A Round with a Legend: Peter Thomson

The modern ball – and the distance it travels – also worries him. Brought up on the classic sandbelt tracks of Melbourne, Thomson, who reckons he only drove it 230-240-yards in his prime, believes technology has gone too far – at least for the professionals.
“A lot of skill has been taken out of the game because of the ball and the sheer number of dimples it has now,” he says, co-incidentally, after I hit my first decent drive of the round. “It isn’t affected by the wind as much, it flies so far and it’s easy to spin, which makes the short game a bit one dimensional. You don’t often see players running shots up to the flag anymore. Royal Melbourne is the best course we have in Australia, but it’s almost defenceless nowadays. Limit the number of dimples and you solve the problem. But having said that, it’s hard to argue with the results. The best player is still winning.”
It might sound like Thomson is stuck in the past, keen for the game to return to the days when courses were less manicured and persimmon-headed drivers were de rigueur. But he’s not. Quietly-spoken yet thoroughly engaging, intelligent and quick-witted, he has lost none of his enthusiasm for the sport. He is simply a defender of golf’s heritage.
His thoughts on slow play and the lack of knowledge surrounding the rules are cases in point. “We used to take three hours and 15 minutes when playing in threeballs,” he remembers. “[Bobby] Locke was accused of being a slow player but he would take three hours and 20 minutes. Now a player doesn’t even have to know the rules because they’re encouraged to call in rules officials at every turn. We never got into tangles; the players used to watch each other. Rule 6.7, which governs undue delay, should be paramount. If a player says ‘I want a ruling because I don’t know what to do’ then 15 minutes passes before it’s sorted out and he plays his shot. If that isn’t slow play I don’t know what is.”