No tees allowed?

[Bill Shamleffer]

Instead of a ban on tees, consider limiting club loft to between 9 and 55 degrees (except for the putter).

I would go much deeper for elite golfers. 8 clubs between 15 and 50 for elite golfers. Maybe even no tee as well...what the hell... I am not elite 😎

Ciao

Agree.  I think just limiting tournament golf to 8 clubs is an ideal start.
Driver; hybrid; long iron; mid iron; short iron; 2 wedges; putter.


This is my bag, but I have the 3,5,7,9.  The 3 is just for punch shots.  I could easily just go with 5,7,9 or 4,6,8.

[Steve Lang]

   No problem on tees, just throw down the ball and pull the 12 degree 2 Wood...


silly to change things.. play on

[Erik J. Barzeski]

Yeah, but that don't put my side of the argument on TV or in the magazines for public consumption. Only two guys discussing the other side.  If they have an architect on, it's one who sees both sides, as he makes $$$ Open doctoring.

Thank you for not taking my reply too seriously. I was just… not poking fun, but… I wasn't being all that serious.   Everyone has biases.

For that matter, they don't put your side of the argument on display, either.  Mostly, I've done as you suggest and just ignored the pro tour throughout my career, except for a couple of clients who insisted.  But golf.com is more interested in what Tiger Woods ate for breakfast than in golf architecture, so they ate definitely not telling readers to ignore the Tour pros.

Indeed. But I guess my point was that we aren't golf.com here, so we can just discuss whatever. I recognize you've mostly ignored the Tour game, and I'm glad you've mostly had projects that are intended for the 99% of the game's players. But… why does it seem that so many care what the PGA Tour players are doing? I don't. Harbour Town is plenty long enough for me, and a winning score of -20 (I'm behind on the coverage, but Hatton is at -19) is arguably "more exciting" than someone winning at -5 for the average golf viewer… perhaps?

McCord said he loves to see guys bomb it over all the fairway bunkers at 320 yards and make them obsolete.  I guess he doesn't understand what they were built for in the first place?

I'm not sure what McCord understands about anything golf-related. 

Looking forward to getting your book. FedEx says it arrives tomorrow.

[John McCarthy]

A few years back I was caddying in a pro am and KJ Choi was the pro. 


As a golfer every time he hit his driver off the deck made me irresponsibility angry.  I can't do it.  I have tried.  And he just picks it perfectly off... Uggghhhhh!


I wanted to slug him but he is a pretty strong guy and he would have beat me silly.

[Peter Flory]

Agree.  I think just limiting tournament golf to 8 clubs is an ideal start.

But wouldn't that hurt the Webb Simpsons and help the Bubba Watsons?  The bombers only use a few clubs anyway. 

Take Tiger's 1997 Masters final round when he was dominating the course with his length.  He led the field in driving distance by 25 yards.  I just use this as an example because he revealed his club selections to the media. 

Approach shots:
1) PW
2) 8i
3) 15 yard pitch
4) 6i (par 3)
5) PW
6) 9i
7) PW
8- hit it in 2 with a 2i
9) PW
10) 8i
11) PW
12) PW
13) hit it in 2 with an 8i
14) PW
15) hit it in 2 with a PW
16) 9i
17) SW
18) SW

So, in total, he needed:
Driver
2i (once)
6i (once)
8i (thrice)
9i (twice)
PW (six times)
SW (twice plus a chip approach)
Putter

[Peter Flory]

The latest example is Gary McCord's new interview on golf.com

Perhaps in such interviews the publisher should disclaim that

(A) the interviewee is paid by the manufacturers to pooh-pooh any talk of rollback, and

(B) so is the interviewer, via advertising dollars

I recently read that and it made me ill. 

"If I’m the longest at 340 yards, like Bryson, then I’m going to be the longest at 290. I’m still going to be the longest…all that’s going to do is bring back these old golf courses… instead, Bryson’s going to be out there with a driver and 6-iron, and everyone else is going to be hitting a 4-iron."

"all" that is going to do?  He really dismisses that point. 

[V. Kmetz]

A few years back I was caddying in a pro am and KJ Choi was the pro. 

As a golfer every time he hit his driver off the deck made me irresponsibility angry.  I can't do it.  I have tried.  And he just picks it perfectly off... Uggghhhhh!

I wanted to slug him but he is a pretty strong guy and he would have beat me silly.

Amen... he is as formidable as Odd-Job up close...


On a tangent, it reminds of the best pro range experience I've ever witnessed...when Choi, Stewart Cink and Davids Toms were the only ones hitting at the WF range (located the 9East) in 2006... Cink, lashing hooking 3ws to the foot of the green...Choi pounding faded Drivers over it... Toms hitting quiet 85 yard wedges that land like a butterfly with sore feet...

