If you don't like your lie, you could take full relief, go back
to the middle of the ferrway, take a one stroke penalty, and now
you go back thirty yards where everyone's hitting a seven iron. Now you're hitting
a four iron and a shot penalty, simple casual water. Hit it out
of the water, don't like it, go middle of the faraway and go
back. Because I believe that relief should be relief. I'll give you an
example. I'm playing in the Alberta Open and on the ninth holt, I
hit my drive left and I was in grass that was this high, but
there were red steaks that were going through this grass, so it was a
lateral hazard. I took relieve and I dropped my ball and I'm still in
grass that's twelve inches tall. The reason that we go back thirty yards is
because when you go back thirty yards, nobody cares about where you drop the
ball. You're back there three clubs fard. Nobody cares when you're back there.
So we were getting around the golf course in a pro am format,
two pros, two ameters, and we were getting around in three hours and
forty five minutes. Hi, this is Christopher Payne from Castle Creek, New
York, and I play at a Ford Hill Country Club. This is Golf
Smarter number nine four. The rules and equipment need to be different for amateurs.
With the always thought provoking John Erics. This is Golf Smarter, sharing
stories, tips and insights from great golf minds to help you lower your score
and raise your golf IQ. Here's your host, Fred Green. Welcome back
to the Golf Smarter podcast. John. It's great to be back. It's
great to have you back here. So much fun to have on the show
because you're never short of an opinion. That's right. I have lots of
opinions, right, It's abouts I have and the more they make sense to
you, Yeah, that's right. But your opinions are based on what you
feel is just common sense. Common sense. Yeah, common sense. That
My whole life is just based upon common sense. It doesn't make common sense.
I don't do it. Do you follow the news or do you just
follow the golf channel and then you look at it going That doesn't make sense.
I don't follow the golf channel. I mean, as far as I'm
concerned, golf is pretty much a different game as much as baseball and softball
would be different. So it'd be like I grew up playing baseball and everybody's
playing softball now or something. You know. So the game that I played
growing up, with high spinning ball, smaller heads, tighter courses, small
greens, it's quite different than what's going on now. So you know,
that's what I learned and geared myself to as I was playing as a professional.
You had to hit the ball straight, absolutely straight. If you couldn't
hit the ball straight, you weren't going to make cuts and you weren't going
to have a career. It was just that simple. It wasn't about how
far you hit. It was about hitting it a reasonable distance. You needed
to hit it. You needed to hit the ball two hundred and thirty yards
off the tee. If you never missed a faraway and you hit it two
thirty year in the game, you know, you could be you could have
a career, you could make you know, many millions of dollars playing golf.
But that's all gone now. So the distance thing is, you know,
they've changed the game to where there's much more emphasis on distance at the
pro level. The courses are much longer. As we know about you know,
what a championship course, US Open course was sixty sixty nine hundred when
I was growing up, and now it's what seventy four seventy three seventy four
hundred yards. The ball is going fifteen percent farther, So common sense would
tell me that the golf courses would need to be fifteen percent longer. So
if you took a sixty nine hundred yard course and made that fifteen percent longer,
it would be just under eight thousand yards. So until the courses are
eight thousand yards, then they'll get my attention again, because I believe that
golf should be a test of the entire skill set across the club. So
you should have to hit long irons into par fours three or four times around.
That's part of the game. Yeah, and we don't see that anymore.
I mean, if I see the pros hitting wedges into every part four,
even the longest par fours, that's a different game, right. Any
game or any sport is based upon the parameters of the field and the equipment.
So like a basketball court, you know, I don't know how many
feet it is, you'd probably know, but I mean, they haven't changed
the size of the court right, since, yeah, football fields one hundred
yards, if they made the football field one hundred and fifty yards, well
it would change the game significantly, right, yes it would. Yeah.
So in golf, for some reason, the powers that be USGA, R
and A, you know, they've decided to allow this to happen for whatever
reason. But what it's done is it's changed the game. Just like if
you played chess and then you said, okay, well the ponds can now
move like rooks going to change the the characteristics of the of the equipment or
the pieces, right, So it's it's changed. They've changed. Uh,
they've changed the golf ball significantly. The golf ball. When I was playing
the old rubber ballotta balls, they were very high spinning balls, and if
you were a good player, you would play the spinniest ball you could possibly
get, which was usually a titleist made a very spinny ball. Most people
played titleists then. And the reason that you wanted to spin as a good
player is because you could you could shape and curve the ball more. And
the more you could shape and curve it, the more you could access certain
pin placements and that sort of thing. The pin was front left, I
could bring it in way from the right and I could have it hit in
the middle of the green and spin it back to that that front left pin
placement, where now it's it's a little bit more of a straight shot.
You know, you have to take everything kind of straight. You can.
The modern ball, you can. You can curve it. You can see
it with the flight tracers the ball. You can curve it up to the
apex and then it falls pretty much straight down. But when we were playing
the blott Is, we could curve it to the apex and continue to curve.
It was still curving as it would come into the green, so it'd
hit and skip left or right or whatever. And you could even do that,
you know, into the short irons and even little wedges and stuff.
You could really kind of curve them in and that sort of thing. So
that to me is more interesting, you know, as a player at a
ball striker, to learn how to shape the ball and to use that to
your advantage to navigate, you know, a narrow golf course with smaller greens
and well bunkered and that sort of thing. So it's quite it's quite different
now than it was. So they changed the ball, they've changed the clubs.
They've changed the shoes, the connection to the ground. We had steel
spikes. One of the interesting things, I mean, I find this fascinating.
Steel spike are still legal with the USGA. Does anybody wear them?
