USGA Issues Distance "Myth" Talking Points

Adam Van Brimmer of the Morris News Service reports on a USGA release apparently handed out at the Masters.

The USGA recently released a list of eight myths about golf equipment and performance. The scientific findings, at the least, cast doubt on whether something significant should be done to rein in the equipment advances many say are changing the way the game is played.

"We thought that people who are avid golfers would be interested in actual facts and measurements with respect to the performance of golfers in today's world with new technology," said Walter Driver, USGA's president and an Augusta National member. "We want to give people access to some of the facts and dispel some of the myths that develop around every golf era, and new golf technology in particular."

Note that Walter Driver was available for a quote on this document. The myths are not available on the USGA website. Here they are, according to the USGA:

MYTH 1: Golfers with faster swing speeds hit today's advanced golf balls farther than they did balls introduced before 2000.
MYTH 2: Golf-ball distance is not currently limited.
MYTH 3:Driving distance on the PGA Tour is rapidly increasing.
MYTH 4: The long hitters on the PGA Tour finish higher on the money list.
MYTH 5:Most PGA Tour players swing at 120 mph or more.
MYTH 6:The USGA ball test doesn't control ball distance well enough because pros' swings are different than the test method.
MYTH 7:The average distance for 5-irons on tour is more than 200 yards.
MYTH 8:You get more distance by putting topspin on a drive.

Van Brimmer offers these rebuttal points:

- Though the golf-ball distance is limited, the USGA's overall distance standard limit made a quantum leap from 296.8 yards to 320 yards in 2003 to account for advances in club technology. The swing speed used in the test increased from 109 mph to 120 mph to reflect these changes.

- Though driving distance has flattened out in recent years, as the USGA statistics show, it certainly grew unabated throughout the 1990s and earlier this decade. For example, 29-year-old John Daly led the PGA Tour in driving distance in 1995 with a 289-yard average. Seven years later, an older and heavier Daly led the tour at 306 yards off the tee - a whopping 17-yard increase.

- While fewer long hitters reign on the money list, most of the top players average 300 yards or better. Half of 2005's top 10 money winners, including the top 3 of Tiger Woods, Vijay Singh and Phil Mickelson, crush the ball.

Top players rely more on length now than two decades ago. In 1985, none of the top 10 money leaders ranked among the top 10 in driving distance. In 1984, only three did.

The lengthening of Augusta National and other courses is an architect's way of keeping up. Augusta has added nearly 500 yards since 2002, about the same time the increase in driving distance leveled off.

Now, contrast this with the two speeches USGA's Jim Vernon has given (Annual Meeting and Arizona).

Talk about sending mixed messages.

Best Read Of The Week...

Don't get me wrong, we loved reading about the course changes and all of the wonderfully complimentary things that the players had to say.  But it has not been the most memorable week for fresh, inside-the-ropes reporting.

Doug Ferguson changes that with a must read about the caddies and players waiting out the rain delay. That's right, he made a great column out of a seemingly mundane topic.

Besides a classic Ben Crenshaw-Clifford Roberts story, I loved this:

Rich Beem stuck his head out the clubhouse door, spotted a reporter and waved him over.

"Have you seen this book?" Beem said.

Sitting in the lounge, he picked up a copy of "The Wit & Wisdom of Bobby Jones," a collection of sayings from the man behind Augusta National Golf Club and a tournament now called the Masters.

Beem pointed out one passage that appeared to go against lengthening the golf course, which club chairman Hootie Johnson has done twice in the last five years. The course now is 7,445 yards, the second-longest in major championship history.

"There was good reason to expect that improvements in the manufacture and the introduction of new methods and materials might make even our long courses look silly and make jokes of our championships," the passage said. "It was not practical to think of buying more and more expensive ground to keep increasing the length of holes to make them fit for championship play as the ball became more and more powerful, particularly when this increase in power carried no actual advantage to the game in any conceivable form."

Beem turned the page to show another passage.

"American architecture allows practically no option as to where the drive shall go," it said.

"What about No. 11? And (No.) 7?" Beem said.

He was referring to two holes that have been lengthened to 505 yards and 450 yards, respectively, both lined by trees that allow for a tight driving area and really no other option.

"Good stuff, huh?" Beem said, then went back inside.

A Few Early Filings

Leonard Shapiro has the American take on Saturday's mostly washed out round, Thomas Boswell tells you more than you ever wanted to know about Chad Campbell, who will not win Sunday.

John Huggan picks on poor Monty for The Guardian on Sunday...just kidding. Scotland on Sunday.

Dai Davies writes about Darren Clarke and his wife's battle with cancer on the eve of Sunday's final round.

