Golf’s governing bodies, after consulting two weeks ago with the PGA Tour, declared Wednesday at the U.S. Open that the rollback of hyper-engineered golf balls would be rolled back itself. Any adjustment now will go into effect in 2030 instead of 2028.
That was the official announcement, anyway.
Unofficially?
The rollback is dead. Pity golf superintendents the world over, who, within a generation, will be tasked with nurturing 8,000-yard courses, 25% longer than God and Old Tom Morris intended.
Two weeks ago USGA CEO Mike Whan, who represents an organization entrusted with protecting the game, met with the PGA Tour’s Player Advisory Committee, which represents a group of independent millionaire contractors whose only concern is winning as much money as possible while shilling for equipment manufacturers. To do so, the aforementioned millionaires must retain their eligibility on tour, which means most of them can’t afford a slump.
And slump they would. It would take players months to adjust to a new ball, which is the most important piece of the myriad pieces of equipment they use. No matter how much they practiced, they could not replicate tournament conditions, and so they would have to recalibrate their game in real time during tournaments that could make or break their careers.
They will never agree to that.
They never should have been asked.
However, they’ve entered the chat, and they’ll never shut up. Now that the pros have a say, the rollback has gone the way of the feathery and the gutty.
The players and the executives said Wednesday they still will consider mitigating distance, perhaps by deflating the balls, manipulating clubs, and re-engineering shafts. Whatever. Don’t expect anything that tangibly affects the game. Ever. The players will stymie whatever initiatives the suits suggest. It’s called self-preservation.
Death of the rollback was always a possibility, and a delay seemed inevitable.
Word spread during the Florida swing in March that there would be a two-year delay of the rollback project begun in 2018 that was supposed to be completed after a 10-year process.
Why does it matter? Golf courses the world over — even places like Shinnecock Hills, the site of the U.S. Open; Merion Golf Club, the site of the 2030 U.S. Open; and Augusta National, the only static site of a major tournament — are running out of real estate and spending exorbitantly to feed, water, and mow so much grass. Shinny played 6,996 yards in 2004. It will play to 7,434 yards this week.
Acushnet ruined everything.
That’s the name of the parent company of Titleist, which introduced the Pro V1 in 2000, a golf ball that combined superior distance and durability with soft feel. Balls across brands have only gotten better since.
Granted, the ball isn’t everything. Clubs have gotten bigger and easier to hit. Golfers have gotten fitter, more dedicated, and more numerous. But nothing affected the game like the souped-up ball that went higher and farther and straighter than Bobby Jones and Ben Hogan ever could have imagined.
That’s why the folks at the USGA, the R&A in Scotland, and the mysterious, powerful cabal that operates out of Augusta, Ga., under advisement of such experts as Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, and Gary Player, have spent the last decade trying to figure out how to put this genie back in its bottle.
The explanations and arguments following the announcement before the 126th edition of the competition were as wild and as entertaining as the golf to be played on the wind-swept Southampton, N.Y., grasslands over the following four days.
Pros said that if the golf ball changed, they would find a way to still hit it just as far … physics be damned, I guess.
As proof, some pointed at the 375-yard drive hit by Cam Young on the 72nd hole of The Players Championship, the longest drive ever recorded on that hole. Last year, Young began playing a Titleist Pro V1x Double Dot, which would conform to the proposed parameters of a rolled-back ball. Wait: All of a sudden, the data-driven analytics crowd is all about the anecdotal?
One argument seemed particularly fatuous.
Golf Channel fixture Brandel Chamblee, the smartest and hardest-working analyst in sports history, is a staunch opponent of a rollback. He is a wonderful writer and a gifted orator with a head of hair that makes shampoo manufacturers drool, but his truest genius lies in his ability to unearth, synthesize, and manipulate numbers. On Wednesday, in asserting that the world’s best players rely on more than distance to succeed — which is true — he also said this:
“If you look at the top 15 players on the PGA Tour right now in driving distance, there is not a single one of them in the top 10 in the world rankings. They average 83rd in the world rankings.”
Which also is true … and wildly misleading, considering it excludes three of the top four golfers on the planet, at least.
World No. 2 Rory McIlroy, the two-time reigning Masters champion, has not yet hit enough drives on the PGA Tour to qualify in the driving distance category. He’s averaging 326.8 yards.
Jon Rahm is ranked No. 8, but he plays on the LIV Tour, so he doesn’t qualify, either. Neither does LIV golfer Bryson DeChambeau, ranked No. 32.
If this trio qualified, Rahm and DeChambeau would be tied for No. 1, at 330.4 yards. McIlroy would be fourth.
Chamblee’s “top 10″ qualification also excludes Chris Gotterup, who is ranked 11th in the world and fourth in driving distance.
Finally, only five of the world’s top 17 golfers would rank below the Tour average of 304.1 yards per drive. Clearly, power matters.
Another thing about driving distance: Some of the biggest hitters rank lower in distance off the tee because they don’t have to hit their driver to eat as much ground as less powerful hitters. Also, they hit their irons farther.
So, for instance, World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler (tied for 30th in driving distance) could choose to opt for accuracy and hit a 3-wood maybe five yards short of another player’s best driver and still might have to 9-iron into the green, while the player who hit driver has to hit an 8-iron.
Other arguments against a rollback are just as disingenuous. Would it disproportionately penalize shorter hitters? Not really. They’d have the same issues they have now.
At any rate, in this discussion, the golfers themselves are irrelevant.
This is about saving money and saving golf courses.
It’s not about keeping Matt Kuchar on tour for a 29th season.
