Golf balls spinning through a revolution
The biggest commotion in competitive golf this year is over a new generation of golf balls.
Solid-core balls, particularly the Titleist Pro V1, may be sending the traditional wound balls on their way to the museums where wooden shafts now reside.
"The wound ball is dead," Bob Wood, president of Nike Golf, has declared.
At last year's Masters, 59 of 95 players used wound golf balls, which have a core, a layer of tightly wound rubber bands and soft covers, usually made of balata. This year, only four players used wound balls, and only one of them - Kirk Triplett, a Pullman High School graduate - finished in the top 25.
Solid-core balls don't have rubber bands. Their cores are high-tech relatives of the high-bounce rubber Super Ball popular on playgrounds and are surrounded by two-layer covers.
The golf-ball revolution is considered the biggest news in the world of balls since the Haskell ball was introduced 102 years ago and flew more than 20 yards farther than the gutta-perchas.
A golf ball may look simple - a small white sphere with dimples - but no ball in sports involves as much chemistry, physics and aerodynamic study. What the golf ball lacks in size it makes up in scientific complexity.
Take golf-ball dimples, for example. The number and depth of the dimples play a big role in determining ball flight. Dimple depth is measured in thousandths of an inch.
No ball in any sport is the subject of as much fierce hype and salesmanship as the golf ball. Tour pros obviously want every edge possible. For the recreational golfer, the dream of breaking 100, 90, 80 or 70 is a siren song to which ball companies cater, now preaching the holy trinity of distance, accuracy and touch around the greens.
"Hope springs eternal," said Steve Hastings, a salesman at Pro Golf Discount in Bellevue.
The rewards for the ball makers are big: About 48 million dozen balls are sold in the U.S. each year.
The new balls are delivering.
Nine of the first 11 tournaments this year were won by golfers using the Pro V1. Tiger Woods, who started the solid-core success by winning the U.S. Open last year by 15 strokes, has used the Nike Tour Accuracy TW to win this year's Masters and two other tournaments. Jim Furyk won the Mercedes Championship with the Strata Tour Ultimate. Robert Allenby and Scott McCarron have won with the new Maxfli Revolution.
Until the new balls came along, the golfer basically had two choices: a ball that went farther or a ball that spun a lot and could be controlled.
Pros wanted the high-spin ball because it had a better feel and was more accurate on approach shots. Unlike weekend golfers who are thrilled to have a ball go straight, pros "shape" their shots, moving them left to right or right to left for perfect positioning on the next shot.
Recreational golfers usually opted for the old-generation solid-core ball because it was cheaper and durable, and gave them extra yardage. Also, a ball that spun a lot was hardly what the chronic slicer or hooker needed because the extra spin moved the ball even farther into the woods.
Too much spin even bothered pros, who didn't like to watch their approach shots spin too far backward. Titleist says its Pro V1 has the ability to almost "drop and stop," allowing golfers to go for the pin.
Entering last year, the challenge for ball makers was to find a way to combine the two properties - to come up with a Holy Grail ball that would spin less when smacked on tee shots and yet have a desired amount of spin on shots closer to the hole.
The magic material that has made this happen is urethane, a material discovered by a German scientist in the 1930s. Urethane, which has been used in floor coverings and bowling balls, is applied as the final layer of a golf ball. Urethane is passive when struck hard yet has a soft feel on finesse shots.
Phil Mickelson, who is paid by Titleist to use the company's balls, has called the Pro V1 "the best ball that's ever been created."
"It is the first golf ball that has worked opposite or conversely to every other golf ball," he said at this year's Bay Hill Invitational.
"The harder you hit it, the less it spins. Every other golf ball, the harder you hit it, the more it spins. And so what that does is give you a different launch off the driver . . . and more control of the feel around the greens."
"Launch angle" is a hot term in golf these days. Most pros used to hit high-spin balls with low-lofted drivers. The result was shots that were beautiful to watch: They started low, climbed high and dropped softly. However, tests showed that a higher launch angle with balls that didn't spin as much resulted in more distance.
