measured vs his current setup. In one hour the pro gets more distance. In my case I just bought an upgraded shaft and gained 10 -15 yards. My scores are higher though because I am not putting well despite spending more time on that than anything else. Even BD won due to putting. If the regular player wants to know what the relative benefit is just move up a tee or two . Your relative distance will change and you will be able to ignore many hazards. You still have to make putts to take advantage though, just like the pros.

[cxx]

There are two advantages to long driving distance. One is that the longer the drive, the shorter the distance left to the hole (unless the drive is way off line). The other is that the longer the drive to more architectural features (hazards and inhospitable areas) can be ignored by flying over them. I don't mind the first, the second is a problem. Those hazards and rough were put there to shape the play of the hole. The increase in driving distance allows people to defeat the architecture of the course. Unfortunately, the architecture does not evolve quickly or inexpensively. Maybe incremental rough or traps in the new landing areas would keep things in line.

[munichop]

cxx is spot on. This is the crux of the issue. John Daly foreshadowed this in his PGA win years ago. Now there are dozens of players that overpower architectural features that were intended to test the pros.

[clevited]

I think defeating or circumventing the architecture of the course has always been a strategy in the game of golf has it not? You cannot possibly put hazards in the flight lines of every player. The closest you could come to that is by dictating the club the player has to hit off the tee directly (based on their distance capabilities). The best thing about being a pro that can hit the ball so far and accuratly, and putt well, and chip well, and scramble well, and strike their irons well, control spin well, shot shape well, play the wind well, play elevations and slopes well, etc etc etc, is that you can play to that strategy more often than the rest of your competition. I mean, many pro's can stop a ball even on the hardest of greens with a wedge on up to a 7 iron perhaps while most ams can't ever hope to do that. Are the pro's defeating or circumventing that bunker or water hazard behind the green that most ams hit into because they can't keep it from rolling down the back? Not a perfect example but I hope you get my drift.

If you come back and say "that is why courses are getting longer" I say that is wrong. Courses are getting unnecessarily longer for 2 reasons. Pride, and real estate sales. Lowest score wins no matter how it is achieved as long as it is within the rules of golf. Those courses still make most of their money by being played by am golfers. Most of them are not crazy long or overly talented. The course obstacles are more in play for them, the majority of golfers. The pro's are pro's because they have the tool set and can pull off the strategy that will net them the lowest score possible. Besides, I think its obvious that making a course longer doesn't do nearly what people think. The longer you make it, the more guys like Bryson can open up the taps and separate themselves even more. They still often end up with the same or close to the same club in their hands for their second shot. A similar effect would happen with a ball roll back. The short accurate guys would get less and less common and you might actually see driving distance average go up at a faster rate, and see the longest average driver go from around 315 yards to closer to their max which could be 350+.

[Mcgeeno]

If you grow the rough out thick you would be penalizing all players who hit it crooked. Not just long hitters right?

[cxx]

.Most of those fairways beyond the architectural features that shape the course are unprotected. The architect did not take a 340 yard drive into consideration when the hole was built. There is no reason that the golfer should have an easier time staying out of trouble with a 340 yd drive rather than a 300 yd drive. You can scale that to whatever tees you play.

What do you think of someone who chooses the forward tees so that they can carry all the trouble on the course?

[smashdn]

Couple things both regarding "risk/reward."

 

Be careful using the term "risk/reward" in relation to growing the rough. Risk/reward is a design tenant. Usually in relation to the taking on the risk of something to gain the reward. I risked carrying a bunker by attempting to hit over to gain the reward of added distance or a better angle. Growing the rough is not risk/reward. Growing the rough to a very penal length makes it then that, penal. Hit it in the fairway or else be penalized to some degree. Unless you want to make the rough at 320+ significantly longer than elsewhere. But I can see where the risk is hitting it in the rough but rough is not a risk/reward feature.

