The Impact of Equipment Technology on Tennis (and Golf)

00:00:00
Speaker 1: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball in a egg Friday, Egg Frida, Egg Frida, egg.

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Speaker 2: Bride, egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the.

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Speaker 3: All right, we welcome on Ian Fillmore, an economist with a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago and assistant professor at Washington University in Saint Louis.

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Speaker 4: Ian. Welcome on.

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Speaker 1: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Ian.

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Speaker 3: I I gotta say that you're a little bit different than our typical golf crazed guest, but you've done considerable research in sports, and specifically tennis. You and Jonathan Hall wrote a paper that I've become just entranced with called Technological Change and Obsolete Skills Evidence from men's professional tennis. So I wanted to have you on just to kind of talk about your paper, and I think there's some really interesting parallels with it to golf in the current kind of state of the game that everybody talks about with kind of where technology is going with our game and how it's affected our game. So so, first off, tell us about you know, how you stumbled onto this topic and wrote this paper with Jonathan.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. So I actually grew up playing tennis as a kid. I got playing competitively, and I was in the Missouri Valley area and played a little bit in college, and then my whole family was a tennis family, and my brother played as well and played in college. And so I kind of steeped in the tennis world and knew about that. And I ended up going to graduate school in economics and kind of wanted to write, you know, write about what I knew. And I knew a little bit about tennis, of course, and so I said, well, you know, there I knew about from talking to my dad and playing tennis growing up. He would often talk about playing with a wood racket, and he had some of his old wood rackets, and about how hard it was and and he would always say, you know, you couldn't you couldn't even hit the ball. You know, it was just it took so much practice to just even make contact with the ball. He said, the new rackets are so much better, and so I sort of knew that, right, the new rackets are better. But then as I got looking into it more, I realized it's not just that they made it easier to play, which they definitely made it easier to play, but they actually changed the way that people played the game. And if you go back and you can find a video of guys like Ken Rosewall or Rod Labor, and you can watch them play on kind of this grainy, black in white video from the late sixties, and the pace of the game is so much slower. The players are moving slower, the amount of effort that they're exerting to hit the ball. It's just a lot more low key sport. And you know, I get. And if you even look at the players, the players looked different. They were very slender, they weren't very muscular. They're often playing in long pants, you know, which is like difficult to imagine guys today doing any of this. And so I said, okay, well, I mean, something dramatic really happened here. And I remember when when I was a kid in the early nineties, which was right, we were finding right when this transformation was really occurring. I remember everyone being really worried about how the game had gone from this beautiful game of tennis to this very crude and boring game where there was just sort of a serf and lots of aces and very short points, and people were kind of pining for the old days when there were these long and interesting points. And so then fast forward, I'm getting out of graduate school and around twenty fifteen, and I sort of occurs to me that hey, we're sort of back right. Like you can go on YouTube and you can watch these points between guys like Nadal and Vederer that are just like they blow your mind right, Like the point keeps going and they're all over the court and they're really entertaining to watch. And I said, well, you know what's going on here? I got to looking into it, and it turns out that there was this transitory period when I was growing up where the game was shifting from the old wood rackets to the new composite rackets. But it took a while for that transition to work itself out, and if you actually I got out of curiosity. I just looked it up and I said, okay, well, when were the when were the records set for the youngest champions of each of the four Grand Slams? And it turns out they were all set at right around the same time. So boris Becker and Stefan Edbergh for Wimbledon and the Australian Open were in nineteen eighty five. In nineteen eighty nine, Michael Chang was the youngest Grandslip winner ever at the French and then for the US Open it was Pete Sampers in nineteen ninety. So it was all within like five years that these all time records for youngest Grandslam champions were set. And I said, well, that can be a coincidence, right, And so we started digging into it more and it turns out it's not a coincidence.

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Speaker 3: So so I guess this is uh, this is the this is the paper. So you've you've uncovered that there's not this coincidence. So you start to dig in and you look at the racket change and and so to give a reader that hasn't read your you know, I think it's about forty page paper, right. What what were you're kind of when you dove into this? What were the three or four things that you really wanted to examine?

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Speaker 1: So, yes, the first thing was this idea that so the idea that we had was a new technology arrives and let's say the new technology is better than the old one. So in our case, it was a new tennis racket arrives, but it could be other things. It could be you're a farmer and suddenly tractors arrived, whatever it could whatever it might be. So this new, this new innis recket makes all the tennis players better. So that's sort of the first effect, but that doesn't really do much. If everyone just sort of gets better, then, you know, on the tour, it's not necessarily going to benefit one player versus another. Just everyone kind of gets better all at once. But then what happens is, at least our idea was, but the young players who haven't spent their whole life learning how to play with the old racket, they're going to have an advantage because they can tailor their game to the new rackets in a way that the older players can't. Like they've already learned their technique, you know, they they hit the ball how they hit it, and they can't radically change their game overnight.

