"Since we have said that, we are on a plateau."

I finally got around to Peter Dawson's R&A media day press conference remarks and found it curious that he brought up the distance issue. Even as he's going around reworking Open Championship courses and using off-property tees at St. Andrews, he's audaciously telling us about plateaus.

I'd just like to have a word about driving distance in the pro game today. These graphs show the three men's tours at the top, the PGA Tour, the European Tour, the Japan Tour, and for the women, the LPGA Tour and the Ladies European Tour at the bottom. Since around about 2002, 2003, driving distance on Tour has plateaued. It is not increasing despite what we often read.

No one has said it's increasing the last few years in anything I've read. They've said it increased way too much a few years ago when you said it was due to player athleticism, not equipment that should have been legislated more closely. Go on...

And the R & A and the USGA in March of 2002 issued its joint statement of principles, which said enough is enough; if hitting distance is increased, we will do something to rein back equipment. But since we have said that, we are on a plateau.

We don't have to do anything! Well, except change all of our rota courses around.

Now, these statistics are drawn from the two-hole measurements that are done at every golf event, and there is a danger that they don't simply reflect shots with a driver.

You mean because people like Peter Dawson pinch down landing areas and take driver out of their hands? Or because the ball travels so far off of today's clubs that driver isn't necessary? Sorry...

And there is a mixture in there because not every player plays a driver at these two holes that the data is corrupted with shorter clubs.

Oh, so the data is flawed?

Fortunately these days we're able to check this data against the ShotLink information from the PGA Tour, and we actually find that if you take the average of all driver shots, because we can identify driver shots, the actual average has plateaued, and it is actually slightly less than the red line up here. And I think that must be because the two holes that tend to get chosen to drive measurements are the ones we feel the pros will most likely open their shoulders.

So we are able to check that this data is, in fact, relevant, and it's something that the R & A and the USGA continue to monitor very closely.

They're monitoring ShotLink, which covers just one of the tours mentioned.

Monitoring translation: not planning to do a thing.