The R&A (the body responsible for golf rules outside the USA) and the USGA (responsible for USA golf rules) come in for quite a lot of stick for not policing aspects of the game sufficiently but FineGolf beleives they should be heartily congratulated on introducing some new rules on clubhead grooves, whose effect hopefully will be to promote ‘fine’ golf over ‘target’ golf.

The new grooves on irons, ranging from four through to wedge, will be gradually introduced: immediately in the case of professionals, from 2014 for elite amateur events and from 2024 for all other golfers.

The reduction in spin generated

by a good ball striker using the new grooves will be insignificant when hit from the fairway but the reduction in spin will be around 40% when balls are hit from the rough.

The research team of the USGA has led intensive research over recent years and this helped develop the policy behind the new groove regulations. Their research studies can be seen at: http://www.usga.org/content.aspx?id=24246

Their initial analysis of the driving length, accuracy and putting ability of tour professionals in comparison to those winning over the period from 1980 to 2006 showed that accuracy was becoming a less important factor to winning while length and putting ability continued to be important.

These new groove regulations are designed to have the effect of restoring accuracy to a higher importance.

The new measure will ensure that it will be more difficult to stop the ball quickly on the green from the rough while not making much difference to the ball’s spin characteristics from the fairway. This will, therefore, promote accuracy in comparison to length as there will be in future be a greater incentive to ensure one is playing from the fairway.

The overall effect will be to make golf more challenging, requiring more thought, strategic skill and creative shot making, in comparison to mere brute force.

With irons producing less spin, the change may also encourage course designers and greenkeepers to take the option to firm up the green and its surrounds and make the pitch and run shot a viable alternative again on professional tournament courses. If the option is indeed taken up, it will provide players with a choice of either trying a lofted shot to the pin that may risk running through the green or a pitch and run requiring the associated extra skill of having to take into account the contours of the ground.

The bane of strategic golf course design is the use of soft greens and target golf. The running game is the key to the future and if amateurs see this variety returning to the professional game, it will surely filter through to our Sunday morning fourball and encourage all golfers to call for firmer surface conditions.

The logical next step is for the R&A and USGA to introduce regulations to reduce the moisture content of greens to produce firmer, less disease-prone putting surfaces……but that may be a new regulation too far at this moment!

Nevertheless investment in research

to investigate how a regulation could be developed around ‘firmness’ would be money well spent.

I have always enjoyed playing in the GSGB events over the years and so would like to promote its existence to readers. Therefore I have invited Alan Golbourn, their chairman to write a short piece:

“Founded in 1955 by the late Sir Aynsley Bridgland, of Princes Golf Club, to help generate a spirit of goodwill and international friendship through the common sporting link, namely “the love of golf”.

The Society is flourishing with around 850 members and 33 of the finer courses around the country as “Participating Clubs” who allow GSGB members to play at reduced green fees, albeit with some restrictions.

GSGB runs five or six two day meetings around the UK each year, usually at a Participating Club and another good course nearby. The meetings take 72 entrants and are well supported.

The Society runs early Spring and Autumn tours to some truly memorable locations. Recent years have seen us visit Tunisia, Morocco, Argentina, Chile, South Africa and Arizona in Spring and a bit nearer to home in the Autumn to Belgium, France, Ireland, Scotland and Yorkshire.

GSGB sponsors six junior golf events each year which are open to boys and girls under 14 on the day of the event and the entry numbers indicate how popular these competitions are.

New members to the Society are very welcome - see our web site for more information and an application form.”

www.golfsocietygb.com

Simon Creagh Chapman, the Chairman of Green at Walton Heath, has led the regeneration of the heathland conditions at this, one of our most famous of inland courses, for a number of years.

David Golding, the man most responsible for the growth of professional Greenkeeper training and development in the UK and Europe since the early 1990s and a close colleague of Jim Arthur.

We know their advice will enormously enhance our ability in the future to promote the fine game to golfers of all shapes and sizes.

READ MORE …

frustrate traditionalists and fine golfers.

How do we protect our fine courses from ball and club developments?

Why can’t we have a more simple set of rules?

The answers are not simple, nor is ‘how do we speed up play’ ?

FineGolf has invited Ted Dexter,

Lorne and Ted at Sunningdale

who has thought a lot about ’speed of play’ and organised live trials, to explain what changes he would like to see clubs and golfers make:

Ted’s Ten Commandments

“Thou shalt keep the “Etiquette of Golf” in mind at all times i.e. your responsibility to the golf course and to other golfers.

