"It would be relatively simple to turn down the distance on a driver by 25 yards."
We've all heard golf's leaders, scientists and manufacturers suggest a distance rollback via the ball would be a difficult, if not impossible task and it's just easier to change the courses because, well, they aren't paying for it!
It really is quite the heartstring pulling story, so much so that they all have a jillion patents on this ball they really haven't given much thought to. 
Thankfully, a few honest folks exist out there and explained how it could be done to John Paul Newport for his WSJ column.
"It would be relatively simple to turn down the distance on a driver by 25 yards," said John Rae, vice president for research and development at Srixon. "The two obvious approaches would be to change the dimple pattern and to change the restitution [the elasticity, or speed] of the core. But once we did that, we wouldn't know, out of the gate, what to expect from the rest of the set."
And this...
With enough tweaking, engineers assured me, they eventually could come up with reduced-distance balls that would work, even though the feel and flight characteristics might take some getting used to.
Saturday, March 30, 2013 at 10:46 PM
Reader Comments (36)
I can't imagine there would be a flurry of activity inside labs in the event that we needed to design a car with a lower top speed, or a camera with a lower pixel count.
What's the problem exactly?
Another step would be to put much more emphasis on shot making and on the short game aspects of golf, by re-introducing strategic designed holes, tough green complexes and the opportunity to play shots along the ground. In other words: back to the origins of the game in stead of continuing the dead end of target golf on ridiculously long runways.
The advance of equipment, technique, fitness and course conditions is inevitable. Please get over it
Of course, it's quite possible the PGA Tour or whatever governing body authorized the restriction would announce that the conversion would take place 5 years hence, giving fair and just time for interested parties to weigh in, as well as threaten legal action.
Pretty sure those recipes still exist in the manufacturers' cookbooks.
Because, like Congress, and American Auto makers, the people in charge have their head stuck up their, I mean in the sand, pure and simple.
''A smart, forward thinking ball manufacturer might consider having a contingency plan for making a limited distance ball. ''/
''...take place 5 years hence, giving fair and just time for interested parties to weigh in, as well as threaten legal action.''
They already have the ball, bet on it./ First we kill the lawyers.
'' a Cart Path Seeking ball ''
Back when I sucked at golf, like when I was playing- I hit a pop up about 300 yards-100 up, 100 down, and 100 forward. Being some 320 yards from the green, I told my partner I was going to hit the path and bounce it on the green, and with daft precision, a small cut, and a perfectly placed 4 wood, I put that sucker about 12 feet from the pin. So, IT COULD HAPPEN!
Now enforce say a minimum of 3500 rpm off a typical tour drive. Lets see the best in the world hit i 300 yards and straight then. I bet they couldn't do it.
Anybody remember the first tour edition? impossible to control spin
Cheers!
Greg Norman remembers the Tour Edition. He never knew if it was going to spin back 10 feet or 30 yards...
I'm fairly certain that I read, a number of years ago, that the winding machines had been scrapped. I'm sure, if they had to, the manufacturers could come up with a modern equivalent with enough lead time. Doubt if we'd see balata, though I'm sure science would come to the rescue with a similar synthetic product.
Two things I don't miss about the old balata ball was it going out of round, and the so easy to cut cover.
The double core golf balls enabled the high end swing speeds to achieve ludicrous distances. These "X" balls do nothing for swing speeds 110 MPH and less, meaning the 99% of amateurs can't compress them to activate them. The PGA Tour driving distance stats reveal what happened between 2002 and 2003 with the introduction of "X" balls in 2003. It's ludicrous!
Leave golf balls alone for us amateurs; length is not one of the things we "suffer". Make a pro ball, and leave the ball as it is for the rest of us.
As stated on this board a bunch of times ... it's not strictly distance that needs a rollback, but added spin as well (larger ball would be my choice at this point).
What about GI irons? Anybody care about pro's using them? Seems to me like there are more and more guys nuking 195y+ 8irons ...
''That Greg Norman puts too much spin on the ball.''
@Ken Venturi, every short iron shot GN ever hit, where KV was announcing.
has any consistency? we have the Srixons, which are far an away the best we have tested,
but they are horribly inconsistent.
