At the turn: At the turn Jack made brief remarks about how distance, the golf ball and his work. He said that he always opens each new project (as he did this one) by hitting a ceremonial drive with a persimmon driver made for the occasion. He said that it does not work with the present golf balls at all because they have been specifically designed for the new metal drivers and only work with them. This obviously is rather new. He said that was why he didn't feel there was much difference in'86 between his wooden driver at Augusta and the people using metal woods, because they were all using similar golf balls that were not optimized for a particular club.
He also said that for a long time he was against design that sough to take the driver out of the hands of the big hitters, but that his view is changing. Part of the reason it is changing is because some players are now able to turn every par four into a driver, wedge and there is no space to fix that on most courses. He also said that an additional problem is the divergence of the big hitters from the pack. He said that when he was the longest hitter on tour he only drove the ball about 25-30yds longer than the average tour player. He said that now that divergence is more like 60yds and that it makes it difficult to design for everyone. He said one of the solutions, employed at Scarlet, is to create large steep faced fairway bunkers which require long carries into narrow fairways to gain significant advantage. He said that shorter hitters (I guess average championship players) who wander into these bunkers by design or by error are far enough from the face that they can still play a long shot to the green; however, the big hitter who challenges the 300yds + carry and fails will be in the front of the bunker where he has lost the play to the green.