And John Hawkins blogs about the Saturday tee time mystery and answers what most of us couch potato pundits were wondering (but afraid to ask):

Yet again, we're left to wonder why the third round wasn't moved up to, say, 8 a.m., and why the most crucial stages of a major championship are likely to resemble a Chinese firedrill. Saturday's forecast had called for rain since the beginning of the week. Today's leaders wouldn't have gotten very far before the suspension, but in sticking with the original plan, viewers stood to see little, if any, of the third-round action that matters most.

It was a virtual replay of the scenario that plagued last year's Masters, when Tiger Woods made up seven strokes on leader Chris DiMarco during untelevised play Sunday morning. It's a problem the good folks at Augusta National already have rectified -- the rest of tomorrow's third round can be seen at 8 a.m. on USA Network -- but it doesn't change the fact that the tournament allowed itself to become needlessly inconvenienced by the weather.

A two-tee start at 8 a.m. Saturday would have sent off the final pairing (Chad Campbell, Rocco Mediate) at around 10:10. They would have finished the front nine before the rain, returned after the suspension and putted out on the 18th well before darkness. Not that any sensible scenario makes much difference now.

Cynical Me?

And you think I'm curmudgeon? I'll look like Norman Vincent Peale after you read read this from Kevin Mitchell in The Observer:

I'm not sure I was as excited about my first Masters as Charles Howell III was about his. He grew up three miles down the road, after all. And he was playing. I'm just scribbling, as pleasant a task as that is.

Charles III (what is it about American golfers that their parents can't think of a different first name for them?) said he was so in awe of the Augusta National Club and the event before being invited to play here for the first time in 2001: 'Even if they made us hit wooden drivers and gutta-percha balls, I'd show up and be happy just to be there.'

It was the kid's entry in the pass-the-bucket all-comers' championship for baloney. Golf and Americans love that stuff: the wonder of the game and the history and the honour and how they'd like to be buried at Amen Corner, if only the guys in the clubhouse would let them, and 'please, please, Hootie, let the sun shine on all my hopes and dreams' - and, if you haven't already, God bless America.

The writers write it down because it looks great in print.

Cynical me? A bit. There is romance and history at Augusta and it must be a thrill for any young player to be on that stage. And a heart-arresting experience to win it. But there is no shortage of horse shit in the azaleas, either. This year's programme fairly dribbles with testimonials from players about the orgasmic experience of being allowed in to golf's earthly paradise.

Wow...oh there's more. Wally, close your eyes.

Maybe they are fit to bursting. But golfers, like all professional athletes, are in sport for one reason: the result. As a rival boxing trainer once observed of the all-dancing Sheffield fighter Herol Graham (who had been described as poetry in motion): 'Nobody ever got knocked out by a poem.'

Yet golf, more than any other sport, drowns in its own schmaltz. Which is odd. Because, for all their love of a soundbite, golfers are pragmatists who work their backsides off honing their game by the millimetre to get just the slightest edge on their opponents (and the course). No amount of sentiment is going to distract them from their work when they step up to the tee.

And where they leave the past behind is in the laboratories of the multinational equipment manufacturers. People there, who might otherwise be finding a cure for cancer or shoes that talk, are paid a lot of money to make clubs that look and sound as if they could fly you to the moon.

That's where the pretence stops. It's not Hootie Johnson, Augusta's chairman, who is golf's overlord. The real oligarchs of the game are the guys who run Nike and all the other fat companies.

Hannigan and Hootie

Frank's love for the man, which started when he went down to Augusta to file this April 2000 feature, has clearly got him still swooning enough that he writes this column blasting the golf media's coverage of the redesign.

Johnson is a victim of the USGA which failed utterly in its mission to control distance. Since 1995 the distance on the Tour has increased around 10%. Johnson, with his latest changes, has upped the yardage of the course by 10%. It's not clear to me what he was supposed to do: just leave it alone so that Augusta would have become a sort of toy, a museum piece?

Frank, he could have added length without adding the rough and trees and chintzy bunker lips and oh, did I mention the trees?

And he could have left some of the old tees behind so that they would have playing options that keep the players off-kilter, something Bobby Jones loved.

Who's Going To Win...

...the contest between Lanny Wadkins and David Feherty to see who can celebrate the course changes most while earning vital brownie points with the ANGC Total Information Awareness Committee.

Wadkins declared that the quality of the leaderboard appears to be "validating" the changes (which Jim Nantz met with silence).

Meanwhile, Feherty wheeled out his "living, breathing organism" spiel for the second day in a row, apparently working under the impression that the new trees are magically popping up on their own.

