johnclayton1982

No, I get it. Its not hard to grasp what the market is. I understand shows with more viewers are more valuable than shows with less. My point is that the market doesn't always make the best decisions for (1) society or (2) for morality. Slaves were legal for a hundred years. Was that just "the market" ? Shouldn't we have just let those market forces play out? I mean, a business with slaves is Game of Thrones and a business without slaves is the Newsroom. So why should we interfere? An enterprise is way more valuable if it doesn't have to pay minimum wage, so under your theory, why does it exist? Of course you can force something like this. The civil rights act did exactly what Julie Inkster is proposing here. It forced people to treat minorities equal in business. Title IX forced it. Affirmative action forced it. You don't agree with forcing it. That doesn't mean its impossible. Do you have any idea how many people would have said this about blacks in 1955 while arguing the Civil Rights Act was un-necessary? Blacks were thought of as less productive, lazy, etc... Now, 60 years later, that seems silly. But it took us *forcing people* to hire these "less productive" black workers in order to change the opinion and the market and society. The problem with your statements is that the concept of "value" is a subjective one based on human prejudice. If we had a value machine that could perfectly calculate someone's value you'd be 100% right. But we don't. Racists and sexists don't calculate value correctly. Therefore, the market becomes skewed. You can't rely on human preference in every single decision because a whole lot of the time those human preferences are, in hindsight, awful. Inkster is saying that given the chance with more cash the LPGA could promote and become much more popular, but an artificial ceiling is there bc sponsors are allowed to lowball them (exactly the same argument as virtually every minority who wants the market interfered with). I don't agree with her, but her argument isn't crazy, and as a legend of golf she deserves the respect of everyone on this board IMO. The level of disrespect you've shown her is awful form, even if you disagree and the defense of "the market" is absolute drivel. Your last sentence makes me think you don't understand your own argument. The Kardashians are billionaires BECAUSE OF A STUPID MARKET. If you love the market, and they have a ton of demand, don't they - by your own reasoning - *deserve* to be billionaires?

Does anyone think there is value in getting your clock cleaned in championship flights? I don't play net tournaments, but not because I'm a low cap (I guess kinda, at a low single digit, but not like these +1s!) but I refuse to play handicapped flights. My background is in tennis and chess tournaments when I was younger and they were 1v1 sports with no handicap. If you were worse, you lost. If your better, then beat me. I don't totally understand this handicap idea, but I've never really used mine I don't think. Ever since the new USGA you can't turn in solo rounds rule my only handicap rounds are tourney rounds for the most part. I think over time you get better at playing in tournaments being up in the championship flight knowing that small mistakes doom you whereas if I'm a 15 I can hit a ball in the water and still place. I dunno. Over time, i think gross makes you a better tournament player regardless of skill. Or I'm just getting my clock cleaned 7-8 times a year to no purpose!

