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Franc38

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Everything posted by Franc38

  1. We had the EGU handicap system until 2 years ago... quite different from the USGA or R&A ways. Now we've joined the WHS... with some adaptation (like everything has got to come from federally sanctioned stroke play competitions, and some other stuff). Rules are sort of public domain to a point, I don't see why they wouldn't if they wanted to. Well, likely not just the French but I could see a EGU ruling body thing appear, if the uproar is big enough.
  2. That might be true, with many caveats, of the RandA, certainly not of the USGA, at least outside of the US They have not invented or standardised the game and have no real authority outside of the US, as the name says it Being in France I don't care a bit for them. So far I adhere to the rules coming from the join efforts of them and the RandA... because they're somewhat sensible, and because of the RandA historical relevance, but I can see many other national federations, which have the same 'rank' as the USGA say they won't follow anymore (for example, the Federation Française de Golf, if it wants to keep me as a paying member...) Edit Plus, they're supposedly in the business of 'preserving' golf, so "making changes" should really not be their "prerogative".
  3. It's indeed Matt Blois who was often on the TXG, now Club Champion YT channel. Nice video, by the way... It matches my numbers. A good, high, well hit 7i is about 1.9 times clubhead speed for me too.
  4. Meaning that if PGA and DP announce, along with LIV that they'll keep using the old balls, and amateurs seem to generally favour doing so as well... the OEMs are not going to produce the "conforming balls". Or would do so very reluctantly. That's James Robinson's take.. And he thinks that, for that reason, the roll back will not really happen.
  5. The thing is, MLR or not developing a new golf ball conforming to new rules and still OK for the best players in the world (feel, spin, control, wind reaction) will cost exactly the same. This cost will be borne by us the paying customers (their tour staffers get balls for free). So ultimately this cost could have been spread between "our balls" and the "tour balls" in some way, maybe making the tour ball very expensive and progressively raising the price of the others, but with the "general rollback" the price will be here for everyone, no smoothing out progressively! i.e. the cost paid by us will be the same but potentially would hit us more brutally. No other way around. Again the USGA has the average golfer at heart... Or so they say.
  6. I hear "don't worry that will impact tour players but not the recreational amateurs"... Well, I maintain a (French, so 100% stroke play official competitions based) 8 to 6 index with a mediocre putting, some mighty lateral dispersion with the driver BUT distances that are "middle of the road PGA tour". So I will be penalised way more than other 7 handicappers who are short but great putters, or short and very straight. Why is that "fair" or "not a problem" when I've never "over powered" any course? (By the way, if you follow Kyle Berkshire on YouTube you'll see that even him, three times world long drive champ, 160 mph club head speed and all that jazz doesn't "overpower courses"). This is just ridiculous.
  7. One thing I don't understand that the USGA could explain to me (or the proponents of the 'rollback'). The MLR was rejected supposedly because ball producers said the cost was going to be too high (I understand from that that the research to develop and the production of reduced flight balls isn't cheap) but now we're supposed to believe that imposing the same reduced ball to every one isn't going to be costly? Adding new tee boxes back for the select few courses that host your events is too costly but adding forward tees to thousands of everyday courses so they Joe (average) Public can still play isn't going to be a problem? John Daly was driving it 317 yards in the early 2000s and courses were fine but now Rory driving it 319 or 320 threatens the integrity of the game? What about charging rules every 4 years so that the guys who had played in their teens and return to the game now are totally lost with hazards, droping and so on... That would preserve the integrity of the game but having 40 guys driving it past 300 yards on tour instead of 10 guys driving it the same distance would threaten the integrity of the game? There is a lot of explaining that needs to be done. And also why the USGA and the R&A instead of England Golf and the Federation Française de Golf or the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers and the Federación española de golf? Historical reasons, sure enough... But this is an historical event that could lead to a change in "golf rules stewardship"...
  8. Sorry to put it this way, but we have had "official word" and that's what reignited so fiercely the thread... Sure they can back pedal but that's hardly the USGA way. They tend to see they were wrong, not admit it and double down!