Rain Delay Flashback: 1937 and Perry Maxwell

Courtesy of reader Michael... 

AUGUSTA COURSE TO HAVE FACE LIFTED FOR MASTERS' TOURNEY

By Charles Bartlett, Chicago Tribune, Sunday, January 23, 1938

Major league golfers who have been swinging clubs for the last four years in the annual Masters' tournament at Augusta, Ga., which brings a man named Bobby Jones back for his single yearly appearance as a competitor, are going to do a bit of eyebrow raising and glove flexing when they step upon the first tee for the fifth all-star show there, beginning March 31 and ending April 2.

(click to enlarge) The reason for their concern may now be called work in progress. It consists of transforming the course from its original Scotch motif to one more adapted to the American topography upon which it was constructed. No official announcement of the revisions has been made, but the presence of a sharp eyed little Oklahoman named Perry Maxwell on the Augusta National course these last few months would indicate that the lads will find a new layout when they set forth in quest of the $1,500 first prize.

Mr. Maxwell is a livestock farmer who, in his spare moments, has become one of the nation's leading golf architects. He has been assigned the chore of making the Augusta National acreage an American course rather than the overseas composite layout it was intended to be when the late Dr. McAllister McKenzie, and Jones himself collaborated on making it a replica of the more famed seaside links.

Principal changes in the National course will be in the vicinity of the greens. It was around these that the original sketches aimed to reproduce the foreign touch of St. Andrews, Muirfield, and other noted courses. Four years of competition have proved that while the experiment may have been a worthwhile effort as such, the lovely Georgia countryside is not adapted to it. The quarter mile arch of century old magnolias, leading to the antebellum clubhouse, are only a preface to the wistaria and dogwood with which the course abounds. Attempting to duplicate the austere Scottish coast line, where the early morning mist makes it difficult to distinguish the rolling sand dunes from the gray of the North Sea, is a feat not in tune with the terrain at Augusta. The abruptness of the dunes contours, which frequently caused well-hit approach shots to kick awry, has been done away with. So also have the peculiar undulations in the ground adjacent to the greens been reduced, although at no sacrifice to testing a shot.
(click to enlarge)

The greens at the fifth, seventh and seventeenth holes have been rebult, and an entirely new tenth green has been cut into the hillside behind and at the left of the original green, on high ground. The hole has been lengthened to 449 yards, and is a fine two-shot test for the experts. P.J.A. Berchman, the horticulturist who was born on the site of the course and who has been resonsible for its general beautification, has removed seventy-five pine trees to make way for the new tenth. The change has been made not to eliminate any peculiarity in land formation, calling for what was at best a freakish second shot, but to try a player's ability to hit a long ball to a well built-up modern green. The green proper is the largest on the lot, and will call for precise approach putting.

Not all of the old country features have been eliminated. The "schoolmaster's nose" bunker in the middle of the eleventh fairway, built to duplicate one of old St. Andrews' most notorious sand pits, is still there. It remains the same as it was on that day when Col. Bob Jones (father of Bobby) hit a good drive into it, and was moved to inquire, "What jackass dug that in the middle of the pretty?"

The Mickelson Trend?

Tim Guidera wonders if a Phil Mickelson win will translate into a two-driver trend in golf:

We lemming amateurs are led around this game by anyone who can play it at an elite level, from the logos we wear to the shots we attempt to the way we react to putts that go in. Or haven't you noticed all those uppercut fist-pumps that resemble Nike swooshes from the mini-Tigers at your home club?

But there is no greater copycat crime in golf than the club selections we base on how somebody who can actually play this game hits the ball.

So, if a guy using two drivers wins the Masters on Sunday, there will be fools showing up at every golf course in the country Monday with twice as much lumber as they need.

The difference would be, Mickelson has his left-to-right and right-to-left drivers; ours would be OB-right and OB-left models.

And just imagine what it will be like playing behind four guys each hitting two different drivers in any number of directions.

Feinstein On Crenshaw

John Feinstein followed Ben Crenshaw around Friday and wrote at length about the day for the Washington Post.

But the Masters is frequently about memories, whether it is Jack Nicklaus charging up the leader board Sunday in 1998 at the age of 58 or Arnold Palmer simply walking up the 18th fairway to say goodbye -- on more than one occasion. For two days, it has been Crenshaw turning back the clock and conjuring up warm memories.

Just A Reminder...

Prior to Saturday's Masters telecast at 2:30 EST, CBS airs "Tiger at 30" with an all-star panel talking about Woods. It's directed by Sam Ditore, one of the creative minds behind Fine Living Network's always interesting "The Wandering Golfer."

