Moriarty - Playing through: modern golfs most iconic players and moments

In 1982 the Pebble Beach Golf Links on the Monterey Peninsula hosted the U.S. Open Championship and played to 6,815 yards and a par of seventy-two. In 2015, in the second round of the U.S. Open, Chambers Bay Golf Course on Puget Sound played to 7,695 yards and a par of seventy. Perhaps never in the six-hundred-plus-year history of golf has the game changed as much as it has in its last thirty or so years. If you need to find a fall guy, blame the computer chip.

No doubt there has been golf instruction since one Scottish shepherd wielded a crook more proficiently than another. From H. B. Farnies book in 1857 to Bobby Joness newsreels to high-speed photographic sequences and videotape, the golf swing has been as dissected as any single athletic move. Now, launch monitors can tell you everything about the flight of a golf ball except whether the eyes of the person who hit it are blue or brown. In 1982 drivers were polished persimmon, almost works of art. Now, theyre outsized laboratory experiments the size of small pumpkins fashioned out of titanium with a measurable coefficient of restitutionsomething that guys in 1982 would have thought was the time it took to get rid of a hangover. Today, golf balls are engineered. In 1982 some guys carried little steel rings to make sure they were round. Back then golfers didnt travel with instructors or sit in the dark with sports psychologists or get their menus from nutritionists or have their backs pulverized by chiropractors or their abs ripped by personal trainers. If you saw an agent at all, it was because someone needed to fill the field in the Philippines in November and was prepared to pay handsomely, maybe several thousand dollars, to do it. These days every player has his or her team.

Are golfers more fit now? Sure, but how much clean and jerk is too much? Are they mentally more able to compete at the highest level? Well, that depends on whom youre talking about and whether you think you can buy self-belief or, at the very least, rent it for a while. Has stretching championship venues like Gumby made the game better or just more expensive to maintain? Have sports psychologists slowed play with preshot routines and visualization? Are drivers that cost as much as the used VW beetle I bought right out of college in the early 70s worth the price, or have they priced the game out of reach? Those werent even considerations thirty years ago.

Nostalgia, however, is a losing bet. Distance, time, cost, metadata, all the things that are right or wrong about the modern game, failed to do one thingchange it fundamentally. During my time covering golf, most of my colleagues and virtually all of the players were introduced to the game as children. I came to it as a sportswriter covering a beat no one else wanted and grew to understand that golf tests an athletes insides like no other sport. To be able to perform as if that performance meant nothing more than stopping at the corner convenience store when it actually means all the world is an immeasurable talent some seem born into, while others forge it in failure. The essays that follow are about my people, the players I saw revealing the best of themselves in the biggest moments. Whatever it is that made Jack versus Tom great in 1982 hasnt been altered one whit. The fundamental things still apply, as time goes by.