I'm one of those people who have one of those "little voices". Also, I think somewhere in this thread Inkster's actual comments changed from "more" to "equal". Those arn't even close to the same thing. I read the entire thread from the first page to the last. The "market" argument is absolute garbage. Anyone who makes that argument here must have been vehemently oppressed to the civil rights act, because the opponents there had the exact same arguments. "If we let black people stay in this hotel, other people won't want to. That's not us, that's just the market. That's just giving people what they want - segregated hotels. It has nothing to do with equality - we shouldn't force people to treat (insert race/gender/religion/whatever) the same economically because the market doesn't treat them the same economically." That argument is 1950/60s garbage. That same argument was used to try to defeat Title IX. Everyone against it said men's sports are more exciting and therefore "the market" should allow a university to have a $100 million male sports program and a $2 million women's program. That is basically what anyone in this thread who is arguing about the "market" is arguing. Sometimes "the market" is racist, sexist, and wrong. And it probably is in this case. The same sponsors pay a fraction to sponsor women over men. Should they be allowed to pay their female attorneys a fraction of what they pay their male attorneys because "the market" allows it? Of course not. Sometimes we have to *force* the market to do the right thing because years and years of stereotype and bias have ingrained prejudice so deep that capitalistic forces can't over come it - reading some of the responses in this thread made me throw up a bit in my mouth. Julie Inkster is better at golf than you could ever hope to be and while you don't have to agree with her she deserves your respect. She isn't proposing the LPGA send someone to Mars, she is proposing identical ideas to the civil rights act or Title IX, which isn't radical nor does it deserve ridicule. Nobody has discussed the part about most of the best female players going to play in Korea and desert the LPGA, which is fine - the market! - but is that fine for our daughters? I don't know. Isn't it worth 8% of the PGA money to keep the biggest female tour in the world here? Again, I don't know. But this conversation of "its the market morons duh" is ridiculous. That isn't how it works when we deal with a protected class (like gender). The market has proven itself time and time again to be hideous to minorities. All of that said, I agree with most of you on the excitement factor. The PGA is way more exciting than the LPGA. But I think that is largely irrelevant. I think the bigger question is if there is a social duty to be more equal in spite of market forces (the way we are with a ton of things like Title IX and the Civil Rights Act). I actually vote No - professional golf is elite and niche enough that it doesn't need broad discrimination protection, and Korea is stepping up. But don't act like "the market" isn't one of the most hideously discriminatory forces in the history of our country ("People won't watch integrated professional baseball, so we shouldn't let blacks in. That's the market.") and don't act like Inkster suggesting that a regime identical to that which exists in a ton of other areas be applied to the LPGA is somehow absurd. I agree it shouldn't be here, but I don't think Inkster is suggesting some radical, liberal, ridiculous thing. So I get to the same answer as you. But I couldn't scream louder my disagreement with your "its the market who cares if its misogynist/racist, the market rules" reasoning. Telling me watching men is more exciting is fine. Telling me that Julie Inkster is a nutjob because the market should always decide issues like this is ridiculous and borderline offensive given the history of this country.

The USA basketball team plays by international rules every Olympics and absolutely dominates. I guess the question I (and golfingdad) have is why is this so important to you? Don't you think its cooler to be able to hit a drive closer to DJ's distance (because you can use a super juiced ball at a .89 COR driver) than it is to be able to figure out what he would shoot on your home course? Bifurcation exists in literally every other sport I can think of. Even in tennis (which I've posted before about playing at a high level) there is minor bifurcation between high school, college and the professionals. I can't think of a single sport besides golf where there is no bifurcation. Going to a middle school basketball game having 20 shot clock violations a game because they play by the same rules as the NBA makes about as much sense as going to a local muni and watching guys hit 5 woods into par 4s because they can't play juiced balls or clubs. I don't understand why playing by the same rules as DJ is as fun as being able to play *more like* DJ.

100% correct. I'd make the ball (and the driver face) longer and hotter. Its more fun for everybody. Shots go flying into the woods more and those shots are fun. I have no issue with obsoleting old courses or the distances people drive the ball. My argument basically boiled down to the fact that science and golf have intersected in a way that makes massive hitters the norm (and not the unique, like in Hogan/Nicklaus' day). Its the phenomenon of diminishing returns. A 4.4 40 running linebacker is incredibly fast, but doesn't seem or sound as fast than a 4.6 linebacker. But those two hundreths are probably more impressive than a 5.5 to a 5.0 at another level. Similarly, adding 10 yards when you hit it 330 is way harder / move impressive than when you hit it 250. But that doesn't come across on TV, just seems "long". Because of that, its like other sports where rather than tune in to see *how* people win we tune in to see who has executed the obviously correct game plan that week. Its less compelling, IMO. Apologies for pulling the thread off topic. I think the best comparison here is aluminum bats to wooden ones in college baseball to pro baseball. I don't know many prospects who can't make it in the majors because they can't adjust to a wooden bat. Its basically the same, the ball just goes shorter. I'd keep the PGA rules exactly as they are now (or similar) but push COR for casuals to like .89 and allow them to juice the balls a lot. It'd be more fun. There's a grey area in rules adjustment where the game looks identical (college basketball doesn't use 8 foot hoops, and I'm not advocating cutting foot wide holes) but becomes easier. We just disagree re: uniformity of rules mattering. I don't care that I can compare my 74 to DJ's 63. I've never heard a single person in my group or club or at my range discuss it. 95% don't even know what slope is. That said, I have no study, so I could be wrong that it is irrelevant to the vast majority of the golfing public. Anyway, my bad for steering it somewhere else - thought the question was more a "Whats wrong with the PGA Tour" in general question. I wouldn't change the ball. If anything I would juice it. I could care less if Merion or whatever is "obsolete". I want to be entertained.