  9. At the moment on tour some guys hit it 300 in the air, and they are only a few. That's barely more than what Tiger or Daly did back in the days, but since it was then only one or two guys and the rest at 270 and now it's 40 guys at 300 and the rest at 270, the average has increased. And will continue, slowly as more long hitters replace retiring short hitters. Strokes gained and logic are showing that longer courses (or shorter balls) give a bigger statistical advantage to the long hitters, so if you introduce a ball that reduces the distance in the air from 300 to 290 for the big dogs, the 270 crew (now 261-ish) will be at a bigger disadvantage. Provided that distance is the key with courses the way they are, the shorter hitters will very soon either hit it further or be replaced by younger, further hitting, new pros. So now the top distance is 293 (yeah, even the top guys work out, improve and optimise their equipment and the tour set up courses to get even more distance as that sells) and 90% of the tour players hit it 290+. What happened to the average? Well, it's increased! Meanwhile the average Joe, who doesn't optimise or train anymore and can't count on the tour to set up faster fairways, has lost 7 yards on his drives, 4 on his long irons and can't find new more forward tees... And if courses have to create these new tees that's a lot of money and environmental impact, way more than the occasional hole made longer at Augusta Well done USGA, you have created a problem for short hitters while increasing the "problem" (which only existed in your mind and that of the people listening to you) you said you wanted to solve without really explaining why! I'd say you well deserve that a competing new organisation organising the game emerged and puts you out of business (I don't know if it will happen but I certainly hope so).
  10. By the way... People complaining that now tour pros hit driver then a short or mid iron, like a 8 or 7 onto par 4, keep in mind that the tour average 7 iron in 37" and 33 degrees plus some change, while "in the golden age" of "good golf" the same club was called a 5 iron... plus, the guys on TV tend to lie on what club the PGA tour pros hit. I vividly remember a time they were saying "Ah, and now for 185 yards, he'll hit a controlled 7 iron" and on the next image you could see the club and it was written 6 on it!
  11. Well, for the newcomers, indeed a shorter ball will not be a problem, they will not loose anything. For me, having worked to gain distance over the last 6 to 7 years, despite being almost 50 and having kids and a rather busy life, getting back to my former distance not because of age but because of some guys decisions, that will be a bummer. That will be a bummer even more because I play more often than not with gentlemen who drive the ball shorter than my 7 iron and already struggle with the "pars" as they are, and don't have the choice to "tee it forward" (as, rather ironically, the same people who say that distance is a problem, shout about all the time... Maybe they really think that distance is a problem as players are hitting too short?). Now strokes gained has shown (and logic also indicates that) that if the course is (relatively to distances people can hit the ball) long, then the longer hitters are advantaged. That makes sense if you think of it: on a 500 yards par 4 the guy who drives it 300 yards and hits his 5 iron 200 yards can be there in regulation and even if he sprays it a bit, he'll be around the green in two. The guy who hits it 250 yards and will likely hit his 5 iron 180 yards... what happens to him? well after two perfectly hit and straight shots he is 70 yards from the green. He'll have to up and down from that distance for the par, while the other guy simply has to up and down from a few yards if he missed the green and two putt if not. On average, the long guy wins, easy. Think now of a 300 yards par 4. First guy may drive it but that puts in play the bunkers and water hazards and the bumps and... around the green. Second guy is 50 yards away, in the fairway. 50 yards from the fairway vs. deep bunker and chance of penalty or a funky lie in the rough... The difference is probably still in favour of Mr 300 but by quite a bit less. And probably more because Mr 300 will hit his 3 wood to 270 to avoid the risk (and probably be more accurate with it than Mr 250 with his driver, a bit) then have only 30 yards in, instead of 50. As pointed out sometimes on the forum, the tougher holes on tour are not massive par 4 or par 5s... Not even the long par 3, but typically the well defended short par 3. Think "postage stamp" at Troon, or the 7 at Pebble... So when the pros start driving par 5s (which would have never happened, even the long drive guys do not have the distance, despite their amazing speed) just make these holes shorter, put deeper bunkers (even in the middle of the green, to really put the onus on accuracy) and the benefit of being longer will be reduced. Finally, if people don't like seeing something (like guys bombing it) they don't buy the product in question, which then adapts. So if distance was a problem on the tour level (we have already seen it wasn't for recreational amateurs and everybody agreed, sort of) then we would expect the tours to address the "issue". They don't. So that show rather clearly that we are in front of a cabal of minority elitists who want to impose on others their view of the problem (because it's the right way, obviously) against the will of the majority.