If you play in the US Open, you can wear steel spikes. Yeah,
on the PGA Tour, there's still a lot of guys using steel spikes
out there. From what I understand, they're legal on the PGA Tour.
What's strange is that ninety nine percent of the golf courses that you play don't
allow steel spikes. They're they're not legal at the golf course. It's like
a local orld, no steel spikes. So think of going to the bowling
alley and you show up with bowling shoes and they say, yeah, we
don't really allow bowling shoes in the bowling alley because you know, they kind
of scuff up the you know, the the lanes, and our maintenance guys
have to come and clean extra hours. And yes, so you know,
you just got to wear like regular tennis shoes and can't wear bowling shoes in
the bowling alley. I mean that that's absurd to me. It is that
I can't go out and play with steel spikes on you know, the majority
of golf course right because I need that connection as a dynamic ball striker myself.
I mean, I need a great connection to the ground. And the
flatter the golf swing is. The old gold golf swings were very flat,
more around the body, and that creates more lateral horizontal tensions in the ground.
So you need the steel spikes. The more upright swings, it's more
up and down. Your weight's going more up and down. The flatter swing,
the feed are wanting to go more like this because you're you're turning this
way and your feet are resisting the pressures this way. So you really need
steel spikes to grip. So I don't think it's a coincidence that golf swings
have become more upright as the connection to the grounds isn't what it used to
be with this plastic spike. So so they've changed the spikes, they've changed
the clubs. I mean, the you know, obviously the heads on a
driver are you know, they're like toasters or frying pans are huge. When
we were playing, they were, well, i've got a driver right here,
I just pick this beauty up here, Okay, this is a nineteen
I think, you know, fifty late fifties Ben Hogan Precision per Simon driver
and this sits at very flat at about fifty degrees the li angle. Modern
drivers are up over sixty sixty three degrees, you know, they're very like
upright like this. So this club is, you know, very flat.
And the face on this club is three inches wide and two inches high or
inch and a half maximum would be two inches. The deep face drivers would
be two inches, so this would be a little over an inch and a
half and three inches wide. And that's the surface. And that was just
standard for golf clubs all the way till about the early nineties. So the
question is should that have been a parameter of the game, Like this is
a golf club. These are the parameters in the Major League Baseball. You
couldn't just show up with a with a bath that's this big around, right,
They'd say, you know, you can't use that, right, I
mean, that's a whiffleball bat, big. I mean, baseball has parameters.
They're still using wood, you know in baseball at the pro level.
Yeah, And and nobody's up in arms about that, you know, is
that our archaic game. It's outdated. Blah blah blah. If if they
had if they came in with a titanium bat and it was really thick and
big like this a baseball, and they say, oh, it's dangerous to
the pictures. Well, we need to move the pictures mound back now,
right, they can say, well, let's move it back. Okay,
Well with the pictures mound back. Now, we got to make the bases
bigger. So we make because they just did last year. They made the
bases bigger. They made it longer. Oh no, no, no,
not from base to base, but they made each base three three inches larger.
Oh okay, all right, so it's easier to steal bases. Yeah.
Interesting. So and then I've talked with baseball people and they're saying that
the baseball is going six feet farther than it used to, but like thirty
years ago, six feet farther, So there's more more home runs. Plus
pictures are generally pictures are throwing a lot harder than they did thirty years ago,
so you're going to get more reaction off the bat. Yeah, so
right, that makes sense. But in golf, you know, the golf
ball is going you know, fifty yards farther, so as compared with six
feet you know, to fifty yards, so you know, but let's also
wait a minute. But on a baseball field, a home run is a
wedge, I mean, it's not that far when it comes. When you're
talking about golf, you know, so things are relative here. Listen,
we're going to take a quick time out. Well, we'll be back in
one minute. We'll continue this conversation at Controversy with John Ericson. Okay,
I'm sorry I interrupted you your thought on baseball going six feet farther, but
a golf ball has to go much for it is going much farther. Yeah,
the golf ball is going much farther. Percentage wise, I'm hearing it's
about fifteen percent farther. So in a baseball I'm not sure how far is
a home run fence anywhere from three hundred to close to four hundred feet.
Yeah, so it's even at three hundred feet, so fifteen fifteen percent of
that would be forty five feet forty five feet. Yeah, and they're talking
it's gone six feet farther, not forty five feet farther, right, See
the difference, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, But so all these
numbers that you're talking about, and the rules and you know, the spikes,
all that stuff that is all directed at point oh one percent of golfers,
the most elite golfers in the world, and there's ninety nine point nine
to eight of the rest of us playing that aren't dealing. We can't deal
with that, but want to go out and play and want to enjoy it.
I agree. I don't think there should be these kind of restrictions on
the eminateur golfers at all. I mean, just like, so you're a
bifurcation fan, yeah, absolutely, yeah. I mean just like baseball.
