[Joe_Tucholski]

On this website and others I've heard many people complain about the advances of the ball and how the ball is the problem.

That being said I wasn't aware the USGA had very specific standards on the ball.  After looking up rules some different equipment I found there are very specific standards for golf balls.  Essentially the max initial velocity must be less than 250 feet/sec and the max distance is 320 yards.  Does anyone have history on these standards and if they have been increased with time?  The standards I read for the initial velocity were created in 2011 and are listed as 1.0.0.  The standards for distance are from 2004 and are listed as revision 1.  With these standards it would seem like the USGA would easily be able to roll back the ball if they wanted to.

Here are the links on the USGA testing procedures if anyone is interested.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usga.org%2Fworkarea%2Flinkit.aspx%3Flinkidentifier%3Did%26itemid%3D10573&ei=yCg0UdiIPKv9iQLtloCgBg&usg=AFQjCNG6PNoNRZRYsCDIG6vhsLnLWsPA1w&sig2=R0olzyO4ciyoV4eLEyJAFA&bvm=bv.43148975,d.cGE

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usga.org%2Fequipment%2Ftesting%2Fprotocols%2FInitial-Velocity-Test-Procedure%2F&ei=Ais0UcjXOqf1iwKyh4GQDw&usg=AFQjCNGYULZmzBbRfPCjv2A4Wg2ubK-3bQ&sig2=P6YR93K_9x94nL05jeWgMg&bvm=bv.43148975,d.cGE

[jvisser]

As far as I know the R&A has already for years the information developed how to roll back the ball.
The main issue appears to be that the reduction in length would be an absolute instead of a relative amount.
Meaning that everybody would lose e.g. 30yards, which not many amateurs would really like....

[Garland Bayley]

These two standards are quite old. The dates you give have to be revisions.

[Garland Bayley]

1942 The USGA imposed a limit on the velocity a golf ball may have at impact - 250 feet per second (with a tolerance of 2%) when measured under controlled conditions on the Association's testing device.
The R&A introduced a similar velocity test in 1976.

In 1984 an Overall Distance Standard of 280 yards (±6%) was introduced. It was increased to 320 yards in June 2004. There is no change in the characteristics of balls; the change comes about due to the modernisation of the test equipment used.

From
http://www.ruleshistory.com/clubs.html

[Garland Bayley]

As far as I know the R&A has already for years the information developed how to roll back the ball.
The main issue appears to be that the reduction in length would be an absolute instead of a relative amount.
Meaning that everybody would lose e.g. 30yards, which not many amateurs would really like....

Since only a few gained 30 yards with the ball improvement, rolling it back will not cause the rest to lose 30 yards.
If they put the spin back in the ball to cause the roll back, then what most amateurs would lose is the relatively straight ball. But, the average guy that doesn't want to spend the family fortune on golf hasn't been playing the expensive balls that would loose their directional stability, and would not lose the relatively straight ball as he would continue to play his low spinning two piece ball.

[Jim Hoak]

The ball being tested by the R&A now would be designed to roll distance back by 8% for all, so it would be relative, not absolute.  I don't know what is happening with the test.  Maybe others do.

[Dan Herrmann]

I played with an R&A/USGA prototype ball a couple of seasons ago.  The reduction in distance was a curve, with the longest hitters losing the most, and the shorter hitters (20 Hdcp women) actually gaining a little distance.  

The trajectory was very similar to the old Titleist Pro Trajectory.  The ball was made by Bridgestone - was one of their "e" series balls with a dimple pattern that upped spin rates.

The USGA and R&A were out at the club with Trackman devices and every player using them completed a survey and sat down for an interview after the stableford tournament they put on for us.

[Pat Burke]

I really don't want to start a fight, so a few thoughts.
IF (big if) there is a roll back in the ball, say the 8% mentioned.  How much would it really disrupt the avg golfer?
I am concerned about it.  It seems the vast majority are searching for a magic driver to give them max yardage, so....

