So here we sit, teetering on the precipice of the ball rollback implementation.  Just four short years from the USGA imposing its will on the PGA Tour and giving recreational golf preppers just two further years to play through the stockpile of hot balls that they’ll be building in their basements.

To be clear, that was bad sarcasm, and I’m pro-rollback.  In fact, I was pro-bifurcation.  I love what Rory said; it’s as though he was reading my mind.  It’s an axe I’d been grinding for quite some time.  In fact, I’ve started a couple other blog posts on the topic and just never got around to finishing them.  Let’s not kid ourselves here; the game is already bifurcated. 

PGA Tour pros have access to equipment that you and I do not have access to.  No one puts drivers in our mitts that get tested on CT machines to make sure that they are right at the edge of the legal limit, but not over.  If we get anything like that; it’s totally an accident of quality control.  Pros have access to balls that we can’t get our hands on, or at least can’t get our hands on very easily.  Titleist has 15 premium ball models on the USGA Conforming Golf Ball list.  Can we roll into Golf Galaxy and grab a dozen of the Pro V1 Left Dot?  Nope.  So the “play the same equipment as the pros” argument just sounds hollow.  But the large OEMs have created a marketing machine around treating pros as celebrities and marketing off things like their names and ball count.  Changing that would be hard, and who wants to do hard things?  So we could have had a rollback that only impacted the elite game, but large OEMs and the pros sponsored by them ensured that wasn’t going to happen.  So now, we’ve got a rollback for everybody. 

With a universal rollback now the likely outcome, I’m interested to see a few things.  I’m interested to see what the actual impact on the recreational golfer who can’t swing a driver 100 miles an hour.  Mike Stachura of Golf Digest thinks the average hack will lose 10 yards the one time in 100 that they hit one on the screws and a whopping 30 yards off their usual high-handled slice.  At the other end of the spectrum, the USGA itself feels that the teeming masses of us that swing around 93 MPH will lose about 5 yards.

Also, giving credit to Andy Johnson at the Fried Egg, we’re going to be giving engineers a new constraint, we’re giving them a new problem to solve.  And guess what?  They’re going to solve it, and they’re going to solve it in ways we expecting.  It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if the new conforming ball can be hit just as far as the current ball if the launch conditions are optimized differently.  But what would be really interesting is if this creates new opportunities for different kinds of balls that meet the criteria of the new tests, but are meant for players without elite swing speeds.  One way to slow a ball down is to make it bigger and for beginners, a bigger ball is easier to hit.  Callaway has experimented with this in the past, but could this potentially lead to a true beginner ball that conforms.  No one wants to play with a ball that goes shorter than the maximum distance, but now there wouldn’t be a distance penalty for playing a larger ball (I understand that you’d make fewer putts with it). 

So while I agree with the rollback in general, I think the USGA is missing the boat on their messaging and focusing so much on the integrity of elite competition.  Instead, they really need to focus more on the sustainability of the game of golf.  I don’t really care how far the pros hit it, and if [insert bland vanilla PGA tour pro’s name here] hits it 310 instead of 317, I’m not going to notice.  I’m not going to be able to tell that there’s anything different on TV.

What is important is the fact that the two biggest inputs that go into golf are land and water.  And they are both incredibly, incredibly scarce in some areas.  There are lots of people out there who don’t like golf and who want golf to go away.  So anything that we can do to reduce golf’s burdens on land and water is a good thing in my book.  If this means that a “Championship” golf course can shorten themselves from 7100 yards to 6900 yards by closing one or two of their back tees and not maintaining them anymore, not soaking them with water, not covering them in fertilizer, not spending labor hours and gas mowing them anymore, that’s a good thing.  Anything that we can do to make golf more sustainable and lessen the environmental impact is a win in my book.

To those of us living in Virginia, the water issue might not feel terribly important to us.  We don’t live in an area of water restriction.  We don’t live in an area where land is at a huge premium. But head out west, especially into California, and both water and land are extremely scarce.  Could there be a day where there’s no golf west of the Colorado River?  If the USGA were smarter, that’s the message they should be hammering away at – that we are trying to make golf more sustainable.  Who in golf is going to line up against that?  How do you say “No, I want golf to take more water, and more land”?

To those who say that the USGA is destroying golf solely because of the PGA Tour and no other golfers, the impact is farther reaching than that.  Hitting distance doesn’t just impact the US Open, but also the US Amateur, the US Mid Amateur, the Walker Cup and the Boys Junior (yes, they’re swinging that fast now).  And that’s just the USGA championships.  There are 50 states with state opens, state amateurs and junior championships that feature players with elite swing speeds.  And countless other prestigious amateur championships.  Oh, and NCAA college golf.  And AJGA events.  All these events need venues.  And these venues simply can’t continue to lengthen themselves in order to host.

And how about a selfish side-benefit?  Fewer inputs into a golf course lowers the cost of maintenance.  Anything we can do to lower maintenance costs, even the tiniest little bit, is going to help golf course operators with their bottom line.  That’s going to help golf courses stay in business.

By Mike Eovino