FORGET THE COMPETITION BALL, HOW ABOUT COMPETITION CLUBS?

[Rick Wolffe]

There has been alot of discussion around competition golf balls for the highest level of competition, but what about the merits of competition clubs instead?  Wouldn't it be easier to rule that wood play clubs have to be solid heads made of wood, not metal and hollow.  Would not the design and manufacture of a competition golf ball create more logisitical problems than just saying that the sport is rolling back the clubs to persimmon heads and that hollow metal headed clubs are not permitted in the highest levels of competitive golf?

In a recent article in DM Magazine written by Curt Sampson (which is posted on the thread about the golf ball and the future of golf), Sampson had several tour pros hit a MacGregor Byron Nelson persimmon headed driver at this year's Byron Nelson.  Chad Campbell hit his best drive with the old MacGregor and a modern ball 253.9 yards.  With the same MacGregor driver Campbell hit an old Titleist balata 247 yards.  With his Adams A4 Tech driver and a Graffaloy tour shaft Campbell hit a modern ball 291 yards.   

Doesn't this indicate that the increase in distance has been more a function of the club than the ball? 

Sampson's test with Campbell would give 7 yards to the ball and 37 yards to the club.  So I have come to my simple, and perhaps obvious conclusion that the increase in distance is attributed to both the ball and the club, but more so the club.  Vijay Singh confirmed Campbell's result by hitting the modern ball 254 yards with the same persimmon headed driver.

Incidently, in Randy Jensen's great book, "Playing Hickory Golf" he wrote that the ball that was in play in the late 1920's and early 1930's went just as far as today's ProVI. 

So, if I was King, or the Commish of Pro Golf, I would rule that the "hollow headed oxymoron metal wood" would no longer be allowed in any professional competitions.  If any manufacturers complained, I would tell them to, "get over it, start making competetion clubs, and keep on making and selling the high tech stuff, because they will remain legal for amatuer play at all levels."

If this played out right would it not become a great financial boon for the manufacturers?  Aspiring young amateurs would play with wood woods and likey purchase a second set -- their competition clubs for tournament play and their non-competition clubs for casual play.  Amateurs at all levels would continue to play the hollow metal headed clubs in club, amateur and college competitions. 

It seems to work well in baseball.  The young high school and college baseball players play with the aluminum composite bats in league play; but the kids with aspirations of moving up to the pros are all practicing with wooden baseball bats.

Would there not be great profit making and marketing opportunities for Titleist, Nike, Wilson, Adams and the rest?  The pitch lines could run the gamet, "Is your game ready for our Competition Clubs?"  "If you think you can play with Tiger, you may be ready for our custom fitting to our finest persimmon!"

Final thought, if the pros played competition clubs, would we be able to make better comparisons of today's greats like Tiger and Phil to the greats of yesteryear's, Nicklaus, Hogan, Nelson and other greats?

[Mike_Clayton]

We are playing the Australian Senior Open this week at Royal Perth.
Mac O'Grady is playing here with wooden woods and 1974 Hogan irons. We have played several rounds together over the last two weeks - one at St Andrews Beach which he loved - and he hits the wooden driver at least 250 yards and often times, further.
On the range he turned it upside down and swung it left handed and flew it 250. Staggering.
He argues that he plays with guys now who 'I used to bomb it by who now hit it past me - and they are not the ones doing the push-ups'.
It takes so much more skill to hit the sweet spot but when you do with a wood it goes very well - it is just that the game is ridiculously easy with frying pan heads on drivers - clubs that have been a catastrophie for the great old courses.
Then there is the throw-away line that 'players are so much better now'
How would you know until they played with the old equipment?

[Dan Herrmann]

Rick,
How about "competition conditions", 1955-era?  If you've seen films from back then you know that fairways were shaggy and greens were slow.

[Carl Nichols]

Chad Campbell hit his best drive with the old MacGregor and a modern ball 253.9 yards.  With the same MacGregor driver Campbell hit an old Titleist balata 247 yards.  With his Adams A4 Tech driver and a Graffaloy tour shaft Campbell hit a modern ball 291 yards.   

Doesn't this indicate that the increase in distance has been more a function of the club than the ball? 

Unclear -- how far did he hit the old ball with his current club? 

[Dan Herrmann]

for what it's worth..

I asked the USGA/R&A guys about the possibility of a competition ball during their "rolled back" ball lab at my club this year.  Their response was, "We already have a competition ball, and you've been playing it all year."

