Personally, I can't recall ever having read, at GolfClubAtlas (or anywhere else), any comment on this issue more pointed (and more demanding of consideration) than this one -- from Dan King: "Personally I prefer the courses remain the way they were designed when I play rather than when the pros play…. I don’t much care if they play putt, putt and shoot 86-under as long as it doesn’t force me to hit a marshmallow on monster courses."
Isn't that exactly, precisely, perfectly right?
Are there any players out there, other than the very top amateurs and the pros, who are EVER (1) finding the game too easy, or (2) making a mockery of fine old course designs?
I don't know of any.
Aren't all of the courses you guys love so much -- the NGLAs and Cypresses and Augustas and Pinehursts (etc., etc.) -- still (even with all of the equipment advances) every bit as much fun and as challenging as they always were? Wouldn't they retain their charm -- FOR US MORTALS -- even with further advances in technology?
I submit that they would (though, of course, that's merely my opinion -- having played very few of the GCA darlings).
I don't have the scientific proof, but these things I believe: The modern ball goes straighter and farther, for the pros and for the rest of us. The modern clubs hit straighter and farther, for the pros and for the rest of us.
Are these bad things? No. They are not. They are good things -- at least for "the rest of us." They make the game at least potentially more fun for potentially more people potentially more of the time -- and they don't threaten to ruin that part of the fun of the game that depends on the game's being HARD. Golf will stay hard, no matter what Callaway and Ping and Little Wally Uihlein have up their sleeves.
Why should we care what astonishing feats the pros can perform? I can think of only two reasons:
(1) Technological (and playing-skill) advances will make more and more of the classic courses unfit venues for top-level competition. These classic courses will be too short to host top-level competition, unless the greens and rough are so tricked-up as to make them as preposterous as Carnoustie was a couple years ago.
This, I think, is a serious concern, and should be taken seriously. It IS a bad thing that Merion could no longer host an Open, even if it had room for all the corporate tents. It WILL be a bad thing when a course such as Interlachen is not long enough even for a top-level women's or seniors' event.
(2) Equipment advances make professional golf less interesting as a spectator sport.
I agree with this statement. The average PGA Tour tournament -- with the players in top form that week firing short-iron darts at pin after pin, and almost never facing a hole where disaster is possible -- becomes little more than a putting contest. Dull. Really dull. (If I didn't have my fantasy teams, I don't think I'd ever watch -- except to maybe learn something about how to play the game better.) The lower the score, in my view, the less interesting to watch -- the Bob Hope tournament being the unchallenged nadir of the entire PGA Tour year.
Is this a problem worth caring about, in a serious way? I don't think so -- unless you're in charge of the PGA Tour and it turns out that I'm in the majority (and I NEVER am). I love to watch the professionals grind for pars -- though that is almost certainly a minority view. It seems as if most people are perfectly happy watching the pros go low. And more power to 'em!
So the PGA Tour doesn't care if the game gets easier for the top players -- and I see no reason why we should require them to care.
Who does care? Or should? The USGA. The R&A. Augusta National. The PGA of America. The proprietors of the classic layouts.
Here's the simple, albeit not-original-to-me solution -- and I'd like to hear, from those of you will find fault with this, why this solution is no solution: a competition ball, regularly updated so as to prudently limit the longest players' distance and thereby keep the classic courses in play, and required for use in the US Open (and the Amateur, and the rest of the USGA events), the British Open (and Amateur, and the rest of the R&A events), the Masters, and the PGA Championship.
Make the competition ball widely available publicly, so that any club wishing to use it for club championships (and any player who finds the highest-tech balls too pepped-up for the course at hand) could easily do so.
Let the PGA Tour events use the latest, longest, straightest balls. Let 'em go low, lower, lowest. Sooner or later, even the golf-fan public may tire of seeing wedge shots and birdie putts -- and at that point, the Tour will act. But until then: Why should those who care about golf course architecture care what the professionals do in the Greater Greensboro Classic?
Let mere mortals play whatever ball they like.