As Bryson and others continue to hit it further and further, defending champion of the ZOZO Championship had some thoughts. Here is Tiger Woods on the distance debate.
“Distance has always been an advantage. Now that we have the tools, that being the launch monitor, the fitting of the golf clubs, the adjustability. I think all that plays into the fact that you’re able to maximize the capabilities of a driver. There’s no reason why you can’t pick up more yardage and guys have done that”, Woods said.
Always one of the longest on tour, and during his dominance, courses were looking at ways to “Tiger Proof”.
“It’s about what do we do going forward and how soon can they do it? You’re not going to stop the guys who are there right now. Guys are figuring out how to carry the ball 320-plus yards, and it’s not just a few of them.”
The general conversation being had is about rolling back some form of equipment either universally to all or specific to the tour professionals…Meaning Bifurcation of the rule book.
“I just don’t see how they can roll everything back. I would like to be able to see that, as far as our game, but then we go back down the road of what do you bifurcate, at what level?”
Tiger is correct at the general idea of rolling back a form of equipment is easier in theory than execution. For all of the talk about Bryson DeChambeau fantastic win at the 2020 US Open, it isn’t that far off from what Rory McIlroy did nearly 10 years ago at the 2011 US Open in his victory. Both were 7th in driving distance and both were 26th in driving accuracy. The yards went up a little bit, but there was virtually no outrage at that time.
Do you agree with Tiger Woods? What do you think the next step should be and will be?
I think it’s the “traditionalist” ideals that permeate throughout golf. Tiger and Rory got loads of pushback too just for working out. Whereas in other sports we love to see athletes who are bigger, stronger, faster, and even more skilled.
I’m not sure anything needs to be rolled back. But I do get bored with super low scores. It’s like watching regular season NBA or Big 12 football—no defense.
If the equipment didn’t fit the player, they’d take that tournament off. Simple.
Like I said, it’s a stupid idea. There would be too many hurt feelings to even think of doing this. It might be cool though. I’d enjoy seeing it… then, when the tournament’s over sell all the equipment for charity. Or the players keep them for the next tournament that sponsor has.
Also of note is the Korn Ferry guys that are struggling their best to make it to the PGA Tour are longer than the PGA Tour guys and have been for decades. Maybe it’s not all about distance, lol.
I think it’s fun to watch the long bombers carry a bunker at 320 yards and taking that away would diminish interest in the game.
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As hilarious as the speed limit sign and driving a car?
Im still trying to figure out the argument. You want limits, which there are. You want testing of those limits, which there are.
Outside of limiting every player playing the exact same thing, loft, length and lie, what are you asking for?
COR and now CT are not new. They have not really deviated much. Players got faster, stronger and better and clubs got a whole lot more forgiving. Now fitting is the norm and diving into getting exact launch windows means maximizing distance.
Im also trying to figure out how a distance average going up about 9 yards in a decade is all of the sudden a golf problem?
I don’t want limits. I would be in favor of a standard.
So lets say they set a standard (not limit) at 257.
What changes? Asking genuinely because you and I both know how CT works. So if every driver on tour is at 257, what changes?
FYI, old man par is safe. Average winning scores have changed very little in the last 30 years. The same goes for the average of all rounds on the PGA Tour. It has only dropped from 71.02 to 70.74 since 2000. You’d think that the improved agronomy/course conditions would be responsible for a big chunk of that improved scoring.
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I honestly don’t understand the difference between the two. Specifically how it relates to golf equipment. Care to explain what this actually means to you?
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Any and all claims that we are playing the same game are absurd. The professionals are so good they create the illusion of playing the same game.
There is NO a justification for dialing back distance for regular amateur hackers. None. That group of players needs even more technology assistance.
IMO there is zero question we MUST bifurcate (if there are going to be limits), the only question is how and at what level of play.
you smart. i like what you say.
How to kill an industry in one swift rule.
You can start with a standard that all drivers must be the same. So make sure we stifle all innovation, kill all of those engineering jobs, etc.
This is done of course because less than .1% of golfers are hitting it 9 yards further on average than they were a decade ago.
We of course kill all fitters and retail because why ever replace what has to be identical to every other in play.
I seriously do not understand the argument here and I am trying to. I want to. Why is what happened 100 years ago in golf, different than 100 years ago in every other facet of life where changes are embraced.
Huh, interesting. May just be a product of me watching more televised tournaments the last few years. I don’t love birdie fests, just seems to make each additional one less consequential.
What would that matter? Bryson is still going to outdrive the field. DJ is still going to outdrive the field. Rory is still going to outdrive the field. They will still have an advantage over everyone.
