Ken Brown Gives Fascinating Look At How 1980s Yardage Book Compares To Today’s

It’s normally around this time of the year that we we start to look forward to Ken Brown dropping balls on Augusta’s table top greens and demonstrating how severe the breaks are – an annual highlight, for sure.

The former professional and now broadcaster is out and about already, and has provided another wonderful insight ahead of this week’s action on the DP World Tour.

Brown is in Kenya for the first time since he won the Benson & Hedges Kenya Open in 1983, and he’s taken the opportunity to share what his yardage booklet from the tournament looked like over 40 years ago.

Back then the onus was on the player and his caddie to work out the yardages, unlike today, with yardage booklets doing most of the really heavy lifting.

Brown, who played in five Ryder Cups and won four times on what used to be the European Tour, described the process of working out yardages as more “hand to mouth” 

Today’s booklets, he jokes, contain “what you had for breakfast”. “It’s got how far every single yardage is from all the different spots, it’s fantastic,” says Brown. 

“This is a massive, massive improvement. It saves you a lot of work because we used to have to try and do this whilst we were having a practice round.”

Although you’ll still see players and caddies pacing around during pro-ams working out certain distances, there’s no need to go to the same lengths as was required when Brown and co were playing.

As Brown explains, before detailed yardage books arrived, there was a lot of work to be done in the lead-up to a tournament, and it meant that it was “easy to make a mistake”.

In Brown’s fascinating piece to camera, which he shared on X, the Scot adds: “A lot of us used to get together at the end of the day and say, ‘What did you get from that spot?’”

There’s no doubt that most of the caddies on Tour get along, but it’s hard to imagine the likes of Tiger Woods’, Rory McIlroy’s and Scottie Scheffler’s loopers sitting down on the eve of a Major Championship to compare notes.