This past weekend’s U.S. Open provided one of those exceptionally rare and exciting moments in all of sport: a hole in one. With such a small hole, this lunar-eclipse-like event requires quite a bit of skill, and quite a bit of luck as well. The television commentator even surmised, as the ball hit the green and began its 10-second journey towards the eventual target, “He probably had no idea it was going to go in. I mean, he pulled it.” Nothing like mis-hitting a shot yet achieving one of the rarest sorts of treasures in sport.
A recent New York Times article explored the current decline in hole-in-ones. “Just unlucky,” the subtitle suggests. The tour hole-in-one leader, Robert Allenby, had this to say of his prowess: “Maybe I’m just lucky sometimes.” All this hole-in-one talk was sparked by the first ever golf walk-off, to borrow a baseball term. While in a recent playoff, Jonathan Byrd holed his tee shot on a par-3 and walked off the tee box as the victor. In an interview, Byrd admitted he hit it well, but “for it to go in the hole was lucky.”
There’s an interesting problem in philosophy known as “moral luck.” We tend to assign greater blame to an action resulting in something bad and less blame to that same action without the bad outcome. For example, if two drivers run a red light while texting and one strikes a pedestrian yet the other does not, we assign more blame to the first driver than to the second even though their actions were the same. The driver of the first car simply encountered an unlucky circumstance.
Likewise in the case of favorable outcomes. Two golfers tee off on a par-3. The first lands the ball just one foot from the hole while the second hits the ball too hard but it catches in the pin’s flag and drops into the cup. The crowd frantically celebrates the hole-in-one despite the fact that we all agree the first hit a better shot. Because of luck, we assign value to the wrong golfer and, worse, that golfer receives a better score on the hole as well.
We want players to succeed based on merit, not luck. Thus, we wouldn’t honor the winner of a coin-flipping competition as much as we do other skill-based games.
And so, with interest in golf waning greatly over the past ten years, the Professional Golf Association (PGA) has proposed increasing the size of the hole from its current 4.25 inch diameter to 15 inches. The hope being that fewer players will be deterred by the difficulty of the whole (ahem, hole) endeavor and stick with it, as well as it reducing the time needed to complete a single round. As one might anticipate, this has caused an uproar in the golf community with such headlines as USA Today’s “An Unholy Abomination.” But just what does it mean for a measurement such as this to be holy or sacred?
Understandably, many of these dimensions feel sacred to fans of the respective sports. Though clearly these measurements, along with all rules and regulations, result from a haphazard tinkering by game-makers. A sort of Goldilocks “just right” approach. And some, like the 4.25-inch diameter hole in question, result not from some scientific adjustments nor from trial and error, but something purely arbitrary.
When the rules of golf were re-issued in 1891 by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, they based the official hole size on a pipe conveniently available at the time, which they used to cut a hole in the ground. Hardly something sacred, not to be altered for eternity. At least not for reasons of sacredness, per se.
On the face of it, it seems that a bigger hole reduces the luck of the hole-in-one. Imagine a hole the size of an entire green. Professional golfers typically reach the green in one shot on a par-3 hole. This means that a hole-in-one would be the expected result on a par-3. Never mind the need this would create for a new par-1 hole (making a birdie and eagle unattainable)—it would seem to reduce the luck involved. If a golfer can call his shot correctly 80% of the time, that falls outside the realm of a lucky venture. And while a green-sized hole would reduce the excitement of a hole-in-one on par-3’s, think of the excitement generated from all of the hole-in-ones on current par-4’s and the 2-shot double-eagles on current par-5’s.
Though before making such a move, might increased circumference actually increase the chance for luck? More area for a lip-in. To decrease the amount of luck needed, it seems that we should actually reduce the size of the cup. Reduce it down to the size of the ball such that the ball has to be exactly placed in order to finish the hole. Now that takes some skill, though maybe too much skill, and maybe too much time to hit a ball in one of those holes 18 times.
It’s often said, “It’s better to be lucky than good.” I prefer, “The harder I work, the luckier I get,” as this aphorism takes luck out of the equation and puts hard work in its place. Interestingly, when people lose a competition they’re more likely to blame the loss on luck while the winners assign their victories to skill. Regardless, this discussion provides a good chance to examine one’s own views on luck—be it moral or otherwise—and to really look at just what we admire and admonish about human actions. And maybe it can help to frame our views on changing the size of the golf hole, or maybe the hole is just fine as it is: I personally wish they’d had a wider pipe laying around at St. Andrews many years back. Unlucky, I suppose.