All I'm saying is dialing back the ball is an insane reaction. It makes it less exciting. The PGA Tour should be getting people excited and into playing golf. We now have game golf and Loft 18 and all that. The PGA Tour needs to follow suit. If that takes music, people being allowed to cheer during swings, teams, trick holes, whatever, I am 110% for it. My view is probably not popular with more traditional golfers / golf fans, and there are obviously some things that wouldn't change (like Augusta), but you can at least tell the difference when two football teams play each other. My bet is that if I showed four PGA tour event clips nobody could tell what tournament was from what. That stinks. There was a cool course I played in New Hampshire once that had a par 3 directly up the side of a mountain. It was hard, but it was super fun. I'd like to see them take on stuff like that. Not dogleg left, dogleg right, straight, dogleg left, dogleg right, straight, etc... Anything but yet another parkland course where a bunch of white guys in Titleist hats compete to see who can be the most precise with a driver, a gap wedge, and a putter.

I actually totally agree with this. Us, as golf fans, see huge differences in Furyk hitting it 285 and somebody else hitting it 300 and Furyk having a funky swing, and ZJ being a wedge master and so forth. If the goal was to get die hard golf fans to watch the Tour, we'd be fine. But we'll watch regardless. Everyone else just sees a bunch of corporate guys who all look the same playing yet another tree-lined course trying to hit as many greens as possible and taking six minutes to line up putts. They know the best way to play the game, and trackman has given them unprecedented control over their ball. This means its really boring to non-hardcore fans. I don't expect anybody who posts on a golf forum to think its boring just like NBA nuts still loved the league from 2000-2009. But casuals were gone, because the game was "solved" - every team wanted an iso scorer and a back to the basket big. To casuals, all the games were the same - 20 second back down and a post move. That's the PGA Tour now. The professional rules need to be changed so that there is an incentive for players to choose different paths to success other than hit it as far as I can without risking a hazard and then try to hit the green. Note: this is why I think the rules should be bifurcated. Because what is good for us on Saturday can't possibly produce the most entertaining golf on Sunday. What do you think the goal of the PGA Tour should be?

We disagree on excitement. I see people do fist pumps all the time (Patrick Reed, for example). But its still not nearly as popular as the Tiger days. How should we judge the popularity of the PGA Tour if not for TV Ratings? My understanding of TV Ratings is that they allow for additional content in how they are measured, but I could be wrong about that. "Figured out" doesn't mean "perfected", it means "figured out". The best way to play has been figured out, as you wrote in your book. When that happens the Sport suffers significantly. Everyone is playing (relatively) the same way on Tour these days. That makes it very, very boring IMO. Amateurs get into the pro ranks in other sports all the time. Jonathan Simmons paid to try out for the Spurs and just signed a 3 year massive deal with the Orlando Magic. Football teams hold open competitions for punters and placekickers. A linebacker made the Ravens from off the street a few years ago, and then was cut and out of the league. It doesn't happen often, but it happens about as often as it happens in golf. I'm not sure where you got this - most sports (All?) have amateurs that break into the professional ranks for brief periods. And when they do, they learn to play by the professional rules. I'm not sure why that wouldn't work for golf.

No. I'm advocating rules changes so that the optimal way to play the game isn't figured out any more. I didn't know that writing more was considered bad here. I was making an argument that I think was correct. The ball doesn't matter. Its boring to watch the same guys play the same way every single week on courses that all look the same. Diversity in looks, approach, strategy and other factors is very interesting. The PGA Tour has none. You might think its not boring, but TV ratings sure think its boring.

