The Great Threat? Puhh-lease: Bomb & Gouge: Golf Digest Magazine

The Great Threat? Puhh-lease

09.07.07 | 1:57 PM

GOUGE: In our ever-increasing quest to answer those screaming for a rollback of equipment technology, I found it interesting to look at some of the recent qualifying scores for this year's Mid-Amateur and Women's Mid-Amateur championships. Surely, if technology were rendering the game simple, it would have at least trickled down to the elite class of players over the age of 25. Surely. Just so you know, the low score of all the qualifiers at all the sectional locales for the Women's Mid-Amateur was 72, and there were 86 players who made it into the field with qualifying scores that started with the digit "8," except for the one medalist who got in with a score that started with the numeral "9." (Tough conditions, probably.) The Mid-Amateur qualifying scores surely must have been lower. Surely. Well, you bet they were. A ton of scores in the 60s, as a matter of fact, including a 60 by Steve White at the qualifier at the Black Creek Club in Chattanooga, Tenn. In a way, I have to confess I'm given pause by these low numbers (after all Black Creek Club can stretch to nearly 7,100 yards), but then he was medalist by 8 shots. So I searched further. How low did they go at the 6,659-yard Bandon Trails qualifier on the Oregon Coast? 2-under was the medalist, but 50 percent of the field shot 80 or more. And oh, by the way, they'll be playing the Mid-Amateur over Bandon Trails and Bandon Dunes at the end of the month. Neither of us believes there's room for panic, but I might need a little convincing when a part-time golfer shoots 60.

BOMB: Need convincing? Well, as Underdog would say, "Here I am to save the day!!!" Actually, I think that was Mighty Mouse. No matter. A 60 (with a double bogey on the card, no less)? Well done Steve White. But so what? There’s nothing to get your Hanes in a twist about here. A quick look at ghin.com shows he’s a plus-2.4 index who has shot in the 60s in six of his last 14 rounds. And by the way, Stevie, better post that 60 before the boys back home get a little unruly about you not giving them enough strokes. I mean, what does this guy do for a living? My point being I don’t worry about pros or pseudo-pros. Bubba Watson is obliterating courses? Fine. We’ll find 50 layouts a year to contain him and I don’t give a flip if 50 courses have to be stretched to 8,000 yards to do so. Now, what about the other 15,000 or so layouts that the rest of us mortals play. Holding up just fine, thank you. Little old 6,500-yard Tashua Knolls not far from our office here in Connecticut recently held qualifying for the State Mid-Am. Medalist? No 60 here boys and girls, but a 1-under 71. What did it take to qualify? 78. In all, 113 teed it up. Only 39 broke 80. A mere 11 bettered 75. Moving onto the finals at Wee Burn CC where it’s all of 6,809 yards when the tees are moved back into the trees, 9 over par won the 54-hole event. The top 32 players in the state at least 25 years old couldn’t post a single round in the 60s. Obsolete? Give me a break.

GOUGE: Gee, I shot 79 the other day. Maybe I could qualify for something.

BOMB: Oh, you qualify for something, my friend.You definitely qualify for something.

GOUGE: Let's not get into particulars, but here's a few others to chew on. 7-over was good enough to get you into the match play portion of the recent U.S. Amateur. Average driving distance on the PGA Tour is exactly the same as what it was a year ago, which was more or less the same as it was the year before and was a yard and a half farther than the year before that. So since 2003, barring something extremely bizarre in the PGA Tour Fall Series, average driving distance on the PGA Tour will have increased three yards. THREE. There hasn't been a five-season stretch with that small an increase since pre-titanium drivers and multilayer, solid core balls 1995. So what we have is the best ams aren't, for the most part, obliterating championship courses and the best pros have hit the wall. You can say we've been there before, but I'm not exactly seeing overwhelming evidence for anything like a rollback.

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Archived Comments (6) Click to expand

Today's Post: Rolling back equipment is insane.

