After years of hand-wringing about how far touring pros are hitting the ball, the USGA s**t has finally hit the fan.

Their report, including recommendations, is titled Distance Insights Report and is available here as a 102-page pdf.

The Report has six chapters:
1. Scope
2. The evolution of hitting distances
3. The factors which impact hitting distances
4. Analysis of golf course lengths
5. Impact of increase in hitting distance and golf course lengths
6. Golf stakeholder perspectives and opinions on hitting distances

If you don’t have anything to do, you might want to read it. It really is pretty interesting, especially chapters 2-5.

After having assembled all their data, what does the USGA now want to do about it? Mainly, tweak equipment. For whom?

The answer depends on where you think the problem lies. Believe it or not, when stakeholders were asked, If distance is a problem, who [sic] is it a problem for? five percent of the respondents said it is only a problem for recreational players.

When comes the day that I can drive the ball 280 with one hand, I’ll agree.

There is even talk of bifurcation of the rules, which the UGSA likens to asking them all to drink a quart of rat poison, though there is baseball and softball, tackle football and touch/flag football, pro ice hockey and amateur no-checking ice hockey. Why not golf?

Rory McIlroy put matters into perspective a few days ago, saying that distance is a problem for only about 0.1 percent of golfers in the world. He said the solution is not to tweak equipment, which OEMs can find a way around, but to make golf courses harder for them.

The USGA says it is doing this because it says it wants to protect the game. But golf is not the professional game. Golf is way bigger than the professional game. It’s our game and if it needs needs protecting, it’s not from how far you or I hit the ball.

I feel like I’ve just said the same thing three times. If distance is a problem, it’s a problem because of and for Rory and Bryson and Dustin, not you or me.

So enough ranting. What to do? The Recreational Golfer knows exactly what to do.

Long hitters on Tour bomb it because if the ball ends up in the rough, even thick rough, they can still get par and birdie isn’t out of the question. The solution is to line each side of the fairway from 310-350 yards not with thick rough, but with a bed of pea gravel ten yards wide and two inches deep. If they figure out how to hit out of that, we can change it to 3/4 minus.

You have to think outside the box.

In a ceremony yesterday at the White House, Gary Player and Annika Sorenstam accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Trump in a private, secret ceremony.

How this is even possible given the events of the previous day is almost impossible to understand.

Maybe you could say that both of the recipients are foreign-born (Sorenstam is a naturalized American citizen) so the assault of the United States Capitol, fomented by the very president they would be seeing, doesn’t register the way it otherwise might.

Maybe they could say, like Justin Rose said when he went to Saudi Arabia in the wake of the state-sponsored murder of Jamal Khashoggi, “I’m not a politician.”

We don’t know yet why they went to the White House.

But whatever excuse they come up with won’t be good enough. These two people have blackened their reputation and their legacy in my eyes forever.

What they did was inexcusable. Period.

I know this is a golf blog, but I also know there are things more important than golf and this is a forum I can use to talk about them. Voting is one.

This is it. The November election has arrived. Or should we say, with a record number of early voters, it ends today.

I hope you have made your plans to vote, either at a polling station or by a mail-in or absentee ballot.

If you have an early ballot, check with your county office to find out how to turn it in.

And turn it in as early as you can. Don’t wait until the last minute.

Once more–vote! Your vote does count.

And for your reward, there will be a post that is actually about golf on November 4th.

After all, this is a golf blog.

[November 4, 6:00 a.m.] THANK YOU FOR VOTING!

I know this is a golf blog, but I also know there are things more important than golf and this is a forum I can use to talk about them. Voting is one.

The November election is 95 days away.

If you are not registered to vote, register today. Or next week.

Covid-19 developments could make voting in person on November 3rd problematic, impossible, or just plain risky.

Therefore, if you do not live in a state that intends to allow voting by mail, request an absentee ballot.

I am not, and will not, advocate for any candidate. Who you vote for is your business, not mine.

I am only reminding you that being able to vote, and getting your vote counted, could be difficult this year in ways it never has been.

Plan now. And vote!

Thank you.

About ten years ago, I wrote a piece on how to make the FedEx Cup more interesting and more fan friendly. That is, get rid of the point system and re-adjusting of the points that no one understood at that time or since.

No one listened.

Two years ago I had another go at it, with a more complicated but more fun way of paring down the list to the final 30-man tournament.

Again, no one listened.

So, here I go again, a voice of reason proposing a system that is so obvious and so simple that again, it is unlikely that anyone will listen.

Except you, my loyal readers.

Take the top 30 players on the year’s money list and there’s your field for the Tour Championship and the $15M prize. Best players for the year, one tournament, done.

The current points are handed out based on the order of finish in a tournament, which is the same way money is handed out. Points and money track each other closely, so why not take the obvious step and go with money, which everyone understands?

Since the FedEx Cup is a Tour championship, I would make two exceptions. Do not to include money won in major championships and WGC tournaments in the FedEx money rankings because those fields are not open to everyone with a Tour card. The major champions would get in, though.