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Speaker 3: It's almost like that saying you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, at some level that's right, especially when we're talking about people who are just at the pinnacle of human achievement, right, like just the smallest little thing makes a big difference for them, And so they really honed their skills to and optimized their game based on the equipment that they're playing with. Then you make a big change in the equipment, and all of a sudden, the young players who haven't made all those investments in learning the old style equipment, they can start doing things that the old guys can't even imagine doing. Right, So in tennis, all of a sudden, people start hitting open stands and they switch their grips from that continental research style grip to that semi western and then even the extreme western grip, which would have been crazy to do with the wooden records. It just wouldn't work. And so if you actually dig into the physics of tennis, I don't know how much your listeners want to know about the physics of tennis. So there's a whole some great books written on this. But basically what happens is the stream bed gets a little larger. It gives them a little more surface area to hit that ball with, and that little extra service allows him to get much more top spin and and kind of swing up, and that extra top spin opens up the ability to hit with a lot more power than they were able to before. And and so that starts to change the game in terms of the physicality of the game. The players involved physical training, which wasn't so much a thing in the late sixties and early seventies starting to starts to become very important, and athleticism becomes much more important. Speed becomes very important, strength and so and so people first noticed it, I think that the serves started to get faster, kind of like driving. I guess, like, oh, the people are driving farther, right, But then.

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Speaker 4: In the racket.

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Speaker 3: Got so the racket and tennis got bigger and more forgiving, which it allows which allowed for more power, just like kind of it's to me, it's very similar to the driver which got became metal, got bigger and more forgiving.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. Both, yes, both both more powerful and more forgiving. And because it's more forgiving, of course you could take a bigger.

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Speaker 4: Swing, yes, exactly, And so then.

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Speaker 1: That sort of increases the power that much more. Yeah, and a very similar thing happened with the tennis rackets. So but then once once that happens, then people start to respond to that and the whole game starts to starts to adjust into what you see today, which is almost a very different game. Like I'm I would be willing to bet that if you took Roger Federer back to the sixties, handed him a wooden racket and had him play Rod Labor, that he wouldn't do very well. On the other hand, if you took Rod Labor in his prime, you know, handed him a new racket and put him up against Roger Federer, it would be over in a minute. So like, there are almost like different sports in a way as they've evolved over time.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, it's something you referenced also in the paper. Is like basketball with a three point line, where the original intention of the three point line was to give the big players more space, and in turn, you know, it led originally to more big players, but now it's led to the advent of the three point shooter, right.

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Speaker 1: Right, right, And yeah, so there that was a paper that some other some other economists published a few years ago looking at the effect of the three point line and finding that the primary effect of it was actually to increase the value of the of like your center, right, because the three point line moved the shooting guards out, opening up room for the center. So you can have these interesting effects that emerge as they are a little bit difficult to predict.

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Speaker 3: So so you start to see a change, So everybody gets better right off the bat, but then you start to see a change where younger players are getting better, right.

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Speaker 1: And so so one of the things we do is we looked at so there are four Grand Slam tournaments every year, and we looked at what was the is we didn't want we just didn't want this to be a story about like one player, right, or two players, because most of the most of the sports press they like to focus on kind of that one or two players and those interesting anecdotes which are which make for a great reading. But we wanted this to be about, you know, bigger picture, what's happening to the whole tour. So we said, okay, well, let's just look simplest way to look at it is, if you want to think about a measure of success for players, advancing in Grand Slam tournaments is not a bad measure. So we said, okay, well, let's look at the average age of players who make it to the round of sixteen in each of the Grand slams, and we just sort of plotted that over time, and the figure is really striking. And what you see is the average age was around like twenty seven years old in the late sixties or least seventies, and then it just plummets to around twenty four years old, with some of the majors being as low as around twenty two years old during the late eighties and around nineteen ninety and then, and that was what people had observed at the time, and they said, hey, look, you know, the game's gotten more physical, it's gotten faster. This is giving advantage to younger, stronger and more athletic, faster players, right, And so all we're going to do is we're just going to make the game younger. But then what happened that I don't think anyone predicted is that it came back, and so now players are as older or older than they were in the seventies, back when the game was slower and less physical. So there was really this temporary there's this U shape and this temporary period where young, younger players had this advantage over older players, but it was temporary. It went away after a while. And our explanation for this is that those younger players during that transition period, they kind of had a monopoly on knowing how to use these these new fangled rackets that the older players were not sure what to do.

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Speaker 3: With, yeah, trying to learn how to adapt the older player versus the younger player. So in reality, the generations that maybe you just got to the pro tour, you know, you've been on the pro tour for ten years, and then the new racket technology, that generation got hurt, but then subsequently every generation for a while after that also got damaged with the longevity of their career, right.

00:14:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, So what you see is that that sort of that Sampras, Andre Agassi, Michael Chan generation got this boost from getting to compete against older players that didn't know how to compete with the rackets, but then the generation after them had no such advantage, right And and so I think there was this effect where because those that that sort of five to eight year window of players got to compete against people who didn't know how to play with these new rackets, they kind of got a leg up at the beginning of their careers, which you see in terms of kind of age of earliest Grand Slam winner and stuff like that, and so you know, there's just the nature of the way the tour works. And I think it's like this in golf, getting that getting that break early in your career is big, right, because that allows you to be to qualify for more tournaments and things like this. And so yeah, which is something I'd like to look at in the future, is to kind of look at the effect of getting kind of an early break and how that how that plays out over the rest of your career. But certainly this generation had done.