  12. They never had the power to regulate equipment... until they took it. They never had the power to regulate based on outcome instead of properties... until they took it. As they are OK saying "a ball is conforming if it does this or that distance when submitted to x or y condition", they can perfectly say "a course is conforming for handicapping and competition purposes if a conforming ball landing this or that way doesn't roll more than x yards... Or "greens are conforming if the stimp is less than x and more than y". Or "no fairway should be wider than X or Y for a course to be acceptable for competition" Would equalise some things, too. The "super long drives" they seem to cry about are way more likely to happen in high altitude during the summer than at lower altitude when it's freezing. As they don't want super long drives they should ban competitions at high altitude courses, particularly in the summer. Tongue in cheek, we could expect, for the purpose of limiting that atrocious distance that so irks them, that it is now forbidden to play golf when the temperature is more than 15° Celsius (59 Fahrenheit) and when the last heavy rain fall is more than 2 days ago. Would be just as good for the game, and just as logical as their rules on the balls. Ultimately, they never had the power to regulate distance. They just happen to try to take it, right now (well, it started, low key, before but now it's really visible and "official"). Nobody voted for that, agreed to that... And the USGA as the R&A have very little legitimacy to do stuff, except historical. I could well see national federations (or tours) branch out on ball rules, same as they had before the WHS, used very different rules for handicap calculations (and still do, to some extent).
  13. Yep. Give them persimmons only and they'll try to optimize for that. Shafts, balls, swings... And within a short amount of time, they'll hit it as far as today. Possibly more often offline, though. Us, on the other hand...
  14. Nobody said that distance isn't important, or shouldn't be important, or whatever. They just pretend that some people hit "too far". You just have to make it so that it's dangerous to hit too far for the incentive to be reduced. Strokes gained show at the moment that "for tour courses as they are" you're the same 125 yards from the fairway to 100 yards (ish) from the rough. Just make it so that in order to compare to 125 yards from the fairway you need to be 50 yards from the rough. And that partial shots from the fairway can't hold the greens as much a full shots from the same fairways. Also, make the fairways (much) narrower at 300 to 370 yards so that the risk when you're long is higher.Sure enough long players will still have an advantage, but they'll bomb less from the tee. Which is supposedly "the problem". Now courses make money, we pay it. Plus, if anything, a less manicured/maintained course would incentivize being on the fairways more, and cost less. Making fairways smaller also limits costs and makes the "bomb and gouge" a less attractive option. The reason why a lot of munis don't have the set up of the tour courses is not because it would be hard for players (like they cared) but because it's cheaper!
  15. To sum it up, if you want less distance, don't try to regulate/block distance by rules on equipment but make distance less desirable by setting the courses and designing them in ways that stop rewarding the longest hitters who spread the ball. If they manage to be long and straight, good, they should be rewarded!
  16. To be honest course conditions and even more design are the ONLY points that could limit the perpetual race for added distance. Sure, you'll always be better off with a gap wedge in your hand than with a 6i when attacking a green... Except that's "from the fairway". If you need, in order to have a gap wedge in hand risk a 80% chance of loosing your ball, 10% chance of being in the rough, 5% chance in a bunker and 5% chance on the fairwy, you'll choose the short club from the tee and then attack with a 6i. As already stated before, my home course is short and quirky, very narrow with OoB and deep woods where balls are effectively lost close to fairways. I could, potentially drive the green on 3 of the five par 4, and I did try this method before: my scoring average on 9 holes was 4 shots more! Then there's our long par 4, 415 yards. Even on this I tend to not use driver and prefer my 4 wood. After 230 yards the fairway narrows down even more and becomes a strip 75 feet wide, with a sliver on rough on each side and then OoB immediately to the left and a 45° steep bank to the right with thick bushes on it (swallows balls often, if you find it you'll have the worse lie ever, ball knee high, etc.). Then the green is elongated, 25 feet wide with OoB 1 yard left and a water hasard back and left... Even for "longer hitters" it's statistically better to play it like a par 5!!! (which I do in competitions... ) I've played once a course just after the Challenge tour (the European equivalent to the Korn Ferry) had played it, and was amazed at "how long I drive it"... Well, turns out the balls were rolling for ages. At the same time, the fairways were quite wide and the rough wide as well and really not that deep (akin to a normal course fairway on days where they don't mow, I'd say). Yikes, I got my first drive past 350 yards! Not that I ever do that in real life... If the R&A and USGA have the power to regulate the equipment and define things for course setup they could as well have the power (or seize it) to define things in the rules, like minimum height of grass in the fairway, maximum stimp for the fairway (or greens, for that matter... slower greens are "more difficult" for lowly amateurs, but actually slow greens are very hard for every one on longer putts since the uncertainty grows massively). That could solve the distance problem, if there is one... Obviously most courses and the PGA tour don't want that, just as they don't want the pros loosing balls often, teeing of with mid irons on par 4 and 5 etc. But that would penalize us way less since our daily courses already more than comply with rules for slow fairways and unkempt rough