 

Secondly, design features, risk/reward features work when there is an actual risk of going in them. A bunker at 300 is no problem if you carry 320. It also is really only compelling to a viewer of pga tour event if there are only a handful of guys who can take it on and get the reward. The best thing for a long hitter is to be able to just barely clear the risk. That means he gets the reward but the bulk of the field cannot. Everybody cranking it 30 yards past something and it might as well not be there.

 

As much as I hate it the most equitable and way that keeps the integrity of the hole in place is to push the tees back. We talked ad naseum about the issues surrounding that.

[clevited]

At my local course, the back tees allow me to go after the ball off the tee with less worry about trouble. It almost "feels" easier to me. You cannot fit the course to every person, nor can you completely lock out any one particular strategy. If there is an open area at 340 and the player has the ability to get there, more power to them. I also say this a lot in these threads but to hit a high bomb takes some balls. The ball is in the air so long that any small breeze can push it quite a long ways offline. Any side spin you impart can be amplified. Bryson hitting a 5 degree driver is nuts. If you have never tried hitting a driver lofted that low, they are incredibly difficult to hit straight.

 

I will again say this, these courses, their architectural design intent is still mostly in play for the vast majority of golfers that keep these places open. There have always been players that can over power a course and we often praised them as amazing compared to everyone else (Jack and Tiger come to mind). If Jack or Tiger were short knockers, I doubt we put them on as high of a pedestal.

If a person pretends that we were still hitting persimmon and balata, I would be willing to bet that today we would have a field full with Jack's length or longer. We would still have this same discussion. It is inevitable that the quality of players will increase as the money or attraction of the sport increases. Golf has always been a sport that puts a premium on distance, in relatively recent times we are just seeing the sport become more accessable to a greater portion of the population imo. This alone is bound to grow more bombers and more athletic built players or players with gifted speed and hand eye coordination come up through the ranks. I could go on and on about this whole discussion but I have done this a million times and tbh, I am quite sick of fighting the same battles. You guys go ahead a duke it out, I have finally grown extremely tired of these threads and they just get locked.

I will end with this, driving the ball long and straight is still incredibly difficult to do even with today's equipment. The driver is still the hardest club in the bag to hit for almost all ams. Golf courses don't need to get longer, the player that shoots the lowest score still wins. These players today are still immensely talented compared to the vast majority of golfers and arguably more talented on average than all fields of the past. I want to give one more thing to think about. In 10 pin bowling, it is possible to just get good at getting strikes but be terrible and making spares. You can get so good at getting strikes that you can win with it. With that however, you still need to be able to get spares because you will never just be able to get strikes all the time. Lanes change (courses differ), and you will need that finer skill to compete when the strike ball just isn't working for you. In other words, golf has and never will be one dimensional and the guys that win, and win often are still the best players in the world and have more talent than almost every other golfer in the world.

[oikos1]

I haven't necessarily disagreed with all of your statements. I just don't see the point you are trying to make so perhaps you could clarify because it seems like your trying to make the distance issue more complicated than it has to be, It really has to do with one issue: Bifurcation or not.

[jholz]

Hmm, intriguing. Let's see if I get you...

 

So yes, I obviously say "not" when it comes to bifurcation. That is where the complication comes from. That makes sense.

 

Bifurcation cuts through all of that. Interesting.

 

A pithy little post there sir! Well done!

[munichop]

Bifurcation already exists and can be expanded thru the conditions of competition. The fact the tours don’t address distance gains and turn more courses into bomb and gouge competitions show everyone which approach to the game they favor. The spineless USGA and R and A are stalling until the generations that remember balata and persimmon golf exit...

[smashdn]

@clevited
I don't think I can go along with driver being the hardest to hit club for ams. It has the largest face and within the last 15 years has had the most technology poured into it to make it longer, straighter, faster, thinner, etc.
I'd say a long iron is hardest to hit. Most entry level sets don't even put real irons in above a 6 iron now, they have hybrids instead. Or I could see three wood. Smaller head by far and it likely has had its shaft lengthened to waht was once driver length.
Picking nits for sure though.