00:16:05
Speaker 4: It's interesting.

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Speaker 3: So we're seeing this similar thing going on with golf right now with like a youth explosion, and it's fascinating to see, you know, kids younger and younger having more and more success. And it's like, you know, the the first debuts on tour, like their debut rounds are all of a sudden in the sixties where it used to be their seventy eight. But I think there's also this intimidation factor that's no longer because they're seeing all their peers do really well.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I would imagine, so, I mean, I would just yeah, it would be It's one thing to be going up against a season player and knowing that everyone else who's done it, has gotten killed. And then it's another thing to be going up against that player and knowing that, you know, just a month ago someone your age meet that guy. Yeah, I think psychologically it's got to help, at least help you feel like, you know, I got a chance. I have a chance here and and and to go for it. You're young, right, go for it?

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Speaker 4: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, So I guess you alluded to this a little earlier. During this period of massive change, what was the reaction of, say, the governing bodies of tennis and then also you know, the the media and the other you know, big players in the space.

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Speaker 1: So the Yeah, so the governing bodies of tennis tennis took a while to really coalesce into us. So now we have the Association of Tennis Professionals is the over seeing body of this of men's professional tennis. It was a little bit prior to nineteen sixty eight there was a split between amateur ten and professional tennis, and so in nineteen sixty eight we had the beginning of what's called the Open Era, but that even took a few years to really sort itself out, and so once things kind of unified that it was a very hands off approach to equipment. So there there's regulations about the height of the net and the size of the court, and that was kind of it. And as far as the rackets go, there was really anything you wanted to do was allowed at first. And so when the first rackets that were widely used were these wooden rackets, and they ended up all being more or less the same size, not because they had to be, but because people quickly figured out that that was sort of the optimal size if you were going to make a racket out of wood, that would work tennis racket. And that was the way all through the seventies, and then in nineteen seventy six, Prince came out with the first large larger head and it was but the problem is is the racket wasn't stiff enough for professional players, right, and so it was great for club players and beginning players and it became very popular, but professional players needed something stiffer because of the pace that they were hitting the ball. So then a couple of years later they came out with the Prince came out with its pro racket, and it was only a couple of years later that everyone on the tour had switched over.

00:19:39
Speaker 3: So with that first racket, that was the intention of that racket for the masses rather than the pros.

00:19:50
Speaker 1: It was marketed at the masses. I don't know, it's hard to know if they knew ahead of time what they knew, right, but it was marketed at the lower level players, and I think some pros maybe tried it out, but it just it wasn't adequate. And so then they developed the pro racket specifically for the better players, because you know, you can only go so far and marketing your racket to club and amateur players. When they on TV, all the professional players are playing with something else, right, so you really want those racket endorsements, and so you know, they quickly figured out how to redesign and engineer the rackets so that they could have that larger string bed. And the way they did it was using what today are called sometimes it's called graphite, although it's not actually graphite, but it's these composite materials that they figured out how to weave together to create a material that was much stiffer and would be able to have the stiffness the pros needed while still having that larger string bed. And once I figured out how to do that. Then the other racket makers jumped right in and you know, it was a few years later and wood rackets were I think in the past.

00:21:12
Speaker 3: So so how did did the technology continue to evolve all the way through today?

00:21:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely so. They you know, there's still there have been improvements in the type of string that players use. So even when I was growing up, the players were still using natural gut, which is made from what it's called cat gut, but I think it's actually made from sheep's stomach, right, and it was very expensive with the idea was that it gave the best feel. Nowadays they've got synthetic string that's better than that, So it's most of the players are using something synthetic. So there's been improvements in the in the strings they get they get used. There's been improvements in the rackets, even things like the grips, and so there's a lot of Like as I said earlier, the physics of tennis are very involved in so there's actually been a lot of research in the industry on really mapping out the physics of what happens in a stroke and how do you weight the racket and you try to put more weight towards one end or the other and all these sorts of things.

00:22:26
Speaker 3: So like those would classify as like minor improvements though, and wouldn't have a massive effect like the racket.

00:22:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, They're much more incremental and much more I would say, idiosyncratic based on like different players. It would be much more customized, whereas this change from from wood to composite rackets was was like a you know, it was better for everyone.

00:22:51
Speaker 3: Okay, So it's like a when there's a when there's a change that forces everybody to change that, you know. So so as we kind of kind of transition this to golf, and so in nineteen ninety three, Calaway comes out with the Big Bertha, which is, you know, kind of the first metal driver that everybody you know is starting to look at. And then by nineteen ninety seven it's fully it's pretty much fully adopted on tour that everybody's using metal drivers across different brands, right, So one would say that would be a first technological shock.

00:23:34
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, Yeah, That's how I would describe it.

00:23:37
Speaker 3: And then the drivers since have gotten bigger and bigger, you know. I think the original Big Bertha was one hundred and ninety secs and then they capped it at four hundred and sixty ccs, so you know, like almost three times the size, not quite three two and a half times the size.