Kind of a cop out, IMHO (and I'm a USGA fanboy)

[DMoriarty]

Here is a copy of the article Rick posted on the other thread.  It is definitely worth a read.


____________________________________________________________________________________________________



____________________________________________________________________________________________________

[DMoriarty]

Rick,  That is a great idea.  I'd love to see it.  But the equipment manufacturers would freak.  Those clubs don't look like the one's they are selling to us, and their wouldn't be enough turn around on the new equipment. 
_____________________________________


Mike,

The new equipment might make the game too easy when you already know how to swing, but I think these new clubs hinder amateurs from ever learning how to swing well.   We can get away with too much, and never get a sense of what we are doing wrong.  So we plod along with horrible swings, never improving and never having a clue why, and getting away with murder without ever developing any mastery of what it is like to swing a club properly.   I love playing old persimmons and blades because I know that I cannot try to kill it and I had better be smooth (for me at least.)  I find them surprisingly forgiving (compared to their reputation) for off-center hits, but completely unforgiving for hacking swings and and over-the-top lunges.    I'm still a hack, but at least when I get a good result I know that it was because I managed a decent swing.
_________________________

Surely with a bit newer persimmons the pros would have it well by 250.  I wonder why the distance drop off with this particular club?  Old shaft?  Old wood?  I have a few woods from the 40's and have never had much luck with them, but I just assumed it was just a combination of old clubs and a bad swing. 

[Paul_Turner]

Rick

Thanks for this...It's not a scientific study but I think you're right the club+shaft has had more of an impact, on maximum distance, than the ball.   Note also that the Titleist balata they used would have lost some of its "spring" since I assume it has to be about 7+ years old (the rubber windings relax over time).

[Mike_Clayton]

Dave,

I think that is exactly right - the new drivers ask for almost no precision and as a consequence players hit them all over the face - and they can hit good shots with ordinary tecnique.
And, they go so much further off line - which has created a multitude of boundary problems for suburban golf courses - certainly here in Australia.

[Rick Wolffe]

Many thanks for all the comments and discussion.

On whether manfacturers would object because they could not retool to make both...I would postulate that if done right, they would embrace it and substantially increase revenue and profit.

If we look to baseball for a reality check, the following two links are to Louisville Sluggers offering of aluminum and wooden bats:

http://www.slugger.com/baseball/aluminum/index.html

http://www.slugger.com/baseball/wood/index.html

Louisville Slugger is offical bat for Major League Baseball.  Wilson offers a full line of aluminum and composite bats for under the DeMarini brand for youth, little league, high school and college.  I don't think the PGA Tour would go the route of one exclusive supplier, and if I was Commish, I would allow pros to play with rolled back wooden headed equipment from the manufacturer of their choice.

If the PGA Tour rolled back competition clubs to solid wood heads and allowed all manufacturers to make clubs for professional players at all professional levels, I would think this could be BIG TIME revenue and profit positive for all the equipment manufacturers.

[Padraig Dooley]

Rick

One of the big jumps in distance came with the introduction of the ProV1 golf ball.

The reason being optimisation i.e. matching the correct ball to the correct club. Approximately, for swing speed in the region of 110mph, a launch angle of 13/14 degress allied with a spin rate around 2500 rpm comes glose to maximising distance for that player.

The balls prior to the ProV1/multilayer balls spun quite a lot, titanium club heads spins the ball more then persimmon hence we saw the phenomenon of really low lofted drivers 7,6 even 5 degrees to keep the ball flight down, the low riser ball flight.

With the introduction of the latest balls which spun significantly less off the driver, players have gravitated towards higher lofts and now are hitting the ball much higher but with a lot less spin, a rainbow flight, very effective for maximising distance, wind also effects the ball less.

However if the current clubs were used with the old ball, the unwanted spin would come back and distance would be lost.

The increase in distance is neither a function of just the ball or the club alone but both, with my judgement being the ball being the bigger factor of the two, also surely it's much easier to regulate the ball where players spend from $1 to $5 on each ball whereas they spend up to $500 and more on an individual club?

Smapson's article is interesting but it wouldn't be too difficult to do a much more rigorous scientific test on all the factors involved.

[Steve_ Shaffer]

How about a new persimmon driver with a graphite shaft?


www.louisvillegolf.com

[Rick Wolffe]

Hi Padraig...for me seeing is believing...and if tour pros can only get 250 to 260 yards out of a ProV1 and a persimmon headed driver all the scientific talk on spin rates, launch angle, and trajectory does nothing for me...