Thou shalt be prepared to step up and hit your ball immediately it is your turn to play.

Thou shalt not take more than one practise swing.

Thou shalt not allow space to develop between your match and the match ahead.

Thou shalt try to shave 10 seconds off the time it normally takes you to hit a shot. (If all players in an average four-ball were to achieve this, they would cut one hour from their usual round).

Thou shalt pick up your ball at all times when you are “out of the hole”.

Thou shalt carry, from time to time, a light bag with ( if necessary to reduce weight) a lesser number of clubs.

In non-competition “friendly matches”.

Thou shalt agree to leave the pin in the hole at all times - until any player wishes the pin to be removed.

Thou shalt agree to a one stroke penalty only, for a ball lost or out of bounds.
A ball to be dropped in the semi-rough within two club lengths of the point of entry to the area being searched. (Thus there is no need to play a provisional ball or another ball from the tee or to go back under the stroke and distance rule)

Thou shalt agree that only the player shall need to look for his ball - 3 minutes maximum search time”.

Lorne comments:

Ted has been a major force at the MCC behind the promulgation of the ‘Spirit of Cricket’ initiative around the world that has had a positive effect on the education of cricketers from the highest professional level to cricket in schools.

What do you think of his ideas?    Is it time for a similar golfers education initiative from the golf ‘powers that be’  or should it be left to local clubs and individuals?

We welcome your comments below.

‘Penal’ and ‘Strategic’ are they really two separate and different concepts of design or are they, as I believe, part and parcel for the strategic design package?
The modern attitude is for easy golf, of riding and not walking, of using distance aids, be they books or electronic aids in place of one’s own eye/brain coordination. In my opinion they are a serious loss to the average golfer who at a stroke has cut him/herself off from the delight and more importantly satisfaction of doing it under one’s own steam.

With this in mind I believe that the modern designer may have concentrated on what is called a strategic design but with a well watered down penal aspect. Yet as we see in our modern society, strategic policies without a penal element are a sign of weakness and rarely works. This I see in golf.

We need a mix and I say yes to deep bunkers that might force a retreat out the back or sides as the best options available, yes to hazards that makes the golfer think carefully before deciding if he/she feel their skill is worthy of the shot. Lets not forget the game of golf is all about the challenge, it’s not just about hitting a long ball from the Tee, its all about facing and overcoming the traps and hazards placed by the designer to test your ability to navigate around his design in the least number of strokes, to push you to your limit and perhaps even help you rise to the occasion. I exclude Island Greens because they go way past accepted penal; they are in fact the equivalent of hanging someone for stealing. The Island Green is more than a hazard, the immense size of some only allow the good golfer the chance of managing the Green, as for the average golfer, these hazards not just penalise you, worst still they can kill the game and perhaps your interest in the course stone dead, not what I consider the meaning of a hazard in golf even a penal one.

Yet how many think, let alone actually notice the work of the designer. At least while walking and using ones own God gifted senses we have more time to understand exactly what we are really facing. That is something that riding and aids just can not match. Lets not forget that golf for over 600 years has been a walking and thinking game, its only in the latter half of the 20th Century that Golfers seem to want to water down their own experience and their game of golf by not playing in the time honoured manner. Perhaps we need to look to that building in front of The Old Course at St Andrews and ask those who are meant to protect our Game of Golf why they have allowed these aids onto our courses.

I will in defence of the cart say that for those unable to walk, the cart is a good tool but for able bodied golfers, I just ask why are you bothering to play golf, clearly its is to much of an effort to play the game as its has always been played. As for those distance aids, well that in my opinion speaks volumes about the ability (sorry I should have said lack of natural ability to judge distance) of those golfers. But then, that again is only my opinion.

Golf is a great game no matter ones skill level, it’s the fun and challenging aspect of the game but it needs that penal aspect that is naturally inherent within strategic planning. Surely the real fun and enjoyment comes from doing ones best, being able to perhaps achieve a little victory over one of the 18 holes, yet that victory then becomes ones target for the next time you play that course. Why are the club lounges, bars and pubs near a course always full of happy smiling faces including those who feel they failed to conquer any part of the course on that day. That’s because it golf, a walking and thinking game.

Like a well known beer ‘normal golf can refresh the mind that other aids can not reach’ not forgetting that ‘Golf’s final frontier is all in the mind’, but you do need to loose your toys (carts distance aids etc) to experience the joy of the game.

Regards from Melvyn Hunter Morrow

Lorne Smith comments:-

Dear Melvyn,   Thank you for your thoughtful and stimulating comments. You raise fascinating issues with which the vast majority of readers, I am sure, will agree.

