Jack Nicklaus said last year at the Masters that the "friggin golf ball" needs to be changed to reduce length players are hitting the ball at the professional level. This week, Tiger Woods joined him, which means the two best players to ever play the sport are on the same page when it comes to the ball.
Woods told UConn women's basketball coach Geno Auriemma on the "Holding Court with Geno Auriemma" podcast that he's hitting his old yardages without even really trying.
"We need to do something about the golf ball," Woods told Auriemma. "I just think it's going too far, because we're having to build golf courses, if they want to have a championship venue, they've got to be 7,400 to 7,800 yards long.
"The USGA's already looking at it. They're doing some research on what would the world look like if you rolled [the ball] back 10 percent, 15 percent and 20 percent."
To Woods' point, the number of golfers averaging 300 yards off the tee has increased significantly this century. In 2000, John Daly led the PGA Tour in driving at 301.4 yards. Woods finished second averaging 298 off the tee. In 2016-17, 43 different golfers averaged 300 or more yards off the tee, an astounding number given the timespan.
Nobody is exempt from the issue, either. Even new Augusta National chairman Fred Ridley has noted "we're interested in (the issue of distance)." Whether anyone actually does anything about what Woods and Nicklaus have said is a problem remains to be seeon.
Wink of the CBS eye to ESPN