Hey one thing about the bowling, do they let the guys know the oiling pattern before the tournament? Could a guy evaluate it and decide that it did not fit his game and not play? That is kind fo what guys do to an extent on tour now. They decide that certain courses do not fit their style of play and just don't play. Few of the really long guys play Harbour Towne. The really long guys shine at really long courses. Bubba seems to do well where he can be long and bend the ball.

[Jwin323]

I'm not a long hitter by the current standard but I don't have any trouble competing with them. Not all of them are accurate, have great short games and are good putters. The ones that check all the boxes are not content to test themselves against the likes of me and my brethren so they move up. With the majority of bombers, it seems that the thing they do really well is equal to what I and other non bombers do well and it pretty much comes out even at the end of the year.

[Shilgy]

On the flip side...distance is easy to see. And easy to say we should rein it in. Many other things have changed in golf but it is more difficult to ascertain the exact change. For instance, if bunker play is getting easier should we go back to a mixed bag of bunker conditions? Or is the improvement because greens are better so more putts are made? Same with agronomy around the greens. Is the up and down percentage better because of more skill or improved greens? If putting is improved is it because the greens are better or is the tour average just better putters than in the past?We know the players are bigger and stronger-and longer- but how much is due to equipment and how much to course conditions.?

 

So here we are chasing our tails. We have had this conversation in numerous threads and they all get shut down eventually. And nothing new is ever posted.

[OrangeGravy]

When looking at the far out future (generation or so) of Golf specifically and other sports, it looks like many of them will have a really difficult time surviving if our lives continue on the current technological advancement trends. Human's attention spans in general, not just kids, have shortened quite a bit due to tech advances. A game like golf will struggle to stay alive unless it evolves to the point that even golfers who enjoy the way the game has changed now, will not like it. The anti-rollback crowd that says "all sports evolve, let things be" will eventually flip sides at some point. Think of tour golf being closer to Top golf than golf as we have it now! To me the only difference between most Pro or Anti rollback stances is that the Pro people think this bastardization is coming very soon where as the anti side either thinks it's far enough out that they'll be gone by that time.

[milesgiles]

The flaw in that argument is that we’ve been having this debate for at least 20 years.

plus, As was pointed out, its the guys at the bottom who are even more significant. We’re basically at the point where if you don’t swing well over 110mph you can forget about aspiring to be a pro. Don’t throw other sports at me as an example, because golf was one arena where all shapes and sizes had a shout.

[smashdn]

Maybe not the easiest if you are already long. But, as an amateur, if you have never had a driver fitting and spent a little time on trackman or the like with someone who can coach you into an upward angle of attack, you probably have 10-30 yards tucked away that you aren't accessing.

 

Confine it just to the guys as the top of the PGA Tour then I'd agree that [additional] distance is not easy to find.

 

Is it that people are concerned that he is longer than everyone else or that he is as long as he is and followed a blueprint that most others could as well in time? Thus making it somewhat of a foregone conclusion that many others will be that long or longer in time.

[chigolfer1]

As to your last question, that's what I'm still a little confused on myself. Are we trying to rein in BD or are we scared this is going to lead to everyone copying it making golf course layouts even more obsolete? And, seriously, I know it's been mentioned, but wouldn't doing something to the ball without impacting most of its other characteristics be extremely "easy" compared to anything else if we are worried about golf courses being obsolete for PGA players? That seems a lot more plausible than building some sort of PGA tour only courses.

[ebrasmus21]

Could you elaborate what you mean? Do you see a future where technology is so good that all golfers become long bombers?

[smashdn]

I think if you read the distance report from the USGA they are on record as saying any distance gains are undesirable but they acknowledge that they can't, won't and shouldn't do anything to suppress a golfer who is working out, doing a different swing technique, etc. Their hang up is when Titleist, TM, Callaway, et al. have a new does of pixie dust they can sprinkle in to the driver and it delivers more yards.

It's concerning to me how far BD is driving it. It is not so much concerning to me as to how he is driving it that far with the qualification that I think shaft technology and club head technology and trackman (used collectively for all those types of simulator things) allows him to do that to an extent. His bulking up and swinging harder/faster does not gain him near as much if he doesn't/can't fine tune the equipment to match it. But all of what he has done, as far as I can tell, is within the current rules so rock on dude.

