I tend to tweet a bunch of polls during the week to get others’ opinions on topics, and like other cases, tweeting thoughts is difficult. So here are the mid morning polls I posted in the past week that show the results and give me a little more space to talk about what I think of them.

Only three questions this week, we’ll see if there are more or less in the future.

One Ball Rule Not in Effect

Pretty funny when people either think nobody is going to make the change, or everybody is going to make the change. Few people thinking it’d be in the middle of the people spectrum.

Switching types of balls with the wind sure could help take less of that into play based on the amount of spin the ball has. I believe downwind you’ll want more spin so the ball hangs in the air and doesn’t get knocked down, and into the wind you want less spin so the ball doesn’t balloon. These cases you’d get more distance, but the main reason for wanting that is for the wind to have less of an effect meaning more consistency which is way better to have than straight distance.

I’m not sure what my guess would have been, but probably in the 5%-15% range, meaning like 8-23 players. 25% of the field is a huge number, 39 guys. My guess is we’d see a few people try this out, like with a trackman on a windy practice day and somewhat in tournaments, where others would follow along with what the initial guys determined.

I said in another tweet that I played with a kid in the US Am qualifier who got a DQ because he played a different type of ball after losing one in a hazard and didn’t take the 2 shot penalty before signing that first round scorecard. The rules official said how they should really get rid of that rule because it affects players in our position, tournaments like a USGA qualifier, but not the pros. The pin rule, which was also changed because they thought it’d only help Am pace of play, didn’t end up like that. Tour pros are the ones who get the benefit. Removing the one ball rule would also only change the pro game, where they’d feel that if they didn’t, they weren’t trying hard enough.

One more quick thing to think about is if the USGA never had that rule in the first place, would it be common for guys on Tour to do that with balls of the current technology? Would it be expected that guys use different types depending? If they added the one ball rule right now, for pace of play reasoning, would guys get super annoyed? Dunno. I can always see reasons for all of those things to happen.

Short or Trousers?

The results say a dead heat for people saying shorts if they want them, or only pants, but I received notice that a friend accidentally clicked “pants only” instead of “shorts if they want”, so shorts is the winner.

Me, I’m an only pants kind of guy. If I see guys in shorts, it immediately takes the professionalism of what they’re doing and brings it down a level. Watching guys play in the PGA Championship with shorts would only make it seem like a fun weekend round rather than anything important.

There’s a great Scrubs clip that I haven’t been able to find, where Carla talks back to a delivery guy after he said something negative to her, about how she can’t take him seriously because he’s wearing shorts to work which is unprofessional. Being a delivery driver, mail person, or something like an airport tarmac worker should absolutely have the ability to wear clothes that they’re comfortable with. But guys playing golf? I want them to show people that they’re doing this for a job, something they care about enough, rather than just whacking it around.

Trackmans or Trackmen?

This was a hard question to post because we can only have a max of four answers, meaning I tried my best to come up with reasonable limits. Which means if I instead had $5k as an answer, would that then have been the most popular answer?

Having space and money right now is clearly the biggest issue of whether or not you have a Trackman. But the important thing to think about with this question is how much having a Trackman would influence your attitude for the game. Would its expense make you feel bad if you don’t use it enough so it puts pressure on you? Or would having it there make you take the game more seriously because you can see all that information rather than continually guessing?

For me, I’m on the side that my attitude would change for the better to take golf more seriously. I’m kind of the guy who just whacks it around and is lucky to make a bunch of putts. With the Trackman, I’d be able to work on distance numbers which is absolutely the thing I don’t have in my game. If I’m spending so much time and money on playing golf now, putting money on the thing I need to get better would be worth it.