Recent Post: Long putters are the tool of the devil and should be immediately eliminated.

You'll excuse me if I can't see the difference.

Posted by samwilkinson September 7, 2007 8:12 PM

Scoring, I believe, has little to do with the "distance" or "rollback" debates. No doubt I could create a course on which even Tiger Woods could not break 90. The better question is "Should I have to?" or "Have we reached that point?"

You're not asking the right questions.

Posted by iacas September 8, 2007 12:23 PM

Thou speaketh with fork-edd tongues! When will you learn that the day of reckoning is nigh? You two are like dark Lords of the Sith, placating us with tales of peace and harmony, while demonic forces at Titleist, Ping, and Callaway work in the shadows to destroy our simon-pure game (gee I wish I were a better writer and could make it sound funnier).

Thanks for continuing to state the truth. All sports and games are designed with rules to keep the balance between offense and defense; in golf, it's the player and his clubs v. the course and forces of nature. And as you point out, there's no reason to believe the scale has tipped too far to one side or the other right now.

A small club in Watchung, NJ where I play is 6700 from the tips, and hasn't been tricked up or significantly altered in several years. This year, qualifying rounds for the state Open and senior Open championships were played there. I don't have access to all of the scores, but routinely the lowest qualifying score is about 69 or 70, with very few people breaking par.

As for what Gouge qualifies for, I'd say admission.

Posted by 86general September 10, 2007 6:14 AM

Dear Bomb and Gouge;
If, in 2003, you told me that the design of the Titleist Pro V1 would have remained largely unchanged in the next three years, I would have told you that tour distances would remain largely unchanged as well. And I would have been right.
On the other hand, your friend Peter Kostis, who claims that "fitness" and other factors are to "blame" for distance increases on tour might have logically been forced to claim that increasing fitness, etc., would see us with continued distance increases. He would have been as full of baloney as he has been all along.

Sure, distance has remained flat on the PGA Tour for three years; coincidentally, guys, the ball designs have remained mostly unchanged through that time period as well.

Get it? It's the ball. It always was. All along.

I don't care about "scoring" among tour players or other elites. Scoring is a result that is easy to control, by fussing with the courses. Which they have been doing for years. Sometimes with very deleterious effect.

If you don't mind altering and sometimes radicalizing golf courses, you don't need to control the equipment to control the scoring. But if you do care about the integrity of the golf courses, you need to address the equipment side of the equation, and what the numbers -- YOUR numbers -- show is that the ball is the biggest and most direct variable. It is also the easiest and cheapest (by far) of the variables to alter.

Why you guys don't get any of this is really curious. Practically every other serious observer of the game of golf gets it.

Posted by Chuck September 12, 2007 2:57 PM

Chuck: Broken record.

Scoring matters.

Score is fundamental to golf, to handicaps, to competition. How can score not matter?

While everyone has a different reason for playing, score has to matter for everyone. Otherwise, you're not playing golf, you're working out, or something similar.

As I said above, the balance between "offense and defense" in golf is the player and his clubs v. the course and the elements. Courses and equipment have constantly evolved as long as the game has existed. A decent barometer of how well the balance is doing is to look at scores.

Posted by 86general September 13, 2007 7:46 AM

86, you've never missed a point as badly as this one.
OF COURSE you can constantly adjust courses to fit equipment and thereby control scoring. But why? Why not adjust the equipment to the golf course?
What is more valuable, more enduring, more historic? Merion, or a golf ball? Riviera, or a golf ball? The Old Course, or a golf ball?
Does anybody remember, or care, what kind of balls Jones or Hagen or Hogan or Nicklaus used? No. We don't care how many dimples they had, or what they looked like, or what was inside them, or how those balls were tested, or what specs they were built to. But we do care about the beautiful, enduring places where they won their championships. The places that we can now go to ourselves.
You, as well as Bomb and Gouge, all seem like smart guys. The fact that you all miss this point just amazes me.

Posted by Chuck September 20, 2007 10:05 AM

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