The aboutGolf simulator features three full screens.

aboutGolf Knows
What Golf Is About

BY JOHN STEINBREDER

Close your eyes and imagine what golf simulators once were like. Back in the 1980s and ’90s. With rumpled screens and fuzzy images. With no real sense of how far or straight you hit your shots.

Frankly, there wasn’t much to get excited about, even if the only thing you wanted from those old machines was some off-season fun with your friends. You didn’t even think about using them for clubfit-ting or teaching.

Now, it’s 2011. Step to the tee
of an aboutGolf simulator, the PGA
Tour Compact SimSurround for
example, which was introduced last
year. What you have here is a unit
that features three full screens that
wrap 160 degrees around the golfer
and gives him, or her, more than 50
courses to play, including Pebble
Beach, TPC Sawgrass and the Old
Course at St. Andrews.

describes as “repeatable and repro-
ducible data quality throughout the
tracking region.”
According to Faust, 3Trak repli-
cates ball flight as well as bounce
and roll better than other simula-
tors. It even reproduces ricochets
off of trees and lets shots react to
whatever wind or weather condi-
tions a player chooses to input into
the system (and players can input
different course conditions at will).

A vast range of swing analysis and software tools are available, and the golf course imagery, which is produced from topographical and survey data and more than 2,500 photos per layout, is impressive.

Those sorts of enhancements have made simulators much better than they used to be – and much more popular in the U.S. as well as in golf hot spots like Japan, Korea and the U.K.

In addition to being better entertainment devices, around which winter golf leagues and rounds of business golf are frequently organized, they have become important teaching and fitting tools.

In some cases, they have even become a way for top touring pros to keep their games in shape during the off-season. Which is why Luke Donald put an aboutGolf simulator in his Chicago-area home about a year ago.

Not surprisingly, these state-of-the-art simulators do not come cheap, and the PGA Tour Compact SimSurround goes for a hefty $62,000. That’s out of reach for most recreational players. But aboutGolf is working to make their machines more accessible by setting up reasonable revenue-sharing plans with golf clubs and retailers in selected locations. l