Doubting Thomas

As the USGA celebrates its 100th birthday this year, it can bask in the remarkable knowledge that baby boomers and even a fair number of Generation Xers have actually come to find golf cool. But even as the guardians of the game have stopped being a joke to America's youth, they have been taking a public pummeling from a bunch of old friends—some of them golf's biggest names.

More than ever, many of the game's heaviest hitters are unified in the belief that, for tournament pros, the advances in equipment technology have compromised golf's essential challenge and made what used to be a most difficult endeavor way too easy. The perceived mess has been blamed on the USGA, the game's official watchdog, which has been called everything from asleep at the wheel to scared silly of potentially litigious equipment companies.

According to the antitechnology lobby, modern equipment is the reason for most of the game's ills. These Luddites say the game's new clubs and balls have destroyed the art of shotmaking and brought a tedious parity to the PGA Tour. Maybe even worse, they say, is that because the golf ball is being hit so far, classic sites such as Merion and Inverness have been made obsolete. And Augusta National could be next. Even on courses measuring more than 7,000 yards, most long hitters are able to frequently use one-or two-irons off the tee without paying a significant penalty on their second shots.

With every major championship the critics have gained more ammunition. This year the biggest buzz was all about 19-year-old U.S. Amateur champion Tiger Woods's turning Augusta's par-5s into the equivalent of medium-length par-4s with drives that left galleries and playing partners alike in awe. If this kid and his equipment is the future, the logic goes, something has to be done fast before golf's monuments to history become outmoded.

Such doomsaying might be easy to put aside if all the urgency was being generated by cranks. But how can the game ignore icons like Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, Gary Player and Raymond Floyd, all of whom have a ready response every time the issue of equipment is raised.

"It's the Number 1 priority facing the game today," says Nicklaus. Adds Player, "Technology is killing golf. There's no way anymore to compare the scores from today to what Ben Hogan and Sam Snead shot."

It's not just the competitors, either. Course architects, too, are riled up about how the courses they designed to be championship tests are now less challenging.

"If something isn't done about the new clubs and the new ball soon," says 89-year-old Robert Trent Jones, the dean of course designers, "I may have to go back and move the fairway bunkers and tees on every course."

Even the carefully measured voice of this country's greatest golf historian, Herbert Warren Wind, is strident when it comes to equipment and technology. "We want to produce players who can play the shot, and play different shots, and that's now out of the game," says the 78-year-old Wind, who is critical of the USGA despite being the recipient this year of the organization's highest honor, the Bob Jones Award. "The USGA has not been good for the game in allowing all those special balls and clubs to come in. The quality of golf has changed in the wrong way."

These grandees leave the distinct impression that good golf is going the way of good service, good manners and a decent Danish pastry. The sky is falling and the apocalypse is upon us. Standing squarely under this avalanche has been a lone figure, Frank Thomas, who as technical director of the USGA for 21 years is the gatekeeper regulating what new equipment gets into the game and what doesn't. If Thomas feels buried by all the criticism, he isn't letting on, perhaps because he believes nearly all of it is a snow job.