Follow us on Google Discover Butch Harmon has suggested that he is not in favour of rolling the golf ball back, and thinks that changing the regulations around the driver would be a better option.
There has been so much debate over the potential golf ball rollback in recent years. Most in the game appear to accept that something needs to change with elite players hitting the ball further than ever before.
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Aldrich Potgieter, for example, averages nearly 332 yards off the tee this season. So action clearly needs to be taken to make the game more sustainable.
Butch Harmon calls for a change to the driver regulations
The rollback has been pushed back until 2030 by the governing bodies, with doubts persisting over how effective it will be. Manufacturers appear to be finding a way to make sure that they produce a golf ball that would conform with the new regulations but does not impact the distances players are currently hitting.
And it seems that Harmon does not support the rollback. Speaking on The Real Deal podcast about the advances in equipment during his time as a coach, Harmon suggested that he would prefer to see the driver become much more difficult to hit again.
“Equipment has made the way the ball launches completely different. If you look at old swings, when we used persimmon clubs and soft balata balls, you had to stay back and release the club. Well, now we want you on top of the ball to launch the ball as high as we can with the least amount of spin. So our business has changed on the things that we teach people because of equipment. I’ve had players who’ve come to me, years ago when Stewart Cink first came to me, very tall guy, was using 13 degrees of loft because he had a lot of spine tilt, well, I got him on top of the ball and driving it better, and he became a much better player. He had to go down to nine to 10 degrees of loft, changed the loft on his driver just because of modern equipment, and how to take advantage of it,” he said.
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“I think one of the greatest advances we’ve had in golf equipment and drivers is being able to change the head. Add loft, change the angle. In the old days, we would take a persimmon club and bend it over our knees. If a guy was hooking it too much, I’d just bend that thing, lay the face wide open and say have at it. You’re not going to hook it from here. Equipment has made our business a little easier if you understand equipment.
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“I think it’s changed the game on the professional level, because there’s no way, no way, these young kids could swing this hard if they had a persimmon head and a balata ball. They would spin it off the earth. I think it’s taken the tour player more so than the average player, because the average player doesn’t have the clubhead speed to take advantage of the equipment sometimes. Look at me, my cart goes faster than my clubhead speed. I don’t get the advantage that the long hitters can get, but I think it’s changed the game completely. For the tour player, the reason they can swing this hard is the ball doesn’t curve as much. It gets off the clubface faster.
“I’d be interested in having a conversation with you one day about dialling the ball back, because I’m not a great believer in that. I think if you want to do anything, change the drivers. Make the heads smaller and the shafts shorter and don’t let the ball come off so fast. That’s not going to happen either, because we’ve gone so far. Manufacturers aren’t going to change all their equipment to do this, so that’s going to be another interesting thing we get to talk about.”
Bifurcation may now be the way forward with the professional game no longer sustainable
Bifurcation has been a contentious issue when it comes to rolling the golf ball back. Funnily enough, TaylorMade produced a survey in 2023 that claimed that 81 per cent of ‘nearly 45,000’ participants were against a different set of rules for amateurs and professionals.
As Harmon notes, the large majority of amateur golfers do not get enough out of their equipment anyway. So there is surely good reason to introduce new regulations into the professional game where the drivers are not so easy to hit.
Harmon is right that the manufacturers will have a big problem with that. However, the governing bodies need to stand their ground so that a course such as St Andrews does not have to rely on wind to show its teeth.
It would demand more skill from professionals. However, they should be the best of the best anyway. They should not have an issue being asked to hit a smaller driver.
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