[Bill Shamleffer]

Agree.  I think just limiting tournament golf to 8 clubs is an ideal start.

But wouldn't that hurt the Webb Simpsons and help the Bubba Watsons?  The bombers only use a few clubs anyway. 

Take Tiger's 1997 Masters final round when he was dominating the course with his length.  He led the field in driving distance by 25 yards.  I just use this as an example because he revealed his club selections to the media. 

Approach shots:
1) PW
2) 8i
3) 15 yard pitch
4) 6i (par 3)
5) PW
6) 9i
7) PW
8- hit it in 2 with a 2i
9) PW
10) 8i
11) PW
12) PW
13) hit it in 2 with an 8i
14) PW
15) hit it in 2 with a PW
16) 9i
17) SW
18) SW

So, in total, he needed:
Driver
2i (once)
6i (once)
8i (thrice)
9i (twice)
PW (six times)
SW (twice plus a chip approach)
Putter

Peter:


This is actually an excellent example.


Maybe after the practice rounds that is the 8 clubs he selects - Driver, 2, 6, 8, 9, pw, sw, putter;
or perhaps his 4 irons (besides wedges) are 2,5,8,9; or 3,5,7,9; or 4,6,8,9.


Over 4 rounds, perhaps they do not have the exact club they want about 6-10 times.
On Augusta, might still be able to get on the green with a club too much or too little, but then have to decide which is the better miss.


In the final round, every player in last 5 groups will be probably not have ideal club 1-3 times.
That might be 10 times on 2nd nine watching the leaders have to choose which non-ideal club to hit, and how to then play that shot.
And on Saturday, might see about 15 shots on back nine by contenders trying to get in that top-10, with non-ideal club available.


I would like to see those 10 shots on tv over the last few hours.
The architecture will now also dictate where & how to play when a club off.
Also, how well can one play the soft 7 iron, when the 9 iron is not enough, when under the pressure on Sunday at Augusta.
And for those who do not pull off that soft 7 iron, what does the architecture then force for that next shot.


Then at The Open Championship, with windy conditions, does one try to use the wind even more when playing between clubs.


Right now, between clubs is only about 5 yard off.
With a 1/2 set, between clubs becomes 10-15 yards.


Based on all of the above, it does now appear that the ideal set for a pro golfer is no more than 7 clubs.


Although for a Brooks Koepka, quite a few PGA Tour courses might just be: 2 or 3 wood; 5 iron, 8iron, 9 iron, PW, SW, putter.
He might only be between clubs 1-2 times with this 7 club set.

[Buck Wolter]

From the trackman website John Rahm swings 118 hits up 5.2 deg and carries it 315, Erik Van Rooyen swings 116 hits up 0.6 deg and carries it 284 --no one is worried about a 285 yard carry.  DeChambeau has his ball teed up completely over the top of the crown of his driver from what I can see - I bet he's up 8.


Maybe Jeff or Erik can comment but I don't think you can hit up if the ball is teed in the middle of the driver's face --you'd risk a drop kick or a whiff.


T

he ideal place for this to happen would be at Augusta. They simply announce that all competitors will have to use a 'Masters Tee' that is 1.5-2" (pick your length) as a local rule. No one passes on the invite.

[Forrest Richardson]

[from 2002] Speech by Robert Trent Jones, Jr:


PART 1

EXCERPTS FROM THE "TEE IT DOWN" DINNER

Last year at the U.S. Open at Southern Hills in Tulsa, I had the privilege to be included in an informal discussion at a private dinner hosted by the USGA. The discussion turned on how traditional championship courses could stand up against the onslaught of ball and implement technology. Thus I now report to you a proposal made by Peter Dawson, Secretary of the R & A, at that time with which I concur.
"There's one sure way to level the playing field of golf," the Wise Man said." And that is to take away the current artificiality. You don't have to ban any new technology. You don't require the player to give up his preferred ball with its hexogumple dimples and its hoxadymonic flight pattern. You don't even have to fight a patent. The only patent pertaining to my subject has long expired. "We also have a long-standing tradition on which to base our decision. It's called playing the ball as it lies," Mr. Dawson reminds us.
So colleagues, here's the plan: we ban the tee from the tee.

Each club player will be allowed to roll his ball around on that area, praying that he finds a tuft of something, or a worm-cast, or a acorn-cup or whatever, while our job will be to ensure that each tee is properly constructed to be tightly cut and as smooth and fine as any eleven stimp-measured green. But during club medals or other championships, the rule would be simple. Drop the ball between and behind the markers and play it from where it comes to rest.