Last week’s field was pretty much the top 30 money winners. There were only four exceptions (with money list rank on parentheses):

In – Abraham Ancer (32), Lucas Glover (36), Louis Oosthuizen (37), Jason Kokrak (44).
Out – Shane Lowry (20), Francesco Molinari (22), Tiger Woods, (24), Ryan Palmer (29).

The point system that we still don’t understand, and the two extra tournaments to get to the final 30 at a time of year when the guys are kind of tired of playing, served only to put four players into the Tour Championship in place of four others who had a better season.

And on top of that, two of the year’s major winners, Woods and Lowry, were excluded.

If the FedEx Cup is a season championship event, the participants should be selected purely on their season performance. They should not have to re-qualify. They already qualified.

Will the powers that be listen? I have the nagging suspicion that The Recreational Golfer flies unnoticed in the golfing skies.*

So next year they will tweak some more, get it wrong again, and say, “We are studying it and hope to do it better next year.”

But what the heck. This blog is about recreational golf. Every now and then, though, I have to rant when I see something so SIMPLE made so complicated.

*Where on earth did that metaphor come from?

I recently read a piece in the GolfWRX newsletter about why golfers don’t improve.   It goes in several directions, but fails to mention the main reason.   Almost everyone who takes up the game does it the wrong way.

Let’s talk about learning to play the piano.   You would start out with easy pieces and basic skills.   You would play within your capabilities because that is all you could do.

Over time, you would become more skillful in your technique, but to become a pianist your focus would have been all along on being a musician, technique being a means to that end.

Learning golf should be the same way: start with easy, basic skills and work up as you go along, playing on courses that your skills make you capable of playing, and using those skills to be a golfer all the while.

But what normally happens is that amateurs tackle the full game from the very start, get in way over their heads, and continue to try solving advanced problems instead of starting off small and working up.

They are like beginning piano players try to start off trying to play this:

instead of this:

People who never went through a process of getting into the game gradually, but rather tried to take it on all at once will find improvement difficult and time-consuming because they never created a foundation from which significant improvement can emerge.

Until they build that foundation, no amount of tweaks at the back end will help very much.

Every year I go through a re-learning process.   I get back to basic putting: hitting a lot of 2- and 3-foot putts.   Hitting 30- and 40-footers.

I re-learn my chipping stroke and re-calibrate my chipping formula. I re-learn my pitching stroke and re-calibrate my pitching game from 55-100 yards.

My swing? I get a refresher lesson with a 5-iron, and another one with a driver.

In short, I become a beginner again.   I re-create a solid foundation.

And that, I believe is what every golf who is stuck should do—start over.   It doesn’t matter if you are trying to break 100, or 90, or go from the high 70s to the low 70s.

If you’re stuck, start over with the small strokes.   Play most of your golf on par 3 courses for a while.   That’s golf without the driver, and if you can’t score there, you can’t on the big course, either.

Get really good at shots that are technically easy before you move on to shots that are technically difficult.

Honestly!   Life is long.    Taking out three or four months months to build a foundation for your future in a game you will play for the rest of your life is such a minimal investment that will pay off huge rewards.

And if you say, well, thanks for telling me this in the middle of July when I want to be out flailing away at 6,400 yards of heartache, I’ll say, why not spend a few weeks tuning up your game, then a few months honing it on smaller courses on which you will have a shorter outing and have more fun and become a better golfer, and this is the IDEAL time of year to do it.

But that’s just how I see it.

After the USGA saved golf from the sacrilege of anchored putting, it is now fixing its sights on how far world-class athletes are hitting the ball.   It’s time I weighed in.   Everyone else has…

Everybody has stories about how much father the ball goes now.   There’s a 427-yard par 4 that when I played it in high school in the late 60s I would hit a driver and a 3-wood and still be short.   Now I get on with a driver and a hybrid iron.

On the GolfWRX forum a guy commented that thirty years ago he was a mini-tour player and a long hitter, but now in his 50s he hits the ball even farther.

Sounds like it’s all ball.   But here’s more to it than that.

In those earlier days we played with a balata ball, that spun like crazy.   That was great around the green, but off the tee, you don’t know what a banana slice is until you’ve seen a slice with one of those.

The woods, not so much the irons, were much smaller.   You had to hit the driver dead center to get anything out of the shot.   Off-center hits were not forgiven.

That meant the game was more about control than about power.   Our swing was more about controlling the club than letting it rip.   So naturally we didn’t hit the ball as far.   And I’m sure the balata balls weren’t designed to go as far, either.

What that adds up to is the ball has evolved.   Changing the cover of the ball from balata to surlyn, changing the innards from wound rubber to a solid composition, those changes are as natural as going from the feathery to gutta-percha.

And, yes, there’s the addition of big, hollow-bodied drivers in place of tiny laminated maple drivers.   They contribute to longer tee shots, too, especially on off-center hits.

