Roll, Baby, Roll

Filed in archive Golf Equipment on September 13, 2007

I was standing the parking lot of a driving range the other day, chatting with Mark Greenwood, Director of Swing Machine Golf Canada. Mark has just finished some instruction with my wife while I beat two large buckets of balls - badly.

At any rate, we were talking about Wendy's new custom-built driver and how good it was working for her (dammit).

Mark then mentioned that when he got his TaylorMade driver re-shafted, he gained roughly 40 yards off the tee.

Now Mark Greenwood is no wimp off the wooden peg. Before his new shaft, he could only manage 290; with the new shaft, 320 and up.

So, point made: equipment and technology are simply amazing these days.

And, as Mark mentioned, when the clubhead and shaft are combined with the right golf ball, distance is almost guaranteed.

Today's golf balls are designed to do several things really well: explode off the clubface, climb with maximum velocity at the speed of a formula one car, reach apex and then drop out of the sky like a stone.

It's all about carry. Watch Tiger Woods and he rarely gets tons of roll unless he's hitting to a downhill fairway.

Mark then explained his theory of how to make the game more competitive and exciting.

Make the fairways harder and the rough longer. Harder fairways, he believes, would make it tougher for the pros. They know how far they hit the ball through the air, he said. So if you add in roll, thanks to a hard fairway, then yardage calculations become more interesting. And when the ball rolls through the fairway (say, on a dogleg) and into the rough, well, now it's time to scramble.

There's no need to make golf courses longer and longer. Just use modern technology against itself.

Interesting theory.