USGA Groove Change Question, Vol. 3
/Do any of you know someone who has heard this announcement on grooves and who has seen it as anything other than a backdoor way to deal with distance?
I ask because the initial reaction to this announcement does not seem to be, "oh they are finally going to do something about guys not caring about hitting fairways." The reaction I hear is, "when are they going to do something about distance?"
Check out Jim Furyk's comments at the Honda Classic yesterday.
JIM FURYK: I could give you a good stat. Back in I think it was in '02 and '03, the Top-5 guys on the Money List each year, only one of them were in the Top-100 in driving accuracy. So why it's become an issue in 2007 is probably my biggest wonderment. You know, we haven't started hitting longer overnight. Didn't happen yesterday in '06. But probably trying to figure out a good way to combat the distance has probably been more the issue.
Being a player, I would just follow the rules and figure out a way to play the best I can within them and won't worry about it. The good players are still going to play the best no matter what they do with the rules. I guess they are just trying to separate, make more separation. I don't know, our game has become a power-oriented game. If my kids want to learn to play or if they want to play competitively, I'm going to teach them to hit it hard, if I can, because I still don't really know how to.
But I'm going to teach them to hit it hard, and we'll figure out how to hit it straight later. Basically that's how my career went. When I was young I hit the ball far. When I was in college I used to hit in the long drive contest for my college team. Obviously it doesn't look like that now and I don't have the ability to move it like I used to. But, you know, my game was kind of long and crooked as a junior, and now it's shorter, more controlled. But if I have a son or a daughter that wants to play, I'm going to teach them to bomb it because that's the way the game is going and we'll teach them to hit it straight later.
