"Do. Nothing."
The Golf Digest Bomb and Shill Gouge boys are at it again! This time with "5 suggestions for the USGA on the spin issue," and like the good ole boys at USGA who believe the ball is going too far and not spinning the way it should, every conceivable solution must avoid dealing with...the ball!
Here's Bomb. Or Gouge, does it matter?
I'd like to think we can come up with five ways to combat the spin issue WITHOUT touching any of your clubs under 50 degrees.Because even these two know that when the USGA bans U-grooves in all irons, everyday golfers will be saying, "Gee, wouldn't it be easier to just tinker with the ball or make the Tour pros play by a different set of rules."
And since you're the Gouge part of this operation, I'm gonna need help on a couple. But here's a couple on my end:
1.) I know it sounds like a broken record, but just grow the darn rough. And I'm not talking about some wimpish 3- to 4-inch grass but some real salad of 6 to 8 inches. Get in that and you could have grooves sharp enough to saw through one of these and you still wouldn't get any spin.
Brilliant! Pass the cost and burden on to the golf course operators of the world, and inflict misery on the player! This is vital to health of the game. Eliminate the fairway, I say! Socialize the cost and privatize that profit! (Though I would recommend that the Bomb and Gouge guys read Golf Digest's own Frank Thomas, who says grooves don't matter at the 3-4 inch rough height. I'm guessing that would also include 6-8 inche hay.)
2.) Sorry Philly Mick, but lofts on wedges have kinda gotten out of hand. And I don't just want to keep the 64-degree that Lefty had in his bag for a while out of play.
Hey, 64 degree wedges only make up a tiny portion of the $17 billion club industry, so they're fair game!
GOUGE: I'll give you two more and I'll bet we can combine on a third.
Oh these bloggers have bonded! Do share more pearls of wisdom...
3) There is no doubt that grooves are better today at channeling out grass juice than they used to be. And dirt and grass make golf balls not work right. The volume on the new grooves has increased, bottom line. Second, grooves are better with modern balls in that the urethane covers are able to get gripped by the sharper groove edge radius. You could attack this issue around the greens by making all clubs with lofts higher than 50 degrees be furnished with v-shaped grooves only. And there cannot be any additional face roughness either.
So the ball is playing a part in this extra spin stuff and distance. Well then, we should...have different grooves for different clubs? Oh yeah, that'll be easy to enforce.
4) Shhhhh. But the real answer everyone is afraid of (unnecessarily so) is bifurcation. It's time for the ruling bodies to seriously consider backing off their stand against separate rules for elite competitions. The best golfers in the world are freaks that are even better in real-life than they are in their video games and letting them play with equipment designed to help average golfers isn't like cheating, it is cheating. The soap box derby gets pretty high tech, but none of those vehicles would make it much farther than down the driveway. Tour players should compete with the crudest tools possible, not the most advanced. With two different sets of rules (only in the area of equipment), you could make every club v-grooved. You could even reduce driver sizes to 260 cc if you wanted to. Hmmm. Might be what all that talk at Muirfield Village was all about earlier this year.
Wait, did I just read that? Warning boys, this kind of common sense stuff will prompt an email from you-know-where.
Of course, bifurcation wouldn't be necessary if you just made a few changes to the...oh that's right, anything but the ball. I keep forgetting!
BOMB & GOUGE: And then there's this.
5) Do. Nothing.
Nice mop up. And they speak as one. Peace at last, peace at last.
Maybe there won't be an email from you-know-where.
Monday, October 16, 2006 at 08:05 PM
Reader Comments (7)
Why-in-hell does every solution to the problem have to be one that's going to impact the enjoyment of the game and pace of play?
Narrow fairways and tall rough? I guess then we'll all be able to say, "It's right there in front of you."
Aack!!
Having played a fair amount lately with old equipment--including hickory shafts and balata balls--I have concluded that the boys over at www.bombsquadgolf.com are dead wrong. It's MORE fun to play golf with difficult-to-use equipment on courses with shotmaking options. And LESS fun to play ultra-hard courses with modern equipment.
But the scores end up about the same either way.
K
Time moves on, sometimes faster than we want, but you don't go backwards.
If the recreational game is not affected by what goes on in the pro game, then why is it that folks like Bomb (not Gouge) resist bifurcation that would allow you to play whatever you want, and maintain the integrity of the pro game?
Unfortunately, the answer to that question speaks to the overall point, which is that action is not taken because of someone's financial interests, namely major corporations, while the game clearly suffers.
While I think it's good to maintain a healthy skepticism about financial motives underlying this issue, I don't think you can frame the debate as one hinging primarily on greedy corporate interests. If they roll the ball back and change the equipment rules, the manufacturers could conceivably reap a huge windfall, when all of us rush out to buy legal equipment. And let's not forget the financial motives of little guys like us--the amateur players. Why should we be forced to run out and buy new clubs and golf balls?
As to the issue of "the game" suffering, I'm not so sure. People decry the home run boom in baseball, but it puts fannies in the seats. By the same token, I think you run a risk of hurting the appeal of golf to the masses if you make radical changes to the equipment that makes the game more difficult overnight.
I think one has to be careful just blindly lamenting things like the "loss of skill" in golf. Yes, there is no doubt that modern players, playing balls that don't curve and forgiving clubs, require less "shotmaking" skills in order to succeed. This is clearly a function of the equipment. Similarly, players from past eras learned to be shotmakers not because of some inherent philosophical or moral superiority of that approach, but because it was necessary to win given the clubs and balls available to them at the time. I guarantee you if you took today's equipment and gave it to Hogan, Nelson, Jones, Nicklaus, et al, in their eras, in a very short time they would be playing golf about the same way the guys do today.
The object of the game is to get the ball in the hole in as few strokes as possible. It's intended to be fun. If we are playing a different game today than they did in 1950, so be it. Maybe this decreases the appeal of golf for some--that's fine. But I don't think the game is in serious jeopardy of becoming extinct because of it.
By the way--I did read your book, and it is very thoughtful and well done. Thanks for answering my previous post.