Maybe because I used to play, I am pretty uncomfortable with a rule that would be designed to disproportionately
limit yardage for high speed swingers.  I understand that it seems those same high speed golfers get more benefit
from the ProV1 generation, but (IMO) only because they are now getting the same benefit of solid cores that Pinnacle users had
before due to improved cover materials (spin).

I am trying to get my better players to maximize their efficiency numbers.  It would seem that  designing a maximum
"smash factor" might be a way to make a proportionate adjustment.  Should balls/clubs be engineered to max out at 1.4 or less?

[Jon Wiggett]

Pat,

try to look at it as making the courses more challenging to the better players.

Jon

[Thomas Dai]

Has any research been done on tee height and its effect on distance?

I used my old persimmon driver the other day. Had to search in my bag for a smaller tee. The tees I normally use with my titanium headed driver were so tall I reckoned I'd go straight under it was my old wooden driver, which was quite deep faced in it's day.

Seems to me it's easier to bomb a drive from a high tee than a tee that's say, only half an inch in length. I think Nick Faldo and before him Peter Thompson have commented on lowering tee height as a method of distance control. Cheaper than altering the balls too.

All the best.

[Garland Bayley]

... I am pretty uncomfortable with a rule that would be designed to disproportionately
limit yardage for high speed swingers.  ...

I am uncomfortable with a ball that has been artificially engineered to change spin characteristics so that high speed swingers gain yardage over more natural physics. If you want a soft spinning ball, then it should be a spinning ball off of all clubs. If you want a hard distance ball with limited spin, it should have limited spin off of all clubs.

Show me your skill, not your technologically lowered scores.

[Brent Hutto]

What's "natural physics"? A vintage 1960 Balata golf ball is just as much an engineered, artificial product gaining every advantage possible for the user as a current-model Pro V1.

As the saying goes, we've establishrf what we are and now we're just haggling over price. The 1960 Balata ball turns out to be a very poor attempt at gaining an advantage for the good player. After all, Jack Nicklaus played a Balata ball instead of a distance rock because it worked better for his game. You can't appeal to "natural" as though God intended golf balls to have rubber bands and latex covers on them.

I believe the "natural" option would be a sheep turd and a crooked wooden stick. Once you move to engineered purpose-built products it's up to the controlling legal authority to determine what's in and what's out. It's a matter of arbitrary standards agreed-upon, not naturally occuring hunks of whatever is at hand.

[Garland Bayley]

Brent,

Here is my guess.
If you were to take a basketball and strike it with a (perhaps grooved) metal plate at different angles and the same speed, and you measured the resulting spin rate and plotted it against the angle, you would get a fairly straight line.
If you were to take a baseball and do the same, you would get a fairly straight line.
Since the basketball is softer than the baseball the spin rate from it would be consistently higher than the spin rate from the baseball.
Perhaps the slopes of the lines would be highly correlated.

That is what I mean by "natural physics".

Contrast this with a multi-layered golf ball where the outer layer(s) have been engineered to slip around and snap back more and more as the angle of the plate striking them increases. The slope of a plotted line would not be highly correlated to the slopes of the unengineered balls above.

This I would call "artificial physical result".

With your physics background, is my "guess" or assumption correct to any level of accuracy?

[Brent Hutto]

Without knowing the engineering details of golf balls, my suspicion is that what you describe is rather more of an effect than is actually present. It's more along the lines of manufacturer's fanciful claims about the advantage of multilayer golf balls (Next One Has Eight Layers!!!).

Simply put, the Pro V1 spins less when hit really, really, really hard than a Balata ball would spin when hit really, really, really hard. And the Pro V1 had a better Coefficient of Restituation for high clubhead speeds, medium clubhead speeds even low clubhead speeds, than a "Tour" ball from a few decades back. It's just better at what good players have always wanted from a ball. Spins well around the green, doesn't spin too much when hit hard, is durable and has the legally-maximum permissable CoR when hit by an elite player.