I think it is just the tip of this particular distance iceberg. I don't know how much money the long drive guys have to work with for shafts and what-not similar to BD but I think whatever he did, if it is not already being done, will be done on the long drive circuit and it will be "proven out" so to speak on the more standardized grid and conditions, then trickle back to the tours.

[Jc0]

Long drivers already do all of this. If you look at most of the body types they look like he does now. He's not doing anything completely unique compared to long drivers. He's just the first to try to get a long drive swing while still playing at a tour level.

[smashdn]

"... if it is not already being done, will be done on the long drive circuit and it will be "proven out" so to speak on the more standardized grid and conditions, then trickle back to the tours."

 

So, yeah then?

[golfortennis]

There is a two-pronged approach required: 1)Most importantly, shrink the size of the driver head. There is no fear in missing the ball when swinging all out. If you've ever swung a persimmon driver, you were not swinging like you are now. 2)Bring back spin properties to the ball. Not sure how you do this, but make it so that a suboptimal strike really cranks it. Relative to many years ago, today's players hit it as straight as an arrow.

There are also properties in the modern ball that once you reach a certain swing speed you actually "unlock" additional distance. Ie., if a MPH of CHS is worth 3 yards, then 115 vs 112 should be 9 yards, but it's not. It can be worth 20 or more. That needs to be undone.

Bring those conditions into play, and you then reward distance that goes straight, but also keeps guys who don't hit it as far but are more accurate in play as well.

[milesgiles]

yes, and the simplest way is to limit the tee to half an inch max.

imagine teeing up a feathery at prestwick on the tip of a pencil 200 years ago and bombing it over the doglegs. They’d have thrown you over the cliff for the seagulls to pick over.

Half inch tee. SO SIMPLE

[rafal]

Jack just said that it's high time for USGA to tackle the ball, courses cannot be made bigger and maintained. Basically common sense, no mental gymnastics.

Now you guys go and change Jack's mind.

[Jwin323]

This is exactly right. I got a custom fit, custom built driver and changed to a positive AoA and picked up 20 yards verified. And my average SS is 103.

[Jwin323]

The argument that courses are running out of room because of distance gains or older course are becoming obsolete is pointless. You can still play golf on any course. How you play the game is another story. I don't really care how the architect intended a hole or a course to be played. If Bryson, me or anybody else figures out a better way to get around than so be it. Score in relation to par in tournament golf is irrelevant; low score wins. I think the governing bodies want the "classic" courses to play the same as they always have so there can be historical comparisons made between golfers. Yo can't compare eras in any sport including golf. To many variables to account for. Just recognize greatness as it occurs in its own time and space and don't try relate it to days gone by.

[golfortennis]

 

That isn't true. When you build a golf course now, you have to think about everyone playing. Sure pros hit it relatively straight and keep it in play, but what about the rest of us hacks? If we can now hit a ball 260 with some regularity, guess what you need? More room on each side to deal with the number of shots that are now traveling further but offline. Not to mention if you want to attract a decent number of players, you need to have a long enough course. You sound like you are a long hitter. So are you playing 6,400 yards and driving greens? Or does a course with 7,000 or more yards interest you more? They hardly existed 30 years ago, and 7,500 was unheard of, but now...

It's not just a case of making the hole longer, it's that each hole needs a bigger footprint to avoid a number of problems that come in from the modern equipment.

[Jwin323]

I'm not a long hitter. My home course is about 6,500 yards. With technology, I do hit the ball farther than before but my scores are not noticeably better. People who build courses now only think they have to make them 7,600 yards. Not necessary. You can build a 6,500 yard course today and make it challenging. Just takes creativity. Architects are designing longer courses because the people paying for them want to use it for marketing.

[chippa13]

Zdeno Chara: 6'9" Defense, Boston Bruins

Rocco Grimaldi: 5'6" Forward, Nashville Predators

All shapes and sizes.