The "seven-club solution" seems like a very odd approach to me.
(Just to get a personal prejudice out of the way, I am not in the club-selling business, and I just love the idea of playing a few holes by myself in the evening with nothing but a Sunday bag and about seven clubs. Fabulous.)
But when people talkabout addressing the golf ball-distance problem by cutting down the number of clubs, to me that sounds like trying to enforce the speed limit by laying down occasional oil slicks. One has very littel to do with the ohter, except tangentially. As crude as this notion is, the "distance" problem could be solved by getting rid of just one club -- driver -- instead of seven of them.
We don't have a 'skill' problem, or a 'golf course' problem in golf. We have a distance problem. A distance problem that is directly related to equipment. And since the one thing that seems to be helping elite players, and not recreational players, is the golf ball (I dare say that big-headed drivers may be of a big help to recreational players as well as elites), it is the golf ball that we should focus on.
After all, the cheapest, most inconsequential, least memorable, most uniteresting part of the game is the golf ball and its formulation. Golf clubs and daily fee course operators have millions invested in their courses. And as Geoff Shackelford rightly says, golf is the game in which the venue is the most important and most fragile in all of sport.
At the same time, individual golfers have hundreds, or thousands, of individual dollars invested in their clubs, along with many hours of work and familiarization in most cases.
But golf balls? Come on. Who, besides Fortune Brands, has any sort of investment in golf balls? Who has bought the golf balls they plan to use in 2010? N-o-b-o-d-y.
Bottom line: For everybody (except perhaps Titleist, Bridgestone and Callaway) changing the rules for the formulation of golf balls would be easy.
And it need not be a change that "punishes" recreational players. Why not a ball that closes the rapidly-expanding gap between elite and recreational players? Right now, quite perversely, we seem to be optimizing balls for the elite players. The Pro V is their dream ball. Why not codify ball specifications that are optimized for recreational players instead?