With the evolution of the ball comes the evolution of the game.   It’s a power game now, certainly on professional tours, and to lesser but still noticeable extent in the recreational game.   There’s no going back, and there’s no need to.

There seem to be three problems with distance floating in the air.   The first is that golf has become a drive and wedge game.   Yes, it has, but mainly on the professional tours.   That will never be a problem for me, even if I move up to the forward tees.

The second problem is that old courses are becoming obsolete.   Merion (East) had to be tricked up beyond belief to make it a challenging venue for the U.S. Open in 2013.    The Old Course at St. Andrews is perhaps two more Opens away from having to retire from the Open rotation.    Augusta had to buy land from an adjoining course to lengthen the 13th hole, a formerly formidable hole that is now one of the easiest.

The third problem isn’t getting much attention from the powers that saved the game by banning anchored putting.   If distance is a problem, it’s a problem only for the people who run professional tours.   It’s not a problem at all for the 25M recreational golfers who will be tested the their limit at Merion or the Old Course or on the 13th at Augusta.

I still use all my irons, not to mention long hybrids, to hit into the collection of par 4s on any course I play.   If the powers that be want to return the professional game to that state, either build longer golf courses, or don’t, and just get used to the new game.

There has to be a balance achieved between what the best players can do and the courses on which they display those skills.   Right now, the players have jumped ahead, maybe too far ahead.    It’s time for the courses to catch up.

This is a lot like the delicate competition between predator and prey in nature.    There is a fine balance.    If the predator is too fast, then all the prey will get eaten and the predator will die out, too.    If the prey is too fast, the predator will starve, and so will the prey when it over-consumes its food source.

Distance is here to stay.   Either we accept it and adapt, or start doing stupid things.   And the powers that be have demonstrated clear talent for the latter.

I’ll finish with this quote from Judy Rankin in her My Turn interview:

“The debate about drivers hitting the ball too far doesn’t apply to women at all.  In fact, it doesn’t apply to most men.  Let’s say there are 25 million golfers in America and 25 million elsewhere in the world.  Of the 50 million golfers on the planet, excessive distance is an issue for maybe a thousand of them.”

Here we are at the top of a new season. Those of you who live in sunny climates can start it right after you read this post, but the rest of us, who live in the other 80% of the country, will have to wait until about April to start playing the golf we know we are capable of.

It’s also a time for predictions for the new year. Here are mine. I guarantee they will come true.

1. Somewhere in Michigan a golfer trying to break 90 for the first time will finally leave his driver home, and shoot 88.

2. Golf writers will start worshiping Tiger as if they were 10 year-olds (actually, it’s already started, and in the golfing press it’s already all Tiger, all the time).

3. Jim Nantz will continue to be the sappiest announcer on the air. Johnny Miller will retire after the end of the year and by March 2019 everyone will miss him.

4. Golf courses across the country will start selling partial rounds, depending on the layout of the course, to serve people who do not have the time to play nine, let alone 18.

5. Gary Player will do 36,500 sit-ups.

6. One day you will play your usual game from tee to green, but putt the lights out, and beat your best-ever score by five strokes. From then on you will spend more time on the practice green than you ever have, and reap the rewards.

7. You will slow down your swing and learn to live with the extra distance you get.

8. Manufacturers will come out with new clubs that cost a LOT of money, and promise you the moon. You will decide to take half that amount of money, spend it on lessons and green fees instead, and become a better golfer with the clubs you already have.

9. The Recreational Golfer will continue to be the best unknown golf blog in America, but it’s OK if that one doesn’t come true (the unknown part).

Play well, and have fun in 2018.

I don’t spend much time at all on this blog talking about professional golf. That’s because there’s so much of it online that you don’t have to find it. It finds you. No, wait. That’s porn. Oh, well…

I came across this fascinating post written by Phil Blackmar about how good Tour golfers are.

You have to be really good even to think about becoming a touring pro. Then you have to be really, really good to be in position to get there. Then you have to be 3r good to get on, 4r good to stay on, and to be a champion is beyond my comprehension.

There’s a list of all the players who have been in 250 or more PGA Tour tournaments since 1980, including one who has made over 800 starts. There are many names at the top of the list you would not think to see there.

This all puts my single-digit handicap earned on fairly easy public courses in perspective, as I needed it.

It try so hard to stay out of politics when I’m online. No matter how egregious someone’s behavior is, there are legions who think it’s all right.

But this is a golf blog, and one of the things I hold most dearly as a golfer is respect for the game.

You know how you hear all the time that you learn a lot about a man’s character by playing golf with him?

That takes me right to the Vanity Handicapper-in-Chief. His GHIN listing was released today. An even though he has played golf at least 30 times since January, this is his first posting in that period.

Now you build a vanity handicap by only posting your better scores. But the assumption is that you actually shot those better scores.

Have you ever seen this man swing a golf club? You have? Then you would know.

It reminds me of when Kim Jong-Il shot a 38 on a par-72 golf course in 1994 in North Korea, a round that included five holes-in one.

Good absolute grief.