Jack Nicklaus: Shorter Golf Ball Important to Future of Golf

Jack Nicklaus is one of the most respected players in the history of golf. Will he be able to sway the debate over the length of today’s golf ball technology?

Jack Nicklaus has said for years that he believes the golf ball travels too far. This week, at the Honda Classic, he met with reporters informally and one of the topics was the golf ball. He believes today’s golf ball impacts pace of play and existing courses in big ways that people do not consider.

According to Nicklaus the longer ball, in combination with metal woods, caused longer courses to be built. Longer courses take more time to play.

"“The times today, people don’t have the time to spend playing five hours to play golf,” he insisted. “When I was growing up, the best player at the club is the one who kept it down the middle, bumped it up around the green, and he’s the guy winning the club championships, and they are playing in about three hours and three hours and ten minutes.”"

Today’s newer and renovated courses have longer yardages to adapt to equipment improvements. He thinks the result is that it takes longer to get around the longer courses.

“The times today, people don’t have the time to spend playing five hours to play golf,” he insisted.

According to Nicklaus, in his prime, golfers played courses that were 6500-6600 yards from the back. That was considered championship length. The men’s regular tees were shorter than that. Today’s courses are 7500 or headed that direction.

The solution, in his mind, is to rein in the golf ball to allow those shorter courses to be championship length again, and he thinks a by-product would be faster rounds.

Nicklaus had a conversation about it with Mike Davis of the USGA about limiting golf ball distance as recently as last weekend. According to what he told Davis, the USGA is making progress on the ball front but a stumbling block is the R&A.

“R&A has been — sort of doesn’t want to do anything,” Nicklaus reported. “I’ve talked to Mike a lot. Mike’s been very optimistic about wanting to get something done but hasn’t been able to get there yet.”

He thinks bringing the ball back 20 percent would equate to what golfers were playing in 1995, which was when wound golf balls were beginning to be replaced by today’s multilayer, composite balls.

“When I got to ’86, I used the wood driver. Then they started enlarging the head (of metal drivers) a little bit, and then it started making more sense, because I got a little bit more out of it,” he recalled about equipment advances.

In the mid-1990s, things changed.

“That’s when they changed the golf ball,” he noted. “When they changed the golf ball from the wound golf ball to the composite golf ball, that’s when you all of a sudden found out there was a big difference. Because the wood driver didn’t hit it anywhere.”

He recalls going to openings of his golf courses and hitting a wood driver, autographing it and giving it to the course as a memento of the occasion. Then he would take a metal driver and hit it to demonstrate why the pros weren’t using the wooden clubs anymore.

“I would hit the metal driver and hit it 80 yards past the other one,” he explained.

Are longer golf balls destroying older courses?

Nicklaus has other reasons for wanting the distance roll-back, and that has to do with the fate of golf courses. New, longer courses have made the older courses impossibly short for high level tournament play.

“I think we only have one golf course in this country, my opinion, that’s not obsolete to the golf ball and that’s Augusta National,” he insisted. “They are the only people that have enough money that have been able to keep the golf course and do the things you had to. They are even buying up parts of country clubs and roads and everything else to get that done.”

New photographs have appeared recently showing a lengthened 5th tee at Augusta National, with the tee moved back so far that a road has to be rerouted. In 2017 the club negotiated purchase of land behind the 13th tee to lengthen that hole as well.

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“Why, every time we have an event, do we have to keep buying more land and then making things longer? It just doesn’t make any sense to me,” he said.

Titleist, Nicklaus noted, is definitely against a ball that goes a shorter distance.

“I don’t understand why Titleist would be against it; I know they are, but I don’t understand why you would be against it,” Nicklaus added. “They make probably the best product, and the product — if they make the best product, whether it’s 20 percent shorter, why, what difference would it make? Their market share isn’t going to change a bit. They are still going to dominate the game.”

He has other solutions, too, such as rating courses for a 70 percent ball, an 80 percent ball, a 90 percent ball and a 100 percent ball. So, in those cases, you would match the ball you play to the course you are playing.

“I think you can do that. Then you don’t have any obsolete golf courses. Right now, we only have one golf course that’s not obsolete,” he continued. “Eighty percent balls are what we played in 1995 for all intents and purposes. Was that a bad golf ball? No. People played a lot of good golf with that. But you don’t need 7,500 yards to play it.”

In addition to a shorter ball keeping courses relevant, Nicklaus stressed lower costs of chemicals and fertilizer needed for shorter courses and lower land costs for building new ones. Not that many courses are being built in the US today.

Next: Tiger Woods: Flawed, but progressing at the Honda Classic

What could change the mind of the R&A? What could provide the tipping point? Well, if Dustin Johnson, Bubba Watson, Justin Thomas and a few others show up at the Old Course and drive the green of the 18th hole all four days of a tournament, the same way that Rory McIlroy did in last year’s Dunhill Links, surely that would make the point. Then, just like the time the R&A decided to ban the anchored putting stroke after Ernie Els won the British Open using it, then maybe the R&A might consider doing something.

Nicklaus on other major golf topics

On the WGC Mexico scheduling –“It’s very awkward to go from Los Angeles to Florida back to Mexico. It will go L.A., Mexico, here, right ( next year)? Which is really a whole lot better, a whole lot better for everybody.”
On next year’s PGA Championship in May — “What? Oak Hill? In May? You’ve got to be kidding….I remember my senior year in high school, I played a high school match on the third of June in Sandusky, Ohio…. and we played in snow the whole day. That could happen.”

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