  17. Can't say that a model based on a ball launched by a machine over 70 feet is a standardized and repeatable way of testing balls that should be HIT by drivers and fly 900 feet. Sure, it's at least repeatable (if you know the machine specs, the tunnel specs, the air and so on). Now I did contact the R&A to tell them that I feel their approach to regulating distance is idiotic... That was last summer when they started talking about bifurcation. I offered some ideas... and I'm still waiting for any reply (my ideas dealt with the regulation of course conditions for tournament play, and respectfully leveraging the idea that the regulation of the equipment should be limited to its basic observable characteristics and never deal with "outcomes" as we all know that golf is not a game of perfect or even well defined randomness... ) You're still have the right to be happy with their way of setting rules; but you'll have to be happy too when the price of balls rise and the tour pros continue hitting it the same distance or further, while the short hitters with limited technique and time scramble more and more since they can't reach greens in regulation, which is a probable consequence of the proposed rules evolution. Now, I'll be happy if that doesn't happen, if we don't see much reduction for the "mere mortals" and price don't change... albeit, I have speeds akin to a "middle of the pack pga tour guy" so I'll be affected more, but if its by the margins they say, fine. I just don't believe that (else why do it?)
  18. Ok, so it's modelled and therefore bull#;t .. and the reason why today we have tons of balls that go way further than the norm when we play them and other that are "already conforming", supposedly to the new rules. And I say that as a guy who's doing and teaching modelling... Regarding r&d the difference between incremental improvement and change in "nature" is quite large, plus it's a "good excuse" to ramp up prices even if not really justified. We'll see but I'd bet some money on 10% price increase for the "new shorter balls" when they become the norm
  19. As Martin Borgmeier as pointed out, the roll back proposed doesn't make any sense even from a rules point of view, unless the way of testing is standardized and repeatable. A robot with a club head speed of 125mph hits a ball with a certain spin and a certain angle and then depending of the surface the ball lands on, the density of the air, the temperature of the ball, the ball will travel very very different distances (a reason I've recently discovered as to why while I do hit my irons about the same distance as the average PGA tour pro, my driver and woods are quite a bit shorter... Their shots roll on for miles while mine pitch and bounce once if I'm lucky then stay in the mud.) You might also have balls with aerodynamics designed to counteract the "roll back", leaving the leading pro playing this or that ball keep (or increase) their distance while the ball still conforms, but the average slower speed am would loose boatloads of distance. The likely result would be the polar opposite of what the R&A and USGA say they want: more distance for the pros and top ams, less for the slower ams a significant increase in the cost of practising golf (the R&D needed for the new conforming balls that would not penalize the top pros that I mentioned above is clearly not free, and will be borne by average joe buying his balls at the local pro shop, not by the pros (don't pay their balls) or top ams (using one ball per 36 holes is quite a bit cheaper than 6 to 9 balls per 18 holes as I've discovered when I play well ) All of that for "solving" a problem that visibly only exists in Jack's and some of the higher ups at the USGA and R&A's heads... Plus the sheep that have been convinced by the repeated screaming of said people in the media.
  20. Very true. Distance is not necessarily related to score (there's some correlation, obviously, an open, wide, flat greened par 4 of 250 yards is an "easy birdy", while an open wide, flat greened par 4 of 510 yards is a "hard bogey", but no one said your short holes have to be wide, with a large and flat green). One way to see that is the scoring average on par 3s which is rather quite high, even for very short ones (Postage Stamp at Troon, anyone? I remember Rory taking 7 -seven- shots to get out of the "coffin bunker" in a practice round... ) But no, it's got to be the distance... and the distance has got to be from the equipment... Just give Kyle Berkshire a balata and a persimmon to see what's happening!
  21. Not a really hard thing to do, honestly... Plus the "rules" in general are likely public domain as they derive from things/texts that date back from the XVIIIth century and were never intended to be copy-righted... Or simply put, take the rules from 1965, add a section for equipment that is "modern" and made with the manufacturers... plus change a few bits and bobs here and there, add a rule for relief from the divots in the fairway and you'll be happy as Larry.
