As golfers get stronger and longer, Richard Williams looks at the arguments for and against a uniform, short- flight ball for all

Hootie Johnson has seen off the critics who called him a racist and a chauvinist and tried to bring the antebellum-style pillars of the Augusta National Golf Club down around the ears of his select membership. But what really scared him one day last month was the sight of his playing partner, a 17-year-old of average build, smashing the ball so far off the tee at the demanding 425-yard 17th he could select a pitching wedge for his approach to the green.

That was when the club chairman glimpsed a future populated by not one Tiger Woods but a whole generation of them, and realised the job of preserving the challenge of the US Masters is far from done.

"A lot was written some years back that we were trying to Tiger-proof our course," Johnson said. "But we're not worried about Tiger. We're worried about these 17-year-olds."

Augusta's dilemma reflects a more general one that has confronted tournament golf since the arrival of Woods in the professional ranks eight years ago. By hitting the ball farther and farther, the top players are reducing the effective length of the courses. The combination of greater physical strength and the development of drivers using exotic metals and advanced construction techniques threatens to render a number of courses obsolete, unless they follow Augusta's lead and undertake expensive redesign.

But, if you cannot raise the drawbridge, you could try lowering the river. And one potential solution is to switch to a standard ball that will fly a shorter distance, even when struck by Woods's titanium-headed monster.

The governing bodies, having sanctioned a larger tournament ball in the 1970s, are reluctant to re-engage with the issue, fearing legal action from manufacturers and the disaffection of players, who choose their balls to suit the characteristics of their games.

But Jack Nicklaus observed this week that Augusta, with its unique traditions, would be the logical place to impose the use of a universal ball with shorter-flying characteristics.

"There's only one place you could start it," the six-times Masters champion said, "and that would be here. It's the only tournament that could get away with saying, 'Hey, do you want to come and play in the Masters? Here's the ball, go play it.' What difference does it make if a guy hits it 330 or 290 if everybody has the same relative distances?"

He suggested manufacturers should be asked to scale back the flight of the balls by 10 to 12 per cent and make casings using a standard number of dimples, which govern how the ball flies.

"You could do that and everybody would have the same characteristics. How long will it take a player to get used to that? Two rounds. How long would it take to change every course they play and how much money would that take? A lot."

Woods, whose prodigious talent started the debate, believes Nicklaus is wrong.

"I wouldn't like for us to do that, one uniform ball," he said. "Everybody has different spin rates, different launch conditions. If you did that, I think it would be detrimental to a bunch of guys. Who do you go after? The guys who spin the ball a lot or the guys that don't spin it? The guys that launch the ball low or . . . launch it high?"

But then Woods has been arriving at tournaments this year with a new ball, the Nike One Platinum, which claims to have a "progressive density core" intended to give a more penetrating flight through the apex of its trajectory, meaning it descends at a shallower angle and rolls farther. Golfers love this kind of stuff, and at Woods's level it probably makes enough of a difference for him to pitch it to recreational golfers willing to pay $54 a dozen for the new ball who would probably obtain very similar results from an old-fashioned balata-covered job with a core of elastic bands.

Nike's readiness to pay Woods $80 million to use its equipment means there are billions at stake in the battle between the manufacturers. Given the scale of the commercial interests, the debate over the regulations covering the ball can never be merely a sporting matter.

Augusta National's chairman denied this week the club had been testing a so-called "Hootie ball", the prototype of a standardised projectile. "We're not too far along with that," Johnson said. "It's an option we would not want to take off the table. We're hopeful the governing bodies will do something about what almost everyone in golf considers to be a serious problem."