I mean, how many people play recreational baseball mostly softball, right, like
the corporate league or that sort of thing. You know, you play softball,
right, you know, and it's a similar game. It's if you
were in the stands. You took someone from a foreign country that didn't know
our culture and you put them in the stands and they were to watch a
baseball game in a softball game, they probably think it was the same game,
right, you know, until you narrow it in and say, well,
the ball is different, and the bats different, the gloves are different,
and the bases are all different. There's no mound, and you know
it's and then they start. Baseball is very simple until you try to explain
it. Yeah, so it's a game, and games are limited by the
by the parameters, and that's what makes them interesting. Chess is interesting because
the ponds can only do you know, what they do, and the rooks
and everything, they're limited. The pieces are limited. That's what makes it
interesting. And I view golf the same way. You know that it's it's
the restrictions that make the game interesting to me. So do you think that
amateurs and recreational players because you know, we could be talking about major league
level or guys on the tour versus his club champions who can be scratch golfers,
but they're still not even close to being able to compete on a PGA
level. Yeah, that's right. But what the pro Tour does is it
it's kind of a it sets the bar. It sets an example. Like
like, why when somebody goes out to a golf course you see amateurs in
their back playing the championship T's right, why are they doing that? I
had no idea Because they want to play where the pros play. You know,
they want to see what it's like to be you know, the pros
play. You know, they want to do what the pros. The pros
do because right and they have to pull out a hybrid or a fairway wood
for their second shot, where the pros are hitting a nine iron. Yeah,
I'll give you an example when when I was growing up as a kid,
so let's say in the nineteen and seventies. I was born in sixty
four, so my dad took me out, say nineteen seventy four, when
I'm ten years old. Nice, and my dad was a club champion at
the course. You know, okay, okay, scratch player. Scratch used
to mean that your average was that you would shoot para that was average,
like if it was par seventy two. His stroke average was seventy two.
He was a scratch player. The handicaps this was crazy, now, but
that was you know, it was like ten rounds. You'd throw one or
two rounds out. You take those eight rounds and then average those and then
that was your handicap. It was very simple. Yeah, but my dad
was not a particularly long hitter. He hit the ball about two hundred and
thirty two hundred and thirty five yards off the tee and we would go out
and watch the LA Open or and this is what the old balls, right,
we're talking about with the with the persimmon woods and the old balls.
And my dad would like, we'd go out and watch someone like Tom Kite
or someone like that. And my dad was like, Wow, I hit
the ball about the same distance tom Kite does, you know. So in
other words, my dad could actually relate to the distance that the pros were
hitting. And he thought, well, you know, if I sharpen up
my short game and get a little better, you know, at this,
and that I could maybe play the pro tour, Like I could maybe try
and qualify for the LA Open and as an amateur and get in and play
in the tournament or something and actually compete against these guys. That's not really
realistic for most people now when they see somebody hitting the ball three hundred and
fifty yards, it's just there's such a disconnect. It's a huge disconnect.
But in the old game, you know, the average up all the way
in through the nineteen eighties, the average distance that a tour player hit it
was was I think two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty three yards,
and it went to two hundred and fifty six yards I think by the end
of the eighties, before the game really changed with the modern clubs and everything.
The longest hitter on the PGA Tour in the early eighties, I think
it was in nineteen eighty two John McComish, who I knew, was a
player, and he was the longest hitter and he was averaging two hundred and
seventy two yards. I think to seventy two is the longest hitter. Wow.
Wow, And now that would be the shortest hitter on the PGA Tour.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. R So the courses have changed, and
you have all these beautiful, amazing golf courses that are sixty six, sixty
seven, sixty eight hundred yards. I mean Pebble Beach was sixty seven hundred
yards sixty eight hundred yards for many many years until they've changed it. So
to have to lengthen these classic courses, you know, the people will say,
well, it's easy to just you know, lengthen the courses move the
te's back, but some courses can't do that because they're only on one hundred
and it's real estate. It's limited. Yeah, Look, at the problems
they had at Augusta. They had to purchase land on thirteen from the you
know, the golf course next door, move the tee back or whatever.
But there's there's another thing that people aren't understanding and and it has to do
with in the old game, we were shaping the ball off the tee to
fit the ball into these farawores, like curving the ball. So if you
move the ball, if you move the tees back fifty yards, I can't
shape the ball around the corner. I have to hit a straight shot out
to the corner. But if the teas were up, I could kind of
sneak it around the corner, like I could turn and curve the ball and
draw it around the corner. I noticed this when Brad Hughes and I,
you know, played Olympic Club together a few years ago and we said,
well, look, we were playing for Cimon and Blades out there, and
we said, let's just play it at sixty eight hundred. So we just
played the course from where it used to be, and we were noticing,
you know, how beautiful it was set up to where you could sneak the
ball around these corners, you know, drawing and fading it off, the
team working, and everything was about working and shaping the ball at the Olympic
Club. But then we'd look back and we'd see some tea box like one
hundred yards back there. So what were you playing from the white teas?
Yeah, so we would go back there and it's like, Okay, with
a modern driver, you can't curve it around this corner. I mean you're
gonna have to hit a straight shot out to that corner, but up over
the top. But you can't get it around the corner by shaping the ball.
So and to me, that makes the game less interesting because I like
shaping the ball. That's what it is exciting about golf is to learn.
First you learn how to hit the ball straight, and then you learn how
to curve the ball and shape the ball not only off the tee but into
the greens. And then dealing with the different trajectories of the shots, like
if we take the if we take the Masters, for example, everybody knows
the famous back nine. Okay, so ten and eleven used to be long
irons into those holes. You're coming in with a low trajectory shot. That's
why there's no bunkers in front of the green it was meant to be.
You could skip the ball onto the green. You could land it short or
on the front of the green. And the greens are fair narrow, but
they're deep, okay, they're and they're designed that way to accept a low
trajectory shot into the green. Now, if you take fifteen, thirteen and
fifteen the par fives, those greens are wide, but they're very shallow and
they're protected in the front with water, right, so the same you're coming
in with again with a low trajectory shot because they're both reachable in two.
But it's much more exciting as a par five when a guy's hitting a two
iron in and the things coming in there, you know, blazing in there
with a low trajectory. Can't he stop it on the green? You know,
coming in low and if it doesn't, it can skip over the green.
