Technophobic Media Is Getting Younger: Millennials Not Buying!

It's a wonderful thing, how these "technophobic" times have changed. The kids are increasingly on board!

As distances have spiked again and rumors of a bifurcation movement looming that might introduce a variable distance ball, our friends in Fairhaven have updated a talking points "stack" they've peddled for years with a summer 2017 update to their case against any kind of golf ball regulation.

(Note: in 50+ pages they never mention the millions spent to change golf courses or to pay for the issues arising from golf balls flying to places never before reached.)

But I can sit back, nurse a cold beverage and watch others do the heavy lifting on an issue that will keep coming up as long as folks keep telling us nothing's happening. Couple this with and increasingly sustainability-focused generation not buying the arguments for sitting still, and there is an air of inevitability to some sort of regulatory action.

Alex Myers at GolfDigest.com considered the driving distances of Champions Tour players this year compared to their PGA Tour averages at age 30 and of course, everyone has gotten longer as their waistlines have expanded, their backs tightened and their clubs have grown more powerful.

Kenny Perry ranks fourth on the PGA Tour Champions in 2017 at 295 yards per poke. In 1990, he had a driving-distance average of just 270.8 yards. That's not bad considering Tom Purtzer led the PGA Tour that season at 279.6 yards (for comparison, Rory McIlroy's 316.4 yards leads this season) but that equates to nearly a 9-percent increase in driving distance from the time Perry was 30 to his current average as a 57-year-old.

The increase is even bigger for Fred Couples, if we use his driving-distance average (a whopping 300.4 yards) from 2015, the last time he played enough rounds on the PGA Tour Champions to have official stats. In 1990, two years before Freddie won the Masters and ascended to No. 1 in the Official World Golf Ranking, he averaged a measly 272.6 yards on his tee shots. Of the players we looked at, Couples' 10.2-percent increase led the way. (It should be noted that the Callaway Big Bertha was launched in 1991, ushering in a new era where driver heads grew to the size of small microwaves, giving a boost to driving distance stats.)

But Alex, don't discount the two-a-day yoga sessions and bicep curls Fred has been doing following his 9 minute planks!

In the wake of last week's 341-yard clutch drive by Dustin Johnson, many revisited the question of distance and whether the sport is better when a top player can drive that far.  I support the long hitter right to his advantage but as we all know, the sport can't keep expanding venues to accommodate distance gains that are going to keep coming as we replace pre-Trackman, pre-watermelon-sized driver heads with those who have never known anything else but swinging hard.

Tron Carter, another young influencer from the only generation that matters, had some fun exchanges with Twitterers about distance. You can read those by clicking on the tweets at his profile or these two (here and here), which no doubt have earned ihs Twitter account top status on some sort of watch screen in Fairhaven.