...didn't the old solid balls made by Topflite (rockflites) and others in the 1980s - 1990s go just as far as the modern soft covered balls?

[Padraig Dooley]

Rick late last year, I used an old Hogan persimmon for about a month or so, just for a bit of fun. I was probably around 10-15 yards shorter with this club then my driver at the time. The main difference was the forgiveness, it was possible to hit some really wonky shots with it.

The problem with Sampson's article is he uses very small samples. There is only two pros, they are comparing a driver which probably doesn't suit them to their own drivers which fit them perfectly. It is possible to build a persimmon driver which would hit it further. Give somebody a club that doesn't suit them and compre it with a club that does, there will always be a big difference.  How can you put too much faith in a small sample?

The old two piece balls did go a long way, but they weren't used by too many players looking for control.

[Rick Wolffe]

Padraig you may be right on the spec point...the driver Singh, Campbell, Strickland, Pavin, Campbell and others tried in Sampson's experiment was 43 inches in length...for me that is a large enough sample to not throw the baby out with the wash.  If the pros rolled back the clubs, all the tour pros would have custom fitted clubs and would be constantly tinkering with swing weights, shaft stiffness, etc etc...just like they did years ago and as they do today.

Steve Schaeffer, nice find, interesting that there are already a company making persimmon again.

Would it not be REALLY COOL for the PGA Tour to make one of its events a persimmon only event...no hollow headed woods or hybrids allowed...they have done these events in the past to create fan interest and to try and improve tv ratings...the stableford event and the match play events that they created.  How cool would it be to say we have an event that is persimmon only on an old line course?

In fact how cool woud it be to have one persimmon only at a future Fed-X event on an old line course like Ridewood or Plainfield?  The whole world of golf would tune in to watch and the media chatter and hype woud be tremendous!

This is not a new idea...I know of at least two State golf associations in the US that have annual open tournaments for amateurs with pre-1936 hickory only clubs...and believe it or not no one has sued the associations trying to get in these tournaments with modern paly clubs.

[TEPaul]

"In a recent article in DM Magazine written by Curt Sampson (which is posted on the thread about the golf ball and the future of golf), Sampson had several tour pros hit a MacGregor Byron Nelson persimmon headed driver at this year's Byron Nelson.  Chad Campbell hit his best drive with the old MacGregor and a modern ball 253.9 yards.  With the same MacGregor driver Campbell hit an old Titleist balata 247 yards.  With his Adams A4 Tech driver and a Graffaloy tour shaft Campbell hit a modern ball 291 yards.  

Doesn't this indicate that the increase in distance has been more a function of the club than the ball?"


Rick:

Don't you think it's a little odd they didn't bother to get Campbell to just go ahead and hit one of those old Titleist balata balls with his Adams A4 Tech driver with a Graffaloy tour shaft?  

This isn't exactly a scientific test but I recall from a friend of Davis Love's that he tried to hit some of those old high spin balatas with his new age driver and some pretty strange things happened with the ball and doing this kind of test with the likes of Davis Love ain't exactly the same thing  as trying the test with the likes of you and me.    

I asked Scott Anderson about this and he told me the reason should be pretty obvious because those balata trees just have always had a total personal natural aversion to any new age metals or materials. If they come anywhere near that old balata it creates some pretty wild geopathic stress lines and results pretty much immediately!

[Carl Nichols]

Rick:

Don't you think it's a little odd they didn't bother to get Campbell to just go ahead and hit one of those old Titleist balata balls with his Adams A4 Tech driver with a Graffaloy tour shaft? 

Tom -- I agree, hence my question above. 

[DMoriarty]

I don't know if we can read too much into the results with Singh and Campbell.   This was quite an old club -- 1950's or before -- obviously many pros were hitting the persimmon club and balata ball combination quite a bit further than this in the 1980s.

Here is a link to a follow up article . . .

http://www.golfdigest.com/golfworld/columnists/2009/05/golf_equipment_distance_stachura

And from that the statistics from Campbell's shots . . .



And from the same article the number of pros averaging 280 yards and above off the tee . . .




This article is also an interesting read, although I think it may be a bit quick in jumping to some of its conclusions.  

[Paul_Turner]

Instead of lclub or ball...how about banning the tee peg? 

Not sure that the greenkeepers would appreciate it though.