And on the fifteen, I think there's water over the greening and up
over there. So those would be par fives because they were they offered a
risk and reward. You're coming in with a low trajectory, very scary shot
to be hitting a two iron into a green with water in the front.
That and the green is very shallow and the ball's coming in low. I
mean when I I would watch that tournament as a kid, I felt kind
of nervous, you know. I remember watching Sevy and maybe in nineteen eighty
six or something, and he was coming in. He's playing with Tom Watson,
and they're coming in with these two iron one iron, you know,
coming into these greens. And now when they're hitting, you know, I
remember seeing Phil Nicholson, the kid eight irony in you know, so the
ball's coming in high and it just lands on the green and stops on ten
and eleven. They come in with short irons now, so they're just coming
in with short irons, and I actually saw guys back in the ball up
on the green like it would hit on number ten. They could spin the
ball back. That never ever happened in the past. They were always coming
in with the longer irons, unless on ten they could really cut that again,
curving the ball around that corner with a persimmon driver and a blot of
ball, get it to come down the left side down that hill, and
they can maybe come in with like a five or six iron. You know,
then you had a big advantage. So all that strategy and the shaping
and the trajectory and the curving that it's not. It's not that it doesn't
exist now, it's just not as much like not it was much more about
curving and shaping the ball. So that part of the game has changed dramatically,
made it really a different game. Yeah. Well it also is the
design, the art, what the architect did. But we're gonna talk about
that more. But I want to take another quick time out. We'll right
back, right, So, when you were talking about these par fives that
that are, you know, the second shot is going to be a two
iron, a three iron. It's gonna be low and coming into a green
that's not deep, so you've got to land it soft. It's really the
architect saying this is going to be a three club. You know, par
five. You're not going to be able to get there in two because you're
gonna miss, right. Is that is that the architect involved in this?
Yeah, that's the that's really the whole thing of the golf course. Right.
You have this common sense again that if it's one shot to the green
in two pots, that's a par three. Two shots, it's a par
four three shots, it's a par five, right, the par fives would
A good par five usually would maybe tempt you to go for the green in
two, so there might be water fully protected in the front. Right.
A bad design would be a par four where you would have to come in
with a long iron, but it were fully protected in the front by bunkers
or water in the green with shallow and we used to call that kind of
like a Mickey mousehole. You know, it's just like this bad design.
You know, it's not fair because a good golf course should be playable under
most any conditions. You know, whether it's in the afternoon, in the
summer and it gets dried out, if the greens get firm and you can't
hold the ball on the green, if you're coming in with a long eye
and you simply can't hold the ball on the green because it's coming in with
a low trajectory, and then you've got some kind of death bunker over the
backside of the green or something. I mean, it's just an unplayable hole.
It's not fair, right, So the great golf courses were were designed
to be able to be played under wet and Soggi conditions and firm and heart
A perfect example would be Cypress Point. I mean, I know not many
people have played there, but I've had the fortune to have played Cypressmen many
times because my sponsors or members out there, so I got to play out
there. In fact, I played there recently, and it's just a fantastic
golf course because Cypress Point can play very difficult when it's soggy and wet,
and also when it's when it's hard and firm, but it's always there.
If you hit a good shot, you get rewarded. You hit a bad
shot, you get punished, and that's best golf should be. I'll give
you an example when I when I went on the Canadian Tour in nineteen ninety
one shot seventeen under there. I was never on a par five into the
whole week, not because I was a short hitter. I was a little
longer than average. I was probably in the seventieth percentile of distance you know,
of the tour players, probably seventy seventy five percentile, never on a
par five and two the whole week. But shooting seventeen under, every one
of those birdies that I made was a one putt green. I mean I
had to earn it. I had to earn those birdies. When I see
the pros hitting mid iron into a par five and two putting for birdie,
it's not a birdie I mean in my mind, because they're hitting the ball
on the green and two shots with a mid iron. That's a part four.
It's a part four. So the tour is basically playing par sixty eights
every week relative to when I was playing. Because if you're hitting the ball
on the green in two with the mid iron, that's a part four.
I'm sorry, it's a par four. It's a par sixty eight. So
when I see sixty five, to me, that's sixty nine when I was
playing. You know, you see all these low scores. Oh you know,
someone shots sixty four, it's like, well, they're playing a par
sixty eight. That's like a part that's a I mean, they're playing par
sixty eight, so they're four under par. That's like me shooting a sixty
eight on a par seventy two when I was playing. So when you were
playing versus today, when you're talking about these guys hitting the ball three hundred
and fifty yards off the tee, are the players a lot younger today than
they were then? You can see a lot of guys coming up in their
twenties, and just last week an amateur one on the tour for the first
time forever. I was really happy to see that. Yeah, that was
awesome, and then that he said, yeah, I'm not going to play
next week. I want to go back home, right, And it's very
exciting to have an amateur win. But you're seeing more more and more players
in their early twenties, which when you were playing, did that exist?
Were there a lot of young players like that coming out of college? And
well, yeah, there's there were always hot shots coming out of college that
would come out and do well right away. I mean Phil Nicholson did really
well right out of college. Tiger right right, Okay, So you know
it's like saying when you talk about basketball, it's like, oh, Michael
Jordan did well. Yeah, so he's the unicorn, you know, like
he's the anomaly. It's not the rule. But what I liked about the
old game better and I think it's it's it should be, you know,
true, is that you could develop experience. Right, So when you were
in your forties, you know, it's like, hey, you know,
you've been playing these tournaments for twenty years. Right, So if you're playing
four rounds and a practice round in a pro am, you're playing that course
six times a year right over the course of twenty years. So you're playing
someone's got one hundred and twenty rounds on this course. And the guy's you
know, forty years old, he's and he's play he's played this course one
hundred and twenty times, and I'm showing up there for the first time.