00:23:56
Speaker 1: And I think, as I understand it, they could straight like why didn't they just jump all the way there right to begin with? Was they had to figure out how to make it forgiving enough that you wouldn't just hook it off the course? Is that?

00:24:09
Speaker 4: I think so? In the I'm not sure.

00:24:11
Speaker 3: I think it was the aerodynamics too, of being able to generate the same amount of speed with the better head, and then the light and how light it is. I think one of the big things was a composite head that eventually came about thanks to I think like Callaway had this C four driver.

00:24:32
Speaker 4: It was a complete piece of garbage.

00:24:34
Speaker 3: But what happened was then the that composite head became like part of their next driver, which was really good ic So, like you know, like there was this evolution. But but then with I think the thing with golf that happened that's unique is that we have this driver revolution going on, right, and then in two thousand and one the ball industry completely turned on his head, where you have all these pros talking about like, I'll never forget the day that I hit the pro V one, which is when the ball went from a wound you know core okay, to a solid core with a eurothane cover, which you know, all of a sudden provided less spin, longer shots, and you know, much more consistency in the in the flight. So you know, all of sudden, this ball was longer and straighter. Significantly longer and straighter. That comes about in two thousand and one. So it was almost like tennis, but where we have two massive innovations at once, both of which became universally adopted extremely quickly.

00:25:42
Speaker 1: Right, So the and they complimented each other in that the you know the value of the ball is improved by having the drivers, but the drivers are also more valuable once you have a ball that can can kind of that you can hit straight at those long distances.

00:26:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, so they would the ball would curve less and everything. And then that ball continued to obviously evolve and the driver continued to obviously involve. And one fascinating thing is we've had this track man come about, which is you know it monitors. You know, like when you swing and hit a shot. It gives you all these statistics on your club path, your spin rates, all these things, which has allowed the instructors to optimize their instruction to get people to hit it perfectly right. So this track man has become universally adopted as well on the tour as recently as the you know, early twenty tens.

00:26:43
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, as similar technology and tennis as Hawkeye. The they so at all the all the majors and many of the lower level tournaments, they have these camera systems that are set up all around the court. They can track the location of the ball, you know, through the whole match, and they so you the most commonplace where you see that this used is that when they challenge line calls and they'll use the Hawkeye replay to say, okay, like was it really in or out? But the but the I don't know if every everyone realizes this, but those cameras are going the whole time actually, and so they can you can compile all kinds of interesting statistics about how players are playing. It's not just tracking the location of the ball, but also it's it's velocity and it's spin right, and so you you know, you have a lot of data that you can dig into as a professional player now that simply wasn't available, you know, ten or fifteen years ago.

00:27:42
Speaker 3: So yeah, so you could probably figure out how people are playing, how players tendency is much easier than before when you just have to sit and watch and observe and try and you know, think about it. It's like, well, he hits the shot forty two percent of the time.

00:27:57
Speaker 1: Exactly, yep, whether it's serve tendance. But also you know, you even have information about where are they standing on the court, are they way behind the baseline or you know, and you can see all these things. It's kind of it's kind of amazing. And I think that this or is still at the very beginning stages of trying to figure out how to use all this new information. So this is this is true with everybody everywhere with big data, right is it's like we've gotten really good at collecting and storing data and we're still trying to figure out how to use it. And this is true in tennis, it's true in golf, and it seems to be true and lots of industries. So it's I think it's an exciting time to be someone who works with data. Is like, Okay, a lot of cool things we can do with this, and we're just getting started.

00:28:48
Speaker 3: So with golf, I think about two thousand and five, two thousand and six is when we got to the four hundred and sixty cc driver head. Is that when you'd cap it? Like since it's capped there is that How if you were going to apply your study or your paper to golf, where would you say the transition period is? And you know, when we would have started to see the effects, because you know, I have in my head where I think it would be, but you know, I'm curious how you would go about it with knowing the general timeline that you know.

00:29:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, So one thing about tennis that's different about golf is tennis player careers tend to be pretty short. So we find like the average career is like six to eight years long, and a really long career might be fifteen years, but that would be a long career. And so when you're thinking about the tennis context from say the early nineteen eighties when the rackets arrived, to say the mid two thousands, when it seems like all the transition had kind of worked itself out, we're sort of back to a new you know, we returned sort of back to equilibrium. So that's like twenty twenty five years. That's almost like four generations of players, maybe three or four generations of players. So it took a while for everything to work itself out. So what's the typical career length for a golf player? I don't actually know.

00:30:28
Speaker 3: I see, I haven't never found like an average. I've looked for this a bunch, But if I had to guess, I would say ten years.

00:30:35
Speaker 1: Okay, so it's a bit longer.

00:30:37
Speaker 4: A little bit longer.

00:30:39
Speaker 3: Like so Phil Mickelson is now entering he's twenty seven years. So on the long end, the long end, if you took the average, because there's so many guys that might be on the PGA Tour for a year and never get back or three years. Like, but if I think if you looked at the median, I think, like, you know, eight to ten years. But then the long I think the long tail of the great players is really long.

