Is the ball ruining golf?

HOW many times have you heard people say in recent times that the ball is ruining the game of golf? Hundreds, I’ll bet, especially if you’ve been playing golf for over twenty years or so, and even more so if, like me, you can remember a time when you could only purchase three or four types of ball.

I remember as a kid the most common ball on the market was the old Dunlop 65. There was also the ‘Warwick’, made by Dunlop, and you had the Wilson Staff and the Penfold Ace. I’m talking about the late 1960s and early 70s and, of course, these were the old 1.62 size or the “small ball” as it became known in later years.

As the Americans arrived on our shores to play our links courses, as kids we’d occasionally find other balls that were bigger and had strange names like the Spalding Top Flite, the Titleist, and the Wilson Pro-staff. As the 70s were coming to a close, more and more of these bigger American balls (1.68) were about and eventually became more popular than the smaller 1.62 balls, which we were used to until 1990 when the R&A outlawed the small ball and everyone had to use the 1.68 American ball.

Anyway, this is not an article on the evolution of the golf ball so let’s get back to the main point that the ball is accused of destroying the game.

Here’s a little statistic for you to digest: just seventeen years ago in 2000, Tiger Woods averaged 298 yards from the tee, which saw him ranked second on the USPGA Tour in terms of distance, but today a 298 average would not get you in to the top 100!

Bubba Watson leads the way in 2017 for driving distance with a 338-yard average, that’s forty yards longer than Tiger, and forty yards is a phenomenal leap in just 17 years.

Think about that for a moment and you will realise why this is happening. It’s the ball.

Tiger said in a recent interview that the 8,000-yard golf course is not far off because of the distances that the modern-day ball is travelling.

“We need to start doing something about the ball, it’s travelling too far and with golf progressing as it is, the 8,000-yard course is not far away, which is pretty scary because we don’t have the real estate to design courses for this and then it becomes complicated,” Woods is quoted.

Remember a few years back when the hallowed course at Augusta National was altered and lengthened to “Tiger-proof” it? At the time I thought that it was sad to see an iconic course being changed to protect it because of the distance that somebody could hit the ball, and Augusta is not the only course that did this, the list goes into the hundreds.

Jack Nicklaus, the only man with more majors than Tiger, agrees that something has to be done about the ball, which he blames for the closure of courses in the USA.

In a recent interview Jack said: “More courses have closed down in the last ten years in the USA than have opened and this is down in no small way to the ball and the distance it travels. We should design balls to suit courses and not the other way around.”

However, a recent survey suggests that it’s only the professionals that hit the ball phenomenal distances, with the average scratch to 5-handicapper in the UK and Ireland hitting it just 250 from the tee. The average 6-10 handicapper hits it 238 while the 11-20 hits it 215 and the above 20-handicapper just 195, which is a long, long way from the pros.

Before I finish consider this: Dustin Johnson has hit 13 drives of over 400 yards in his PGA Tour career while Bubba has hit 12.