There's an equalizer there, right. Maybe the guy doesn't hit it quite as
far as as he used to, but he's got all the local knowledge.
He knows where to hit and how to play the course. And that enabled
the older players to still be you know, competitive against the young guys because
they could have experience on their side, you know, of knowing the golf
course. And the other thing too, because the golf ball going a percentage
farther it actually it actually hurts the short hitters even more because the longer guys
are picking they're hitting it even farther percentage wise. Right. So a guy
who hit let's just say you hit a ball two hundred yards and you add
you know, fifteen percent to that, so you're picking up thirty yards,
right, but if you hit it three h yards, you're picking up forty
five yards. So the gap is just bigger and bigger and bigger. The
longer the ball goes and all this, the gap it just gets bigger and
bigger and bigger. But back when I was playing, you know, the
short hitters hit it to thirty. The longest hitters hit it to seventy.
You know, but your average guy was too fifty. So if you were
a short hitter, you were only twenty yards behind the average tour player.
So if you hit every faraway, you're a guy like Corey Paven was a
guy that just the guy just never missed a faraway. I mean I played
with Corey many times. I don't ever remember him just you know, mapping
one into another faraway or something. I mean, if he was in,
if he missed a ferry, it was just he was off by a yard
ors you know, it was just trickled into the rough or something. But
I can't ever remember him ever even missing a Faraohy but he only hit the
ball about two hundred and twenty five thirty yards with a driver. But when
I was a freshman in college, he was a senior. I was playing
number one man at Fresleent State as a freshman, and he was number one
man at UCLA, So we got paired together a lot. Every time we
got paired with UCLA, I was playing with Corey Paven and you know,
it was it was incredible to see how good he would play. He would
shoot. I remember him shooting sixty six at Stanford Course, hitting the ball
two hundred and twenty five yards off the t shot sixty six out there,
and that was a long, hard course, you know, back then.
And he won seven college tournaments that year. He was Collegiate Player of the
Year. And he was a guy hitting it two hundred and twenty five to
two hundred and thirty yards off the tee and there were guys that were hitting
it to seventy. You know, Duffy Waldorf at UCLA was really long at
the time. Davis Love, you know, I played against in the sun
Ball and you know, incredibly long hitter. But Corey Paven would beat all
these guys. So there's something you know, beautiful about that. Actually.
You know, on the PGA Tour, you had Tom Kite winning a US
Open, your Cheechi Rodriguez. You had guys that didn't the real game.
Even Lee Trevina wasn't a real long hitter, you know, relative to some
of these other guys. So if you hit it short and straight, you
could compete against someone that was long and wild with a high spinning ball.
The longer hitters had trouble keeping the ball in play because the ball spun so
much more so if they missed it a little bit, they were off in
the trees. I mean, you hit a ball out of bounds, or
you make a double bogie once or twice around because you're hitting it long,
you don't need you're not gonna want to hit it that long. You know
you're going to try and rein it back and get it in the ferryway.
And so it kind of kept the whole kept all the horses kind of a
lot closer at the finish. You know, everything was a lot kind of
closer in there because the long hitters weren't all that great necessarily, and the
short hitters that were in the ferry all the time kind of had an advantage.
So I think that was a thing that made golf more of an equal
opportunity for people. And I think that's a good thing. If you if
you're at if you were small and petite and you know, you only weigh
one hundred and thirty five pounds or something. But if you could just laser
that thing down there, you could make a career out of golf. And
I think that's a good thing, you know. And now it's everyone kind
of looks like, you know, they're like a super athletes out they're lying
by everyone's you know, you know, fit and just all that sort of
thing. You don't see the you know, back in the seventies you had
guys with big beer bellies out there, and you know, Bob Murphy and
Craig Stadler and Roger Malty. They look like they'd be cutting the grass next
door in your in your neighborhood. You know, you could, you know,
you could sit there and relate to these guys. You know, it's
like the look, it looks like he looks like my neighbor at he's out
there. I think because I guess ultimately golf was a game, right,
a game, and it's now become more of a sport. I mean,
you wouldn't find the difference, well, there is a difference. You wouldn't
consider chess to be a sport right, it's a game. It's a game.
Monopoly is a game? It does. Does the sports require a ball?
I think? I mean, would you consider croquet a sport? Probably
to those who are serious about it? How about how about pool shooting?
Pool, billiards? Any kind of billiards game? Is that a sport?
It might be on the sports channel, but it's not. It doesn't take
any physical characteristic. You don't have to be big and strong or whatever.
You just be able to need to be tall enough to get up and over
to you. You know, it takes an eye, it's but it's coordination,
it's you know, I mean an eye and steadiness. I mean there
are elements to it. Is is archery a sport or is it a game?
