How Long Is Long?

I remember the day when I first got my driver to hit the ball up in the air. I was by myself at a driving range, late on a summer’s day in 2008. I had taken a couple of lessons and read a lot of golf magazines, and somehow all of the wisps and whispers of golf tips that had been circulating through my brain came together to produce a shot that launched the ball forward in a high arc that ballooned upward and then plummeted gently to the ground. Its trajectory was a perfect miniature of the swing I was most familiar with, my husband’s golf swing, and I knew I had done something right. The ball went all of 120 yards, and I was darn proud.

Within a month or two, I was at the range three times a week and getting the ball to go 150 yards. In the fall, after watching the 2008 RyderCup, I was inspired by something Anthony Kim had said about taking a shorter backswing to gain more distance and control. I tried it out on the range and found myself pounding balls stick straight 180 yards.

For an amateur woman, 175 yards is average, according to this chart on Golf Club Distances. 

Of course, the professionals can hit much farther. Michelle Wie is famous for drives of up to 350 yards, but even Morgan Pressel, one of the LPGA’s shortest drivers, drives around 230 yards on her worst day. Not that I aspire to such great lengths. When Pressel paired up with Annika Sorenstam at last November’s ADT Skills Challenge, Sorenstam was only hitting about 200 yards or so. Sorenstam once had a driving average of around 265 in her prime, so you can see how not playing regularly can really drop your stats. But if a retired, former number-one professional golfer over the age of 40 can still bat the ball 200 yards, then so can a never-ranked, completely amateur golfer in her 40s, such as myself.

Why is driver distance so important? It directly influences how many shots you need to reach the green. Theoretically, on a par 4, you’re supposed to reach the green in 2 shots and hole in 2 putts. So if you can’t reach the green in 2 shots, then you’ve got a lot of pressure on yourself to make the putt.  

Now there are those who have done research showing most golf courses are actually disproportionately long for women when compared to men, based on amateur swing speeds, an average woman's drive of only 140 yards, and a general rule of thumb that the total fairway length should be 30 times your driver distance. So in terms of tee box placement, golf courses should be moving the forward tees even farther forward.

In fact, last summer, Play Golf America launched a “Tee It Forward” campaign encouraging golf courses to add more distance-appropriate tees for all amateur golfers. According to their guidelines, if I am driving an average of 150 yards, then I should be playing a 3500-3700 yard course. That’s 1400 yards shorter than the forward tees at my usual local course! That could take at least a dozen strokes off my game. But until golf courses permanently create these distance-appropriate tee boxes, I will probably just keep trying to slug away. The only other alternative, as the campaign suggest, is to literally set up your own makeshift tee ground on the fairway. But I doubt I’ll ever do that.

I already know that life isn’t fair, so why should my local golf course be? And now that I know that I'm playing courses that are really too long for me, it makes playing well on them all the more sweet.