Columnist Dean Juipe: Par suffers as new ball sweeps tour

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or 259-4084.

Joe Durant made it 8 for 8.

That's eight PGA Tour events this season and eight winners using a new golf ball that is solid and unwound and producing ridiculous sounding scores.

Whether this is good for the sport is open to debate.

Durant, who won the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic that concluded its five-day run Sunday, finished the tournament a bedazzling 36 under par. But it would have been even more bedazzling had he not done it with a ball that routinely adds 15 to 20 yards to his drive.

What the longer drives produce are shorter and easier approach shots to the green. As a result, the hardest sport in the world isn't as hard as it once was, at least for players of world-class ability.

Curtis Strange, a tour player as well as a commentator for ABC Sports, said during the final-round telecast that the new ball makes for a two-club difference. So instead of hitting, say, a 7-iron into the green, a player with the new ball is hitting a 9.

"I can't afford not to play it," Strange said of the new ball. "The problem is, so is everyone else."

A year ago at this time, only 13 percent of the tour players were using an unwound ball. Now, everyone who is not using it is running the risk of becoming obsolete.

Durant just devoured the courses in the Hope rotation and established PGA Tour records for lowest score (in relation to par) after both 72 and 90 holes. With additional highlights from Mark Calcavecchia's record 256 score at Phoenix and Davis Love's front-nine 28 at Pebble Beach, seven of the last nine PGA Tour events have broken tournament records for scoring.

"It's a joke," commented tour veteran Jeff Sluman.

Factor in long-running fairways and meticulously groomed and easily read greens, and par is no longer a decent score at the typical tour event. The scores at this year's Hope were 7 1/2 strokes better per man than on the same four courses in 1988, and not all of that is the result of the players' improved conditioning.

They're cheating, some would say.

There are rules and limitations on equipment, and just this year Arnold Palmer was exorcised as a USGA spokesman for advocating an illegal club -- the Calloway ERC II driver -- for use in casual play. But no one seems to be taking a hard stance against ball development, and an era of prodigious and Super Ball-like drives seems to be upon us.

The new unwound balls the pros are using are the Titleist Pro VI and the Spalding Strata Tour Ultimate (which has a tungsten pellet at its center). The going rate for each is $54 per dozen.

What they give the player is a ball that has a higher rate of initial velocity and a more penetrating flight than a wound ball.

They also give players like Durant -- and Las Vegas' Robert Gamez, who closed with a 61 Sunday -- opportunities at scores that have a once-in-a-lifetime sound to them yet are becoming fairly commonplace.

The golfer in me will be happy to try these new balls but the fan in me wants to see the pros have to at least struggle a little bit. Between the titanium drivers that emerged in the '90s and now these unwound balls, they're making it look too easy.

And golf, even at the top level, should never look too easy.

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