Rolling it Back and Bringing it Forward

Dec 05, 2023

Incentives

“Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.” - Charlie Munger

The world of golf is in flux right now. A few different power struggles are happening simultaneously, and the future of the sport is uncertain.

The bad news is that greed and conflicts of interest are threatening the health of professional golf in the short term. Long term, I feel confident in the future of golf, especially since professional golf is not the only golf that gets played around the world.

The good news is that if you’ve been reading this newsletter from its inception, you should have a pretty solid understanding of the variables influencing the future of the sport. Many editions of Finding the Edge have focused on root causes of problems within the golf ecosystem. Now that some of the cracks in the system have fully surfaced and a couple impactful announcements are expected this week, it’s an opportune time to check in on some of the issues with which the golf world is grappling. And, as always, we’ll consider the role of incentive structures within the system.

Rolling it Back

I just designed a golf hole, and I’d like you to evaluate it. Conditions are firm and fast. A water hazard lines both sides of the hole from the tee box through the green. If you hit the ball any distance between one yard and 285 yards with your tee shot, the fairway is 10 yards wide. Miss the fairway and your ball bounces or flies into the water. If you hit a tee shot 310 yards off the tee, the fairway is only five yards wide. Miss the fairway and you’ll either bounce it or fly it into the water. Lovely hole, isn’t it?

A 10-yard wide fairway is incredibly narrow. So how should you play this hole?

You could hit a little wedge off the tee to try and keep the ball out of the water. The problem is that there’s a good chance that despite your conservatism, the wedge is still going to go into the water. And even if you keep the ball dry, you’ll likely have to hit the wedge 3-4 times before you get the ball to the green.

What if you just hit driver?

Sure, it’s almost a certainty that your ball is going to find the water, but you can hit a modern driver pretty straight. You’ll likely hit the ball into the water, but you can take a penalty drop and hit your third shot onto the green. Even if your opponents elect to hit wedges and execute their shots perfectly, you’ll still make it to the green in as few shots as they did.

The hole we just talked through is a bad golf hole. Players will simply smash drivers and their shots will overwhelmingly end up in the water. Players capable of hitting a shot on line will not be rewarded for their accuracy. There just isn’t enough space on the hole to reward the player who can control her shot once it hits the ground. The dimensions of the hole prevent accuracy from reaping a proper reward.

Ok, I just renovated the hole. Let me know what you think of it now.

Note: The triangles are tall trees.

We discussed how on the first hole I showed you, players’ ability to control the ball on the ground was not tested. For this iteration of the hole, I made sure players have to control the golf ball once it hits the ground. I took the same hole, widened it, and removed the features that stopped the ball in its tracks.

Now it’s much more meaningful where you hit your tee shot. Let’s say you hit your driver 300+ yards, like a professional golfer. You can try to squeeze a driver up between the fairway bunker and the edge of the left side of the fairway, but you may find yourself in a penal fairway bunker. If you miss the fairway just a little bit left, you’ll still have a chance of hitting the green, but you may be slightly impeded by the trees down the left side. If you miss the fairway way right or way left, you’re dead. You’re going to have so many trees in between your ball and the green that you’ll probably have to pitch out sideways back into the fairway. Errant shots with driver get penalized on this hole.

Perhaps you’ll just elect to tee off with something like a wood to stay short of the fairway bunker and find the widest section of the fairway. There’s enough width that your shot can bounce and roll while remaining in the fairway. Hitting a wood isn’t risk free, though. You might fire the shot off line and it may bounce and roll into the trees. Still, it is appreciably easier to keep the ball in this fairway with a wood than with a driver, so hitting a wood is an option here.

This is a much better hole than the first hole that I presented to you. The design of this hole allows for optionality off the tee with different risk-reward profile attached to each option. It requires skill and control to play it successfully. Players have to hit shots on line and control the golf ball once it hits the ground. The dimensions of the hole accommodate modern dispersion patterns, a core tenet of maximizing shot value.

Did some of you recognize the hole?

The second hole I presented to you is No. 1 at Augusta National.

The opening hole at Augusta National is one of my favorite holes in professional golf. The hole has enough space that a well-struck shot can find the fairway even after taking a few bounces and rolling. A shot that just misses the fairway results in a difficult but manageable second shot. A shot that misses the fairway by a wide margin results in serious trouble.

The beauty of this hole is that it requires you to control your shots. Wide corridors with firm, short grass like in the picture above require players to hit shots on line with control. The more off target you hit a shot, the more it will bounce and roll into penal areas.

The problem with holes like the opening hole at Augusta is that they require an enormous amount of space. The farther golfers hit the ball, the wider their dispersion patterns stretch. Thus, over time, to maintain the competitive integrity of golf shots, courses must stretch both backwards and laterally. Otherwise, golfers’ dispersion patterns become too wide for narrow, firm fairways, and finding the fairway begins to require more luck than skill.