Tiger Woods was interesting because he was different. If in 2000 there were 55 guys who played the game exactly like Tiger and were just as long as Tiger and understood what it took to shoot low scores like Tiger (i.e. iron approaches most important, than drives, etc...) Tiger may have won a lot, but he would have been boring. All the guys we remember as super amazing, super interesting, super memorable guys are almost uniformly the first great type of guy who has solved the sport. First great isolation scorer in a no-help-D-allowed NBA? Jordan. First great fast/ forechecker / finisher in a hockey game that allowed dump and chase? Gretzky. etc... etc... When there was one (Jordan) he was "incredible". When there were 15 (McGrady, Kobe, Iverson, Carter, Francis, Eddie Jones, etc...) because everyone knew it was the best way to play it was boring and we needed Jordan back. The issue isn't that Tiger is great and we miss him. The issue is that we now have 55 Tigers (i.e. guys who understand iron shots and then driver are most important), so its not interesting. Sure, Tiger was awesome, but "charisma" ? Go watch some youtubes of his interview from his prime. He was incredible, but "charisma" would be pretty far down the list of terms I'd use to describe him. He understood (whether consciously or not) how to best play golf from a scientific perspective. Combined with his talent, he dominated. If there were 100 guys who all knew distance and approach shots and GIR were king in 1999 he may have still dominated, but it would have been a whole lot less interesting. The rules have to change to make the Tour interesting again because everyone up there knows how to play golf the "best" (read: most high probability) way. Its exactly like the NBA with zone defense, the NFL with passing defense, hockey with forechecking, etc... If 23 teams in the league were still playing the Tampa 2, keeping everything in front of them, and winning super bowls 17-13 NFL TV ratings would still be in the toilet. So they changed the rules. They didn't change the rules when Gruden's Bucs did it, because it was only one team. When more than half the league switched to it, football started to suck. When the Pats dominated the mid-2000s with it and literally every single AFC playoff team played it one year (it was awful), the rules had to change (and they did). Once everyone starts doing it one way, it sucks to watch regardless of the personalities. Its not the ball. Its that, gradually, every single one of those guys is starting to play the game the same way, because its been figured out. It needs rules changes to become un-figured out in order to be interesting again. EDIT: The sport can self-correct. The entire league ran the west coast offense and it was generally considered unstoppable with the right personell until Labeu invented the zone blitz to beat it. You can't throw quick dump offs if a random lineman is dropping into coverage. Hard to imagine golf self-correcting though.

