I haven’t picked up the clubs properly in months. Great to be back out. Cracker day at my home club.
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That looks…narrow.
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All I can see are really big trees
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I need to get out ASAP
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Went out today too, was a beautiful day for it. Got 37 points in the stableford comp and got 10th. Happy days.
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Where is that? Looks great
The Vines of Reynella in Southern Adelaide.
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6 of us have been putting 20 dollars a month away this year. We had a Christmas dinner last week and today we play for the 600 buckaroos left. 300 for winning pair, 200 for 2nd and 100 for last team. So guaranteed at least 50 smackers. Does this mean I lose my amateur status? 
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What format are you playing? And where?
What do we think of the gold ball rollback? I think they should have gone back to wound balata to really force the pros to learn how to play some different shots!
Ambrose and Cole Valley near Richmond down here in Tas. Tie for first so 125 each😃. Great day had by all and making plans for next year.
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I have mixed feelings about rollbacks / bi-furcation.
There’s a part of me that wishes they would do like baseball did and only allow pros to use persimmon woods instead of metal, but the toothpaste is well and truly out of the tube with that. With a lot of things, actually.
I’m a big golf architecture buff, so much so that it was one of the professions that I nearly pursued at one time, and my job is more or less a virtual version of that, so I’m heavily invested in the design of courses and understanding how they play. There is certainly a concern among those in that business that as players get obscenely long, that golf courses will need to be built longer and longer to tame them. The consequence of this is that more land is needed, more water and fertiliser is needed, and also many of the great classic courses on Earth will become obsolete or otherwise face a grotesque amount of cosmetic surgery to remain relevant. None of these things are ideal, especially in a climate (so to speak) where golf is becoming something of a scapegoat in many urban parts of the globe and where municipalities are choosing to sell off public golf courses so developers can build more hipster apartments and dog parks.
But how do you tell Titleist to make crappier balls? How do you tell Taylor Made and Ping to make crappier clubs? There really isn’t a good way to do this, and any serious effort to do so is always met with threats of litigation.
Maybe we should just leave it alone, and if -30 starts winning a US Open, well, we should just deal with it. Or maybe the concept of “par” simply needs to be rethought. These things have all been done before when they went from hickory shafts to steel and from gutty balls to modern.
One thing they could do is possibly reduce the number of clubs in the bag to say, 12. Nobody needs five wedges. What else is funny about that is that the lofts on modern clubs are a lot stronger than they used to be. A 9-iron in 2023 has the same loft that a 7-iron did in 1983. When I was a junior player I had a 50 degree pitching wedge; now they are 45 degrees.
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Interesting to see your arguments laid out and then you suggest there’s an argument
On one side you have
-environment
-cost
-time to play
-history
On the other side you have
-minorly tweak the rules that equipment manufacturers have to design to.
They already have to design to a set of rules. They could make balls that go 600 yards now. Changing the parameters really makes no difference to anything. They did it in the past when they got rid of the small ball. They did it when they limited club head size. Etc etc.
The manufacturers will be fine.
I know I have definitely benefitted from improved technology and equipment.
Just make pros play with a standard baseline and hacks hit their bazooka drivers.
Same. But they also took away my anchoring of the putter because history.
The benefits of the roll back (which won’t hurt the average golfer anywhere near as much as the pros) far, far outweigh the small pain.
They should roll it back further though, because it’s unlikely they are going to stop the next generation from driving 400 yards even with a ball that needs a 5mph swing speed increase to go 317 yards.
The next generation are just training for ball speed, because that’s the way the game is played as a pro. The classic courses are screwed. And it’s not the concept of par that hurts them, because it doesn’t matter if 30 under wins. It’s because all the subtlety of the challenge is lost when you can blast it into love wedge range from anywhere, and no one ever needs to even hit a long iron.
They tried to do that and all the pros had a sook, so they just changed it for everyone
Absolute twaddle
Um? Perhaps add an argument rather than just throwing abuse?
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Same with all sports. Technology makes the gear for faster, further, more accurate etc and the coaches, schools, academies etc make the participants. Ordinary Joe pays to watch and then gives up his weekends to try and copy them. As for golf, every now and then you get the perfect swing, contact and flight. Doesn’t it feel farkin good!!