Right? You could debate this for yeah, you could. You could
debate these things. But my point really is that golf was I think more
on the game side where it didn't require any specific physical characteristics. Like if
you're a horse jockey, I mean you can't weigh three hundred pounds right,
right, I mean it takes us if you're a basketball player and he pretty
much gotta be six or four minimum, right, or you know, unless
you're stuff or something but I mean Steph Curry six. I mean, it's
not like, yeah, he's a short guy, right, he looks teeny
out there at So the beauty of golf is that, you know, you
had a guy like Cheechi Rodriguez it was probably what five six weighed one hundred
and twenty five pounds or something out there, you know, and then you
would have a guy like, you know, George bar there was six six
and weigh you know, two hundred and eighty pounds or something. You know,
you could have these guys competing against each other, and chee Chi Rodriguez
want a lot more tournaments than George Barre. Ever, did you know people
go watch George Barre because he hit the ball. You could hit a persimmon
driver and a lot of ball three hundred yards and people were just that was
just amazing, you know. But it was fun to watch. But he
didn't you know, he wasn't in the winter circle very often, right,
But I think that was a good thing for golf. You could pretty much
you could be tall and thin like George Archer. You could be short and
fat like Roger Malty. You know, you could be any any You could
be anything, really, and be out there and now it's not as much
that way. Everybody looks pretty fit and they really turned it into a sport,
which I'm not saying that that competition is right. I mean, it's
all about the competition. You got to you know, play up to the
competition and if they're going to be in top physical shape for the stamina,
for the you know, the mental game and everything else that goes with that,
yeah, you have you have to compete that way. Let's take another
time out. We'll bred back the guys that you played with in college,
that stuck around the tour and that you played with early in your career as
well. They transitioned into new gear, right, they had to make that
transition. Yeah, some did and some didn't as well. I mean I
know some of the guys didn't transition very well. Really yeah yeah, like
like what they just flesh that out for me because I don't know where to
go with that, but yeah, well I think you know some players,
well I'll take for instance, Bradley Hughes. I don't know, say,
if you had Bradley on your show, no, okay, should I yeah
you should. So Bradley won the Australian Masters twice played on the President's Cup.
He he's a good friend of mine and he was telling me that I
think it was nineteen ninety seven, ninety six, ninety seven. There was
a stat called total driving, which was a combination of distance and accuracy.
And he led the PGA too, was number one for two years on the
on the PGA tour. And then they changed the clubs came out with a
they changed the ball took a big jump, and the frying pan, big
headed drivers got bigger and all this stuff, and he just stuck with the
same you know, equipment, and all of a sudden, all these guys
just passed them up, you know, just all this just so it wasn't
really a matter of skill. It was just the equipment changed, right.
I mean, if you look at Tiger, I mean, he was by
far the longest hitter when he first came out. I mean, it was
he just had a huge advantage. But that was that was the topic of
conversation. Wow, look at how far he's hitting the ball. And then
everybody else kind of figured things out and pretty soon he's just another guy out
there, right, I mean, he became just a not average, a
little longer than average, but there were plenty of guys that are hitting it
as far as he was, if not farther, you know, so he
kind of lost his advantage. I mean, the technology, if you homogenize
something, it's it's it brings everything kind of closer together. Right, So
if you give the high tech equipment to people that allows certain players based upon
their swings and their swing speeds, there's a trampoline effect that comes in off
the face that shoots the ball out farther, this kind of thing. But
the longer hitters tend to get a little more trampoline effect coming off off the
club face than somebody the shorter. So the shorter hitters actually get punished with
some of this stuff. Right. So my point being that if you had
a guy that was a shorter hitter, even giving him the tech, the
new technology, it's not necessarily helping him as much because he's he's he's picking
up distance, but not as much much as the longer hitters are. Right
when you're talking about equipment some people transitioning, I think some of the shorter
hitters didn't transition well because equipment wasn't it was helping them relative to what they
used to be, but not relative to their competition, because it's competition now
they're hitting it even farther, right, So it's just like if everybody's hitting
the ball ten percent farther, well, the shorter hitter is he's not getting
as much yardage off his ten percent as a guy who's hitting it much farther.
He's getting his ten percents bigger. Ten percent of three hundred is a
bigger number than ten percent of two fifty, right, ten percent of two
fifty twenty five yards three hundred yard guys now hitting at three three thirty,
So he's actually picking up another five yards from the guy. So it getting
back to what you were saying that your average golfer like with a new ball,
you when we talk about that, you know this this rolling back the
ball, I'm totally against that, really absolutely against it. I'm I think
it's a terrible, a terrible thing to take that away. Maybe at the
pro level, fine, but for the amateurs, what are they doing.
Nobody wants to hit the ball shorter, that's crazy, So why not have
a tour ball? You know, but if they really wanted to solve the
problem, they're not looking at the ball. They got to look at the
driver. That's the problem, the problem. It's not the golf ball,
it's the driver. If you have the longer the club given the same weight,
you're going to hit it farther. If at the club's longer. If
my driver's eleven ounces, if it's forty four inches and it's eleven ounces compared
with forty six inches at eleven ounces, I'm going to hit the forty six
inch driver longer. Because it's just like like a like a record going around
on a record player. You know, you watch the inside's going like this,
but the outside's really moving faster. Right. The RPMs are the same,
but the velocity of the outside edge is more than it is going around
like this spindle. Yeah, but if you have more control with that forty
four inch shaft versus a forty six Yeah, But when there's no trees on
the golf course and the fairways are you know, eighty yards wide, like
this last US Open at La Country Club, It's like, what was that?
I mean, you know, I played La Country Club when I was
a kid many times, and that was a fairly narrow course. But they
went in there and they cut down like thousands of trees out there, and
they turned it into like a Lynx kind of looking car. It's like,
what are they doing? You know that? That's I didn't even recognize the
golf course, Like what is this? And guys are hitting it all over
the place out there. You know. US Open used to be narrow and
thick grass and if you were just a little bit off, you were hitting
at it. You know, you grass anymore, you know they So it's
the USGA, it's an organization, it's their tournament. They can do what
they want. I'm not for me as a spectator playing the old game.