There will be one new etiquette standard, and that shall be all. A player who scuffs the teeing area will be required to make repairs from available sod and sand to ensure the area is left as pristine as we presently leave bunkers and greens. With that then let the best player find some way to fly the ball with a 7.5 degree light-alloy, bigheaded driver three hundred and thirty-three yards through the air.
And for my fellow golf course architects in the audience we shall have a role to play in all of this. Up until now most of you have been moving bunkers on the fairway wings forward from two hundred and sixty yards out into the high two eighties. Now I want you to consider placing sizable bunkers with significant lips, and very soft, powdery sand, say about fifty to one hundred yards or so from the championship tees as Donald Ross once implemented.

I see some of you grimacing, no doubt thinking that this change will only service to take the driver out of the hands of highly-skilled exponents of golf; and that they will simply use a 3-wood to get ample distance, the way young Tiger Woods has done in order to master holes such as that tough, dogleg 13th at Augusta National with a high sweeping hook. Perhaps therefore I have not been sufficiently explicit in the proposal.

What I heard is exactly the opposite: the driver will still be obligatory for everyone on the par fours and fives. The only other option permitted will be the wedge. Draconian, did I hear someone murmur? Perhaps, but you see we have sat around for long enough doing nothing while that was always the constant complaint. No, we have waited for far too long while technology crept up on us and turned golf on its ear. Now it is impossible to turn back the clock, and we are stuck with lawsuits by manufacturers, and how resistance to change is bad for the game and on and on.

Nevertheless, now we can do something and something very positive, even though it too will cause some measure of resentment. Still, that's the way things have always been with golf, ever since Old Tom Morris or even before his time.

Our own historian Geoff Cornish, and some older members of the audience will probably recall reading about the acrimonious feud between featherie ball maker Allan Robertson and Old Tom Morris. It was so contentious that Old Tom moved his club-making and teaching business across the entire width of Scotland from St Andrews to Prestwick. Morris favored the new guttie ball, a product that would have put Robertson out of business had he not been decent enough to die first. That ball changed golf, and most say for the better, and perhaps that is hard to dispute because the easier, cheaper guttie attracted many more players to the game.

But fifty years later, the next-generation ball - that bouncing, bounding Haskell - was not viewed by top professional players as an improvement. The great Harry Vardon, after his first test, stated the new ball would make the game too simple and particularly decried the loss of one skill. "Playing the guttie into a tough headwind," Vardon wrote, "has always been the toughest shot in the game. Learning to strike down hard on the ball to ensure it does not bellow up and finish behind you was an art. Sadly this new ball has taken all the risk out of that shot." Thus the sand patty tee mound became more in vogue to help get the new ball get airborne. [Subsequently Vardon, the most talented player of his era accepted a lucrative tour of the United States to promote this new ball.]

Innovations, good and bad, were arriving thick and fast at the end of the nineteenth century. Among them the original greens mower provided the first consistently maintained putting surfaces. Dr. George Franklin Grant, graduate of the Harvard School of Dentistry, class of 1870, spent most of his nineteen-nineties leisure time on the recently imported fad of golf. Perhaps he was a persnickety fellow accustomed to permanently clean hands. Whatever the reason, he tired of making mud-pie tees from damp sand, he returned to his study and invented golf's first artificial aid.

Patent 638,920 was granted in 1899, a ball-perch around two inches tall, a folding rubber top on an upright stem. An immediate success? Not at all. Grant died in 1910, his tee-up idea shelved a decade earlier from lack of general interest.
The tee-it-up business and dentistry would appear to have no obvious connection, but the next and considerably more successful attempt to put the golf ball on an artificial pedestal was the brainchild of yet another American dentist, Dr. William Lowell from Maplewood, New Jersey.

Lowell first experimented with gutta percha, the material used to produce the rubber "guttie" ball but found the material too brittle. Local birch-wood proved more durable and he painted his trial batch green. Wrong! Red turned out to be the color that caught on and in no time at all "Reddy Tees" became a vogue. Walter Hagen helped the cause when he accepted a healthy fee from the inventor to publicize the product. Unlike Grant, or perhaps because Grant's patent was still viable, Lowell failed to register his product. Soon the burgeoning golf-market was flooded with imitations.

[Forrest Richardson]

PART 2

The artificial peg itself would change very little in the next eighty years, outlasting hickory shafts, the stymie, leather wraparound grips, the British ban on center-shafted putters, persimmon drivers, golf hats and shirts without logos, and yellow, bell-bottom pants. So please, if you will, concentrate on that word, artificial. Because that is what a tee is, an artifice, a ploy to simplify the game, a scam invented by a high-handicap player to help get the ball in the air. Golf, my friends, should properly be played from the ground to the ground into the ground.

Here's a bit of history. The "T" is an ancient Egyptian surveyors' mark, set in the ground, meaning 'begin here,' in the direction of the stem of the "T". But begin what? — A pyramid? — Or begin playing the Royal and Really Ancient game?

