I back Shaks opinion, just watch the Masters each year - in 2005 Tiger hit Driver 9 iron to 15, Bubba did the same in his win in 2012 however the hole had been lengthened 50 yards in the interim. Something needs to change...
Don--
Re: Bubba's short-iron approach in 2012, it's important to remember that he took kind of an insanely risky line off the tee that day, and it paid off. 90% or more of the field is hitting a long iron into that green, or laying up. Taking an extreme outlier as proof of the problem suggests the vast majority of data points may not be backing up the conclusion you're arguing for.
If a player is going to take on the crazy risk of that sort of shot and he pulls it off, why shouldn't he get a big reward? I've always thought that's part of what makes ANGC #13 such an incredible golf hole.
In every other major sport, fans marvel at the physical feats regularly performed by the best practitioners in the world of said sport. In golfers, those physical feats are seen as evidence of a flaw in the game. Could you imagine how silly it would look if basketball fans saw Stephen Curry make 10 three-pointers in a game and their reaction was to demand that the hoop be made smaller? Or if they saw LeBron James posterize some hapless defender and reacted by demanding the hoop be placed two feet higher?
Just as Shackelford theorizes that golf's governing bodies are conspiring to sell him and other golf minds a bill of goods by misusing data, he does the same thing with regard to the excerpt from Will Gray's article, which observes that there are more players who are averaging ~300 yards off the tee:
“A whopping 27 players cracked the 300-yard average last season on Tour, 15 more than the 2010 season and 18 more than in 2003. Individual drives over 300 yards, which made up just 26.56 percent of tee shots in 2003, accounted for 31.14 percent last season.”Shackelford wants to lay this entirely at the dimples of the golf ball, but the reality is more complex. Golf course selections and setups, particularly at the lower-tour levels and, heck, all the way down to college and junior golf, tend to be friendlier to the bomb-and-gouge set than the straighter-hitting set. This stems from a sentiment that I think most of us share:
greens are too soft. The softer greens get, the smaller the advantage hitting fairways carries, to the point where, tee to green, power becomes too important and accuracy and strategy cease to be important enough. That trend means that longer, less accurate golfers have more of a shot than they used to, and so it makes perfect sense that big hitters are showing up in greater numbers. If the powers-that-be have been pushed around by anyone, it's elite golfers who have been indulged too long by simplistic course setups, and therefore feel entitled to greens that hold a shot from 100 yards, even out of Tour rough.
It's also about site selection. Courses that require thoughtful shaping and placement of tee shots and approaches will put up more of a challenge to bombers,
especially if their greens are tough to hit from off the fairway.
Harbour Town. Pebble Beach. TPC River Highlands. Year in and year out, these courses produce leaderboards featuring diverse groups of players, despite not fitting the lame "All courses need to be 8,000 yards for the pros now!!!" narrative.
In the end, the reality is much more complicated than merely "The ball goes too far." That means there are more, and better solutions than making the pro game less awe-inspiring by punishing pros for having skills that most golfers will never have.