Dear USGA and R&A

Don't back down

I realize I’m getting in just under the wire for the comment period about a proposed Model Local Rule for the golf ball during elite play. As in, today is the deadline. Forgive me, but please read on.

This was going to written a week ago, after watching the Greater Greensboro Open (okay, Wyndham Championship). When I was growing up in North Carolina, and we got the Greensboro Daily News tossed in our (unpaved) driveway every morning, come GGO time each spring I could count on some stories about the 16^th hole at Sedgefield Country Club.

The par-3 16^th—No. 7 on the scorecard as Donald Ross designed the course in the 1920s and as the pros play the course in the tour stop now—was a bear. There was carnage there every time the pros came to the Triad. Someone would make an 11, or a grouping of three golfers would combine for 15 strokes. Sam Snead, who owned the GGO, made a double at the 16^th in 1963.

There often was hell to pay on the 225-yard downhill one-shotter with a branch—Ross’s word, in his architectural plans—to catch shots that were short, right or left. At some point between when the course was built and when I was old enough to read about the havoc the 16^th was causing the best golfers in the world (or in America, anyway), a bunker was added greenside. The green was as skinny as someone on a diet of salad and Tab.

Before the PGA Tour adopted the one-ball rule in 1979, Sedgefield’s 16^th was a place where pros who resorted to such tactics would pull out a Top-Flite—for the distance, to keep it out of the wind, to try to get out of there without a wreck on their scorecard after finding the creek.   

“A Triple Bogey for Arnold!!!” was a headline in 1972 after Arnold Palmer, leading the GGO by two when he got the 16^th tee, hit a 4-wood into the water on the left and could not pull off a successful salvage operation. He made a 6 and finished a shot out of the George Archer-Tommy Aaron playoff won by Archer when Aaron found trouble on the 16^th on the first extra hole.

In the 1960s and 1970s, if players didn’t reach for a fairway wood on Sedgefield’s 16^th, they often had to hit a 1- or 2-iron. Having refreshed myself on some Sedgefield 16^th history prior to the recent Wyndham Championship, I tuned in to the final-round broadcast curious about how Lucas Glover and Billy Horschel, in the last pairing, would play No. 16, which measured 209 yards.

The answer was 6-irons for both.

Even acknowledging the jacked-up lofts of today’s irons, that club selection is a long way from what faced Palmer and his peers. Whether we look at data or anecdotes, we know what has happened to golf equipment in the last couple of decades when it comes to elite male golfers and how far they hit the ball. (Yes, it’s a confluence of factors: ball, clubhead and shaft construction, advanced fitting, agronomic factors, fitness.)

The proposed Model Local Rule is at best a modest step in dealing with what has happened to how far the ball goes, yet recently the PGA Tour and an alliance of PGAs around the world have weighed in against it. Neither response was surprising, but here’s hoping that the negative feedback doesn’t sabotage your plans to implement a touch of sanity.

Let’s face it: The governing bodies’ inaction on equipment a long time ago has made it more difficult to do something now. The USGA’s former technical director told Sports Illustrated in the mid-1990s that the ball wasn’t going to go any farther. The USGA was either out-scienced, had its head in the sand or was made timid out of litigation fear—perhaps all three.

In a way, it was a natural outcome. Golf manufacturers, perhaps more than any those in any other sports industry, always “sold hope.” And that hope was largely more yards off the tee. But for decades, until the sophistication of equipment-making with new methods and materials, the “increased distance” was mostly marketing hype. Balls and clubs might have been said to be “new and improved,” but the dimples were the same and the driver heads were still made of wood. Even for the most skilled players in the world, new gear was a facelift, not a bionic implant.

My last year of Little League was 1971, the year aluminum bats were allowed. I remember the first game someone brought the new species to one of our games. It was a nighttime spring game, cool and damp, at the park across the street from the National Guard Armory. We jumped on the chance to avoid the possibility of hitting one off the handle of an Adirondack ash bat. In pretty short order, every level of baseball (and softball) below the major and minor leagues was utilizing aluminum bats. (I couldn’t get one past the warning track with wood or metal by the way.)

Major League Baseball (and its farm teams) never did. MLB officials not only wanted to maintain the timeless feel of the sport but also knew that allowing aluminum bats into the bigs would drastically alter it—not to mention probably cause mortal harm to some pitchers and third basemen. Half a century since Little League okayed aluminum bats, they are nowhere to be found in MLB. Wooden bats are swung; fences are by and large where they were decades ago.

Metal clubheads had been around golf since the early 20^th century but didn’t catch on until Gary Adams’s Pittsburgh Persimmons that debuted in the late-1970s. And those models didn’t radically alter the game at the top level.

Even the oversize, thinner-faced drivers of the 1990s didn’t pervert the elite game until paired with the multi-layer, solid-core ball introduced around 2000. That was golf’s “spaghetti strings” moment, and the governing bodies let it pass.

“Spaghetti strings” appeared in pro tennis in 1977; the stringing method allowed less skilled players to defeat better ones. The International Tennis Federation (ITF) moved quickly to ban spaghetti strings.

Many of us who have studied golf history and care about its present and future have written about a ball “rollback” and why it makes sense. This group includes not only those who have observed the game, like me, but architects and players. It can feel like you’re banging your head against a wall. Some years ago, I wrote a column and tried to be as clear as could be: In life at large, in things that truly matter such as medicine or automotive safety, of course we want maximum technology. But in the governance of a game, a sport, there is no such obligation. There ought to be someone enforcing a speed limit, and the person with the radar gun at the side of the road shouldn’t be the person interested in a company’s stock price. Manufacturers have had de facto rule over the game, but why?

The best equipment makers would still be the best equipment makers. The longest drivers would still be the longest drivers. With a rolled-back ball, and likely even with a driver face reduced to less forgiving dimensions, say 300 cc instead of the current 460 cc maximum.

Some concerned about the proposed Model Local Rule cite the golf boom since the onset of Covid-19 as a reason not to mess with anything. But no one got into golf, or resumed playing golf, because they were promised 10 extra yards. They played because golf was something they could do safely during the pandemic, because they were outdoors, because they were socializing with friends, because they were challenged by a game that has intrigued people for centuries. In the two decades after the introduction of “hotter” golf balls and skillet-sized, springy-faced drivers, golf participation didn’t go up. The essence of golf, not its equipment, is the foundation for the boom.

If the proposed Model Local Rule is enacted and someone makes a ball within its parameters and the best, most powerful golfers on the planet must use it in competition and their Sunday best becomes 310 yards instead of 40 yards farther than that …

Keep communicating with those who have expressed skepticism about the proposed Model Local Rule, but this act of governance is overdue and warranted. You have been timid for too long.