To my knowledge, only two entrepreneurial types made personal fortunes from tee-related matters. Naturally one was a frugal Scot, Hamish MacFadgen, who invented the woolie-bobble. The bobble, a sort of sporran tassel but made from knitting wool of various colors, was attached by a piece of tough thread, about a foot in length, to the tee-stem.

"Aye, I know it costs sixpence when the tee only costs thruupence. But you'll only need ane o'each in a lifetime of golf," he'd tell his parsimonious clients.

MacFadgen woolie-bobbles sold in millions until Grandma Gourlie discovered, much by accident, that bobbles were easily and cheaply made at home simply by means of twisting and knotting excess knitting yarn and so ended MacFadgen's fortune.

The sprawling British Empire introduced the game of golf to India long before it reached New York and Jamil "Pindle" Singh — so nicknamed for the paucity of his drives — also made a small fortune from the game. Aware that the ownership of a tiger's tooth was considered one of the most significant of all good-luck charms in his native land, he inventively added superstition to his sales pitch. Boring a small hole in each large tiger-tooth, he threaded a small wire through the hole and attached the other end to a wooden tee; a ploy by which he persuaded gullible clients that they could always find their tee and have good fortune at the same time. Such aids are now but a footnote in the litany of golfing memorabilia, while the artificial tee lives dangerously on. It is time to kill it before it kills the classic courses we know and love.

Of course there will be a minority who say we are changing the nature of the game by limiting freedom of choice. Yet, in modern times, we have most certainly done this before. Name me one golf course where a player, whether professional or amateur, is allowed to use any club other than a putter on the greens? Yet once upon a time the tee-off area was from just alongside the previous hole, and there was small difference to be noted.

I see a smirk over there. You, Sir - are you one of the Mulligan-types or perhaps an all season "winter rules" nudger? Of course there will be surreptitious rascals who will sneak wooden tees onto the course. But to quote a better source than anyone in this room, those fellows are simply not playing the same game as the rest of us. So be it. For the vast majority the game is simple. The USGA and the R&A set the Rules - we honor them.

We have choices now being forced upon us as rapidly as the Industrial Revolution forced unremitting change upon the 19th century. For us to simply sit back and do nothing will ultimately result in a routine of nine thousand yard golf courses, and what will be the point of that? To prove professional golfers play a different game from the rest of us? To defend Par as some sort of gesture to tradition? To humble those of us who from time to time would like to play the back tees?

Finally, we have Big Bertha and the little ball. Those who swing ever larger-headed drivers will set the ball upon even higher pegs. Today's young college limberbacks are already swinging from their heels every time because the physical properties of the medal driver have overcome Hogan's fear of the hook with his persimmon woods. But drop the ball on the ground and the large trampolined sweet spot will physically be above the ball as it lies and therefore useless. Get to the root cause and the new equipment will revert automatically to its former size.

And for all you architects who like to crack eggs to make fresh omelets, you will have plenty of design work to do. For example, you could even design, as Tom Fazio did, a "teeless" golf course like the short 10-hole replica course at Pine Valley. Let your imagination be your guide to help save the game.

Ladies and gentlemen, one simple decision today can change golf forever, for the good of all.
Ban the artificial tee from the game and do it now!

Robert Trent Jones, Jr.
as presented to the American Society of
Golf Course Architects annual meeting
Santa Barbara, California
April 28, 2002

[Peter Flory]

I'd rather have a rollback, but I'd agree to that proposal over the current rules.  The 2 wood would really come back in style. 

[Thomas Dai]

Ref RTJ-Jnr and PD above, a drop back then was from shoulder height, now it's from knee height. A much more accurate drop can (unfortunately) be achieved from knee height.
atb

[jeffwarne]

The ridiculous flaw in the first line in the no tee dinner speech is the one about "leveling the playing field"
1. Why would that be desireable? Why not reward those with skil
2.It would be a matter of time before smarter and well funded manufacturers would find a way to lower the center of gravity on a low profile driver  and increase launch while reducing spin
3. many hit 3 woods 300 plus yards now
4.It would destroy tees
5. It would destroy most amateur's games-far more than a rollback
Can't we agree that a two wood off the ground would rarely be struck solidly by an am, who already struggles with a three wood, and that 2 wood off the deck would certainly go shorter than a driver off a tee with a 10% rolled back ball.


The argument made assumes there is a "distance" problem(many who I respect disagree there is one, but the entire "teeless" speech assumes there is one).
Solve a "distance problem" by reducing the distance the exact way it became a "problem"-thru equipment adjustments to the ball and or clubs.


Besides, if we're that scared of the manufacturers suing, shouldn't we assume they would sue if removing the tee suddenly made their drivers obsolete?

[Kyle Harris]

Terrible ideas. Why not just make the player play out of the divot of the player in front of them with a limit of one club?