Every other pro sport has an official ball. Let all the ball companies fund a plant in China to make it (from the dough they save in endorsements?). If clubs and amateurs want to “play what the pros play,” fine, sell them some balls. Might actually sell more balls. The only golfers really hurt are the pros raking in huge endorsement money for playing the latest, greatest, hot ball. The endorsements will just shift to equipment: if xyz pro can hit this tournament dud so far with this nuclear club, imagine what you can do with our latest supercharged recreational ball? Problem solved. Obviously, I don’t give a hoot about bifurcation or ballfurcation. The pros play a different game. Don’t change the courses, change the ball. Make it bigger, spin more, or whatever they need to do to keep our courses relevant for a few pros. Let everyone else have fun.
Dave:
Agree.
I have pointed it out many times before in this debate, but there are a lot of new faces here who can't remember back to the 1970's, so I'll say it again ... they've changed the ball before, quietly and effectively, in my lifetime. Until the mid-1970's, the 1.62-in "small ball" was the law of the land everywhere outside the USA. It went 20-30 yards farther off the tee than the 1.68-in ball of the same era. But the pros didn't like having to swtich balls when they played overseas ... so the R & A changed the ball spec JUST FOR COMPETITORS IN THE OPEN AND AMATEUR CHAMPIONSHIPS, to the US standard 1.68-in ball.
Nobody screamed bloody murder about bifurcation. The manufacturers didn't care, since they were making both balls already [and if that's bifurcation, it's been around since the 1920's].
The genius of the move was that by making the small ball illegal for the Amateur instead of just the Open, they sowed the seeds of change. Anybody who wanted to play in the Amateur championship needed to switch ... and those players started clamoring for the ball spec to change further down the chain of important events, so they wouldn't be at a disadvantage. By the mid-1980's, many club players still played the small ball, but it was gone at the elite level. I don't know when it was discontinued altogether, but it had been pretty much abandoned by then anyway.
The only difference between then and now was that the Tour players SUPPORTED the change because they didn't want to adjust back and forth between two balls. Now, of course, the Tour players do NOT support the change publicly, because they are being paid a lot of money by the manufacturers to endorse certain balls that sell like gangbusters to the public, and they're afraid their endorsement money might be curtailed if that ball is made illegal for tournament play.
None of this has anything to do with overall golf ball sales -- we will all continue to lose balls at our normal clip.
The argument is all about market share and protecting the market leader.
Don't change the courses, change the ball.