I read the thread, I think some of the "other sports" analogies are a bit off, because they have all made massive allowances for players getting bigger and stronger and faster. Sure, there is someone just as big playing defense on the other side, but all those sports have still recognized the need to change as "distance" (physical prowess) has changed. To say the hoop is still 10 feet and someone bigger and faster is playing defense is so simplistic as to be wrong. All of those sports have made massive rule changes at the professional level (but not the amateur) to "keep up" with what the modern professionals in those sports can accomplish. Most were done for either safety or to keep the game from becoming incredibly uniform and boring. Sports get solved, so will (has?) golf. Its more about that than the ball - its really, really, really boring to watch the PGA Tour these days compared to years past because you can simply do a lot more with a 200 yard shot than an 80 yard shot and you can do a lot more exciting things when there *haven't* been exhaustive scientific studies on how to best play the game. With trackman, LSW, Broadie, Strokes Gained (and, I guess, starting with Pelz to a certain extent) golf has made a massive transition out of unknown art and into known science. That's fine, but it is a heckuva lot less poetic and interesting to watch. In basketball, when the players go so quick and strong that nobody could stop the best isolation scorers in the league, they changed the illegal defense rules. Now, the ability to bring help means that if a team doesn't have an isolation scorer and two or three really good shooters they can't run boring, clear-out, one-guy offenses like Jordan and Iverson could run. The rule of verticality allows big defenders at the rim to play defense despite the fact that 6'2" guards can now dunk with two hands - that would have been impossible to stop under the rules Bird and Magic played under. The shot clock is 24 seconds and only resets to 14 so that defenses don't have to play D against those big strong guys very long - in college its 48. Ditto the NFL. As defensive backs to stronger and faster, the offenses couldn't keep up. Rules were changes to disallow contact and take away those advantages and scoring skyrocketed. Hockey made very similar changes as athletes got so big and strong that a single defensemen couldn't stop a forecheck alone, so the rules were changes so dump-and-chase wasn't the strategy used by literally every single team. Could you imagine a high school referee trying to interpret the NBA rule of verticality? Or trying to play with a 24 second shot clock? Could you imagine a 17 year old high school kid trying to cover somebody without being allowed to touch them even after they caught the ball, but required to stay with them step for step? Every single sport except one has different rules for the pros and the rest. I don't know about the ball part, but, IMO, golf should have three rules levels: pro, amateur, casual. Amateur can be like pro, but designed to be fast - OB like water, 2 mins lost balls not 5, 2 mins to hit putt when its your turn, etc... Something like that. And each event can choose its rules level. I have no idea why golf insists on having the "same rules" at every level, but it doesn't make any sense. Sports get solved, and golf is being solved. I would argue that this whole topic isn't correctly based. Its not that distance is getting longer randomly, its that professionals (And their advisors) have figured out how important distance is and are doing everything they can to maximize it - JUST like NBA teams realized about 1995 that Iso scorers were the most important type of player and NFL teams figured out a quarterback and two cornerbacks were under those rules. Its about information, not the ball. Millions of dollars are at stake - they'll figure out how to hit a beach ball 300 yards. The rules should change to make this un-solved because watching it is like watching paint dry. I can think of a few suggestions, but the issue isn't distance its information. If we took a time machine to 1960 and handed some aspiring tour pro a trackman, a copy of Broadie's work, some of the distance studies and LSW he'd become the best player the world, or at least one of them. That is the advantage. Knowledge of the most optimal way to play the game (smash it as far as possible that doesn't risk a hazard) is way bigger advantage than the ball. Now that everyone knows how to play golf optimally, its incredibly boring, just like the other sports when every team was trying to do the same thing. One team running the run-n-shoot is great. 15 doing it sucks. One guy dominating by being an isolation scorer and nobody else doing it is fantastic TV. 20 teams running isolation offenses is awful. One guy hitting it 300 yards (Nicklaus in his time) is awesome, half the tour doing it sucks. Its a time-tested pattern. Sports get solved. You un-solve them with rules changes, not equipment changes. Oh, some corporated-out whitebread guy hit a 310 yard drive, then a wedge to 9 feet, then slid a biridie putt by? Awesome. Tune in next week!

The issue, though, is the mental "aspect" of the game always looks backwards. Someone always "was" in the zone. Nobody is ever "going to be" in the zone. Whereas in 2000, Tiger Woods playing well at the British was probably a pretty likely outcome given his US Open. Nobody ever seems to be able to predict when a golfer will become mentally strong. Its always used as an excuse or a justification after the fact. Which is why its nonsense. You miss a ton of short chips and putts, and self-diagnose yourself with the yips. Its a storyline you've made up because you don't want to tell yourself you stink and chipping and putting. It removes it from your control and makes an inability to roll a 3 foot putt straight into some sort of uncontrollable bogeyman. This is how human beings cope with things that are outside of their control but about which they care very much - they make up nonsense narratives to try to explain them. Cavemen blamed thunder when their loved ones got sick. You blame the yips when you can't make a three footer. Both are equally true, and both excuse you without working to find the cause and fix the problem. One of my favorite things in golf is the difference between a wormburner hook with my 3 wood and a gorgeous, high, tight draw is pretty tiny at my swing speed. We are talking tiny degrees and very small increments of measurement. In the golf swing, the difference between a great shot and an awful one is pretty small compared to the differences in other sports. Golf is a unique game in that respect. As Sam Snead said to Ted Williams, "sure, Ted, hitting a baseball is hard, but we have to play our foul balls." There is no margin for error in golf. I saw a very good player at the Open at Chambers' Bay live literally cold top a fairway wood. Mental mistake? No, variance. You hit enough 3 woods, you'll top one. Some of us accept the fact that there is variance and that sometimes we hit bad shots no matter how good we are, and the only path to improvement we can actually control and get benefit from is to work on our golf swings and putting strokes. Others can't stand the fact that there are aspects of golf completely out of their control, so they call the chaos of golf the mental game so they can come up with theories to try to control it. Don't be the caveman yelling at the inexplicable thunder. Work on what you can control, which is the physical. Make your median shot better and all your shots will become better because they are all anchored by it. Or just skip all the work and read a few Rotella books. Either one. Above all else, to thine own self be true.

