What’s a 56-year-old former British Amateur champion who twice captained a winning Walker Cup team supposed to do for an encore? How about developing a variation of golf meant to address its high cost and the time it takes to play a traditional 18-hole round?
That’s what Peter McEvoy is doing, with PowerPlay Golf. McEvoy, an Englishman, was at Copetown Woods Golf Club here yesterday to launch the nine-hole game in Canada. The Royal Canadian Golf Association has taken an interest in the intriguing game, and one of its representatives was at the course.
The format is simple. A white and a black flag are placed on each hole. The white flag is more accessible than the intimidating location for the black flag, marked by a skull and crossbones. A golfer must nominate three black flags to attack on the first eight holes of each nine holes, and can also go for the black flag on the ninth hole, where extra points are awarded or lost for a successful or failed gamble. Points are based on a player’s score and handicap.
“I’ve seen thousands of golfers play the game and I know they like it,” McEvoy said of pilot programs in Britain and elsewhere, including Australia.
McEvoy, oddly enough, is a traditionalist, even a purist. He mentioned a nine-hole course he’s involved in near St. Andrews.
The Hill of Tarvit course is all of 2,300 yards. Players use five hickory-shafted clubs that the club provides, along with appropriate golf balls.
“The first hole is 320 yards and it plays into the prevailing wind,” McEvoy said. “It’s often two woods to reach the green.”
McEvoy has just come off the equipment standards committee of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, of which he’s a member. He said it’s difficult for him to be critical of people who came before him – “It’s a protocol thing,” he said – but it’s clear he believes the ball is going too far and too straight with modern equipment.
“It’s difficult to argue that the game hasn’t been deskilled to a certain degree,” McEvoy said. “It used to be that if you hit the ball too high, you had to learn how to hit the ball low in a wind. Now you’re put on a computer and you get equipment and a ball to do that for you. To me, that’s deskilling. Of course, the only people who say that are over 50.”
But McEvoy doesn’t have his golfing mind stuck in an old bunker. Hence PowerPlay. He’s seen that a new form of cricket called 20-20 that takes three hours rather than, say, five days, has caught on.
“It’s completely transformed the game,” McEvoy said, although he acknowledged purists aren’t sold on the version.
As for PowerPlay, McEvoy realized it had to offer something beyond a quicker round. That’s where the idea of two flags and the requirement to nominate three aggressive plays for points and the option of a final attack on a black flag for extra points came from.
“If you do well on your PowerPlay holes, you can come rushing through the field,” McEvoy said.
Barry Forth, whose family owns Copetown Woods, thinks the game has merit. He’s signed on as the Canadian representative for PowerPlay. The BraeBen, Caledon and Peninsula Lakes clubs in Southern Ontario have joined the club in the pilot project as well. Canada is one of 21 countries involved in the global pilot program.
There’s even a pro component. McEvoy is working with International Management Group, whose clients include Tiger Woods and Canadians Mike Weir and Stephen Ames. Three pro demonstration events will be held next fall, in Britain, the United States and the Far East. Each event will have a purse of £350,000 ($623,000). The plan is for the events to be televised.
“People have to see the top players playing the game,” McEvoy said. “We realize that.”
He added that his first call is always to the ruling body of the game in a country.
“We want to work within the game,” said McEvoy, who is in charge of junior golf development for the R&A. “We haven’t contaminated the game. We’ve just added the extra dimension of the second flag.”
Will PowerPlay Golf catch on? Who knows? McEvoy is at least trying to address some critical issues in the game. He’s taking a shot, and in a hockey-mad country such as Canada, maybe something called PowerPlay has a chance of staying the course.
