The biggest problem on the PGA Tour, besides getting back to work after this coronavirus subsides, is so many of pros knocking the cover off the ball and sending it into the next county! I mean, these young punks hit the ball too far and shorten the golf courses. So, the golf course developers and their course designers have to keep building golf courses that are longer and longer, taking up more and more real estate, so that the pros don’t just hit driver and wedge on all the par fours and a few par fives.
I wonder what Bobby Jones would say about these guys. When young Jack Nicklaus started the PGA Tour, he had such prodigious power off the tee and could chop the ball out of any thick cabbage patch like it was spinach. When Jack won the 1965 Masters, golf”s living icon and founder of the tournament, Bobby Jones, said of his feat, “Nicklaus played a game with which I am not familiar.”
So, last week Sir Nick Faldo, perhaps the best TV commentator and who has three coveted green jackets in his closet, came up with a solution to the tee shot bombers that I’ve never heard of–take away tee pegs. That would cause a reduction in distance with driver off the tee of perhaps thirty yards or more for the longest hitters. But it sure wouldn’t for Mr. Faldo, and I think that is an underlying factor in his suggestion.
Nick Faldo was a master at “hitting it off the deck,” as the pros say about using a driver while hitting the ball off the ground, with no tee under the ball. Nick was so good at that because of the way he swung. That is, he had no dipsy doodle in his upper body because he maintained the same spine angle on his backswing, downswing, and well into his finish. Or more simply, but not technically since the neck can bend forward (Nicklaus was a perfect example of that), put–Sir Nick’s head did not go up and down like bobbing for apples.
One thing Faldo did to achieve that, at least sometimes, was to take a fairly wide stance and shift his weight a lot to his back foot in the back swing and to his forward foot in his forward swing. In fact, watching Nick practice and practice swing, you could tell that he was often was conscious of trying to do that. The result is that it made for very solid ball contact and thus gave him the ability to excel at “hitting it off the deck.”
So, if pro golf ever outlaws tees, pros who excel at hitting driver off the fairway would have quite an advantage. But there aren’t a lot of those guys around. That’s why I think the PGA Tour pros would vote to throw Nick’s proposal out-of-bounds and keep making those golf course developers build longer and longer and longer courses.
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