MILESTONES IN DISTANCE
Hitting the ball a long way has always been one of golf's primal objectives. Herewith, highlights from the quest.
1836 Samuel Messieux of the Royal & Ancient Society of Golfers creates a sensation by driving a featherie ball 360 yards into Hell Bunker on the fourteenth at St. Andrews.
1848 The gutta-percha ball is invented and quickly replaces the shorter-flying featherie.
1868 Young Tom Morris wins the first of his four British Open titles. Extremely long, he sometimes broke shafts with the force of his swing, or even with his waggle.
1898 Coburn Haskell invents the rubber-core wound ball in Ohio. Longer for average golfers by twenty yards, it quickly becomes the worldwide ball of choice.
1903 The intimidatingly difficult Oakmont Country Club opens outside Pittsburgh at more than 6,400 yards. The course was the first to challenge the modern ball's length.
1912 Ted Ray, in winning the first of his three majors at the British Open, gains renown for his burly, aggressive swing and outlandish length.
1916 "Long Jim" Barnes wins the PGA, the first of his four majors, in large part due to his thundering drives.
1921 The USGA and Royal & Ancient standardize the size and weight of golf balls. From 1931 to 1990, however, the Brits reverted to a smaller, longer ball.
1925 Brook Hollow in Dallas installs the U.S.'s first complete fairway watering system. Before the irrigation era, golfers got far more roll on baked summer fairways.
1931 At the U.S.Open, Billy Burke becomes the first player to win a major championship using clubs with steel shafts.
1936 Immensely long and preternaturally athletic, Sam Snead celebrates the first of his record eighty-one PGA Tour victories.
1937 Oakland Hills in Michigan is the first U.S. Open course to measure more than 7,000 yards.
1951 In response to increasing distance, Robert Trent Jones Sr. toughens Oakland Hills before the U.S. Open. Winner Ben Hogan called the course "a monster."
1962 Rookie Jack Nicklaus wins the U.S. Open playing a style of long-ball golf with which Bobby Jones later famously said he was "not familiar."
1970 Spalding introduces the solid-core twopiece ball. It goes farther than the wound ball but has less spin and feel. For now, pros stick with wound.
1974 At a senior event, Mike Austin launches the longest competitive drive ever, at 515 yards.
1976 The USGA adopts its first overall distance standard for balls, limiting them to 280 yards under controlled test conditions.
1979 TaylorMade brings out its first metal wood.
1980 The PGA Tour begins keeping distance statistics. Dan Pohl finishes first with an average drive of 274 yards.
1986 Long-hitting Greg Norman has his breakout year, winning the British Open and six other tournaments worldwide.
1991 Unheralded John Daly wins the PGA Championship, astonishing the world with his massive windup and paradigm shifting distance.
1996 Tiger Woods turns pro.
1997 The 300-yard average driving distance barrier is broken. John Daly finishes the year at 302 yards; Woods is second at 295.
1999 The USGA begins testing "springlike effect" in drivers.
2000 Titleist Pro V1 ball debuts on Tour, triggering a mass switch by pros to longer-flying solid-core balls.
2002 Augusta National "Tiger-proofs," adding 265 yards. The club also floats the idea of using limited-flight balls at future Masters to reign in distance.
2003 Hank Kuehne posts the Tour's longest-ever driving average at 321 yards. Eight others also average more than 300 yards.
2004 Supplementing an earlier restriction on clubhead size, the USGA and R&A agree to limits on springlike effect and shaft length.
THE NEXT GENERATION
As a benchmark of the unattainable, the 300-yard drive long ago went the way of the four-minute mile and the seven-foot high jump. But to really understand how ordinary 300 yards off the tee has become, you need look no further than the American Junior Golf Association (AJGA). "I would say well over half the fifteen- to eighteen-year-old players in our tournaments drive the ball 300," says Stephen Hamblin, the organization's executive director. "It's nothing that you really go 'wow' over." At the long-drive contests held at some events, the winners—using their regular drivers—usually hit it about 330 yards.
Naturally, the players get even longer in college. The buzz this year surrounds three-time all-American John Holmes, of the University of Kentucky. His coach, Brian Craig, says Holmes averages about 310 yards. Last summer, Craig remembers, Holmes cut the dogleg of a par five with a precisely placed drive that traveled 360 yards. At the U.S. Amateur last August, Holmes's clubhead speed was measured at 135 miles per hour and his initial ball velocity at 190 m.p.h., numbers on par with Hank Kuehne's.
Holmes has plenty of company in the 300-yard club. "Drives that long are pretty normal for a college kid—good but not off the charts," says Matt Thurmond, golf coach at the University of Washington. "It's becoming a driver/wedge game. Those low and midirons you don't see as much now."
Just as has happened on Tour courses, the new length is forcing college layouts to adjust. "We need to get rid of the conception of a long par four being 480 or 490 yards," says Kuehne's former coach at Oklahoma State, Mike Holder. "You'd better get it over 500. A 600-yard par five—that's reachable in two now. It's not the same game that was played fifteen, twenty years ago."
How to account for this power surge?"The biggest factor is equipment," says Steve Desimone, coach at the University of California, Berkeley, which won the 2004 NCAA championship. "The equipment manufacturers have their reps at all the tournaments. Sometimes they bring the science man, who has a launch monitor." But the AJGA's Hamblin insists that better training and better athletes are also responsible: "Our kids are the kids who used to be pitchers, quarterbacks and hockey players." Competition for top high school prospects has grown fiercer as the pot of gold on Tour has ballooned.
But the pendulum may be swinging back the other way. "College players on the whole are probably longer than the players who play professionally, which shows that being longest is really not all that important," says University of Florida coach Buddy Alexander. "We're actually seeing a push more toward accuracy than length."
