Recently I was reading about Mike Clayton and friends experiment at Royal Melbourne of using steel shafts and persimmon woods to play the course, but with the modern golf ball. Their results, if I remember correctly, were that they hit their shots roughly the same distances
that they do with state of the art equiptment, leading to the conclusion that much of the distance issues and the rendering of classic courses obsolete, was due to the modern golf ball.
So, that got me to thinking. What if as you walk into the Pro Shop at Cypress Point, Merion, Royal Melbourne, etc to check in, they say hello and issue you a sleeve of golf balls that they require/suggest that you use to play their course. This sleeve would be whatever they could get Titleist to manufacture/pull out of storage that would approximate the game before we had this problem-say circa 1985. You would have a wonderful day playing the course as intended, and solve a lot of the irreversable technology issues of today. You've heard of "The Tournament Ball," this would be "The Architecture Ball," or some other smarter name.
This could be a whole new revenue source for Titleist, give a solution to the Classic Courses, give the USGA an out, and seperate the needs of golf courses from being a tournament site vs an architecturally pure site.
Any value to this idea, or ways to make it stronger, or just stupid all together. I await your thoughts.