One other key ingredient to keep in mind: the longer players hit shots off the tee, the shorter distances players have into the green with their second shots. The shorter distances players have into the green, the higher the loft on the iron the player hits on his second shot. A highly lofted club will cause the approach shot to bounce, spin, and stop more quickly than a less lofted club. Therefore, the farther distance the ball travels off the tee, the less a player will need to control his approach shot into and around the green on the second shot. Related, the farther distance the ball travels off the tee, the less a player’s position off the tee matters because she’ll be able to stop the ball more quickly the closer she is to the hole.

Over time, due to technological and physical advancements, players are hitting the ball farther than ever before. 50-year-old Stewart Cink is hitting drives 25 yards longer today than his average in 2000 when he was closer to his physical prime. The key is to understand that if players are hitting the ball farther than ever before, courses must be lengthened and widened to maintain the same level of shot value. However, most voices in professional golf don’t call for golf courses to be lengthened and widened.

Instead, they think that you should make fairways narrower and surround them with thick rough to increase difficulty for professional golfers. They misunderstand the problem. They are correct that narrowing fairways and increasing rough length raises the scores professional golfers will shoot. But at the same time, they expedite the erosion of shot value. Scores increase, but the golf shots did not become more demanding.

This same group of people tends to think Bryson DeChambeau, one of the longest and most errant drivers of the golf ball in the world, will win the Masters. Every year I hear them endorse Bryson at Augusta. Each time that he shows up and underperforms leaves them shaking their heads. They continue arguing in favor of narrow setups with thick rough without realizing how Augusta allows talent to separate itself at the top of the leaderboard every single year.

When you advocate for narrow, bouncy fairways with thick rough that stops a ball in its tracks, you end up with setups like Oak Hill, the site of the 2023 PGA Championship:

Watch that video.

At Augusta, you must control your shot both through the air and when it hits the ground. At Oak Hill, you’re launching moonshots and trying to get the ball to stop as quickly as possible, hopefully in the fairway.

Guess who missed the cut at Augusta this year and registered his first top five finish in a major championship since 2020 at Oak Hill. Yes, Bryson DeChambeau.

Unfortunately, providing high-caliber tests of professional golf is an ever-increasing challenge as golfers continue to hit the ball farther and farther. Augusta National has the resources and acreage to try to keep up with advancements in modern technology, but 99.9% of golf courses lack the space and resources needed to accommodate ever-increasing challenges imposed by distance.

Following record-breaking scoring at the Travelers Championship last year, tournament officials announced they’d be making changes to increase the difficulty of the golf course. You might be able to guess what feedback professional golfers gave to Travelers. They recommended growing the rough up, shrinking greens, and narrowing fairways. They conflate scoring with shot value. Growing rough and narrowing landing areas will raise scores, but it does not restore shot value. Rather, it further compromises shot value. See how we get trapped in this cycle?

Golf’s governing bodies are trying to fix that.

Last Friday, Mike Stachura reported that the USGA and R&A are set to announce a universal rollback of the golf ball. Essentially, they’re regulating the distance a golf ball can travel when tested by a robot. Details have not yet been released, but the change is expected to reduce the distance elite professional golfers hit the ball by about five percent. Reportedly, the rollback will apply to all golfers, including amateurs.

Originally, the USGA and R&A proposed bifurcation, a proposal that would apply equipment regulations to elite professional golfers without affecting recreational players. Bifurcation may be a better solution than a universal rollback, but that option was taken off the table. You don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s some insight from the fingertips of one of the best golfers in the world.

Agreed, Rory! Tiger Woods, in a similar spirit, reinforced his long-standing support for bifurcation.

Assuming it becomes impossible to buy golf balls that fly farther than the new regulations allow, amateurs may notice a decrease in how far they hit the ball once the rollback goes into effect. That said, I am highly skeptical that this will harm anyone’s enjoyment of the sport. Most recreational golfers would play a random golf ball they find in the woods. Do they think those golf balls fly to their absolute maximum distance?

Yet, a loud chorus of influential voices insists that rolling back the golf ball is a disastrous outcome for the sport. PGA Tour player Keegan Bradley called the decision ‘monstrous.’ You don’t have to look far to find a multitude of opinions that sound much like Bradley’s. Bear in mind that many of the voices expressing outrage about the rollback are paid by equipment companies who are fearful of how regulation could impact their bottom lines. Beware of incentives!

To be clear, I don’t think everyone who is voicing disapproval is being disingenuous, but it’s been apparent to me for a long time that a rollback is within the best interest of the future of the sport. A five percent reduction in distance is a reasonable step, and I’d like to see the governing bodies consider other measures too. With increases in technology and expansion of the driver head, it’s become easy to swing a driver with reckless abandon without fear of spraying the ball off line. Shrinking the driver head could be a sensible way to reward the players who find the center of the club face.

