Word: backspin
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...nature to wish our lives and careers to be marked by unbroken ascent. But deep down, we know they won't be; decline - terminal, indeed - comes to us all. Watching a Henin crosscourt backhand hitting the line, or a towering iron shot from Sorenstam plonking softly, with a little backspin, onto a green, the world seemed to stand still. It didn't, of course. All things come...
Augusta's addition of the thin rough was likewise both radical in its break from tradition and subtle in its impact. The best golfers soon figured out how to adapt. Nick Faldo, a three-time Masters champion, says the longer grass may actually assist players as rough reduces backspin, which can cause balls to scurry off Augusta's treacherous greens like startled mice. "The rough is so short and the greens so challenging that players can potentially use it to their advantage," he says. "You can hit intentionally into the rough to take the spin off your approach. Players...
Last year the U.S. Golf Association threw a new hazard at the industry. When Callaway introduced a revolutionary, ultra-powerful driver called the ERC II, the USGA decreed that the club had a rule-violating "springlike effect" on the ball. The attendant publicity has put a devastating backspin on sales of the ERC II, but it also raises the disturbing prospect of a curb on further technological enhancements to clubs...
Earl taught the basics, but Tiger couldn't hit the ball very far, so he learned to score with putts and delicate wedge shots. His first instructor, Rudy Duran, recalls that at age five "Tiger had the skill and imagination to hit high wedge shots, low ones, shots with backspin." Nicklaus, in contrast, feels he never developed first-rate shots from off the green because he didn't start playing golf seriously until age 10, when he was already big for his age and intent on smashing the ball...
...late, the modern player has been wringing his overlapped hands over something called square grooves. Though the U.S. Golf Association has demonstrated scientifically that the benefit of these ruggedly faced irons is negligible, even those traditionalists on tour who are offended by the idea of backspin out of the rough have been changing cudgels in self-defense. "Golf clubs aren't only tools, they're totems," says Frank Hannigan of the U.S.G.A. "The game turns on illusions...