00:31:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's kind of how it isn't tennis too. A lot of players in our data, you see them one year, right, and then they just kind of don't make it, or you know, they kind of make it on barely, but then you know, it doesn't quite work out for them for different reasons. So it sounds to me like it was the combination of this, the drivers and the balls that kind of really changed the dynamics of the game from one where and this was this was sort of my question. I know a little bit about golf, but not as much about you know, as you and your listeners the as I understand it. As the driving distances have got longer, players have become less concerned with hitting the fairway and they and they kind of realized that, you know, I'm better off going fifty yards longer even if I land in the light rough or the rough, than I am laying up shorter and hitting the fairway. Is that is that correct?

00:32:07
Speaker 4: Yes?

00:32:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, So it's you know, like the proximity the whole with somebody from one point fifty in the rough is better than the proximity of the whole if you're two hundred yards away in the fairway, right, So there's no reason not to hit the driver up there, and you just go for it.

00:32:27
Speaker 4: The other aspect of.

00:32:29
Speaker 3: It is the associated penalty of the rough if you have a higher lofted club is much less than the associated penalty of rough if you have a lower lofted club, you know, like a five iron versus a pitching wedge.

00:32:45
Speaker 1: Right right, so you get the you know, the nine iron or the wedge, and then if you can get within one hundred yards or so, then it's not a big deal.

00:32:58
Speaker 4: Exactly.

00:32:58
Speaker 3: That associate penalty of being the rough much smaller the closer you get to the hole, right, So I think.

00:33:05
Speaker 1: It's almost it's almost riskier to go for the shorter drive. Yeah.

00:33:10
Speaker 3: And I think one of the interesting things with golf though also that happened is that there was this, uh, you know, golf courses aren't all the same, aren't a uniform size, you know, like a like a tennis court, you know, you're playing on the same course. So golf courses have gotten significantly longer to attempt to combat this distance, right And what what that we saw was these longer courses actually played more into the long hitter's.

00:33:40
Speaker 1: Hand, right right, right exactly. Yeah, it's hard, it's hard to know exactly what what is the So if you were if you were trying to design a golf course that would help, uh, that would give less of a benefit to long drivers, not quite clear what you would want to do, and maybe the right answer would be something like something about pin placement on the green as opposed to the length of the hall, because you were just saying.

00:34:17
Speaker 3: I had one of the top architects in the world on and he said, to challenge the long hitter. They want to make courses shorter and wider, I see, because then it forces them to pick lines and you know, they can hit drivers still, but you might get into weird positions where you can't hit a full shot in and because the spin, you know, you're coming into the green with less spin, so it's harder to hit it.

00:34:45
Speaker 4: At certain pins like you were talking about.

00:34:48
Speaker 3: Right, It's a fascinating thing, you know, in we're at the beginning. You know, just last year we had an eighteen year old to earn his PGA Tour card. We have you know, the the top ten in the in golf is now younger than the top ten in tennis.

00:35:07
Speaker 4: First time after that's happened.

00:35:09
Speaker 3: The average age of the official World Golf rankings top two hundred is three years younger than it was twenty years ago. So you know, pretty significant change in the age of the sport. So to me like reading your paper, you know, and this is my interpretation, but I'm curious. It's like we're just at the start of where it went from everybody got better, or you know, everybody got better, some people were a little bit better. To now this young age is the age that grew up never hit you know, the small headed driver, because I'm thirty three and I grew up with a small headed driver.

00:35:48
Speaker 1: Right. So now we've got the people who grew up with this, these new drivers and these new balls. They never knew the old thing. They're not they're not playing playing with an old style playing old style game with new equipment. They're playing new style game with new equipment. And part of what that means is they can hit those drives really far. You know what's interesting about golf it's different from tennis is in tennis the court hasn't changed. They have changed some about the surfaces some, but it's really players playing against each other. Golf has an interesting dynamic where players are kind of playing against each other, but they're really playing against the course, right, And so there's a competition here almost between course designers and players, right, which is which is an interesting to mention what you were alluding to, is okay, Well, in this arms race between course designers and players, Okay, the players have made their move right now they can hit these long drives, and now how are the course designers going to react to that? And then how are the players then going to respond to that? And so I would imagine, and you know, if folks start to see the new courses that are designed to reduce the benefit to these long drives, you probably would see innovations in things like the iron the irons right where we've focused so much attention on how do we make these drivers hit farther? Well, maybe now it's more about, well, how do we come up with better wedges and better like five irons and things like this that will allow you to maneuver through those holes. I don't know, but I think it will be fascinating. I can tell you what happened in tennis. So the first thing that people figured out how to do with the new rackets is they figured out how to serve really hard, and and that kind of outpaced everyone's ability to return those serves. And so there was a period where there was a lot of hard serving and a lot of just aces and very very short points, and people were complaining that the game had gotten very boring on the men's side. But eventually players figured out how to return those serves because even though the rackets allowed you to serve hard, the rackets also with that larger string bed, gave you more room for error to return that same serf. And so players started to figure out how to how to return those serfs. And it turns out if you hit the serve very hard, it makes it almost impossible to serve and volley. And so whereas in the past you had these serve and volley players who would serve and then rush the net and that would end the points quickly. As the serves got hard on harder, actually that strategy no longer work, and so the serve and volley players started to become a dying breath uh and more and more players they were serving those hard serves, but staying at the baseline, players were getting better and better at returning those serves, and then the point started getting longer. So it's hard to know when these changes have when these when these new equipment changes occur and something immediately changes in the game, it's hard to know if that's going to be a permanent change, or if it's just a transition period to something new interesting.