Nobody wants a solution that feels like moving back in time. It’s important to communicate that rolling back equipment does not indicate a desire to return to the past. Among other benefits, it’s an effort to restore the beautiful elements of the sport that have degraded over time. It’s an effort to test every club in the professional golfer’s bag and to examine the control he exerts over the ball both through the air and on the ground. And it’s an effort to host those tests on brilliant, historic golf courses that have been rendered obsolete by modern technology.

Bringing it Forward

I don’t think you can tell the story of professional golf without a deep appreciation for the uncertainty in players’ career arcs.

Viktor Hovland is coming off an incredible year. He has a legitimate claim to being the best golfer in the world right now. Nonetheless, if you hear two people discussing the number of majors he will win in his career, the person taking the lower number is likely the more astute golf mind.

That is not an insult to Viktor Hovland, a player for whom I have high expectations in 2024. It’s just how golf works. Expectations get heaped upon promising players, and it’s extraordinarily difficult to live up to those expectations.

Uncertainty is baked into the fibers of the sport. Playing golf at the highest level requires a unique combination of strength, speed, finesse, experience, etc. To sustain greatness over an extended period of time, players have to remain strong in all of those categories while technology changes and their bodies age. Even something as simple as deteriorating eye vision can end up unraveling a player’s career.

Trying to make long-term player predictions with certainty is a fool’s errand. One thing I can guarantee, though, is that some of the best golfers today will be mostly irrelevant in the sport in five years. Predicting which golfers will drop off is virtually impossible.

At the beginning of 2010, the top five ranked players in the world were Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Steve Stricker, Lee Westwood, and Jim Furyk. At the start of 2015, Jim Furyk (World No. 7) was the only one of those five players ranked in the top 10 in the world.

In March of 1999, David Duval ascended to World No. 1 at the age of 27. Within just a few years, his game would completely fall apart. In 2003, Duval played in 20 events. He finished in the top 25 zero times and missed the cut or withdrew in 16 of those tournaments. Once he lost his form, it never returned.

That is the story of golf.

Longevity as displayed by the likes of Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, and Phil Mickelson is much more of the exception than the rule. More common are the stories of golfers like Ian Baker-Finch and Jordan Spieth, players who surged to the top of the sport only to find themselves searching for answers shortly thereafter. Some return to form; many do not.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the fragility of careers with respect to the division in professional golf right now. More often than not, if professional golfers accepted large sums of guaranteed money in exchange for future earnings, the players would be taking the sharp side of the bet. Money on the PGA Tour is almost exclusively non-guaranteed. That kind of leaves a vulnerability…

To be clear, this is not a great way to describe the story of LIV Golf and how professional golf came to be fractured. LIV isn’t really offering players guaranteed money in exchange for their future earnings. However, they are offering guaranteed money to professional golfers making non-guaranteed money, which is an enticing proposition given the dynamics of the sport.

All of that is to say, regardless of how the LIV-PGA Tour battle plays out, unpredictability of careers will always play a dominant role in how professional golfers make decisions with their own best interests in mind. Even once the dust settles in this conflict between the tours, it’d be short-sighted to assume the future of professional golf will be stable unless you figure out how to align players’ incentives with the long-term future of the tour on which they play.

Some readers are probably saying, “Well yeah that’s what giving them equity in their franchise/tour solves.” I don’t know that it will be that simple.

Even if you disagree with me in the context of LIV & the PGA Tour, I think it’s instructive to consider the role unpredictability plays in golfers’ decision making processes.

For example, I believe it’s playing a significant role in players’ reactions to the rollback the governing bodies are reportedly set to announce. It’s easy to understand why an elite professional golfer would be averse to equipment changes. Difficulty adapting to the regulation could derail his career.

In sort of related news, I’m reminded of a recent Sports Business Journal report detailing that PGA Tour sponsors are going to be asked to fork over much more money in fees starting in 2025. Within the article, one source says “Our TV ratings aren’t worth it. You’re playing in a sport that has a cap on it, and we’ve reached our cap.”

I don’t know enough to evaluate the financial viability of the PGA Tour. I do know that in a notoriously unpredictable sport, it is rational for players to resist change and to bring money forward from the future of the sport into the window of their own careers, even if it jeopardizes the long-term health of the sport. That might not be what’s happening, but if it were what’s happening, the current landscape is what it would look like.

Moving Forward

Ok, I realize this is not the most uplifting edition of Finding the Edge, but despite some of what I’ve written about in this newsletter, I am extremely optimistic about the future of golf.

In a recent interview that I cannot recommend more strongly, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver declared that this NBA season is a return to basketball. Enough distractions: he’s recommitting the league to focusing on the game play and letting the basketball speak for itself.

Golf is the greatest sport in the world*, and I’m looking forward to when the shots hit between the first tee and the eighteenth green regain the collective attention of the golf world. That is when golf is at its best.

*Just remember that this is only true when the dimensions of the course accommodate modern dispersion patterns :)

Contact/Feedback/Telling Me You’ll Quit Golf If You Start Hitting a 7-iron 143 Yards Instead of 150

Email: Joseph.LaMagnaGolf@gmail.com

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