What percentage of active golfers would vote for a roll back?
Not a PGA TOUR survey, Not a Shackelford survey,
a golfers survey.
Golf is a game, AND golf is an industry. If you don't think a huge roll back would hurt the industry, fine.
Why not ask the customers?
good points, but since (most) folks are saying that the pro's alone should be playing with a "reduced" ball, I'm not sure that there would be a large enough impact to "hurt the industry" ... nobody I know plays with that Nike One Vapor (or whatever it is that TW is sportin' nowadays) .. so if he (or insert your favorite pro here) switched to a Titleist Professional 90/whatever ... where would be the harm? Maybe a few less ball choices? I can't afford $5/ball anyway, so I guess I'm not in the "customer base" anyhow! :)
As for reminiscing about older balls that actually moved...Titleist perfected the would ball in the Tour Prestige....call it the Professional90ver2.0. It was great.
Honest to god true experience. I hung up my full time pro golfer/Tiger wannabe spikes in 1999/early 2000. On a whim in 2001, when I was settled into a dream IT job in a mtn resort town, I entered a monday qualifier for the Payless Open. The first pro-V1 was out by then and everybody but me seemed to be playing it. I had three new sleeves of Tour Prestige 100's and NO ONE would swap 2for1 for some new ammo....the rep was a dick to me BTW.
I only had played about 6 times all year up to that point, and armed with a new Ping ISI 7* toaster driver I thought I was crushing it....and I was compared to my old driver. Then after 3 holes on monday, it was apparent the dudes with the ProV1s were usually 20-25yds past me (very dense air BTW in Victoria, ball goes nowhere normally) and I knew it was the ball since my driver was relatively current at the time. With my irons I was maybe 1/2 to a club shorter than those guys and jerked a few short irons back on soft very soft rainy conditions, the other guys one hopped and stopped it.
Oh what a help it would have been to have those extra yards on the last 3 when I needed to make 2 birdies...made only one naturally. That was the year, IMO, that the pro game changed. I was out of it for maybe 2 years, swing speed was the same, yet I was getting outdriven like a slack armed choirboy on weed.
(This was the ProV1 with the supposed "seaming" problems which was changed to the ProV1star IIRC)
<b>About going back to some old-fashioned design like the Titleist Professional:</b> No, it's a silly notion. We can do better; golf ball design technology doesn't need to go backward. That was the central point of Newport's excellent little essay. That the golf ball equation is terribly complicated, but if we put our minds to it, we could create a golf ball design specification that could successfully roll back the distances of elite players, but leave alone the technologically-irrelevant market of recreational players who hit 200-yard drives.
<b>About rolling back driver specs, particularly driver head size, MoI, and/or CoR/CT:</b> The USGA was unquestionably caught with its regulatory pants down, and Frank Thomas should be called to account for the delay. I think it would be a good idea, conceptually. But unlike urethane balls, I am not so sure, that recreational players don't benefit as much as elites from 460cc driver heads. It might be a good, democratizing technology. I'm not sure. This could be the one and only area wherein bifurcation might be a worthwhile initative. But I'd leave it as a last resort. I hate all bifurcation with a passion. Bifurcation only arises where the USGA has fallen down on the job in other respects. And the last point is the most obvious -- now that we have been producing and selling expensive 460cc drivers for years, who is going to take them away from recreational golfers? That could get ugly. Telling a guy that his $400 driver is going to be illegal.
<b>About having regular recreational players "voting" on golf ball regulations:</b> Those regular recreational players are dumb, mostly. Most of them can't accurately say how far they drive the ball, right now. Most of them don't have GHIN handicaps. Most of them couldn't tell you within 10 strokes what their score will be. Most of them don't buy Pro V1's, right now. Most of them would do better to spend money on replacing the grips that are on their clubs, that don't match and which are all worn out. Most of them haven't taken a lesson in four years. And most of those golfers don't follow the Rules of Golf when they do play. For all of those players, a tweak in golf ball specs, especially a smart tweak with their interests in mind, should mean nothing. No, I don't want those players' views substituted for the USGA Executive Committee.