Records falling
The new balls are considered responsible for what is becoming a year of wild golf results.
Mark Calcavecchia made 32 birdies at the Phoenix Open and won with 256, the lowest 72-hole score in PGA Tour history. Annika Sorenstam, using the Rule 35 ball in Phoenix, shot the first 59 in the history of the LPGA. Andrew Magee aced a 332-yard par-4 hole. Joe Durant increased his driving distance nine yards and has won twice on the PGA Tour this year.
At the Masters Tournament this year, the fence on the driving range was raised 10 feet to keep balls from flying onto a street.
Unlike balata balls that most weekend golfers realized weren't for them, these new balls are developing a big following among recreational players.
George Sine, vice president of golf-ball marketing for Titleist, said the Pro V1 has claimed 10.5 percent of the market, which is impressive considering the ball's weighty price tag of about $50 a dozen.
"We're still in a demand-in-excess-of-supply situation," he said.
Sine said he gets e-mails, telephone calls and letters from amateurs telling him of personal golf accomplishments with the Pro V1, such as breaking 80 for the first time or finally reaching a particular par 5 in two shots.
Hastings, the salesman at Pro Golf Discount in Bellevue, said the store received calls daily from customers until it got its first shipment of the Pro V1s this spring.
"I had a guy come in and buy four boxes (four dozen)," he said. "That's $200 plus tax."
Jim Pike, head pro at Sahalee Country Club in Sammamish, said most recreational golfers should keep an open mind and find out on their own which ball works best for them.
"A 17-handicapper shouldn't be that influenced by what the pros play," said Pike, noting that the swing speeds of pros are much higher than weekend players'.
Meanwhile, the Pro V1 is hardly the only ball making a splash.
Furyk said he tested balls, including the Pro V1, and prefers Spalding's Strata Tour Ultimate, which features a pea-size tungsten core surrounded by a solid core, a casing and the cover. Suggested retail price: $54 per dozen.
Spalding's claim: The tungsten concentrates the ball's weight at its center and allows for efficient energy transfer from club to ball. The company says this results in higher launch angle.
Furyk said he has been able to clear some doglegs this year he couldn't get over in the past.
Men using women's ball
The wild-card entry in the ball frenzy is the Lady Precept, now called the "Laddie" by a lot of men. The ball has lower compression for the slower swing speeds of most women, but some male amateurs started winning state championships in the South with it last summer, and word of mouth traveled fast.
The Lady Precept, which sells for about $24 a dozen at discount retailers, has a denser rubber cover and softer core. It has a higher trajectory - women have more trouble than men in getting balls airborne - but a low spin rate that has been resulting in good distance.
During a practice round at the British Open last year, Woods hit a gutta-percha ball. He smacked it about 230 yards, about 110 yards short of his first shot with a Nike ball.
During Masters week this year, Jack Nicklaus renewed his arguments that the distance golf balls can fly needs to be limited.
"Pretty soon we'll be teeing off downtown somewhere," Nicklaus said. "It's so simple just to restrict the golf ball. If I had my way, it would have been done 20 years ago before every golf course in this country, including this one (Augusta National), became obsolete."
Indeed, Augusta plans to lengthen some of its par 4s next year.
Nicklaus noted that improved balls enabled plenty of players, including Woods, to take all the bunkers at St. Andrews out of play at last year's British Open. To Nicklaus, that was a travesty and an insult to golf tradition.
"St. Andrews last year was an absolute joke," Nicklaus said.
Nicklaus noted that improved technology has added 10 to 15 yards to the distance players are getting. He has switched to the Titleist Pro V1 and said the ball he played last year is obsolete.
"The USGA hasn't stood up to the manufacturers because they are afraid of being sued to death, and I don't blame them. But where do you go? Meanwhile, the game gets ruined."