251

Two fifty one is a good drive for you and me. In fact, it’s a exceptional drive. The average player thinks he hits his drives “about 250” but in fact that’s only when he’s sleeping. A 250 yard driving average won a lot of PGA titles and a U.S. Open for Corey Pavin, but it hasn’t done anything for him in years. Even tour players who have never been considered long are now challenging and, in the case of Mike Weir, winning events that were believed to play only into the hands of the longer hitters on the tour.

I mention 251 because that was the winning distance in a long drive contest recently. No, it wasn’t at an AJGA event, it was on the European Tour. It seems that the organizers of the Dunhill Links Championships wanted to commemorate Ben Hogan’s 1953 British Open win at Carnoustie. Contrary to popular belief neither Riviera Country Club or Colonial Country Club are really Hogan’s Alley. The term actually refers to the way that Hogan cut across a gap between a fairway bunker and an out of bounds fence on the 6th hole of famed Scottish Links. Someone found a stash of old British spec balls and a 1953 vintage persimmon driver and had the Euros tee ‘em up. The winner was Arjun Atwal with a drive exactly the same length as the title of this article. It doesn’t seem that anyone has noticed.

Now Atwal’s no Tiger Woods and his ranking of 62 on the European Tour Order of Merit speaks to this fact. Still, the guy’s a professional who has earned over 300,000 Euros on tour this year. But again, it really isn’t Atwal’s game that is of interest here. What I want to know is what his average drive is with his regular club and ball?

Remember that the old British ball was longer than the American ball of the time, so I have to assume that had he used a 50s balata Atwal’s poke would have only been in the high 240s. Again, what surprises me is that no one seems to care. I guess that the world simply likes being long. Tiger used to like it at least until technology made half of the tour and at least one 13 year old girl pretty much as long as Woods.

Industry types like to talk about the theoretic limits of COR and how their balls all meet the USGA’s initial velocity requirements. What no one seems interested in explaining is where this will all lead and how completely the ruling bodies understand the science of the ever greater distance the ball is flying. Rules are fine, but what do they assure?

More and more distance makes the PGA Tour a little jumpy but the fact that the tour is trying to bring new fans to the game make the long ball and lots of birdies useful, at least for now. In the long run, the tour has to be concerned with the essential nature of the game, the viability of its tournament courses and the meaning and value of par. The practical definition of a par 5 on tour has already been changed, whether they admit it or not.

Sure, the golf industry likes selling its stuff, but long, longer, longest really isn’t that much of a selling point when pretty much every company’s clubs and balls are as long as another’s. At the same time, no one dares stand still, let alone roll back distance gains no matter what the source or the consequences.

The media seems largely satisfied to simply ooh and aah. Television commentators will gawk at the 200 yard 8 irons but no one has what it takes to say that enough is enough. The equipment manufacturers learned a long time ago that it pays to keep a player under contract long after his competitive days are over. Curtis Strange hasn’t hit a ball in anger in years, but as long as he’s in that broadcast booth Titleist will keep the checks coming, the same goes for Callaway and Johnny Miller. It’s not that I find the media complicit in the distance wars but rather a warning that we shouldn’t look to them to take a stand.

You won’t hear much from the players for many of the same reasons be they professional or amateur. The USGA did its part to assure this with their recent rule changes that allows amateurs to accept free equipment. With younger players, they even lack a point of reference. Where a Davis Love III or Justin Leonard can reach into their closet and pull out the persimmon driver they used but a very few years ago on tour, the rising stars have never known anything but beta titanium, multilayer balls and properly spined graphite shafts sure to optimize their launch angle.

It would be as if the next generation of big league hitters all showed up to the ballpark with Easton aluminum bats and wondered what the older players were doing with those hickory sticks. Really, that example says alot about the difference between golf and other sports. Even though it may be true that today’s athletes are bigger and stronger than ever, no one in the majors today throws any harder than Sandy Koufax or Nolan Ryan did 30 or 40 years ago. How then do we explain, or accept, the amazing distance gains in our own tradition-rich sport? Perhaps it’s more about the fiddle than the fiddler after all.

Nope, it can only be the USGA (and its rule making lapdog the R&A) to figure out what to do and then develop the fortitude to actually do it. One thing is for sure: No one’s going to like it. There will be no greater challenge to the USGA than to reign in distance gains, if they ever engage the process at all. The first step is for them to figure out what their testing protocols fail to measure. This will involve an admission that the equipment companies know more than they do and that will be a tough admission for the USGA as well.

I wish I’d been at Carnoustie when Atwal beat the other European pros with his 251 yard drive. It would have been great to hand him his real ball and driver and have him hit another drive and then measure the difference. The problem is that no one wants to know the truth, but there may come a day when it’s too late to save the game from itself.