Tim,
Augusta has been lengthened by 5-7% over the past 30 years. If you rollback the ball 10% and play from the current back tees, I think players will hit the same clubs Jack did in the 86 Masters. He hit 3 and 4 iron into 13 and 15 and 5 iron on 16 and 18. Sergio hit 8 iron on 15 and PW on 18 last year. I personally would enjoy watching players play the golf course the way it was designed to be played. I loved watching Faldo hit 2 iron from a sidehill lie on 13 in 96. That was such a difficult shot and there was a true risk/reward calculation. What risk is there hitting a 6-8 iron into that green? I understand the average fan may not care about that.
What a 10% rollback would do is allow tournaments to slow the greens down a little, maybe to 1986 speed. Greens have gotten way too fast in order to defend par because players are hitting shorter clubs into greens than they used to. This is why scoring has not come down over the years. Ball striking has become easier, putting has become harder. To me, greens that run at 12-14 is what really slows the game down because every lag putt rolls out to 4 feet, you almost never have a tap in, and you have more three putts. If tournament greens ran at 10-11, I think play would be faster, members at home would not demand greens that run at 12, and maintenance cost would come down a little.
Eric--
What do you mean "the way it was designed to be played?" By whom? In what year? Alister Mackenzie in 1934? Is there any golf course that has received more adjustments in the way it is designed than ANGC has?
ANGC seems to be the perfect example of a topic that I think is very taboo in our circles, but at the risk of ridicule I'll broach it here:
What if the original design of a particular golf course is flawed? What if X classic course, designed in 1918, could be better now if certain changes were made, either to the routing, shaping, maintenance, vegetation, etc.? Given better resources and information than their forebears had, is it universally inherently preferable to restore X course's flawed former self, or is it preferable to instead preserve the original intent and style of X's beloved original architect while addressing the course's baked-in flaws?
What I'm getting at here is: what makes it the case that the way Nicklaus played 13 and 15 in '86 was undoubtedly superior to the way Sergio and Phil and Bubba have played those and other holes in the modern day?
You speak of the pleasure of Faldo's 2-iron in 1996 and praise Nicklaus' use of long irons in 1986. But under 1986's technological conditions, we would never have Mickelson's superhuman 6 iron from the pine straw and trees to 13 green in 2010. Are you prepared to argue that that shot - one of the most exciting single shots hit on a golf course on TV in my lifetime (I was born in 1989) shouldn't have been possible?
Yes, Sergio hit 8 iron into 15 (didn't Tiger hit PW into 15 the year after you reveled in Faldo's 2 iron?), but in order to do so he had to hit a long, straight tee shot under immense pressure. Might you be taking the greatness of the preceding shot for granted?
Bubba Watson's shot on 10 in the playoff in 2012 is one of the greatest golf shots ever hit. But to set that shot up, he had to hit a poor tee shot. If the modern driver and ball are such a no-brainer combination for long and straight tee shots, it is still clear that there is tremendous skill involved in hitting a fairway when the chips are down.
What about the way Angel Cabrera played the 72nd hole, in the rain, just having seen Adam Scott hole the presumptive winning putt, in 2013? It looks like he hit 7 or 8 iron up the hill. I think the knee-jerk reaction is to use that as an example of why the golf ball goes too far, but I think doing so requires a refusal to acknowledge the difficulty of hitting as great a tee shot as Cabrera hit. I think that's a selective approach to the issue.
If you are asserting is that the modern golf ball has decreased the potential for incredible shots and moments in professional golf, I would vehemently disagree, with these and many more shots as evidence.
Now, I think part of the rollbacker's reply might go something like, "But the golf ball has made it so pros don't hit many long irons anymore, and that's not good. And I don't necessarily disagree, which is why I put together my little matrix of clubs hit over the course of a round in my response to Tom Doak in post #104. That matrix laid a framework for what seemed like a balanced round of golf in terms of full shot demands, and it arrived at a course yardage of 7,355 yards. That makes me wonder whether the assertion that all the pros are hitting nothing but short irons and wedges is somewhat overstated. It would be good to know whether this was true - rather than just rely on anecdotal "well in yesteryear..." reminiscences. Again, rolling back the golf ball would be a big deal if enacted; we need to err on the side of doing too much due diligence, not too little. I think we've done much too little, especially since, as available data shows, equipment has generally plateaued.