I hope you’ll find this commentary to be the most accurate description of golf you’ve ever read.
She hit 40 fairway woods in a day. Rory McIlroy might hit 30 in an entire season. It is an estimate, obviously.
Golf statistics are rarely clean enough to survive contact with reality. A fairway wood can mean a 3-wood, a 5-wood, a 7-wood. A competitive season can mean 15 tournaments, or 20, or whatever the professional schedule happens to demand. Some courses invite fairway woods. Others make them nearly obsolete.
But let us use a reasonable approximation. Suppose Rory—or Bryson DeChambeau—hits a fairway wood approximately half a time per competitive round. Give him 15 tournaments. Give him four rounds per tournament. That is 60 rounds. Half a fairway wood per round. Thirty fairway woods.
Now consider the woman hitting a 120-yard fairway wood. She might hit 40 fairway woods in a single day.
There is something almost philosophically offensive about this comparison.
Courtesy Pixabay.com
The world’s best golfers may hit fewer fairway woods in an entire season than an ordinary golfer hits before lunch. And yet we insist they are playing the same game. Technically, they are. That is the beauty and the absurdity of golf.
The rules are the same. The hole is the same. The ball is the same. The scorecard does not care whether your second shot was a 4-iron, a 7-wood, or a fairway wood you bought after watching a YouTube video that promised to fix your life.
But the experience is not the same.
Rory sees a 450-yard hole and sees a driver and a wedge. She sees a driver, a fairway wood, another fairway wood, and perhaps a prayer. He is playing a game of precision. She is crossing a continent. And golf has somehow convinced her that the problem is that she is not crossing the continent quickly enough, and that is where the conversation about equity in golf becomes interesting.
We talk about equality as if giving everyone the same course solves the problem. Same tees. Same hole. Same rules. Good luck!
But equity asks a different question. What does it take for different people to experience the same game? The answer may not be that everyone needs to hit the ball farther. Perhaps the answer is that the course should be designed around the distances people actually hit.
The modern golf course is increasingly built around an elite physical outlier. The professional golfer hits the ball farther, so the course gets longer. The amateur then stands on the tee, looks down the fairway, and realizes that the hole has become a small infrastructure project.
The professional hits driver and wedge. The amateur hits driver, fairway wood, fairway wood, and something that may technically be a golf shot. And then we wonder why the round takes five hours.
There is also a water problem hiding inside this obsession. Longer courses require more land. More land requires more maintenance. More maintenance requires more water. The longer the course, the more territory must be irrigated, managed, mowed, and maintained.
We have created a sport in which the average golfer is asked to chase the physical capacities of the most exceptional golfers in history. Then we build the environment around the exceptional golfer. This is like designing public swimming pools around Michael Phelps and then wondering why everyone else is tired.
There is a point at which distance stops being a performance attribute and becomes an infrastructure demand. The question is not whether golf should celebrate distance. Of course it should. Hitting a golf ball 350 yards is objectively hilarious. It is an act of violence against geography.
But perhaps the person hitting a 120-yard fairway wood should not be made to feel as though she is failing because she requires more of them. She is not failing.
She is using the game available to her. And she may actually be having more fun. That is the part the golf industry has trouble understanding. You are never going to be good at golf.
Neither am I.
Most people reading this are not going to become good at golf. You may buy the new driver. You may get fitted. You may take lessons. You may learn about launch angle, spin rate, attack angle, shaft flex, clubhead speed, and whatever new measurement the golf industry has invented to explain why you still hit the ball into the same pond. You may improve. You may even become respectable. But you are not becoming Rory McIlroy. And that is okay.
Golf is one of the few games where the central experience is not mastery. It is repeated failure with occasional evidence that failure may not be permanent. You hit one good shot and spend the next three holes trying to recreate it.
Courtesy: Visit Scotland
This is not sport as optimization. This is sport as delusion. And perhaps that is why it is fun. God only gives us the vision we need for the distance we hit the ball. That is why people get nearsighted.
The long hitter sees the green. The short hitter sees the whole hole. The long hitter sees the shot. The short hitter sees the journey. There is something valuable in that.
The professional golfer’s achievement is making the course disappear. A 500-yard hole becomes a few elegant decisions. The ordinary golfer’s achievement is accepting that the course is still there.
The fairway wood becomes a kind of democratic club. It does not promise transformation. It does not pretend you are one swing thought away from greatness. It simply says: the hole is still 400 yards away. Fine. Hit another one. And another.
Maybe the future of golf should not be a universal race toward distance. Maybe it should be a recognition that different people experience distance differently.
The woman hitting 40 fairway woods in a day is not playing less golf than Rory McIlroy. In one sense, she is playing more of it. She is experiencing more of the course. More shots. More decisions. More opportunities for the ball to do something completely inexplicable.
Rory’s ball gets there faster. That does not necessarily mean he is having more fun, and it certainly does not mean the rest of us need to rebuild the game so that we can pretend to be him.
There is a distance between us. Between the 120-yard fairway wood and the 350-yard drive. Between the person we are and the golfer we think we should become. Between the course the professional needs and the course the rest of us actually play.
Perhaps golf does not need to eliminate that distance. Perhaps it needs to stop pretending it is a problem. Because sometimes the point is not to reach the green as quickly as possible.
Sometimes the point is to hit another fairway wood, watch the ball disappear toward the horizon, and have absolutely no idea where it is going.
