{"id":841,"date":"2005-07-12T21:48:10","date_gmt":"2005-07-13T02:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesandtrap.com\/uncategorized\/a_quick_nine_with_the_ball_jack_wants_you_to_play\/"},"modified":"2005-07-12T21:48:10","modified_gmt":"2005-07-13T02:48:10","slug":"a_quick_nine_with_the_ball_jack_wants_you_to_play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesandtrap.com\/b\/balls\/a_quick_nine_with_the_ball_jack_wants_you_to_play","title":{"rendered":"A Quick Nine With ‘The Ball Jack Wants You To Play’"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a rumor that’s been going around the equipment biz that a major golf ball manufacturer has crafted a unique response to Jack Nicklaus’ continued complaints about how far today’s balls travel. The company – which hasn’t been positively identified, but I’m 99.9 percent sure it starts with a “T” and ends with “itleist” – made a limited run of golf balls manufactured to mid-1980s specs. The balls are stamped “RIP Distance” on one side, with the inscription “This is the ball Jack wants you to hit” on the other.<\/p>\n

In the name of due diligence, Lawrence Donegan of The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. came across some of these rare old-school golf balls and had PGA European Tour player Gary Orr try one side-by-side with the new Pro V1. Read on to find out what happened.
\n
\nDonegan’s complete article can be read here<\/a>. It’s a must-read for anyone who cares about the distance debate in golf. That means you.<\/p>\n

If you’re short on time, allow me to sum things up for you. Orr pitted the two golf balls against each other in a 9-hole match at Loch Lomond in Scotland. The Pro V1 dusted “The ball Jack wants you to play” 2 and 1, and Orr pulled off some nifty shots to keep the match that close. Some of Orr’s drives with the old ball left him more than 100 yards behind the newer ball, and he sometimes had a 3-club difference on approach shots.<\/p>\n

The biggest differences were the way the two balls performed on bad shots, and how the wind affected them. With the Pro V1, Orr’s mis-hits didn’t lose much distance. But “The ball Jack wants you to play” was positively abysmal on off-center hits. Likewise, the newer ball’s lower spin rate helped it to knife through the wind, while the dialed-down version was more easily blown off line.<\/p>\n

Orr concludes that he wouldn’t mind playing the “RIP Distance” ball if everyone else did, and he liked the soft feel. But he sums up the two-ball match thusly: “Trust me, life is much easier with a sand wedge in your hands rather than a 4-iron.”<\/p>\n

Interestingly, this story appears on the same day as my new Golf Digest. The August 2005 issue of the magazine has a short piece in the equipment section called “The distance myth.” It details how the USGA has studied the stats and concluded that driving distance is a weak predictor of how much money a player will earn on the PGA Tour, while driving accuracy is essentially a non-factor. Hitting greens and putting well were much better indicators of how much money players will earn.<\/p>\n

In fact, USGA Senior Technical Director Dick Rugge is quoted in the piece as saying, “What this data suggests to me is that the four major statistical factors were in reasonable balance to each other in the 1980s, and now driving accuracy seems to be no longer in balance. It also says that the idea of rolling the ball back to the golden era doesn’t necessarily get you all the way there. You need to look at a broader picture.”<\/p>\n

Hmmm. So maybe to make Jack Nicklaus happy with how the game of golf is played, we’ll need to change more than the ball. How about “This is the golf teacher Jack doesn’t want me to work with,” or “This is the out-of-shape body Jack wants me to have,” or even “This is the Verti-Cut lawn mower Jack doesn’t want to mow the fairways so low?”<\/p>\n

Or, how about we just let the game of golf evolve? This week’s British Open won’t be won with a score of 20-over par, like it was in the 1880s. Where will scores be in another 100 years? Who cares? It is still a game about outplaying your competitors, not what you shoot in relation to par. “RIP Distance”? I hope not. “RIP Clinging to the Past” would be much more welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How does today’s state-of-the-art golf ball stack up against a comparable ball from the mid-1980s? Let’s just say there’s a great distance between the two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16,98],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-balls","category-hot_topics"],"yoast_head":"\nA Quick Nine With 'The Ball Jack Wants You To Play' (Balls, Hot Topics) - The Sand Trap .com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thesandtrap.com\/b\/balls\/a_quick_nine_with_the_ball_jack_wants_you_to_play\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"A Quick Nine With 'The Ball Jack Wants You To Play' (Balls, Hot Topics) - The Sand Trap .com\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"How does today's state-of-the-art golf ball stack up against a comparable ball from the mid-1980s? 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