The golf dilemma: players hit too much

Bryson DeChambeau takes his shots almost 300 meters on average. Stock Photography.Image: Charlie riedel

Better balls, better clubs, sharper technique and stronger players. There are many reasons why development continues to falter when it comes to how far the best professionals can hit a golf ball.

The sport’s leading bodies, the US USGA and the Scottish R&A, stated in a joint report this spring that the continued development of long-term strokes is detrimental.

Both because it runs the risk of undermining golf’s basic tenet that the sport is about having a wide range of skills, but also because many courses run the risk of becoming less challenging and obsolete.

But no ready-made solutions were presented, and the question is whether there are.

– Of course, it is sad that there are good old golf courses, which cannot be extended any further and are therefore “destroyed”. But on the other hand, I think there are little opportunities to do something about it with a set of rules regarding balls or equipment, says Ola Lindgren, head coach of men’s activities at the Swedish Golf Association.

– In some way development is in the DNA of all sports: longer, higher, faster. And I think it is very difficult to stop the development in a global sport with a lot of money, and that is now also part of the Olympic program.

The stroke issue was raised further when Bryson DeChambeau won the US Open in superior style last fall. Thanks to a combination of lots of muscle and high swing speed, he is cutting just over 300 meters with the rider this season.

– But you don’t win a US Open because you move away from the tee. He was probably number one in putt within three meters and also hit a lot of good melee shots, Henrik Stenson told TT in connection with The Masters at Augusta in November.

There, DeChambeau, 27, was later defeated, among others, by legend Bernhard Langer, 63, as proof that length is not everything. Stenson, Sweden’s most successful male golfer of all time, realizes that the golf world still has a problem to contend with:

– It is clear that our decision-making bodies are a little concerned about where it is going. Because where will we end up in 30 years?

– There are several reasons why we have finished where we are now: Technology, rod, balls, clubs. And they all have a “launch monitor” when you train; you can see more quickly if your swing is effective. The players are also stronger, the golfer has changed a lot in 20 years.

Ola Lindgren and Henrik Stenson agree that a great deal of responsibility falls on the various career paths, to ensure duration is not a factor that is overly and frequently rewarded.

– Length has always been an advantage, but the best thing is that there is a decent mix of competitions during a season, so that not only players who have length as their strength can assert themselves, says Henrik Stenson.

You are concerned that someone will be discouraged from starting golf because you feel like you can’t hit far enough.

– There is the classic one with slightly narrower fairways, a rough where the ball cannot be controlled and harder greens. Then you need to play another kind of game.

Stenson takes the field outside of Paris as an example, where Europe hosted the last Ryder Cup match.

– The Americans weren’t about to push their toes off the tee, but they went ahead with the driver and knocked him out on the batter as we hit the fairway. It made a huge difference.

Ola Lindgren, the coach of the national team, still believes that different types of players can achieve success in the future.

That said: if you look at the world’s top 20, they are, with a few exceptions, basically long-range players and I have a hard time seeing us get a short-range global number one in the future.