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The PGA of America has approved the use of distance-measuring devices in all of its championships including the PGA Championship to be played at Kiawah’s Ocean Course in May. Another piece of my golf soul died with the news.
Call me old and out of touch, but today's glut of data has ruined much of what made golf so attractive when I started playing as a kid. The quest for utter precision has diminished the simple beauty of the game. Golfers today are technicians more than they are artists.
Playing one-club challenges as a kid with friends was the most fun I’ve had. We’d set out in the long shadows of the afternoon with nothing but a few golf balls and tees in our pockets and (usually) a 7-iron in our hands. You had to hit every shot – from drives to putts – with that club. Moving the ball forward or back in your stance. Opening and closing the clubface to change lofts. Playing knockdown shots and bump-and-runs. It all developed feel and intuition.
Distance never mattered in a one-club challenge. Unless you happened upon a perfect 7-iron number, you had to make whatever distance inside that yardage work. Outside the number, you had to play for a spot that would give you the best angle for the next shot to be most playable.
Would Seve Ballesteros have been a better golfer with today’s tech? Would Lee Trevino have played with the same artistry if he had a rangefinder?
The last time I played a one-club challenge was a few years ago at Firestone. After a full day struggling with thick rough on the South Course and not making a single par, a few of us went out well-lubricated with only our 7-irons to play Nos. 1 and 9 for money. I parred the first and made a long “putt” on the ninth for bogey to win all the bets before the club manager politely asked us to return to the bar.
All we ever had to gauge distance at my home club of Willow Oaks were 150-yard bushes on each side of the fairway. I’m not sure I ever knew if they were measured to the front or the middle of the green, but every club I chose was based on those bushes and the eyeball test of how far in front or behind them I was. We looked at the nearest bush; we looked at the ball; we looked at the green; we picked a club and we hit it. It was that simple.
Would Seve Ballesteros have been a better golfer with today’s tech? Would Lee Trevino have played with the same artistry if he had a rangefinder? Not being reliant on big data is what made golf’s greatest players stand out. They could better assess whatever situation presented itself and use their guile and touch to make magic happen, inspiring awe in ways another gap wedge stuffed next to the hole doesn’t today.
Give today’s elite players the tools of their tour ancestors and we’d really find out who the best golfers are. That skill package is diminished with every new precision data point they all come equipped with nowadays – “validation through science” as Bryson DeChambeau calls it.
Pros pulling out rangefinders at Kiawah isn’t going to ruin golf. It just takes it a little further down the road from the beautifully complex game it used to be.
E-MAIL SCOTT
Scott Michaux