Re: Some Amateur's Equipment, my Pet Peeve


"Lloyd Parsons" <lloydparsons@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:lloydparsons-E5C5B9.21285505092006@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

No problem. My particular pet peeve in all this is so many
automatically discount the usefulness of real wood vs metalwoods. I
know how it happens, none of the major winners are playing them anymore.
For lots of reasons, but probably because they can take full advantage
of the improvements made over the years better than us daily hackers,
and of course, they get paid big bucks to play them! ;-)

It's not really for "lots of reasons". It's for one major reason and one
trivially minor reason. The major reason is they get far better results
with this equipment. The trivially minor reason is the manufacturer bucks.
The top pros really could not care less, since their results are so much
more important than their endorsements (in fact, their endorsements
completely rely on their results.) Furthermore, Titleist doesn't really
care what gets endorsed. If Tiger wanted a wood driver, Nike would make him
one and pay him a bunch to use it. Then they would start selling a ton of
them.

But that begs the question. If all these new clubs are so improving,
how come the average golf score hasn't changed much? Is it because
those improvements really only help the lower index and pro types? Or
is it because the real difference in score can only be done with the
'feel' strokes. You know chips, pitches and putts. Since feel is so
much a part of those strokes, maybe equipment differences really don't
help there. I don't know.

You are right in one thing - the better equipment helps the pros more than
it helps amateurs. There are many reason the average score hasn't changed,
but it doesn't imply the equipment isn't better. (I will speak for
Americans here.)

1) People are working more and have less free time (this has been shown in
many surveys). When people have time to play, they do just that, they don't
practice. In other words, the new equipment is needed to simply keep their
scores the same.

2) More people are now playing, meaning more new golfers are playing, which
tends to keep the scores up (older golfers basically keep playing the same.)
Also, some players simply hit it farther out of bounds and this can't be
measured in score. For example, if they hit a slice that went 50 yards off
line before and 220 yards, they now hit it 240 yards and 40 yards offline,
which translates into the same distance into the woods (because the vector
is longer). i.e., no help.

3) People buy new equipment that is actually worse for them. They buy
shafts and lofts which are ill suited to them, because it's the macho thing
to do. So the equipment is better, but it fits worse, negating the benefit.
(The titanium head adds distance, but they are now using an 8 degee driver
instead of the old 11 or 12 degree persimmon drivers, which hurts them.)

4) Courses are longer (due to equipment, a vicious cycle) and players are
playing "pro tees" more often (due to the higher popularity of golf and
wanting to play like the pros.) Also, courses are more often built with pro
tournaments in mind, or at least top amateur competition as an option, so
more courses add even longer tees.. In the "old days", there might be white
tees at 6,000 yards and blue tees at 6,500 yards. Now, there are white tees
at 6,200 yards, blue tees at 6,700 yards, black tees at 6,900 yards and
championship gold tees at 7,200 yards. Not only is the average yardage
increased for the same set of tees, there is also a tendency to want to play
tees even farther back, more than negating the equipment advantage. It's a
wonder scores have not gone up.


.

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