I’ll even say that by creating a standard for equipment you’re handicapping the lesser skilled players even more. Now not only do they have the disadvantage of being outdriven by the big guys but now since distance is rolled back they are hitting longer, and harder to control, clubs in to the green. In my eyes you’re making a bigger gap in results among the field.
The day when one player dominates and wins week after week, blowing away the field and making tough courses look too easy, then it should be discussed, but nothing we have seen from any player, including Bryson, indicates that will ever happen.
Equipment, fitting, instruction and fitness has changed golf for the better. Let them tear apart previous course records! It comes with the times!
You don’t see them going back in nascar or formula one because track records are being beaten.
Sure. I’ll try.
A limit offers tolerance ranges. It allows anything up to a certain point. A standard states what something needs to be exactly. This is a very distinct difference.
Can a standard be a limit? Technically, yes, as long as the tolerance is very small and tested repeatedly.
You know as well as I that there has to be tolerance in everything. Even if something is standard, you cant realistically expect everything meeting the standard to be exactly at the standard.
I still think that in this example, the CT limit is the standard that has been set.
ASTM A36 steel has a minimum (a lower limit) yield strength of 36,000 psi, in addition to other strength and composition properties. Because there is a limit involved, this isn’t a standard? It’s in the acronym!
Fair points. And has been brought up in the past, if all OEMs are designing clubs to the absolute limit (sometimes, as in the case of TaylorMade, exceeding the CT limit and then adjusting it "back" to conforming), then perhaps the limit is the standard in this case.
Just watch part of a WNBA game. Their technique is impeccable – I’m a big fan of double handed chest passes myself.
So they set the standard COR for drivers at .0830, which is currently the limit. Probably just about every driver on the market is at or very near to .0830 already, so what just changed other than calling it a "standard" instead of a "limit"? Semantics aren’t going to affect how far the ball is traveling on the course.
I doubt very many companies are intentionally manufacturing drivers that don’t go as far as their competitors. That wouldn’t exactly be a strong marketing point for all the amateurs who want all the distance they can get. "Buy our driver, it’s less hot and guaranteed to be 30 yards shorter than any other driver on the market!"
They outlawed anchored putting after a couple guys won majors with it. That, and the groove rule on wedges, were even more ridiculous knee jerk reactions than this distance rollback debacle.
Where’s my “Last FP” trophy then? I’ve been waiting for like 15 months, diligently checking the mail every day.
I expect it to have my likeness slurping from the last teet of a cow.
Golf is a sport, no?
Bifurcation? Everyone plays the same ball? Same equipment?
How stupid. Who cares if the winning score is -30 or +10. It basically plays fair to everyone. If someone worked their ass off to hit it further, how are they not still hitting it further with reduced flight balls/equipment.
Maybe we can have a strict CHS limit of 120 with driver? That should teach em. In fact, 1 stroke penalty for each MPH they go above 120. Every hole.
That makes sense? Let em score. Let them hit the ball as far as they want/can. That’s what I want to see anyways.
Pardon me if I can’t get horned up by a tour pro hitting it the same lame ass distance I can conjur up because they’re playing limited something or other.
I cannot concur with any dialing it back or distance is killing the game/sport arguments.
Get bigger/stronger/faster, reap the rewards. Dial it back and those that can will still get those rewards.
Everyone playing the same gear? ?? Same thing with ball. ??
Golf is supposed to be fun. Most of us here pay to play versus the other way around. If I want a ball to go less than optimum distance I’ll swipe at it weakly until it does.
Many years. It does not seem to be dominating tour wins week in and week out. I mean Bryson has won twice this year, that’s hardly out of the norm. We still have a lot of different winners in the past year. Tiger has won twice, ok maybe a little more than a year. He is not driving it like is used to. You still have to play well to win.
I agree here. How is that having a good iron, wedge, short, or putting game is skill but being able to bomb it and keep it in play is not. We have all tried to swing out of our shoes to crush a ball and have all probably hit a few good ones doing that. We have also probably hit a much larger amount very bad while doing that. Just look at long drive competitions. They only have to have one ball go far and be reasonably straight. While they have some athletic ability and talent, I wouldn’t put it in the category of skill like Bryson and Rory. Now if they had to hit 7 of 10 in play and measure the average distance than I would be more inclined to say that is a skill.
Are we? The same old guard that rail against distance also insists that it is mandatory that we all play the same game, and that bifurcation of rules is a non-starter.