And I played in three US Amateurs, so you know, I didn't play
in the US Open, but I played in three US Amateurs, made the
quarterfinals and eighty three, so I took it pretty far into that got to
play in some of that grass. It was like this, and it was
really narrow and you had to hit it straight. And if you were in
that grass, you weren't thinking about getting it on the green. You were
just thinking about wedging it out and getting it back into the faraway. And
I have to decide do I want to kind of wedge it out down the
right side of the ferry so I can hit my little pit shot in to
that back left pin place when I wasn't making birdies from the rough. But
I remember seeing Rory McElroy when he won was it a Congressional maybe ten years
ago or whenever that was, And I remember him like hitting it in the
raw on Sunday and making two or three birdies the final round out of the
rough in the US Open. And because the rough wasn't that deep, and
I even took some pictures on it and put it on the advanced ball striking
side, it just showed like the rough was like this. And then I
had a picture at Tom Watson at seventeen and he chipped in, you know
the goose with this, you know this thick stuff. They change it for
some reason. The PG twur the usg They don't really want to see high
scores, you know, they don't like the US Open words. You know,
guys are shooting over par or anything like that, or par is a
good score in the US So they don't want that. They for marketing reasons
or whatever, they just like to see the lower numbers. I think it's
more exciting for the public or whatever. I played Congressional in the fall this
past fall. I could not believe my nephew is a member there. I
could not believe the rough. I was like, wow, this is punishing.
I bet it probably wasn't that punishing, and that us opens that I
saw, you know, birdies being made out of the roughs. I mean,
could you imagine making birdies out of the rough when you played there?
No? Probably not. No, I couldn't imagine hitting birdies there. I
think I got one. So the ball, Yeah, I don't think the
ball should be you know, rolled back. Not for the general public.
I think that the modern drivers are just fine. You know, for the
modern players. They want to hit, you know, because they're they're just
playing on the weekend and you know, they need a big head and you
know, long and light and you just they just want to smack it out
there and just be able to kind of play golf. And that's fine.
But for the but the pro tour, that's really what kind of sets the
example. And if you're really serious about it, if the pros were still
playing for Simon and blades and a blot of golf ball, I bet you
would see more people doing that at the amateur level, just because they'd like
to see what that's like, I want to play the pro game, you
know. Well, also you're going to have people, you know, they're
not going to be playing that equipment just when they get to the tour.
They have to like train on that equipment for years. Yeah. Yeah,
so they're going to play that to try to get there. And you're not
going to see a ten year old kid now Like I have a nephew whose
son is nine and obsessed with golf, Well, he's going to be playing
the most modern equipment. He's not going to be like, well, I'm
going to be training for the training for the PGA Tour for you know,
when I when I'm an adult, and so I need to play with lesser
equipment against my competition because he is competing already. Yeah, it doesn't It
doesn't make any sense at all. What needs, what I think needs to
happen is there should be a professional tour that is a persimon and blade tour.
You know, that's just it wouldn't be the money that the PGA Tour
or Live or something like that, but you might be able to go out
in the summer and play half you know, play half a dozen or ten
tournaments or something, and you know, maybe make a couple hundred thousand dollars
or something, and that'd be okay for a lot of people. That'd be
good. Hey, I'm playing golf and I pick up one hundred thousand bucks
or so, not so bad. You know. Well the problem with that
is is, you know, we've had conversation with Barney Adams and he says,
the PGA Tour is nothing more than a TV show and what you're proposing
is not great television compared to what's out there now. And that means less
money, less prize money, you know, less sponsors. It's sub I
don't know. Would would it be less entertaining? I mean it might.
It could be very entertaining. I think because people love to life forever,
they could relate to it more. You know, like, wow, these
guys are only hitting the ball two hundred and fifty yards. I can do
that or I'm close to doing that. You know, like that it could
be of interest to people, I think. I mean, golf was You
have to remember golf was very popular in that area. You had Arnold Palmer
and you know, I mean you can look back at pictures of US Opens
and Masters and a lot of people were attending those events back then. It
was right, But was it golf was popular or Palmer was popular? You
know, it was it golf was popular, a tiger was popular. There's
always going to be a charismatic figure, right, So if you had a
pursuit, there's going to be some guy out there that's going to be really
charismatic and people are you know, it might just be the way he dresses,
the way he throws tempered tantrums out there, or whatever. People are
gonna you know, there's always going to be personality, you know, and
I think you're going to have that. But golf was not an unpopular game.
It's it's much more popular now than it was. I mean the first
ticker tape parades were Bobby Jones. Yeah, Bobby Jones was the most popular
athlete in the nineteen twenties and he was an amateur. I think it would
be interesting to buy for Kate the game and to just it would just solve
all the problems that people are talking about it. It's like if you it
would create new ones. If you want to play the roll back ball,
you go play the Percimin Tour, you know, play the classic courses,
all those great courses that people talk about, all of a sudden, they're
relevant again. They're played properly. The bunkering is correct. You hit the
ball, You got to hit it between these bunkers. You can't fly at
fifty yards over the bunkers. And we did a couple events down in Las
Vegas TRGA events. I think we did three or four of them down there
at the old Sahara Country Club, and we played per Simmon and Blades,
and we played a low spinning, not a low spinning, a low compression
golf ball that didn't go as far. And now everybody's sitting the ball too
fifty again, and now the bunkers were in back in position again. You
had to hit it, you know, work the ball between the bunkers and
the greens. Played correctly, and everybody had a great time. And it
was a pro tournament. There was prize money, and we just you know,
there was no USJ official out there because we just had our We did
our own tournament. We just had our own rules and we just rule.