00:39:37
Speaker 3: So you know, it's just it almost is like the you know, the market normalizing is the right The whole idea of it is there's you know, the technological shock, massive change, youth comes in. But then it's just it takes a while for to normalize and you get a game that's wildly different but has the same types of careers and the same you know, the ability to have a long jevit, a long time time great player is back.

00:40:11
Speaker 1: Right, And yeah, you know, there's sort of there's a few different players here. So there's the players themselves, there's people designing the course, and then there's there's the racket or in your case, the clubmakers and the ball makers, right, and those those club makers are responding to what the players want, right, and what the players want depends on the courses that they're facing, right, So everyone's kind of responding to each other. And as these things evolve over time, it's always interesting to see where they go. And it's very difficult, I think to predict. I don't think anyone would have predicted in nineteen ninety where tennis would be today. In terms of the style and how it's played and everything.

00:41:00
Speaker 3: So so if you were given advice to golf, you know, I might be one of the people that's like, this is this is crazy?

00:41:07
Speaker 4: What's going on?

00:41:08
Speaker 1: What would you say, Man, well, that's a great question. I would say that I would say, let's be I would be cautious about making big changes that are difficult to undo, So making.

00:41:32
Speaker 4: Like a roll back.

00:41:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, changes that are that are trying to take us back in time, because it's really hard to put the genie back in the bottle with a lot of this stuff. And rather than rather than trying to say, come up with some new rule that you know that the say, oh it has to be a wound ball, no more solid pore balls or something like this, right, rather than doing that sort of a thing, you know, allow the allows the designers of the courses, allow the equipment makers, you know, allow the players to experiment and find new things. And I think that the course designers and people running the tour, like, they want the game to be entertaining, they want it to be interesting. They and they're going to find creative ways to adapt to the to these new technologies that retain kind of what everyone loves about golf without having to kind of put the put the sport in a straight jacket and try to keep it in you know, static, rather than allowing it to evolve over time.

00:42:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, because if you did a rollback, for example, and you went back to say the small heads, it would just cause the same effect that happened when you went to the big heads.

00:42:54
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, that would that would be really interesting for like a follow up study for us, But I don't know if it would be good for golf.

00:43:03
Speaker 3: That's because that's the one thing I I've always you know, I've been in this camp I thought about is like the biggest problem is like, so one of our issues with golf is like you know, you can imagine if baseball allowed aluminum bats that all of sudden, Wrigley Field and Fenway Park would be irrelevant.

00:43:22
Speaker 4: So the most historic golf courses.

00:43:25
Speaker 3: Are being forced to lengthen and do all these these crazy things that cost you know, the expense of building a golf course is very high. It's not not a cheap thing to do. Is that the keeping up with the distance has become unstainable, unsustainable. So that's that's the added issue as opposed to a tennis court that remains the same size regardless.

00:43:52
Speaker 1: Right, And and that's where, Yeah, you know, I don't design golf courses. I don't know the details on how you do this, but I imagine that designers are going to come up with more more creative ways than just lengthening lengthening holes, but more creative ways, maybe the maybe the dog legs start to look different, or there's more dog leg holes, things that keep the course interesting without allowing the sort of these drivers to make sort of make it too easy or something like that.

00:44:31
Speaker 3: So here's here's just something that just popped in my head, is like, if we had done nothing to the golf courses, by continuing to change them, are you creating it like an effect that is almost magnifying the technological change?

00:44:55
Speaker 1: Well, I think every time every time the courses change, you're going to see club makers and ball makers change in response. Right, So, whatever you change about the courses to make them challenging in a new way or whatever, the equipment makers are going to be trying to come up with ways to help players overcome those obstacles. And players are going to want to buy the equipment that works, that does that, So, yeah, I think it's going to be. There's always a flux in these things. And you see this, I think in tennis, you see it in golf, you see it in other sports as well, where the equipment keeps evolving and then the sport kind of has to keep up with it in one way or another. And as you change things about the sport, there's this feedback loop where you know players are going to respond. I think if the sport doesn't ever change anything, we'd expect scores to just continue to fall, right, because equipment's going to keep getting better, players are going to keep getting better, and they're going to get really really good at playing the courses that never change.

00:46:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, And that's I think that's one of the golf's issues is everybody's stuck on this par aspect like score to par. But it's like, you know, it's oh, they shot twenty under. It's like, well, it's a completely different game than twenty years ago, Like, shouldn't hold onto the same par You know, you can change the number that par is, like change it from seventy to sixty seven, and all of a sudden they were only, you know, instead twenty under, they were eight under the one.

00:46:41
Speaker 1: The one technology that you mentioned that I thought was really interesting were these green reading books.

