The recreational golfer who has, over the course of the last decade, slowly worked his handicap from the high twenties down to the mid teens, and who plays, on most weekends, the same set of tees he played from when his handicap was twenty-three, is the most common figure on the average golf course on a Saturday morning. He has not, in his own description, played the wrong tees in the last ten years. He has played the white tees, or the blue tees, or whichever set of tees the men in his regular fourball play from, and he has done so because the alternative was the set of tees in front of those, which would, in his account, have made the course too short for him to take seriously. The argument this piece would like to make is that the alternative is, in nearly every case, the correct one. The recreational golfer who plays one set of tees forward will, by the end of a season, have a lower handicap, a slightly faster round, and a different relationship with the course he plays most often than he had before he made the change.
The yardage the course was designed for
The set of tees that a course architect designs as the daily-play tees on a regulation course is the set of tees from which the average ball-striker in the membership can reach the par-fours in two shots and the par-fives in three. The yardage that produces that experience, on the average club golfer driving the ball two hundred and twenty yards in the air with a touch of roll, is in the region of six thousand to six thousand four hundred yards. The recreational golfer with a fifteen handicap who carries the ball two hundred and ten yards is, by every reasonable measure, playing a course that is too long for him when he plays a set of tees in the region of six thousand six hundred yards. The four hundred yards of extra carry the course is asking him to find every round is the four hundred yards he does not have. He compensates by reaching for a wood off the deck on holes where the architect intended him to be playing a mid-iron. He misses the green in regulation on roughly fifteen holes a round. He plays the wrong shot, off the wrong yardage, on most of the holes the course was designed to ask the right shot of.
What the score actually does
The lower handicap that the forward tees produce is not, in the first instance, the consequence of an easier course. It is the consequence of the player being asked the right questions. The par-four that he reaches with a driver and a six-iron, rather than a driver and a hybrid, gives him a putt for birdie rather than a chip from forty yards. The par-five that he can reach in two with a fairway wood, rather than the par-five he lays up on with a three-iron and an eight-iron, becomes the hole on which he produces a four on his card rather than a six. The course-management decisions that the proper yardage allows the player to make are the decisions the architecture was set up to reward. The score, over the course of a season, drops by two or three strokes a round. The handicap, eighteen rounds later, drops accordingly.
The ego, and what to do with it
The reason the recreational golfer does not move forward a set of tees is not, in most cases, that he has thought carefully about which tees produce his best golf. The reason is that the set of tees a club golfer plays is a piece of information he gives to other club golfers about his self-image. The white tees are, at most clubs, the tees the men play. The yellow or the gold or the senior tees, at the same club, are the tees the older or the shorter-hitting members play. The move from the white to the yellow is a move the fifteen-handicap club golfer in his forties does not make because of what the move says about him, rather than because of what the move would do to his score. The move would, in fact, do quite a lot to his score. It would also be invisible to anyone who was not in his group. The cost of the move is, in any practical sense, zero. The benefit is on the order of three strokes a round.
The pace of play question
The further benefit, and the one most often missed in the conversation about slow golf, is the pace of play. The recreational golfer who is playing the tees that are slightly too long for him is the recreational golfer who is, on most holes, playing a third shot from a hundred yards that he is not entirely comfortable with. He takes two practice swings. He looks at the yardage book. He plays a shot that goes long or short of the green. He plays a chip back to the surface. The hole, in total, has taken him eight minutes. The same player, from the forward tees, plays a second shot from the same hundred yards, lands it on the green, takes two putts, and has finished the hole in six minutes. Across eighteen holes, the difference is half an hour. Across a foursome of like-minded players, the difference is two hours across a Saturday morning tee sheet. The pace-of-play conversation that the golf media has been having for the last decade has been, in the recreational game at least, a conversation about a problem that the correct tee selection would have quietly solved.
What to do about it
The change is the easiest one in the game. It costs nothing. It does not require new equipment. It does not require lessons. It does not require any change to the swing. It requires the player, on the first tee of his next round, to walk forward one set of markers, drop the ball on the appropriate side of the tee box, and play the round. The first nine holes will feel slightly easier than the course usually feels. The first round will produce, if the player is not entirely unlucky, a score that is two or three strokes lower than the average. The second round, and the third, will start to confirm what the first round suggested. The course will start to feel like the course the architect designed. The player will start to play the shots the architect intended the player to play. The ego, which was the only obstacle to the change, will quickly adjust to the slightly lower scores and the slightly faster rounds, and will not, by the end of the season, be missing the four hundred extra yards a single bit.