We made the rules simple to where the entire rules of golf in the TRJ
it was one page. So in other words, you play it as it
lies period. Okay. If you don't like your lie, you're on a
sprinkler, head, a cart path, whatever, you could take full relief.
So that meant you would go back to the middle of the fairway.
You would take a one stroke penalty, and now you go back thirty yards.
Okay, So where everyone's hitting a seven iron, now you're hitting a
four iron and a shot penalty. Simple, don't like your lie, casual
water, hit it out of the water. Don't like it, go middle
of the faraway and go back your decision. Do you want to take a
shot penalty? Because I believe that relief should be relief in other words,
I'll give you an example. I'm playing in the Alberta Open. This would
have been about maybe nineteen eighty eight. I said, okay, and on
the ninth holl I hit my drive left. I hooked it left and I
was in grass that was this high, okay, about twelve twelve inches.
This is an audio podcast. Yeah, but the steaks there were red steaks
that were going through this grass, so it was a lateral hazard. I
took relief and I dropped my ball. Okay, I had to take a
penalty. Two club lengths. I dropped my ball and I'm still in grass.
That's that's twelve inches tall. Ouch ouch right beat. In other words,
I didn't really get relief. Yeah, or I could go back to
the tea, take stroke and distance. So, in other words, what
we did and we said, if you're in that situation, you don't We
don't even need steaks on the course, so you don't need red steaks or
yellow steaks. I'd look at that ball and say, you know what,
I don't want to play this. I'm going to go back to the fairway,
take a shot, penalty, go back thirty yards. The reason that
we go back thirty yards is because when you go back thirty yards, nobody
cares about where you drop the ball. Nobody's like, hey, you're dropping
it over. You're back there three clubs far. Nobody can when you're back
there, nobody they see you way back, they're hitting a foe iron.
They don't care. So we were getting we were getting around the golf course
in a pro am format, two pros, two amateurs, pro am format,
and we were getting around in less than four hours, three hours and
forty five minutes. Wow. Yes, So you want to talk pace of
play great. You know you want to talk simplifying the rules, Play it
as it lies. I had, I had one shot. My ball was
I had to stand on a cart path and I decided to hit the ball.
I didn't take the relief. You know, I didn't want to take
a shot penalty and go back. Now if depending on what I'm comfortable with,
I could have just taken a wedge and just sort of chipped it forward
right. But I took out a two wood. I had a good lie.
It was a par five, and I took a rip at it.
I kind of lost my balance a little bit, but I'd hit it perfect,
rolled up on the green eight feet from the pin, and I made
eagle. Wow. I took the lead. I took the lead at that
point in the tournament. Wow. So my point is that that way you
put everything on the player, like do you want to play it or not?
You know, if the ball's plugged in a bunker underneath the lip,
right, I don't want to do this. I'll take the shot penalty.
I'll go back thirty yards, hit a wedge in take a shot penalty,
full relief. Now is this traditional? Actually it is. When we traced
back to the Golf Club of Leith in Scotland. They had a distance penalty
written into the room rules distance penalty that if you hit the ball into the
watchery filth you would go back six yards or more interesting, it was actually
a distance penalty. So we thought, well, let's just go back thirty
yards and then we'll just shut everybody up. Six yards. People say,
well, it's not six yards, that's you only went four yards. Somebody's
going to argue with you no matter what. Thirty yards, no arguments.
We got around three hours and forty five minutes. So you know, and
it's a beautiful way to play the game. Uh, it's it's quick and
it just puts the decisions on the people what they want to do. And
you don't need a rules official out there. There's no rules officials, you
know. So and it was a professional tournament. We had real prize money
and you know, everyone was just playing the classes gear and everyone had a
great time. So this is what I this is why I love having you
on the show. I prepared myself. I wrote seven different topics that we
that we could cover in an episode. I checked off one of them.
Yeah, let's talk about what do you want to talk about live or you
want to talk about No, it's time to go. So do you still
have a website? Do you even't care? What's your website? Our website
is Advanced ball Striking dot com. Excellent. And next time you're on,
I want to get more of your history of you know, you playing professionally
after college and that, and I'm sure we'll never get to it because I'll
throw out one topic and that'll be the next hour. I played. I
played seven years, I played four years on the Australian Tour, seven years
in Canada, played a little bit in the US, and I won once
on the Canadian Tour. A decent, you know, career, but that
was that's about it. I was a good journeyman guy, basically a good
good guy, making huts and that sort of thing. But I realized I
wasn't going to be you know, Greg Norman after playing against him at that
time, I was like, no, different ballgame. Yeah, wow,
that sounds up my pro career. But I found I can teach a game
pretty well. Awesome. John lag Ericson, John, Great to talk to
you again, man, Talk to you soon. Happy New Year. Okay,
we'll see you so I'm currently in Costa Rica for a couple of weeks
with a group of close friends to celebrate my wife's seventieth birthday. But that
doesn't mean we have to skip any episodes, right. I was able to
survive my back and arm pain and have new shows, so why should this
keep me quiet? Still haven't started swinging my golf clubs yet, but hopefully
we'll start that once I return. Did you see my unboxing and first impressions
of my new lab Golf DF three point zero putter? Hmmm? Check it
out on any social media platform including YouTube shorts Golf Smarter. I've already got
interviews for the next couple of episodes lined up, and next week we'll meet
an instructor friend of doctor Greta Anderson, and his name's John Marshall, who,
in addition to being a golf instructor, has competed in the Senior's Long
Drive competitions. Can't wait to talk to him about that, and then after
that we'll talk to course architect Augie Pisa again about his unique and fascinating thoughts
on golf course design. This week's golf Smarter Ambassador is Christopher Payne of Castle
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