‘Coloured golf balls the future’
JACKLIN: HE WANTS GOLF TO COPY SQUASH’S SYSTEM
Ryder Cup great Tony Jacklin has urged his sport to take a leaf out of squash’s book by using colour-coded balls to distinguish the professional game from the amateur one in the modern era of “grip it and rip it golf ”.
Jacklin is concerned at the way long hitters are dominating professional golf, an issue that came to the fore again when Cameron Champ, probably the longest driver seen on the PGA Tour, clinched his first win at last Sunday’s Sanderson Farms Championship in Mississippi.
Champ started to attract a lot of attention on the secondary Web.Com Tour in 2017, averaging a single-season record of 343 yards off the tee.
“Cameron is like a lot of guys on tour these days, they smash it a mile,” said Jacklin, the most successful European captain in Ryder Cup history. “And most courses are set up to allow them to do it because there is no premium on accuracy any more.
“It seems like everyone has bowed to new technology. The ball goes miles which also means we need longer golf courses, making them more expensive to maintain and having the negative impact of taking more time to play 18 holes.
“Meanwhile, the amateur game seems much the same as always. I believe we could start to adapt by going the way of squash and using different colour-coded golf balls for the professionals and for the amateurs,” said Jacklin.
“Let’s have one colour for the ball that goes the furthest, then cut the distance 20 or 30 percent and use a different colour. You would get round quicker while courses would be shorter and less expensive to run.”
Squash balls for senior players come in six varieties, each with different levels of bounce denoted by coloured dots. For younger players, there are a number of mini-squash balls that have a high, prolonged bounce.
Jacklin, who also won the 1969 British Open and 1970 US Open, believes modern-day golf has become too one-dimensional, with imagination and creativity in short supply.
“It’s a sad reflection on the game the likes of Peter Thomson, Bobby Locke, Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus used to play.” – Reuters