The 16th hole at the Doral Golf Resort and Spa's Blue Monster course is 372 yards. It's a par-4, obviously. The hole turns to the left around bunkers, while more sand protects the green. The hole's design calls for golfers to hit their tee shots to the fairway and then follow with a short iron to the green.
But more and more players choose to drive across the corner and try to reach the green, a 330-yard carry. South African Louis Oosthuizen drove through the green in the first round of this week's CA Championship while playing with Tiger Woods. Woods has driven the green before, but found the front bunker this time.
Tour players hit the ball so far that they are making a mockery of many holes. The distances they reach are also fooling amateurs into thinking they can, or should, hit the ball much farther with modern equipment. Meanwhile, too few of them are playing from tee blocks appropriate for their skill or ability.
Frank Thomas, the former technical director of the United States Golf Association, has long addressed the ways amateurs delude themselves by thinking they can buy a game with the latest, greatest driver with the biggest clubhead, or the ball that the professionals use. Amateurs pay up to $70 a dozen for premium balls, when, as Thomas argues in his new book, Just Hit It: Our Equipment and Our Game, balls that sell for $20 a dozen would be just as good for the vast majority of players. (Disclosure: Jeff Neuman, with whom I once co-authored a book, helped Thomas.)
"Golf equipment makers are in the business of selling things," Thomas writes. "But just as the word new on your toothpaste tube doesn't mean that your previous brand will make your teeth decay, the presence of a new model club or ball doesn't mean that the stuff you already own is holding you back."
Still, amateurs see players going for the green on what were once par-4s of a decent length and think the equipment pros use will help them. Yet, as Thomas points out, amateurs drive the ball an average of 192 yards. Most golfers routinely overestimate how far they drive the ball. Their egos — well, the male ego anyway — keeps many from using cheaper balls and sticking with older equipment that's good enough.
"I hope I get people thinking a little bit more," Thomas said in an interview at the Bay Hill Club in Orlando last week. "Guys, let's be real about ourselves. We drive the ball 192 yards. Don't tell me you drive it 250."
Thomas, who also hosts the franklygolf.com website, isn't a Luddite who wants golfers to live in the past. He takes a scientific approach, and he acknowledges three innovations to clubs that have changed the game and helped all golfers. They are perimeter weighting, graphite shafts and titanium.
Perimeter weighting of putters, irons and now even woods decreases the margin of error for off-centre strokes or shots. The graphite shaft, which Thomas helped develop 40 years ago, is light and strong and helps golfers swing faster without losing control.
Early graphite shafts twisted too much at impact. But that problem has long been solved. Most players, including tour pros, use graphite in their drivers and fairway woods. Many use graphite in hybrids. Seniors and women use them in their irons, and Thomas believes more players, including tour pros, will use them in irons.
The third innovation, titanium, is a thin, resilient material that, used in the head of a driver, will generate a spring-like effect to the ball. Thomas writes that this is the first time in golf's 500-year history that "the clubface was making the impact more efficient and adding speed to the ball."
A golfer whose driver speed is 95 miles an hour will gain up to 15 yards, assuming solid impact. Tour pros swing at speeds of up to and beyond 120 mph. The spring-like effect and the ability to optimize launch and spin conditions with the balls they use account for the 25-yard increase, on average, that tour pros have gained in their drives since the mid-1990s.
Some golfers appear to have found even more distance because of their fitness and enormous clubhead speed. Hence their ability to reach the green at Doral's 16th hole. But that's them.
"We've maxed out," Thomas said of the advantages equipment can offer.
This won't matter to equipment acolytes. They'd answer the question the Lovin' Spoonful asked in their popular 1965 song Do You Believe in Magic? with one word.
"Yes," they'd reply. Thomas provides a better answer, an answer based in science, not magic and marketing.
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