3/18/26
Yesterday at LIV Golf’s inaugural LIV South Africa, Crushers GC was one of four teams that held a press conference. Crushers GC consists of Bryson DeChambeau, Paul Casey, Charles Howell III, and Anirban Lahiri. The team provided one derisible answer after another, but when the topic of rollback and modern equipment came up, the team united to rise to the occasion with the most preposterous answers of them all.
Bryson DeChambeau stepped up to the plate first by saying that a driver made in 2009 is “relatively the same” as a driver made today. If that were the case, players would continue to play those drivers from 2009. DeChambeau is notorious for tinkering around with equipment as much as anyone in the history of golf, and frequently blames his equipment when things go wrong. Furthermore, Robert McIntyre admitted last year that he intentionally hits drives off the toe of his driver, rather than hitting the center of the club face. With older equipment, hitting anything but the center of the clubface would be detrimental. That is part of what made the game so compelling, especially during the pre-solid core golf ball era of golf. It wasn’t all about blindly mashing the ball.
After Paul Casey tried to give credit to golf architects for building more houses, which is a bemusing slant, Anirban Lahiri chimed in. Lahiri claimed that, “Some of the hardest golf courses are some of the shortest, like Valderrama every year is by far one of the hardest golf courses we play. It doesn’t even compare to the last 10 U.S. Open venues, but it plays like a U.S. Open.”
Firstly, shorter courses are becoming obsolete, like Pebble Beach. Pebble Beach is a historic golf course, but with the course being as short as it is, and modern golf technology being as untamed as it is, it doesn’t play as it was intended. Men’s professional golfers emasculate the course, and it will be on full display when the U.S. Open comes to the Monterey Peninsula next year. Without major rollback, bifurcation, and/or equipment changes, Pebble Beach, Merion, and other shorter courses will be exposed, and championship venues won’t be the same.
Secondly, Lahiri has played in two U.S. Opens in the last 10 years, and the last time he appeared in a U.S. Open was in 2019. For example, Preston Summerhays has played in three U.S. Opens since 2020 and was on Arizona State’s golf team until he graduated last year. In Lahiri’s career, he’s played in only three U.S. Opens and hasn’t made the cut in all three of his attempts.
DeChambeau reloaded for an encore. He said, “If you want to grow the game, that’s not how you get kids to hit the golf ball farther and enjoy it and want to be a part of this game.” He also added, “I like showing how much fun it is to play the game of golf, not how difficult it is. Yeah, there’s difficult moments but I want people to enjoy it, get out in nature.”
Part of what makes golf so addictive is the constant chase for perfection, despite perfection not being a reality. It’s not like bowling, where you can bowl a perfect 300, or how a pitcher in baseball can throw a perfect game. Sure, you can get an ace, but that’s one magical or lucky swing, on just one hole. No one will ever shoot an 18 for a full round of golf. There’s constantly going to be something, like a game of whack-a-mole, that’ll pop up and make the game challenging for every golfer. Also, this “grow the game” farce of a phrase that keeps getting regurgitated needs to be retired from golf vocabulary.
Some professional golfers, specifically men’s professional golfers, sometimes have a delusional and pampered mindset that the game should be as easy as possible. Some golf manufacturers are also guilty of this belief as well. Some of them also believe that they should be immune to any changes to make the game challenging again, despite other sports making changes or surviving with bifurcation. The NFL pushed back extra points because they were too easy. The extra point was a boring play when it was an 18-yard attempt. Now at 33 yards, there’s added intrigue, and the play has proven to be not automatic like it once was. It’s made the game more interesting because it’s a more challenging play. Baseball has been bifurcated for a long time with bats. High school and college baseball use aluminum bats, while the MLB uses wood bats. There are wood bat leagues in which high school and college players participate, but baseball and the manufacturers seem to do just fine with bat bifurcation. Golf manufacturers often see themselves as above all, and bifurcation would hurt them. Baseball is doing just fine with its version of bifurcation, and football continues to grow with the extra points being more difficult. Golf would continue to thrive with bifurcation and more challenging play.
Rollback is scheduled to take place in 2028 for professionals and 2030 for amateurs, but it’ll barely impact the game. There’s been pushback from pros that rollback should be postponed to 2030, and if they get their way, the game won’t be the same. The balls and equipment need to be altered so courses don’t need to be at ridiculous lengths like 8,000 yards or rough so thick that hitting into bunkers is preferred.
Golf isn’t supposed to be an easy sport. It’s inherently a hard, challenging, strategic sport. There’s nothing wrong with going back to that.
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