[Rick Wolffe]

That link to the article is a great find!  Thank you much for sharing.


http://www.golfdigest.com/golfworld/columnists/2009/05/golf_equipment_distance_stachura

The following is Dick Rugge's comments on Chad Campbell's test at the Byron Neslon.  It is very interesting to note that the USGA has been testing persimmon drivers as well as competition balls.  Is there a glimmer of hope or am I reading to much into Rugge's comments?

Dick Rugge, the senior technical director of the U.S. Golf Association and the man who oversaw the change of that organization's golf ball overall distance standard test in 2004 to a modern titanium driver and a faster swing speed, says the experiment, though limited, seems consistent with what his team at the USGA's Research and Test Center believes is happening with modern equipment.

"The results agree very closely with our own in-depth testing with a larger number of professionals (and amateurs) hitting their own modern driver vs. a persimmon driver," Rugge said.

"The reduction of swing speed is also not surprising. Compared to modern drivers, the wooden club is probably about two inches shorter, about two ounces heavier, and has such a small head and sweet spot that great golfers have to slow down their swings. 'Hitting it on the screws' used to really mean something."

Though the USGA has been conducting research on shorter golf balls for the last three years, that project has not yielded any announcement of a proposed rollback in the golf ball in the way groove performance was rolled back late last year. Rugge simply says today that the research project is "ongoing." For now, Rugge believes that current research suggests that the ball need not be singled out as the root cause of distance in the modern game.

"Our testing showed me that the majority of PGA Tour distance increases attributable to equipment have likely come from changes in the driver, not the ball," he said.

It's not clear whether one set of numbers and a few swings through history on the range of a PGA Tour event last week confirm that idea or call it into question. But isolating the effect to either club or ball seems impossible. Rather, today's club-ball system seems to exceed the sum of its parts.

[DMoriarty]

Rick,

Unfortunately, I don't think Chad Campbell is the best pro to look at if we want to draw conclusions about distance.   Campbell is not a long hitter on Tour and while he did get around a 10 yard bump with the ProV1 but did not receive a similar bump with the ProV1x.  It could be that he doesn't like it or it could be that it doesn't do anything for his distance.  Likewise, it seems this particular club lacked the performance of the persimmons from the 80s.

Regardless, whatever percentage of the change one credits the balls or the clubs, I'd love to see the pros playing with persimmons.   

[Rick Wolffe]

DMoriarty

Thanks very much again for the reference to the article and the quotes from Dick Rugge and his statement that,  "Our testing showed me that the majority of PGA Tour distance increases attributable to equipment have likely come from changes in the driver, not the ball,"

I was also very pleased to learn from the article that the USGA is testing persimmon so maybe there is hope that the golf powers will roll back the clubs!

[Paul_Turner]

I haven't seen any evidence within the PGA tour, at least, that the longest hitters have gained disproportionally more from all of the tech advances when compared with the shortest.

Some interesting studies at:
http://www.usga.org/equipment/research_studies/Research-and-Studies/

including one we've discussed here before "Do Long Hitters Get and Unfair Benefit" (from the ball) (see Appendix 3)

http://www.usga.org/news/2006/April/Speed-Vs--Distance--Do-Long-Hitters-Get-An-Unfair-Benefit-/

Rick

I agree with the Rugge statements that changes in the driver were more important.  Getting the optimum mass, lowering the center of percussion/gravity, the spring effect of the driver face, lighter and therefore longer shafts.

[TEPaul]

Rick:

For a number of years the USGA's Tech Center has said that increased distance has happened for a number of reasons and that it was not all the ball. On the flip side they seem to say a capping or even a rollback could probably not be accomplished just via the golf ball but by a number of factors (they have never said they are in the process of rolling back distance but if they feel they are or should I wouldn't exactly expect them to go public about it at this point and for reasons that should be fairly obvious to most).

But one certainly could logically ask if they weren't thinking about it at all why did they ask all the manufacturers for prototype balls to test a few years ago that go 15 and 25 yards less and why did they enact a new regulation on grooves that will go into conformance effect shortly?

[Rick Wolffe]

Hi Tom, thank you for your perspectives.

I will sing the praises to the Commish that rolls back the driver...and the $ billions wasted on new back tees won't be for naught!  The big name tournament courses can just let them go to seed; and, for the once a year tour visit, or every 10 year major, these old pads will be quite useful for bleachers, signage, concessions stands, or porta johns where every seat has a nice even lie to minimize spring like splash effect.