I must be out of touch. I have no problem with a ball rollback.
I don't want to see Augusta National have to keep buying land to move tee boxes back 20 yards, which also requires them to move bunkers & mounds. And I am sure all the classic tour courses are having to do something similar on a regular basis.
But yeah, sure, the Pro Tour players are different. The average Joe doesn't support a rollback.....
I was volunteering at a high school tourney on our local muni a few months ago. Course plays just under 6400 yards. I was a spotter on the 2nd longest hole, a flat & straight 525 yard par 5. All day I sat there and watched high school kids hitting anywhere from 5 iron to 8 iron to get on in two. And this was just a local school district tournament - not a serious junior tour group. I am sure all the par 4s on this course were driver / half-wedge for these kids.
44 years ago I was a high school golfer. Persimmon woods and balata balls. A good drive went 250. Misses were much worse. Now these high school kids are getting 300+ easy. Balls are long. Clubheads are huge. Instead of a miss being a 50 yard shank, it is now a 300 yard bullet into a house. And the result is our local muni course, which would have been a perfectly fine venue in my HS day, has been rendered toothless and quite dull by the new distances.
But that's OK. We can get the city to just buy some additional land all around the course so we can move the tees back. Oh and we'll need to relocate bunkers to keep them in play. All that added land will raise the water bill by 33%. So add the land cost, the water bill, probably will need to add a few hundred trees after the lawsuit from homeowners getting pelted by attempted 350 yard drives. Greens fees for average Joe will go up from $30 to $80 to cover all of this. And that should fix the problem at least for another 20 years.
Or we can dial the ball back, and poof, the muni course becomes a viable tournament host again.