00:46:48
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, but that I thought was very interesting because that so when we were thinking about these rockets, we were thinking about changes that affects.

00:47:01
Speaker 1: That that increase the returns to one type of skill and decrease the returns to another type of skill. And so the creation of these, uh, these technologies that will kind of read the green for you really reduce the returns to being able to read a green well at the same time, we've increased the returns to being you know, driving distance or something like this, right, And so, uh, that was I thought really fascinating And I don't know what that's going to do to the game.

00:47:32
Speaker 3: But that's you know, that's a fascinating thing that might be a more chewable study to look into because we have shot link data before and after the green reading books, and I would be really interested to see if that might be one of the biggest you know, where older players like you learn how to you know, you're constantly learning how to read a green better and better and better. You know that there is a diminishing return when you get older. You're putting skills typically fade. But all of a sudden, these young kids have a book that tells them how green it breaks that these other guys have played for fifteen years and that that advantage is extremely minimized, right in a.

00:48:18
Speaker 1: Way, Right, And so yeah, in the past, it had been the case that being able to read a green was something that took years and years to really develop and hone, and now it just doesn't anymore. Right, That's something that I would I would have thought would be a big benefit to the younger players relative to the older players.

00:48:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, And they and the older players like they don't even like really know how to you know, it takes time to learn how to read those books versus the kids that grow up with them now, right.

00:48:48
Speaker 1: And it's just it's kind of second nature, like a kind of like my kids and the iPad. They I don't know how they know to just slight left, but they know.

00:49:01
Speaker 4: So Like when I was reading you reference computers.

00:49:04
Speaker 3: That's like the perfect example of this is like where my I'm thirty three, my parents are not nearly as good with computers as I am, and I'm not nearly as good as the generation younger than me with computers.

00:49:19
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, so I can imagine, imagine it's, you know, nineteen eighty and you've got a secretary who's been a secretary for the last twenty five years, and you know it is very a very good typist, and you know, uses the typewriter all the time, and you know, you you remove the typewriter and you install a computer, you know, one of those green, green screen computers at the time, and you say, here's this thing, use this now. What's what's her response going to be or his response is going to be, It's going to be, well, it looks like I got a typewriter that I don't have to is white out on right? Like? Which is better? And so that secretary would say, well, this is definitely improvement, and would and the productivity would go up. But you know, treating a computer as if it's a typewriter that doesn't require whiteout is kind of like, you know what happened with these older players when the new rackets arrived, like it was a better version of of of what we had before, And but it's very hard for them to fully realize and fully take advantage of the fact that no, this isn't just better than before, this is something fundamentally new and uh and and to work through all the implications of.

00:50:38
Speaker 3: That's see, that's that's a great parallel. I think that like the computer one with everything, you know, that that really explains a lot of stuff with both tennis and with golf, with with how the different generations you know, are able to use the modern technology.

00:50:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so the question, the question for golf will be are there are there more large equipment innovations to come in the future or have the big ones happened and it will be mostly incremental from here on out. So in the case of tennis, there was that big one and then incremental you know, from then on out. And so you kind of got this return to what we've had before. If there are more ones on the horizon, then you know it could take that would prolong. How long it's going to take to get back.

00:51:35
Speaker 3: It seems like, you know, at this point, the governing by the U S, g A, and RNA are like much more stringent about like no, like this is not not going like they limited what a green book could have this last year, which made everybody really upset, you know, they they and they've started to do different things where they talk about de skilling the game, you know, so I would guess that we're at the end of it. We're I don't think we'll see any major innovation, like I think track Man. Stuff like track Man will probably still continue to evolve, but we aren't going to see any like huge ball or driver technology advances in my opinion, because they're pretty capped out.

00:52:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the issue is always so what happened with one of the things that happened in tennis? So I told you it was very hands off. People do what they want. And then someone invented what's called spaghetti stringing. So in spaghetti stringing, what you do is the normal way that you string a tennis racket is just a basic weave pattern, so kind of alternating under over and you and you weave the strings together. In spaghetti stringing, it's you do it in this crazy way right where uh. And the effect of the spaghetti string is that it makes the spin that gets imparted to the ball unpredictable, right, And so you'd hit this ball and it would have some crazy spin on it and it was almost impossible to return. And so then at that point they stepped in and said, no, we're going to outlaw spaghetti stringing, and so at some point the governing bodies did say, Okay, this type of an innovation is kind of destroying the essence of the gamer's contrary to the essence of the game. And the determination was if even the person hitting the ball can't predict the spin they're putting on it, like, that's not what we're going for, right, And similarly with golf, if there's a consensus that being able to read agreed with the naked eye is an important aspect of what it means to play the game of golf, then I could see why you would be opposed to the books.

00:53:59
Speaker 3: But yeah, and I think with tennis, what you saw was you saw the game went one way, and I think with golf, we're like, it's very like, drive it as far as you can, wedge it.

00:54:14
Speaker 4: You know where you know where we go it.

00:54:17
Speaker 3: Driving it straight and far is obviously most important, but driving it far is is more important than.

00:54:22
Speaker 4: Driving it straight. So yeah, and then it's wedges and putter.