I like the fact thought that I can go out and pretty much play the same game as the pros. Yeah I’m not at the same level they are but I’m playing the same game. The reason I say pretty much is because some of the courses I can’t play the same tees that they may play for a tournament. I have played at TPC San Antonio on the Oaks course on the last day it was open to public play (about 10 days) before the start of the tournament. We played the tips that day and on most holes it was just a few yards in front of where they had it closed off for the pros. There were a few holes where they were still a good 20-30 yards back. That is about as close as I will probably get to playing the same course as the pros and it makes you realize how good they are. You simply can’t do that with other sports.
The governing bodies made the mistake of letting it go during the Golden Tiger years, but realized that they were all rolling the cash and were to greedy about it.
Thick rough / narrow fairways is a great way to force all the short hitters off tour. Did you see what happened at Winged Foot? Harding Park?
Part of the reason we have this so called problem is that golf’s ruling bodies are totally clueless as to which setups actually favour long hitters. They keep making courses longer so that guys like Bryson, Wolff, and Champ can’t hit wedge into every par 4, but in doing so, they put an even bigger premium on distance. They make the fairways so narrow that nobody can consistently hit them and then grow the rough so long that only the highest swing speed guys can gouge the ball out of it. Then they complain that the modern game is all about distance (which it isn’t since approach play is still the biggest separator at all levels of play), but they sure aren’t helping with the way they insist on ‘combating’ the bombers.
But most of us don’t play the same game as the pros. I don’t have any desire to go out and play from 7000+ yards with ankle deep rough and greens stimping at 13 with tucked pins, and we don’t have galleries and forecaddies and TV cameras to find our wayward balls for us, or Top Tracer and Shotlink monitoring all our stats. We don’t have caddies, yardage books or green charts, nor rules officials all over the course when we need a ruling. Most of us don’t hit the ball as far as the pros do, or have such tight dispersion and distance control. We’re playing the same game in that we’re using clubs to propel a ball around a golf course, but in a lot of other ways we’re not playing anywhere near the same game. If one of the Tour pros came to my home course and played from the tees I play from, the way we played the course wouldn’t bear much resemblance at all.
It’s part of why I shake my head in amazement at the fact that Tour wins drive equipment sales. The thought of a 30 handicap going out and buying Bryson’s driver or JT’s irons because they saw them win with them is ludicrous. Unless you have Bryson or JT’s swing and talent, chances are good that the vast majority of golfers are doing their game a grave disservice by trying to play the same clubs they do. I read the pro WITBs just out of curiosity because I’m a golf geek, but not once in my life have I ever made an equipment decision based upon what a Tour pro was playing. In fact, if they’re playing it that’s a pretty good indication to me that I shouldn’t be.
Fair enough my point was distance has always been an advantage and getting to the right steps to abate it is difficult. Steps like progressive rough (deeper closer to the hole etc.) and variable rough are all possibly in play by those making decisions but I do not want two balls personally.
I think he’s also right that if you are going to roll back gear, at what point do you do it where its fair for recreational golfers but still maintains the spirit of the game and doesn’t obsolete classic courses that don’t have option to simply make the holes longer.
I disagree with part of this… the tour is trying to balance power by putting a premium on accuracy. It won’t force short hitters off the tour. It’ll require players to work on accuracy…. Regarding the Open, you can’t lump all the long hitters with Bryson. There were plenty of long guys who missed the cut. There were short hitters who made the cut. I don’t understand why folks dismiss that Bryson was very good vs the field in driving accuracy, gir, and putting. He had an all around very good game that week.
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I don’t know where Top Tracer and Shotlink have anything to do with playing the game. Those are to collect data for stats and training purposes but don’t have anything to do with actually playing the game. You can play courses where you will have Forecaddies, in tournaments with people watching that can see your ball, etc. At the end of the day though non of that has anything to do with the fact that you playing the same game, maybe outcome a little without as many last balls but still the same game. Sure you can play from different yardages but you still have the same specs on golf clubs and golf balls, play by the same rules, and are trying to put a ball in a hole from a long ways away.
Golf balls and clubs have been getting better for a long time. The distance that people have hit the ball has been increasing through the years since the first open was played. Why is it only now a problem? Guys are more athletic and have started training to maximize their potential. They shouldn’t be punished because of that. Literally ever other sports has people training to become bigger, better, faster, stronger, etc.
No disagreement there, and I don’t understand why golf is the only sport that seems to have a problem with it.
According to Pro Football Focus, the average linebacker in 1920-1939 was 6’0” and 205 pounds. The average linebacker 2000-present is 6’2” and 245 pounds. They’re bigger, stronger, and their training and nutrition is far more advanced and focused. I haven’t seen a cry for the NFL to roll back linebackers.
That might be one sport where it would make since to roll them back. I bet the average speed for modern linebackers is faster too. Add those together and it can really hurt someone getting hit by them.