  22. Why do you think that something needed to be done? Because the USGA keeps saying it? If something really needed to be done at the pro level, the tours would have started addressing the issue, or the courses. Or even the pros themselves. Reality is, everybody is fairly happy with things the way they are. Bombing it 330 ? Great for TV and marketing ("these guys are good"... euh, long... ). Low scores ? That attracts the fans... Long courses, well that might be costly but that means more fans on the course, more space for grand stands and hospitality tents; so that's lovely. No, the only people not happy are, in order - Jack and other ancient players who would have liked scores and distance to remain what they were when they played (like if Carl Lewis was lobbying for the 100m dash to be lengthened so that his times remain at the top of the board) -Augusta and the Old Course (plus a few other old courses) as they want to remain a challenge without changing anything in the way they set the courses, or anything, except maybe adding backest back tees to the back tees (you don't want to disturb the members... who happen to count a number of the guys at the first point) -The USGA and R&A who, like pure politicians that they are, create a problem for the sole purpose of "solving it" and therefore show that they are important, useful and so on... Keeping their well paid and prestigious jobs in the process. By the way, is there any other sport where the rules change every 4 years? Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for no reason (changing the name of lateral water hazard to "lateral penalty area" did help the game tremendously... ) The risk is that some guys somewhere (maybe the "collective tours fusion" of PGA tour, DP World Tour and LIV that is shaping) decide that "OK, we take the rules as they were in 2019, keep everything as is for the foreseeable future, and will now do the conforming tests ourselves... and as a present to whoever wants to now follow our thing, there's free relief for balls landing in divots in the shortly mowed areas!"
  23. Yeah. That definitely proved that the "problem" (that only exists in the mind of Augusta and a few select old glories that don't want to change nor to see the scores go down) isn't solved by change of equipment but by change of course set up. On top of that, having thicker rough, smaller fairways and greens, slower fairways with taller grass as well, and the spectators behind the rope be always "out of bounds" would promote less expanses in green keeping and less risks for spectators as hitting among them would be costly in terms of score. The ball... well, does very little, costs a loooooot (be ready to buy your 12 reduced flight proV1s at close to $80) forces to obsolescence a shitload of perfectly fine balls, just to not solve the problem that doesn't exist and that the R&A and USGA are hell-bent on solving badly and irritating everyone!
  24. For all you guys liking the idea of new equipment rules and new balls... I hope you'll pay the extortionary price the new ball will cost (hey, development isn't free and you won't be able to buy second hand at the beginning) plus you'll do things to offset the pollution caused by billions of balls suddenly made illegal and that most players will have to replace "just because"... 3% of the top players on the top tours hit it "too far" (read, farther than the guy writing about that). This is ridiculous: making a very very costly decision because the sport has moved forward is like changing all the stadiums in the world to make the tracks 420m long instead of the current 400m because sprinters (well the best 10 in the world anyway) nowadays go "too fast" and races are lasting enough time...
  25. The whole thing smells very very fishy... If they want the courses that are short to be "relevant again" by making the ball shorter, that's not by taking 8 or 9 yards away that they'll achieve that. Proper training, driver and swing optimisation allows to gain more than that... For the tour pros. For random Joe, that's probably making a number of par 3 unreachable unless they use the drive and have a lucky bounce, some par 4 into par 5 -or 6... However, course can be made narrower, the help from public being on the side of the rough can be supressed by making all the "behind the ropes" areas OoB, and so on. My little par 32, 9-holes home course which is 2300 yards long has, a long time ago, hosted an event with European tour players... Well, the best one shot 4 under. When the fairway is 25 yards wide, when you then have penalty areas or OoB on the side, when the greens are small and fast, when you have trees, sharp dog legs, and so on, you just don't gain from being longer, you gain from being accurately long, which is hard... Sure half of the par 4 greens are "drivable" for a tour level distance player. But miss the 16 yards wide green by 3 yards and you loose your ball. Do you hit driver? I don't! Having an "tour average" length ball, I very often tee up with a 4 iron, or even a 7 iron, because having the right club to attack the green in paramount, and deviating a bit when you attack them kills your card. Why not offer, for the courses that are short, yet wide, or historic or whatever, the possibility to have a local rule that imposes a "reduced flight" ball from their own choosing ("monotype") to all players. That is, if they want to keep doing what they've "always done"... But clearly making courses shorter is a better answer than making them longer and then trying to shorten the ball.
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