00:54:26
Speaker 3: Right, But eventually that's going to come back and normalize in the next two to four generations and become more complete game.

00:54:34
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, and it might it might take the form of increasing the penalty of those of those roughs or something, and maybe you make the grass higher in the roughers. I don't know what they'll come up with, and I don't know what the rules are limiting the way that courses can be designed, and maybe those need to be rethought as well to give the course designers more flexibility and and creating courses that are still challenging and interesting even in the face of the new equipment that's come out.

00:55:08
Speaker 4: It was fascinating.

00:55:08
Speaker 3: They had one of the leading architects put a center line bunker. So you put a bunker in the center of the fairway, oh okay, on a hole that was a regular PGA tour stop, and the players hated it because it was like, you know, right where they wanted to hit, and right in the middle of their shot distribution, right, so you know, you put a cone on how the shots distribute, so like they didn't know where to aim. But it favored if you played up the left side into this thirty thirty yard window, you were like greatly rewarded, and that's where almost all the birdies came on that week. But the players hated so much they asked for it to be removed. It got removed this year. Yeah, so there's this other dynamic of the players if they complained, the architects can't actually like that's an innovative. That's a example of an innovation that that test that player, you know, changes the look of everything, and the players complain and it gets removed.

00:56:09
Speaker 1: Yep, and yeah, so that'll be the that will be the decision I guess the governing body folks have to make is how to'll be trade off. We want we want the players to be able to showcase their skills because that's what people want to see, right, they want to see people playing golf at the peak, peak levels of human performance. On the other hand, if the course is too easy, you actually can't, right, it's not impressive to watch professional players play on a course that's not hard enough.

00:56:43
Speaker 3: And it doesn't it doesn't create the true best player, right. It will lead to less variance in scoring, and you know, the it won't identify the true champion. You'll have a packed leader board and a bunch of guys really close together and you're not really sure who the best player was that week.

00:57:03
Speaker 1: That's right, and so you know what I imagine will happen. Well, it'll have to happen, is some consensus is going to have to emerge about what what types of frustrating things are considered appropriate, Like bunkers are always frustrating, Like no, all players would like all the bunkers to go away, you know what I mean, like if you don't want to land in one, and so it's but everyone gets like, oh, we're used to seeing bunkers in these sorts of locations. We're not used to seeing them in this one. That throws us for a loop. But you know, when there, if the culture of the game changes and people say, well, actually, like the ability of maneuver around a mid fair way bunker is that's like a real sign of technical prowess, then you know, I imagine that the players would view that as as a as a necessary challenge as opposed to an irritating because.

00:58:09
Speaker 3: That create that's a test that identifies the best player, the one that's able to maneuver, who has the most confidence to aim to one side of it and hit it around it.

00:58:19
Speaker 1: You can say the same thing about you know, water hazards or whatever, if you weren't used to them being there and suddenly someone put a big lake between you and the green. Yeah, you would say, like what is this, but you know, we're used to that stuff.

00:58:33
Speaker 3: And so what's also fascinating is the period. The rise of professional golf came during the period of the dark ages of golf architecture, when it completely departed from like the ideals of great golf, which you know is the most the most timeless golf courses embody these different and now we're in a period of architecture that's starting to embrace the you know, principles that you know, made golf more popular than any sport, you know, than it had ever been, not any sport, but than it had ever been. So it's it's a fascinating thing. So, you know, in a sense like the future of the game, a lot of it is is architecture.

00:59:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think my my optimism my optimistic site says that this, this renaissance in in equipment of equipment will lead to a renaissance in in course architecture and a renaissance in player strategy. There's players facing kind of new these new course designs, armed with new equipment, start coming up with more creative and innovative ways to play the game, which is exactly what you see in tennis, right and now you know the I would say that the game is as entertaining as it's ever been to watch. And you know, if you ever get to watch a tennis professional tennis match in person as opposed to on TV, is mesmerizing. It really is amazing to watch them hit the ball.

01:00:12
Speaker 3: US Open, Wimbledon is definitely on my bucket list.

01:00:15
Speaker 4: One of those two.

01:00:16
Speaker 1: Hopefully yep Flishing Meadows or Wimbledon. The other will be great.

01:00:22
Speaker 3: Hey, Ian, thanks so much for your time. And uh I will put a link to your paper, you and Jonathan Hall's paper, which was Technological Change and Obsolete Skills Evidence from Men's Professional Tennis. Uh so everybody can kind of read it. And then I don't know you on social media anywhere? Can people you know read your thoughts on on.

01:00:48
Speaker 1: The Economy website and Mike and author has a website. Okay for my for my own psychological well being, I steer clear of Twitter and social media.

01:00:58
Speaker 4: But that's the website.

01:01:01
Speaker 1: Uh so, oh, let me just pull it up here. Good question. So it's just a Google site sites dot Google dot com slash Ian fillmore. I believe all.

01:01:14
Speaker 3: Right, I'll put that link in there, but thanks so much for your time. I think this h I hope people find this really interesting and as interesting as I find it.

01:01:25
Speaker 1: Well, I had a great time and I learned a lot about golf as well, So thanks for having me on ye Thanks Ian,