And Sunday at 1:30 EST is Jim Nantz's exec-produced look back at the 1986 Masters, which I never get sick of hearing about.  Especially since it was my first Masters and we were there until Sunday mor...oh I won't tell that story.

Duval A "Deepening Mystery"

AP's Tim Dahlberg looks at the absolutely bizarre round of David Duval. First round 84, then a 6-10 start Friday to move to 19 over for 20 holes.

Then? A back nine 32 "that could have easily been a 28 or 29."

Litke: Fewer Roars

Jim Litke, AP columnist, writes:

The course not only looks different; it sounds different. The roars that once echoed across the pines and made it possible to track a golfer's progress three holes away are becoming a thing of the past.

There were a near-record number of eagles in Round 1 and a healthy total of 267 birdies in Round 2. But the course has become so treacherous in spots, and the galleries treated to so many disasters, that the patrons spend more time sitting on their hands than putting them together.

"You don't hear any roars, do you?" Fuzzy Zoeller, the blunt-speaking former champion said on his way out of town after missing the cut. "And I'm not sure there's going to be charges like we used to have out here when guys get on a roll. I'm not sure that's going to happen — unless somebody gets lucky and starts chipping them in."

WSJ: Golf's Digital Divide

Warning: more biased anti-technology agenda stuff from that cess pool of liberal anti-corporate journalism.

That's right, Reed Albergotti in the Wall Street Journal(.com) analyzes whether $50,000 simulators and $4,500 sensor vests "are driving a wedge between haves and have-nots."

Golf already has an elitist reputation, but a new generation of expensive high-tech tools is stoking a costly arms race among players looking for an edge. Pricey golf simulators can now be rigged to play matches over the Internet, while an increasing number of weekend duffers are investing in $3,000 "launch monitors" that use infrared beams to measure a ball's angle, speed and backspin. At the renowned David Leadbetter Golf Academy near Orlando, two-day courses in a new biometrics lab, where sensors attached to various muscles detect swing flaws, will cost $7,500 -- compared with the $3,000 tab for three days of old-fashioned instruction. And gearing up for tournaments from this weekend's Masters in Augusta, Ga., to the U.S. Amateur Championship, players are turning to laptop computers and digital video cameras to help hone their swings.

The result is a widening digital divide that's drawing new lines in the golf world. Traditional equipment makers are squaring off against upstart high-tech companies that hail from the world of Hollywood special effects. Courses are split on whether to take the high-tech route to woo new golfers or hew to more time-honored ways. And golfers who say the sport is founded on basics like practice and focus worry that turning golf into a kind of rocket science could ruin it.

And...

All of this poses some risk for an industry that has seen little growth in recent years: The number of golfers has stayed at about 28 million since 2001, according to the National Golf Foundation, a trade group. With more complicated tools flooding the market, newcomers may wind up feeling that the sport takes too much time to master even before they get on a course.

And...

But industry experts say much of this stuff tends to help experienced duffers far more than beginners. While overall spending on training and equipment hit $2.6 billion last year, up 73% from 1994, according to the National Sporting Goods Manufacturing Association, a trade group, average scores and handicaps have remained fairly flat over the last decade. "A better club will help Tiger Woods more than it helps me," says Marty Parks, a spokesman for the U.S. Golf Association.

Tee Time Spacing?

There are two gaps in the third round tee times (12:20 and 1:40). Is this normally done?

Early Saturday Masters Reads

Fred Couples still hasn't missed a cut in the Masters and he's in contention. Tiger is positioned nicely. Vijay has three doubles and he's right there while the "Big Five" are all in it.

And what is everyone writing about? Ben Crenshaw.

Gary D'Amato looks at Ben's great run, while Damon Hack writes about Chad Campbell as well as Crenshaw and his special bond with Carl Jackson.

Lawrence Donegan in The Guardian analyzes the erupting Allenby-Hensby spat, while John Huggan writes about his beloved Monty's missed cut: 

Monty did stray off the fairway once, at the new, super-charged 7th, where his tee-shot finished three feet into the rough - or "first cut" as it is pompously labelled around these parts - but still inside the tree-line. It was not a problem, though. Without much in the way of ado, Monty flicked what looked like an eight-iron up to about 10ft from the cup. It was also a shot that doubled as a clear indication of how misguided the Augusta club chairman Hootie Johnson has been in his grass-growing project.

Had the rough not been there, Monty's ball would have run down the slope into the pine needles that lie beneath the trees, leaving him a much more difficult - but still possible - second shot. Long grass does not always mean more difficult; it always means less interesting. That is not a label one could ever use for Monty, of course. He may not be quite the player he was in his pomp, but he remains a fascinating psychological study.

 Can't you just feel the love?