Distance study in this month of Golf Digest

[sean_miller]

I think part of the problem with these discussions (other than the fact that people seem to get inexplicably emotional about this subject) is that true average drive isn't a terribly useful statistic for high handicap amateurs like me. For example, on Saturday I drove the ball pretty well for me and was playing a fairly open course. On the fifth hole, a 405 yd, pretty flat par 4, I had a 332 yard drive according to my playing partner's GPS (a once-a-season occurrence at most for me, and something I certainly could not do again on command). Unfortunately, it was my second shot, after the first tee shot snap-hooked into the woods OOB on the left. Granted, I'm using an artificially small sample here--but the true average of the two is 161, I suppose, but that's not the yardage I or anyone else would use in planning how to play a hole with their driver. For a pro golfer, where the standard deviation of drives is presumably much lower because of the repeatable swing, it's a lot more useful. For someone like me, who happens to be rather large physically (6'6", 235) and reasonably athletic, and so can put the ball out there reasonable distance unless there's a disaster (which happens all too often at my handicap) it's fairly meaningless, as the disasters pull the mathematical average far below the distance-I-plan-to-hit-it-based-on-range-practice-and-my-recollection-of-non-blow-up drives "average," which is what everyone has in mind when they're standing on the tee box trying to decide where to aim and what club to pull.

Sports is the only place where outliers are included in the average. If you're faced with an approach to an island green, with the flag at 161 yards, clearly you gotta pull the driver - your 161 yard club. LOL