Aldrich Potgieter, who claimed his first PGA Tour win at last week’s Rocket Classic, is remarkable among professional golfers. The 20-year-old South African leads the tour in driving distance by numbers that are so bizarrely vast – seven yards longer than second-placed Rory McIlroy – that it evokes memories of the early John Daly years. In his rookie season of 2025, he has already played in the final group on Sunday three times even though he has made only five cuts in 14 starts. And during his most recent Sunday round at Detroit Golf Club, Potgieter recorded eight drives longer than 330 yards, including a 370-yarder on the 71st hole.
But Potgieter’s most prodigious trait may be what he represents about the future of elite golf. His current talent may be a lot and his individual prospects may be as epic as his Detroit victory roar. But it is his Brobdingnagian speed that may be the most tangible harbinger of distance excess that golf’s rulemakers fear most. Because as unique as Potgieter might seem to be, he is in fact emblematic of a trend that is fully taking hold of the game at the elite level.
This year, Potgieter’s top recorded swing speed is 132.58 miles per hour. Sounds enormous until you dig in and realise it’s not even in the top 15 of highest speeds recorded in 2025. Now, we can debate whether Matt Fitzpatrick’s top speed of 153.82 miles per hour was a glitch in the system, but what is irrefutable is speed in professional and elite amateur golf is in a whole different stratosphere than it was a relatively short time ago. In 2015, not a single PGA Tour player recorded a swing speed in excess of 129.38 miles per hour. This year 25 already have surpassed that figure.
All of these speed numbers are simply preamble to what R&A and USGA officials are trying to do with the golf ball come 2028 and 2030. You cannot make athletes perform slower in any sport, and in golf, figuring out how to swing faster has not been merely a cottage industry, it is now very nearly the fundamental guiding principle. So, long story short, when the governing bodies changed the test parameters for golf balls to a swing speed of 125 miles per hour, up from the current test speed of 120 miles per hour, it wasn’t outlandish or theoretical, it was conservative. (Also, it’s worth remembering that the original proposal was for the speed to be 127 miles per hour.)
Again, you can argue whether trying to regulate a skill set is fair or unfair, or even necessary (there are other ways to strike fear into free-swinging bombers, of course). But remember that the original swing-speed parameters when the first ball test was developed in 1976 (called the Overall Distance Standard) were meant to reflect how the game’s fastest players were hitting the ball. That also was true when the test was modernised in 2004 when the R&A’s David Rickman said, “The effect of these changes is that the Overall Distance Standard will become more reflective of what is happening today on the professional tours – rather than what was happening in 1976 when the standard was first introduced.”
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The rollback to the golf ball that is set to be implemented for elite players in 2028 and all golfers in 2030 attempts that same kind of adjustment, but if you look at the current numbers being produced by tour players, it seems inadequate. Moreover, the PGA Tour and the PGA of America don’t seem all that on-board with adopting the rule in the first place. The PGA of America continues to suggest it isn’t necessary, and the PGA Tour claims numbers show it isn’t in line with what it sees, stating in 2023, “we believe the proposed increase in test clubhead speed to 125mph is disproportional to the rate of increase we see when analysing PGA Tour radar data.” At least publicly, its position hasn’t changed.
To put it mildly, that assessment is just wrong. The average swing speed on the PGA Tour is now 116.58. Certainly, that’s nowhere near the new test speed of 125 miles per hour. But, in the past five years average swing speed has jumped 2.57 miles per hour. That increase is by far the largest in any five-year window since the stat was first tracked in 2007. In fact, it nearly triples the average five-year change seen since 2012. In short, the best golfers are getting faster at a faster rate than ever before. (The R&A and USGA have made this case in their annual Distance Report for years.) More telling: 52 players have recorded a swing speed of 125 miles per hour or higher this year, or nearly a third of those with statistics on tour, and 128 players have recorded a speed of 120 miles per hour this year (equal to the current test speed parameter).
Trying to contain this kind of athletic improvement very well might be a fool’s errand. The swing speed used in the ball test is the only club golf’s rulemakers really have in the bag, assuming of course that you believe distance at the elite level is a problem. (And even the rulemakers have acknowledged they might have to keep changing the test speed as elite players swing faster and faster.) What can’t be argued in any way is that the fuel behind the engine driving distance is increasingly super-charged – and likely more by players than their equipment, if the struggles of average golfers to experience their own distance explosion (as shown by Arccos’s recent statistics) are any indication. That’s as obvious as Potgieter’s 374-yard drive on Sunday at the Rocket Classic.
