Ever since Tiger Woods and his soaring drives burst onto the scene in 1997, golfers have been driving the ball farther and farther, with courses lengthening their holes to mitigate the advantage—a practice both financially and environmentally unsustainable. But this week at the US Open, the United States Golf Association will showcase a course in Pinehurst No. 2 whose firm and fast conditions, along with slick, domed greens and considerable length off the tee, aim to challenge the biggest hitters without resorting to more yardage. This, the USGA hopes, will show how courses can stand the test of time. The Open could be a key turning point in golf’s arms race with sports science and technology.
These tactics, if successful, might bring about changes well beyond the major championships and PGA tour. The need to combat ever-longer drives goes far beyond the professional ranks, says Thomas Pagel, the USGA’s chief governance officer. “You have the college game, you have state amateur tournaments, you have state opens, you have PGA section events—these golf courses all are having to increase length in order to keep up.” The need to keep the sport sufficiently testing at the top level “is an issue that impacts thousands of golf courses worldwide,” Pagel says.
Pinehurst No. 2 is a course with a long and storied past. It is also landlocked, with little ability to outgrow its current footprint. In fact, the North Carolina course will play 10 yards shorter than the last time it hosted the US Open, in 2014. The USGA has committed to continuing to use “cathedrals of the game” such as Pinehurst No. 2—it’s planning to return to the North Carolina course four times in the next 25 years—but with the ball traveling farther than ever, such classic venues are in jeopardy. Over the past decade, average driving distance on the PGA tour has ticked up every year, clocking in roughly 10 yards longer since the Open last came to Pinehurst. Compared to the early 1990s, drives today are 30 yards longer.
Partly this is because of the players. Today’s professionals—and elite amateurs—are the picture of fitness, with toned arms and powerful legs that allow them to push against the ground and pop up on their swings, increasing the distance the ball flies. A combination of new techniques, modeled after a similar move in Woods’ golf swing early in his career, have been adopted by men and women alike to achieve this effect.
These have coincided with advances in technology. Launch monitors, which use doppler radar, the same tech that’s used in speed guns, measure the ball’s physical characteristics at the point of contact to offer players and coaches a range of data: swing speed, the ball’s launch angle, how fast the ball travels, how much it spins, not to mention how far it flies. These devices give golfers the data they need to change their technique and hone in their equipment to hit the ball farther.
“A lot of distance is coming from lowering the spin of drivers and even irons, but maintaining the launch,” says Chris Voshall, director of product development for the sports brand Mizuno. Voshall says that over the past 10 to 15 years, launch monitors have helped players understand the relationship “between launch angle, spin rate, and the golfer’s ability to generate ball speed.” As well as informing technique, this has led to more athletic players, who seek faster swings to impart more force on the ball, he says. On top of this, these monitoring devices have allowed sports companies to optimize their products for generating distance by focusing on launch and spin, he says.
Then there’s the ball. The modern golf ball doesn’t spin as much, in general, Voshall explains, meaning that shots that used to bend wildly offline today curve less and fly straighter—which means farther. Elite golfers have taken advantage of these gains in the equipment, he says, to hit more controlled shots too. “It used to be that the longest players in the world hit a draw,” he says, which is a curving shot that bends in the air away from the golfer’s dominant side, “because it had less spin and would go farther. Now, equipment has gotten to the point that we can lower the spin rate so low, they can get the same distance with a cut.” A cut swing bends in the air toward the golfer’s dominant side and has less chance, in general, of being mishit.
Some of golf’s most recognized luminaries, including Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus—notably two of the longest hitters in their respective eras—have gone on record saying that courses are too long and that something needs to be done to the golf ball to rein in driving distances.
In December 2023, the USGA—along with the Royal and Ancient Society in St. Andrews, Scotland, who together oversee the worldwide rules of golf—announced a controversial plan to help eliminate distance gains by putting new restrictions on how far the golf ball can fly, by changing how they are manufactured. Critics of the “ball rollback” plan have accused the USGA of being mired in the past and not embracing technology. Those in favor, including Pagel, argue that it will help preserve not only historic golf courses that host championships but also everyday courses regular golfers play. Ball rollback will come into effect in 2028.
In the meantime, the USGA is trying to claw back an advantage against big hitting without relying once again on lengthening courses. “We have the capability in many instances for venues to grow, but there’s an expense to that,” says Pagel. Longer courses mean more irrigated turf, pesticides, and fertilizers, which are all counter to the USGA’s messaging around environmental stewardship.
Besides, adding length to holes isn’t upping the challenge proportionately. Traditionally, the men’s Open Championship has been one of the sternest tests in golf, ripe for players to have metaphorical car wrecks on their scorecard, because of the narrow fairways and deep grass surrounding them, the rough. Miss the fairway and hit the rough, and players would pay by having to take extra shots.
But as players have gotten longer and stronger, for some finding the rough has not proven to be the detriment it once was. The ability to generate clubhead speed through heavy grass has brought about a strategy termed “bomb and gouge,” meaning: Hit it as far as you can without worrying where it lands, and then use your strength to gouge it out of the rough and land it on the green.
Therefore, this year’s US Open will be more about the condition of the ground than overall length. Prior to the 2014 championship, when the resort last hosted the tournament, some 40 acres of irrigated turf have been removed from Pinehurst No. 2, along with over 900 sprinkler heads, saving the course 40 million gallons of water a year. This led to firmer and faster conditions that allowed even well-struck balls to run through fairways and into sandy native areas, where the wiregrass gives unpredictable lies. And unpredictability is the elite golfer’s worst enemy.
In 2014, Martin Kaymer ran away from the field with an eight-shot victory but was one of only three players under par for the tournament. This year, the USGA has doubled down on toughening the conditions, by planting more wiregrass at the edges of the fairways to create more trouble. “We will identify the better players, because we believe that the best players can control their golf ball not only when they hit in the air but once it hits the ground. They anticipate where it can go and miss [trouble] appropriately,” says John Bodenhamer, the USGA’s chief championships officer.
“We intentionally chose not to lengthen the course [from its 2014 yardage], because our role as governance body with distance is important,” Bodenhamer adds. To that end, he says, three of the next four venues that will host the US Open will play to the same lengths as previous championships.
In many ways, No. 2 is a showcase for all that a golf course can be, and if the USGA gets things right with its initiatives—and how it sets up the course to play—nearly all that a course will ever need to be, from a yardage standpoint at least. If scores remain near par and no one runs away from the field as Kaymer did 10 years ago, the USGA should be able to proclaim success and show that when the ball rollback goes into effect, the old courses will stand the test of time. The organization knows it can’t put the distance genie back in the bottle, but if it can slow down its march, that will be progress. For now.