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.