Permission to ignore golf’s fan boys

Not before time golf’s administration, headquartered in St Andrews and New Jersey, have drawn a long called-for line in the sand when it comes to equipment.

Primarily the target of their intended legislation is the golf ball – specifically a ball which flies too far when it’s put into play by the game’s most skilled practitioners.

Predictably the ball companies have wheeled out their ‘influencers’ to sprout the company lines.

The gist of Justin Thomas’ argument this week from Florida seemed to be that the game has never been in better shape,

“Why are we taking the game backwards? Why are we being dictated to by 12 handicappers? We’re better athletes now and all the distance increases are due to our hard work and physical superiority.”

Bryson DeChambeau offered his view. “It’s a great handicap for us guys that have worked really hard to learn how to hit it farther.”

Sure, he’s worked hard, but the equipment advances have meant the game has never been easier to play at the top level. Longer and lighter shafts and driver heads resembling frying pans have allowed DeChambeau to swing as hard and as fast as he can knowing he can hit the modern ball close enough to the greens to wedge it onto most of them.

Webb Simpson blamed it on the architecture. “We need more doglegs. We need tighter fairways. We need longer rough. We need smaller greens. We need more firm greens. We need to plant more trees.”

For a man who played the 2019 Presidents Cup at Royal Melbourne it’s a poorly-conceived view. Royal Melbourne is one of the best handful of courses in the game. It’s also one where the best players in the world play it in a way unimaginable to Alister MacKenzie who laid out the club’s new course in 1926.

No one is suggesting we go back to how the course played with hickory shafts and rudimentary golf balls but how Severiano Ballesteros, Greg Norman, Hale Irwin, Sam Torrance, and Graham Marsh played the course in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a fair contest between man, architect and golf course.

The longer two-shot holes (some of them par 5s and others par 4s) were tests of drives and long or middle irons. Forty years on no one can argue the same as the modern ball and driver has turned even the strongest of that genre of hole into drives and short irons.

Using but one as an example the 435-metre 12th on the West course is no more than a driver and a short iron in this era, something which would have undoubtedly dismayed its designer.

Augusta National had the same problem with MacKenzie’s famed 13th hole but unlimited budgets afforded them to the ability to buy an adjoining hole from the Augusta Country Club and build a new tee.

It’d be fair to say Royal Melbourne spending five million dollars to buy the house behind the 12th tee would be pocket change in comparison to what it cost Augusta National but that’s a lot of money to turn a driver-eight iron hole…