I would like to take the opportunity of explaining further about my use of the word ‘penal’ and how it fits into the Four Eras of Golf Architecture.

Hazards must of course by definition penalise. Links pot bunkers - and inland ones like those at Ganton and Woodhall Spa, for example - are great hazards that infest the mind.

Being called  ’strategic’ or ‘penal’ is determined by where they are placed.

Era One: Early golf hazards (pre c.1890), often across the fairway, tended to catch the rank bad shot. This has been called the ‘penal’ design period.

Era Two: In the ‘golden era’ through the Edwardian expansion of golf and up to the Second World War, hazards were ’strategic’ally placed where the expert wanted to play his ball and he was thereby penalised for the ‘not quite truly hit ball’ (see Woking GC review for further explanation).

Era Three: In the over-watered 1980/90s era of ‘through the air’ target golf, stopping the ball by the flag became too easy. Television demanded ‘modern penal’ hazards again to create drama - the Island green being the extreme example, where only the expert can succeed while for the less able it is hopelessly insurmountable.

Era Four: It is exciting to see how some of the latest golf architects and developers are moving forward to a new ‘fine golf’ era.  With firm greens, even the very best strikers of the ball, have to consider how to run up their shots to the pin. The distance ‘through the air’ becomes less important and creative shot making returns.

The new ‘minimalist’ school seems to epitomise this return to strategic design for firm running conditions. The Renaissance GC, near Muirfield created in 2008 by Tom Doak, a leader of the minimalist school, is an example where use of fine fescue grasses and firm conditions (under the management of one of our most able greenkeepers) are the key to challenging the best golfers, rather than protecting the course by penally placed hazards.

We are so lucky in the British Isles, our temperate climate encourages these grasses that like dry, firm conditions, (even if recent wet summers haven’t helped!)

Let me also add that the modern aids you understandingly hate, are encouraged by ‘target’ golf. They are of less use in ‘fine’ golf.

The trend again is ‘fine golf’ !

Best wishes from Lorne

Admirable as your golfing “cause” is, it is the game that counts more than the course. Where is the satisfaction of playing on fine turf when you are stuck behind ignorant golfers who take all day to hit each stroke and walk at a snail’s pace? I recommend that you add speedier golf to your aims and objectives so that “Fine Golf Courses” can be more sure of providing “Fine Entertainment”. Edward Dexter.

Lorne comments:   we are so used to your sensible and erudite comment on Cricket and wonderful work around the issue of  ‘The Spirit of Cricket’ that it does not surprise me that you come up with a brilliantly made point. Thank you.

It is interesting that we have already started recognising this aspect of ‘fine’ golf by recently posting a page on ‘foursomes golf’ , identifying those clubs who favour foursomes, for those who want to play quickly.

Now that you have stimulated this debate, I look forward to others suggesting how we may be able to influence golfers in this regard.

He thinks golf has a wonderful story to tell on this.

The R&A and the RSPB have published a joint book “Birds and Golf Courses, a guide to habitat management” by Keith Duff and Nigel Symes.

It was reviewed by David Adams of The Guardian recently and he rang me up for a quote. The last time I made a public statement to a journalist was in the 1970s and I got ‘burnt’. I was misquoted out of context.

This time the journalist was of a higher quality and he extracted quite neatly a short quote from our long chat to link into the effects of television and target golf on biodiversity.

CLICK HERE to read The Guardian article    (FineGolf’s bit is at the bottom!)

The above fascinating concept was used recently by a Royal Dornoch golfer while telling some friends about FineGolf.

He has given his permission to be quoted and I feel it does touch on something that is worth posting in this news column, while comments back are always welcome.

We also have some new developments, for instance at Bandon Dunes in Oregon where fine Bent grasses thinly cover a rolling linksland on cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean and in northeastern Colorado’s chop hills where Doak discovered the holes that would become BallyNeal.

With climate change and the likelihood of water rationing in many of the western United States, greenkeepers here may need to rethink their grass selections and maintenance practices. Who knows, perhaps firmer fairways will force American golfers to rediscover techniques for run- up shots on courses originally designed for classic play such as The Olympic Club (Sam Whiting & Willie Watson, 1924) which has preserved the narrow openings in front of most of their small greens.

Sincerely,
Gerry Stratford

We are humbled that our website, in existence for only four months should attract interest from so much more experienced commentators. Thank you Gerry for allowing us to quote you. Best wishes from Lorne.