'Too Little, Too Late' - Ian Baker-Finch Questions Golf Ball Rollback

Former Open champion and long-time golf broadcaster Ian Baker-Finch believes the distance professional golfers hit the ball is contributing to slow play in tournament golf and the planned golf ball rollback doesn’t go far enough to reverse the damage that has already been done.

The Australian argues that with existing courses having to add back tees that are an increasing distance from the previous green and new courses being built longer and longer, that extra walking time is making rounds slower.

“Now the pros walk off the green and backwards 75 yards or more, so it slows the game down,” explained the 1991 Open champion.

“The leading players are all walking an extra couple of hundred yards every hole. It’s two miles at the end of the day, which doesn’t help the speed of play.

“I think the rollback is too little, too late. I think they’ve (the manufacturers) already developed a ball that will go just as far as it does now for when the rollback starts. The governing bodies should have gone 10% at the time, mainly because the ball just goes too far.

"I’m still a scratch player or better at my club but I’m 65 years old and if I play a scratch player who’s 25, he will hit it 75 yards past me.

“A lot of the bodies say they don’t want bifurcation, they don’t want a ball for the pro and not for the amateur, but the game is already bifurcated.

"My son-in-law hits it 300 metres and plays off the black tees, I play the golds or blues, my buddies my age can play the whites, my wife Jenny plays the greens.

"We all play different tees, so I don’t understand why they can’t make rules for the elite players to stop them from hitting it so far, because we’re losing the old great courses.”

Baker-Finch also believes the governing bodies need to look beyond just limiting the ball if they are really going to curb ever-increasing driving distances, bring back the playability and challenge of some of the world’s greatest courses and help speed up play.

“It’s not just the driver head size, but perhaps a rollback of the driver head size would help a little. There’s lots of little things you could do, but the main thing would be to make the ball spin more and bring the driver head size back.”

While he wants to see equipment rolled back more than what has been proposed, he has huge respect for the athleticism and talent of modern tour pros, and recognises that hitting it a long way is a skill that makes the game more attractive and should be rewarded.

“It’s great that we now have women and men that are really wonderful athletes playing our game," Baker-Finch said.

"Our shop front is so exciting, fresh, vibrant and explosive when you look at the young players now. I love that, because it’s now all about speed, athleticism and distance.

"So there are good aspects of it, but I still think they would be the best players at the forefront of the game even if it was 10% less.

"So the guy that hits it 350 yards now is only going to hit it 320. It’s still a bloody long way – and it’s still longer than the guy that hits it 300 now and would drop further.”

The golf ball rollback will come into force from 2028 for professionals and 2030 for recreational golfers.

The announcement was made by The R&A and USGA in December 2023, following five years of studying the impact of hitting distances in golf.

The limit for a conforming ball now is that it can go no farther than 320 yards when hit with a clubhead speed of 120mph with specific launch conditions, but the new rule states it can go no farther than 320 yards when hit with a clubhead speed of 125mph in those same conditions.

It is expected that the average tour pro will lose around 10 yards in distance with driver, while it will be less than five yards for most handicap players.

When it was announced, Martin Slumbers, Chief Executive of The R&A at the time, said this: “We decided we needed to change the rule because we felt that we needed to preserve the integrity of golf courses, as we’ve seen significant lengthening of lots of golf courses over the last 20 years.

"We wanted to maintain the balance of skills and technology around how the game is played, and not have one element of it dominating all the other elements. We wanted to make sure and be cognisant of our environmental responsibility to our sport.”

With manufacturers spending millions and millions of dollars on improving their amazing equipment every year, will that change that was revealed four years before it will come into effect make any real difference to the hitting distances, course set-ups and speed of play that we’ve seen in recent years?

Ian Baker-Finch certainly doesn’t think so.

The Australian was speaking to Golf Monthly following the launch of his autobiography, To hell and Back.

Why did he choose to do his biography now with Geoff Saunders – and what did he learn in the process?

"I’ve had many journos and authors over the years say, ‘let’s do your book’, and I always said I don’t need to. Geoff Saunders said you need to chronicle your story and your life, even if it’s just for your grandkids, family and friends. I trusted Geoff because he’d written a couple of good books on Peter Thomson and Sir Bob Charles, and had a lot of information already on me from those two books. He basically convinced me at the St Andrews Open in 2022. I see it as a great book about the ‘80s and ‘90s era of golf – he’s placed me in the centre, but it’s not just me. The process definitely helped me. It allowed me to look back on my career in a positive way. It was cathartic and I enjoyed going through old photos and great memories with Jenny and the kids."