The idea of a magical performance curve where at certain clubhead speeds the ball kicks into another gear and offers hitherto unimagined performance seems highly unlikely to me. But I'm not a golf-ball engineer. Simply not spinning at a million rpm when struck by a 130mph driver is an enormous improvement over pre-urethane Tour balls. No more complex performance curve is necessary to explain why the Pro V1 works so well for today's elite players.

[Garland Bayley]

... And the Pro V1 had a better Coefficient of Restituation for high clubhead speeds, medium clubhead speeds even low clubhead speeds, than a "Tour" ball from a few decades back. ...

How do you know this? Has that been published somewhere? Can you point me to it? I would like to understand that.

[Brent Hutto]

No link or reference available. Back when the USGA was dragging its feet on updating their driver and golf ball testing there was an article in one of the magazines. Turns out especially at very high clubhead speeds the old rubber band and latex Tour balls were not anywhere near the maximum permissable CoR. Of course I suppose they spun so much at high clubhead speeds that the lack of max-CoR was not necessarily the limiting factor anyways.

[Garland Bayley]

No link or reference available. Back when the USGA was dragging its feet on updating their driver and golf ball testing there was an article in one of the magazines. Turns out especially at very high clubhead speeds the old rubber band and latex Tour balls were not anywhere near the maximum permissable CoR. Of course I suppose they spun so much at high clubhead speeds that the lack of max-CoR was not necessarily the limiting factor anyways.

By one of the magazines, do you mean Golf Digest, or Golf Magazine, or perhaps something analogous?

[Brent Hutto]

No link or reference available. Back when the USGA was dragging its feet on updating their driver and golf ball testing there was an article in one of the magazines. Turns out especially at very high clubhead speeds the old rubber band and latex Tour balls were not anywhere near the maximum permissable CoR. Of course I suppose they spun so much at high clubhead speeds that the lack of max-CoR was not necessarily the limiting factor anyways.

By one of the magazines, do you mean Golf Digest, or Golf Magazine, or perhaps something analogous?

Yes, one of those two I think. But it's been what, six-eight-ten years ago? Probably around 2005-ish.

[Garland Bayley]

The old tour balls were no where near the ODS. It is hard for me to imagine the golf ball companies producing balls deficient in COR. Why would they purposely produce balls that were deficient? When the new two piece balls were produced with COR at the limit, they created a distance problem, so they had to be regulated with the ODS which was added after the two piece balls came out. It seems to me that if anything it is the two piece balls that were deficient in COR so that they could come within the ODS.

[Garland Bayley]

http://www.golfdigest.com/golf-tours-news/2007-06/gw070608millard

Discusses how the ball was limited by the ODS, not by COR.

[Brent Hutto]

There was a time in history when nobody knew how to make something better for golf than a hard piece of gutta-percha (or before that a leather sack of feathers). Now they can build golf balls that perform like a Pro V1 (or presumably even better if the Rules allowed). In between there were various points of development with performance in between a hard piece of gutta-percha and a Pro V1, all suboptimal in one or more ways. It's just the way things developed.

Thinking back on it, what seemed to catch the USGA unawares was the possibility that someone might build a ball that performed like a hard distance-rock Surlyn ball while still offereing good players the approach shot and greenside characteristics of a "Tour" ball.

USGA presumably confused a brief period of stasis during which elite players settled for less ball speed and too much spin off the driver for a permanent state of affairs where elite players would never demand the best possible performance in all performance regimes. Once the ball designers dangled that multipiece urethane "carrot" in front of the Tour players it was time RIGHT THEN for the USGA to step in and comprehensively revamp their method of regulating ball performance. Instead they let the better part of a decade pass, by which time it was not politically feasible to regulate away the now-permanent increase in distance that elite players experienced in the late 90'/early 00's.

