It’s Official: Distance is Killing the Pro Game on the PGA Tour

Distance is starting to kill the PGA Tour.

The prodigious length we are seeing from Bryson, Rory, DJ, Brooks, and others is not good for the game, or the PGA Tour. It’s just not. I know it’s fun to watch now, but it will get old and uninteresting in a couple of years. Then it will get boring. Watching driver-wedge all day isn’t very compelling viewing in my book.

https://twitter.com/PGATOUR/status/1276586486108786688

It’s quaint to think that there was a time not too long ago when seeing a 300-yard drive was like spotting the Loch Ness monster. Remember John Daly in the early 1990s? That backswing where the clubhead seemed to bounce off his front leg. Those were balata balls he was hitting, too, not some four-piece, nitrous-injected moon-missile like we have today.

It was only a little over 20 years ago -1997 – when a player first averaged 300+ yards for an entire year. The player? John Daly, of course. But we didn’t care then because Daly wasn’t threatening to redefine the game. He was already gaining speed past his prime at that point. His long drives were little more than the star attraction in the larger John Daly Circus of Life Tour.

This year on the PGA Tour, there are currently 72 players averaging 300 yards or more off the tee.

72.

The courses played by the PGA Tour now stretch well past 7,000 yards to accommodate this new reality. But there is a breaking point and we are currently hanging the toes of our Footjoys over the edge.

There was a commentator on TV recently, I can’t recall who, who said something along these lines: “Go out on your home course and drop a ball 350 yards from the tee. Golf gets a lot easier, doesn’t it?”

Uh, yeah.

“But West,” you say, “it takes incredible skill to hit it that far. If length was the only thing that mattered, those Long Driver Champions would be on Tour. Tour pros are amazing all-around players.”

And I agree. You are 100% correct. But I don’t have to like it or think it’s good for the game.

Here’s why: We are vandalizing the courses that defined the modern game.

We’re reaching the point where the courses can’t be modified anymore. Building new tee complexes works for a while, but eventually, the integrity of the layout and the intentions of the original architect are severely compromised.

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The fact of the matter is that any course built before 1930 was built in the age of persimmon, balata (or gutta-percha) balls, and hickory shafts. Surlyn balls were created in the 1960s. Graphite shafts became popular in the 1970s and ’80s. But even until about 1990, persimmon and metal shafts were still the choice of many pro golfers.

In other words, it was a different game.

Today we have computer designed clubs, cavity-back irons, titanium faces, Speedfoam, urethane, and golf shafts made of materials found in the International Space Station.

How much has it changed the game? More than you think.

In 1980, Dan Pohl led the PGA Tour in driving distance with a 274-yard average. The overall driving average on Tour that same year was a paltry 256 yards off the tee.

There isn’t a single PGA Tour Pro averaging less than 275 yards off the tee in 2020. The shortest hitter today is longer than the longest hitter in 1980. The average pro player, in 40 years of technology growth, has added 50 yards to their driver.

How can the courses possibly keep up with that?

Adding length by moving the tee back seems like it would just shift everything into balance. However, there’s a problem with that. Golf holes aren’t straight and flat. When we move the tee boxes; doglegs, contours, elevations, sightlines, flight lines, and unintended hazards suddenly change or come into play.

In practice, you create a new Frankenstein hole that trashes the well-considered intentions of the original architect.

Think about a Pete Dye course. Dye is considered one of the greatest architects of all time. Much of his design philosophy and intellectual approach is based on his ability to shape holes and sightlines that create anxiety, discomfort, and doubt based on what a player can see from a given lie or approach angle.

This is particularly true from the tee box on Dye Design courses. A 70-yard wide fairway can look like a thin goat trail of turf from the tee box. When you move the tee box 50-75 yards – in any direction – you are fundamentally changing the character and strategy of the hole.

Some may say, “Who cares? So it’s a different hole now. Big deal.”

That’s where the historian in me gets his dander up.

Listen, I love the new courses being built by Coore/Crenshaw, Gil Hanse, David McLay-Kidd, Tom Doak, and others. They are some of the leading visionaries in golf architecture’s Second Golden Age. Doesn’t it bother you that in 100 years those masterpieces may be obsolete, too?

It’s a big deal. At least it should be.

Think about the 15th at Augusta. It’s a par-5 with the pond in front and the wide green sloping heavily from back to front. There was a time it was a huge risk/reward shot to get on in two. It was once a pivotal point in the closing stretch at The Masters.

Now it’s Driver/8-iron for most. I suppose if they want to change the hole, just change the scorecard to a par-4, because that’s what it is. But no, the folks at Augusta are trying to move the tees back to make it what it once was. I guess we’ll see if it makes a difference.

There is good news in all this. Kind of.

You and I don’t hit 340-yard bombs down the fairway. We can go play Pinehurst No. 2, Whistling Straits, and Bethpage Black just as Donald Ross, Pete Dye, and A.W. Tillinghast intended. We can see the course from the original tees, with everything perfectly situated to give us the experience the architect intended.

But for the PGA Tour, the days of the quaint 6,800-yard courses are behind us. The only way to give them teeth is to trick them up; speed up the greens, narrow the fairways, add bunkering, etc.

Let’s all agree not to do that. It feels like retouching masterpieces in the Louvre. We should think in terms of restoring them, not repainting them.

Perhaps it’s time to look forward. We might be entering an age of “Pro-only” layouts, stretching out beyond 8,000 yards. With 260-yard par-3s and 700-yard par-5s. That would be more fun to watch and, whether we like it or not, that feels like where we are headed.