I think its kinda like Gary Player said. The more I practice the luckier I get. The more I practice the better my mental game gets. Locking seems silly. We're disagreeing about the role (or even, on a more basic level, the existence) of the mental game in golf over the internet. Its like the old joke. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and a phenomenal ball striker who shoots 85 because of his bad mental game are all in a race. Who wins? None of them, because they are all figments of your imagination.

Every single golfer has a probability distribution every single time they step up to the ball. This probability distribution narrows in band among more consistent players and widens among less consistent players, but it is a probability distribution. You are a band of potential results which get less and less likely in terms of proximity to the hole as you get closer and closer and less and less likely likely in terms of proximity to the hole as you get further away. You are about as likely to hit a driver from 400 yards away into the hole as you are to hit it 200 yards behind you. Its a bell curve, with your skill being at the median (the most often and likely outcome). Every time you swing, random factors influence that swing that happen too fast for you to control consciously, and a point on the probability distribution is hit. If you flip 100 coins in a row, you'll hit 5 heads in a row. If you hit 100 golf shots in a row, you'll hit 5 shots in a row that are on the "great" side of your probability distribution. Its variance. This is all an illusion because you are incapable of telling yourself the narrative that all you can do is move your median point of result better and better and accept you will hit shots worse and better than that median in relatively equal proportion. Hitting 5 below your standard in a row is like flipping 5 tails in a row. You don't like it, so you "need to work on your mental game". Golf is unique in this because we have nowhere to hide. We have no teammates. We don't even have hustling hard and being a backboard like tennis. We have "that shot sucked" or a nonsense narrative that preserves the players' ego. Most choose the second option. You arn't "in the zone" when you hit 10 greens as a 15 cap any more than you are "in the zone" when you flip 5 heads in a row. You just happened to hit a certain cluster of results that are atypical. Its not some amazing mental game phenomenon. Its chance. I don't need to "know about your game" or "watch you play" to know that you have a probability distribution clustered around your average shot like every other golfer and that sometimes you go above that and sometimes you go below that and then ascribe storylines to explain it when its really just variance around your ability. This is basically you: Caveman 1: Crops die. I didn't sacrifice goat yesterday. I sacrifice goat next year. Crops live. Caveman 2: Uh, they might have died because there was no water. Why don't we build an irrigation canal? Caveman 1: No, I didn't sacrifice goat. Crops die. I sacrifice goat. They live next year. Caveman 2: Uh, OK, but you should go work on your swing I mean water them.

Those folks who "experience it" are experiencing a physical swing breakdown that, generally due to putting in so much time and caring so much, their brains will not allow them to attribute to being really bad at the physical act of a golf swing. Golf is unique in this. In basketball, if you play a lot, you can hustle around and play D and rebound and generally be OK even if your mechanics in all facets of the game are poor. In Golf, you can work constantly and incredibly hard on your game and still stink. Our ego doesn't let us believe that, so it makes up a nonsense narrative about issues with the "mental game". As Bill Parcells said, your are what your record says you are. There are no asterisks. In golf, your game is what your scores say you are. You don't have a "weak mental game". You are bad and you are (likely) wasting a whole lot of practice time. Rather than say "I made a huge mistake with this physical approach, lets try something else, it sucks I wasted all that time" you get "its mental!"