[Garland Bayley]

The article I linked related how the UGSA felt it was between a rock and a hard place. They had been informed of the new ball coming out, but they felt they couldn't reduce the ODS to account for it, because that would drive all the long ball companies that didn't have patents on tour style balls out of business. They would have rendered 74 percent of all balls nonconforming.

Balata had over a 70 year run in ball manufacturing. How do you characterize that as a "brief period"? Furthermore, I don't believe there was less ball speed as you claim. The ball speed regulation was put in place to reign in the balata balls.

[Brent Hutto]

Perhaps I recall wrongly that the Tour balls had lower than allowed CoR back then. It's been almost a decade since I read it.

My contention is the USGA should have quickly adopted a more comprehensive testing and regulation spec, not just crank down the single parameter in their old spec. They tested and regulated in a way that made assumptions about the performance of any ball a good player would want to play. When faced with an emerging type of ball that did not, in fact, act according to those assumptions they dithered for several years before choosing to implement regulations based on updated assumptions. They are not the only large, bureaucratic organization to resist changing assumptions they've been making for decades. The old test was like a Maginot line defending against a "hot" Balata ball and expected to continue working for years after the Blitzkreig had bypassed it completely.

[Garland Bayley]

Perhaps I recall wrongly that the Tour balls had lower than allowed CoR back then. It's been almost a decade since I read it.

My contention is the USGA should have quickly adopted a more comprehensive testing and regulation spec, not just crank down the single parameter in their old spec.

I agree.

They tested and regulated in a way that made assumptions about the performance of any ball a good player would want to play. When faced with an emerging type of ball that did not, in fact, act according to those assumptions they dithered for several years before choosing to implement regulations based on updated assumptions.

The regulation is not changed in essence. They had to find a test method that was not the labor intensive old method, that depended on among other things, consistent weather. They simple updated the ODS standard to a new test regimen.

They are not the only large, bureaucratic organization to resist changing assumptions they've been making for decades. The old test was like a Maginot line defending against a "hot" Balata ball and expected to continue working for years after the Blitzkreig had bypassed it completely.

[Doug Siebert]

Simply put, the Pro V1 spins less when hit really, really, really hard than a Balata ball would spin when hit really, really, really hard. And the Pro V1 had a better Coefficient of Restituation for high clubhead speeds, medium clubhead speeds even low clubhead speeds, than a "Tour" ball from a few decades back. It's just better at what good players have always wanted from a ball. Spins well around the green, doesn't spin too much when hit hard, is durable and has the legally-maximum permissable CoR when hit by an elite player.

My understanding is that this is exactly why the Pro V1 and other multilayer balls go further for players with high swing speeds.  I noticed this immediately when I first played the Pro V1, though the thing I noticed even more was how damn far it went into a strong wind.  I always hit my drives so high and with so much spin that hitting into a strong wind was a real killer for me, so the improvements in the V1 and V1x helped compensate for my lack of proper technique/skill.  Which is exactly what equipment should NOT do, IMHO.

I think the simplest solution would be to require that all balls can only have a center of uniform density and construction, with an optional cover that has a maximum thickness of whatever is needed to make a ball durable with modern materials and no more.  That would probably go a long way towards rolling back much of the increase without it even being noticeable to the masses.  Let them go back to making the meaningless innovations on dimple patterns they used to before 2000.  They certainly managed to sell plenty of balls by changing the dimple patterns every few years, or coming out with revolutionary new ones (remember the Maxfli DDH?)

It would be interesting to know the details of what the USGA and R&A are testing, I'm sure what I've outlined was probably only a starting point.  I sure hope they don't overengineer the rules to try to allow multilayer balls but regulate them.  I'm sure that's what Titlelist and friends would like.  If they take that route they'll probably end up leaving loopholes that engineers will eventually find and exploit, and a decade later the old distances will be back with a $100/doz Pro V2. 

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