Last week, as part of their Distance Insights Project – a joint effort to study the past, present and future impacts of distance in golf – the USGA and R&A asked golfers to participate in a distance survey.
Many of you felt (and I agree) the survey was too long and polluted with questions designed to elicit the answers necessary to justify a foregone conclusion. Namely, distance is a problem that impacts all golfers and threatens the future of the game. The USGA and R&A are poised to take your feedback and do something to address the problem, even if it means you and the other 99.99% of golfers who don’t play at a professional or elite level will lose yardage because of it. Sometimes we all have to take one for the team.
For us, there were two issues with the survey. Firstly, many of the questions were, for lack of a more elegant term, garbage. Phrasing, in many cases, was suspect. It’s the sort of thing to which TV lawyers object on the grounds of leading the witness.
The second issue is that we’re fairly certain the USGA and R&A have no plans to publish the full, unfiltered results for all golfers to see. If you’re going to ask for the opinions of your constituency as part of the basis for a significant rule change, we think it’s reasonable to put those results out there for everyone. That’s exactly what we’re going to do.
We Fixed It
Before anyone tackles the distance problem, we wanted to solve the survey problem, so we fixed the USGA and R&A Survey.
We’ve eliminated some questions, left some alone, cleaned up others, added ones we think need to be asked, and just for good measure; we threw in a leading question of our own to get you to think about how a rollback might impact the courses you play.
We know its a big ask, but we hope that you’ll take 10 minutes out of your day to take the survey (again). We’re going to leave it open for two weeks. Once it’s closed, we’ll publish the results for everyone to see.
This really is your chance to be heard (and seen) on golf’s distance problem.
As an incentive, anyone who inputs their email address at the end of a completed survey will be entered to win a dozen 2018 Callaway ChromeSoft Golf balls.
Click here to take the MyGolfSpy Distance Survey.
Sam
6 years ago
Forget the ball. Take the driver away from the pros. But we can’t do that can we, because the golf industry thrives on selling us drivers most of us hit very poorly.