Doak - it's the club, not the ball

Little as ever in the way of fence-sitting from Tom Doak, interviewed recently in the UK edition of Golf World. Highlights:

• "I'd make the pros go back to hitting wooden drivers...Wooden drivers were really hard to hit...No-one swung at the ball with 100 per cent effort; it was just too risky. Most went at it at 90 per cent to make sure they hit the ball off the sweetspot. When that stopped mattering, the swings changed and the game changed...if we fixed the driver thing, I don't think we'd have to do much with the ball."

• "The design of a course doesn't happen from the tee forwards. It happens from the green back and from features in the landing area."

• On why architectural standards declined in the mid-1900s: "...there was a boom but no-one from the Golden Age was around to do the building...there were only a handful of 'name' guys left...So instead of building a small number of great courses, those guys were running around building 30 courses that were inevitably not as good."

• On reduced ball spin reducing the use of fades and draws on tour: "I'm sure a lot of [pros] are bored. They hit the same shot over and over...The giveaway is that not many of them play golf for fun any more." 

• On architecture revolving too much around the pro game: "That's why courses are set up for championships the way they are. They seem to want a really good score to be 68...[but] if nobody shoots 65 then that's a hard course. That's a course where three-handicappers won't break 80. Do we need a lot of that? No."

• "My bias is towards giving people more room and having more short-game interest.

• "We want everything to look as if it was always there...When I'm looking at a course built by someone else and they didn't try to do that, I'm driven crazy. But there are a few architects who don't care about that at all...they almost want their work to look unnatural."

• "The worst thing you can say to me is that my course was dull."

[Pic courtesy of CORE-Materials]