Bear’s best idea: restricted flight balls for PGA Tour

Victoria Sun

Tuesday, April 23, 2002 | 9:56 a.m.

Power and accuracy.

Balls that travel 1,000 yards but stop on a dime.

For years golf ball manufacturers have flooded the marketplace with longer, more manageable balls.

But not everyone thinks the rapidly changing technological advances in golf ball production have benefitted the professional game.

The legendary Jack Nicklaus, for one, would love it if golf ball producers shortened a ball's length by 10 percent to level the playing field.

"It's ridiculous what's happened to the golf ball," Nicklaus said Monday before giving a clinic at the Bear's Best Las Vegas Golf Course he designed. "You've got about 16,000 golf courses in this country and 15,990 of them are obsolete.

"That's terrible and it's only because of the ego of the ball manufacturer.

Nicklaus said if the balls traveled a shorter distance, shorter distance courses would be back in vogue.

"I mean, if you took the golf ball and pulled it back 10 percent, all of a sudden a 7,200-yard golf course becomes a 6,500-yard golf course playability wise. How many golf courses do we have in the 6,500 range in this country that are good golf courses? Thousands.

"My feeling is each golf ball manufacturer should be able to make his own golf ball, keep the same aerodynamics, just make it 10 percent shorter and call it a tournament ball."

The golf ball debate intensified during the recent Masters at Augusta National Golf Club.

Equipment advancements forced Masters officials to lengthen the course by 285 yards and expand the bunkers in hopes of making it more challenging.

But tournament committee members now realize they can't make massive renovations to the course on a yearly basis to keep up with ever-evolving equipment. So they discussed having players use a common ball.

On the PGA Tour, Nicklaus doesn't think it will happen.

"They won't regulate golf balls on the tour because I don't think that the tour will go away from the (USGA) rules of the game," he said. "If you tried to do that, every ball manufacturer that pays them a couple hundred or $500,000 to play their ball will say, you've got to vote against it if you want to get paid.

"I understand the economics of it."

Sadly, Nicklaus counts every one of the 206 courses he's designed as obsolete because of today's clubs and balls.

When he began designing courses, he said they stared out as tournament-caliber championship courses.

"My golf courses were relatively tough because I did them for tournament golf," Nicklaus said. "But I still had generous fairways.

"In those days, length meant something. Length doesn't mean much any more so if we have a golf course that is generous in the fairways and not particularly long, they're just lights out. So my golf courses went from being 73-, 74-type golf courses to 65, 66 golf courses without changing them."

Nicklaus said altering ball specifications is more practical than redesigning clubs.

"Let's just say the club continues to gain yardage," Nicklaus reasoned. "You're not going to change the clubs kids grew up with.

"We could say, 'OK we can go back to steel shafts. We can go back to persimmon drivers.' That would be like asking me to go to hickory shafts and that's ridiculous.

"But how long does it take to adjust to a golf ball? These guys get different golf balls every week. They've learned to adjust to a longer one every year. How hard would it be to adjust to a shorter one? Ten minutes? That's all that it takes."

For any change to occur, Nicklaus said the club owners need to speak up.

"Where it's going to happen is if the golf course owners of America realize, 'Hey, I can't spend that kind of money every time you guys let a golf ball go another five yards further,' " Nicklaus said. "You'll run us right out of business."