<b>About a higher-spin regulation for balls:</b> This is an interesting point, and worth discussion. But it would be very tricky. A generalized higher-spin golf ball could play havoc in recreational golf. It would take the guy who can hit a 260-yard drive and make his hook or his slice much worse. The average recreational player who is "aspirational" (Wally Uihlein's famous appellation) fights spin problems off the tee, mostly. Those are the players who are playing with very low-spin non-urethane distance balls. I like the general discussion, but this is the problem.
At one time, I was a pretty decent player.
Played my best golf with the Maxfli HT, which is still the best ball I ever played IMO.
That ball was made in a plant in Kobe, Japan, and was destroyed by the giant earthquake there.
Maxfli moved manufacturing of the ball to the USA, which changed the ball's playing characteristics
quite a bit. There were a number of players on the tour using the ball, and a good number of them switched balls rather than playing the "new HT.
Maxfli, re-branded the Royal Maxfli (also Japan manufactured, in a different plant) and brought it to the US for many tour pros to use,
they couldn't get the ball made here quite right.
So what? Well, Every ball is a little different, every player has a different set of feels and skills. One competition ball sounds good to some. Personally, I could say, make everybody play a super spinning ball. It will only help me, and punish guys that hit it longer.
Or do you make the Titleist Professional ball for everyone. A ball that did not perform worth a darn for me, or many of the guys who played the Maxfle back then? Seems there is always an ability to discard a few players for our own beliefs in these debates.
.
thanks for the interesting response. I was saying "so what" to the major effect to manufacturer bottom lines in regards to a ball bifucation.
I have no doubt that different balls play differently for players. Even I (a hardcore betting, non-GHIN-labelled 17hc) can feel/tell the difference between a premium ball and a rock. I wasn't trying to say that everyone should be specifically playing a Titleist Professional (which I've only ever hit once btw ... skulled the snat out of a findy with my 5i) ... just that there seems to be an issue with the over-engineered ball+over-engineered club+launch monitor+pro combo. Somebody smarter than I am will hopefully come up with a solution before golf becomes: #1. even more boring to watch on TV, #2. even more expensive due to playtime needed+land costs.
As @chuck says - it's not an easy problem to be fixed.
Steve, that's no solution. You are suggesting that we make courses narrower and nastier and more penal, just to combat technology-produced distance, just to check scoring?
That's wrong in every way that I can imagine. We shouldn't need to futz with golf course design to check runaway technology. And we shouldn't be making golf courses more boringly one-dimensional just to hold down scoring. It's not fun; it's not strategic; it's not the way many/most of the championship courses were designed by their original architects.
Good grief. The mere thought of gross alterations of golf courses, for the sake of a $3 or $4 golf ball.
So, you call the majority of the golfing public dumb.
And want the USGA Executive Committee to make the decisions.
The same committee that has given us the current rule book, which is in quasi English.
Which give us a radically tortured golf course every year for "their" Championship?
WHo has years to get their championship sites ready, and comes up with an 11th at Shinnecock situation?
WHich has been such a great leader on the equipment to date?
I never nominated the USGA for sainthood. Perhaps the biggest problem we've seen with the USGA is their failure to do what I am now encouraging them to do; be more proactive in regulating equipment. I just never saw any percentage in ridiculing the USGA, and then hoping for some other agency to more carefully regulate golf equipment.
Re: the Rules of Golf. The worst rules, by far, are the hypertechnical equipment rules which no one could hope to understand. We all simply rely on the USGA and the manufacturers to figuratively hand us compliant equipment at golf shops. The reason that those rules are so bad is because the USGA has had to play catch up, under the fear of lawsuits. Sad, and dundesriable, but true.
Re: dumb recreational golfers. I notice that you didn't like what I wrote, but you didn't show that it was wrong. I think that I was exactly right on all counts.
Re: U.S. Open golf courses. I think you have a good point. They've been tricked up in many cases. I blame the desire to use golf course setups, to defend the grand traditional historic championship golf courses, against advancing golf equipment technology. We agree on the problem, but perhaps not the cause.