Why multilayer golf balls spin less off the tee and more around the greens

During the collision between the driver and the ball (which lasts for less than half a millisecond, 200 times faster than you can blink your eye), there's an average force of 1,500 pounds being applied to the ball. This violent collision compresses the ball to about two-thirds of its diameter. The cover thickness is less than 3 percent of the size of the ball but doesn't much influence the outcome of this collision.

Two-piece balls, which have been on the market for many years, will spin less and go a little farther off the driver than the soft, wound balata balls that were used on tour until five years ago. The hard-core two-piece ball will spin about the same as the wound ball off the wedge only if it has an extremely soft and relatively thick cover. But such a cover reduces the ball's distance off the driver. The trick is to get a ball to spin less than a wound ball off the driver but the same as a wound ball off the wedge. A multilayer ball will do this because it has a soft core (for speed off the driver face) surrounded by a hard mantle and a thin soft cover. The mantle reduces spin off the driver, and the cover, too thin to influence driver launch conditions, is soft enough to significantly influence the spin off the wedge. The collision between the wedge and the soft cover, less violent and more oblique than with a driver, generates more spin. Thus, designers combined new materials with a better understanding of the synergy between ball and club to create a more efficient multilayer ball.