Teeing Off: Power Struggle

So many players have been done in by the potency of their equipment that the need to regulate it seems less urgent.

By Cameron Morfit

The dunk, the dinger, the 350-yard poke. In every sport there is a razzle-dazzle subspecialty that's as visually arresting for the fans as it is viscerally irresistible for the players. Every sport worth its multimillion-dollar TV contract has one -- needs one -- not only for the Nielsen ratings, but also for the bar-stool purists who otherwise couldn't lament the ruination of the game.

Howell's refusal to back off led to his demise at the Nissan Open. Scott Halleran/Getty Images

It's an old chestnut: Players seek the glorious (but largely gratuitous) ESPN highlight rather than the utilitarian (but effective) play. Hoops hopefuls of the '80s tried to match Jordan's hang time but failed to work on their undependable jump shots. Shameful! Young ballplayers of the '90s swung for the fences like Sosa, but their batting averages cratered. Kids today! Golfers of the 2000s get so caught up in "Drive for show," they "Putt for bogey." Oh, the humanity!

This season has made for delicious viewing because it has played out like one of those videos hawked on late-night TV, the one that stresses baseball's fundamentals to youngsters. Just replace "hit the cutoff man" with "play smart and lay up," and you'll get the idea.

La Quinta, Calif., Feb. 2 -- Jay Haas ends a showdown with Mike Weir at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic by going for the green in 2 on the 543-yard 18th hole and dumps his ball in the water. Afterward, Haas blames not his faulty four-iron but his long drive. "I almost got too close [to the green]," he says. "I'd rather go in there with a five-wood or something."

Let that be a lesson to the kids watching at home!

La Jolla, Calif., Feb. 16 -- Phil Mickelson, having pronounced his equipment superior to Tiger Woods's in Golf Magazine, uses the latest graphite-shafted super sabers to hack his ball around in the trees in the final round of the Buick Invitational, losing to Woods yet again. As Lefty bombs his lab-tested drives into the rough -- Gee, they looked great on the launch monitor -- and Woods dials down his "substandard" sticks to hit fairways and greens, you can almost hear CBS analyst Lanny Wadkins pulling out his hair over Mickelson's unabated vanity and his inability to recognize it.

It's not how, it's how many!

Pacific Palisades, Calif., Feb. 23 -- Charles Howell, powerless to resist trying to drive the 315-yard 10th at Riviera, makes a mess of the hole in the final round of the Nissan Open, playing it in regulation and sudden death in a total of nine strokes. Weir, having tried to drive the green in each of the first three rounds but playing the hole in one over par, lays up both times on Sunday, birdies it twice and walks off with the winner's check for the second time in three weeks. You can definitely hear ABC analyst Curtis Strange wanting to wrap Howell's driver around the lad's head as he challenges the young Georgian to a duel in which they both play the hole 100 times.

Hey, kids: Discretion is the better part of valor!

In golf, razzle-dazzle versus bedrock fundamentals translates to technology versus tradition, that well-chronicled debate that is shifting in subtle and surprising ways. It has been a great year for technology, but not because Ernie Els is blasting 400-yard drives. On the contrary, it's because so many players have been done in by the potency of their equipment that the need to regulate it seems less urgent. Traditionalists fret that short holes and courses are being made obsolete, but Riviera's tiny 10th made Howell's Great Big Bertha II a liability rather than an asset.

CBS's Peter Kostis explained during the Buick how Woods's club specifications are similar to those favored by Jack Nicklaus in his prime, causing viewers everywhere to exhume that dusty set of MacGregors from the garage. Amid talk of flex points, ball speed and launch angles it might seem counterintuitive for Woods to set his specs back to 1995, to say nothing of '75, but he has reminded even gearheads that there's a point of diminishing returns with technology.

Is this how the distance wars will end? Voluntary disarmament? No way. A few pros will copy Woods and adhere more closely to tradition -- the march of technology slowed not by the USGA but by the invisible hand of self-interest. Most will not. For amateurs the quest to catch one on the screws is written in the genes, the hell with where it goes. But for the pros it's more about the constant search for the outer limits of capability, the quest to be the guy riding atop the ziggurat, as Tom Wolfe put it in The Right Stuff. Els is that guy; Mickelson and Howell are not. That could change next week, though, for the chase is irrational, unpredictable and, above all, irresistible.

Issue date: March 10, 2003

 

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