The Conformist in Me

One of golf’s fascinations for me is that it brings out our inherent love of rules and our abject hatred of them, sometimes all at once. The local gentry take mulligans a plenty, but razz their fellows when they move a ball away from a divot.

I guess all of this is a mere expression of human nature, just like the universal desire to hit the ball ever farther. The quest for the long, longer, longest drive has led us to an equipment industry that is preparing to do battle with the keeper of the rules, our own USGA and the R&A.

The question at hand is whether a driver ought to may able to possess a face that has an elastic, or intentionally trampoline-like effect. The USGA has let all of the current gear on the market off the hook by labeling it conforming. But, recently Callaway Golf has introduced their ERC driver which they admit will fail the USGA’s test. The USGA, of course, promptly got hold of an ERC and found that it was indeed non-conforming.

Callaway’s out is that they have confined sales of the ERC to their overseas markets where the rules are set by the R&A, which is yet to address the issue of the trampoline-effect. Still, ERCs are finding their way home in good number. You can find several on auction at EBAY for upwards of a kilobuck.

Callaway’s actions are quite cunning. They have used their remarkable R&D facilities to develop a club that is very likely longer than the USGA wants drivers to be. But, instead of breaking down the USGA’s front door, Callaway has decided to test the waters by bringing the ERC into the market through the kitchen.

Now that Callaway has done the R&D heavy lifting, other club makers have built their own spring-faced drivers using a process that is sometimes called “cut & clone.” This means simply cutting open a head and copying as much of its materials and internal dimensions, as is cost effective for the cloners, in an effort to extract its performance. When the USGA tested a number of these products they found that they too failed to conform.

In a recent promotional publication, the giant Austin Texas-based component club head manufacturer Golfsmith announced new club heads that employ thinner faces for slower club head speeds, and slightly thicker faces for higher swing speeds. Why? Golfsmith claims that the thinner the club face, the more the face deflects and the less the ball compresses. The effect is a less-lossy transfer of energy and more distance. Golfsmith does not say whether these new heads have been judged conforming by the USGA or not.

What I always like to look for is motive. What’s Callaway’s motive? Naturally, it’s to make their stock market symbol move up in value. What’s the USGA’s motive? Well, that’s harder to say. Are they, as their ads say, simply the guardian of the game? It is obvious to me that they are at once more and less than that.

A major thrust of the USGA’s test is to reassert their primacy in the making of the rules of golf and to a lesser degree in actually defining the game. The USGA’s position here is quite unusual. In baseball, the rules are made by the individual leagues (which are made up of rich club owners) and the now defanged commissioner (a rich, team owner himself).

This frees baseball to invent and maintain the sacrilege of the DH, among other things, and to assure that their financial interests are served. But, even in the home run crazy world that is major league baseball today, can you imagine one of the major bat companies coming out with a new bat that’s made from genetically engineered hickory trees that grow cork in their cores? Balls hit by these wonder-sticks would come off the bat as fast and fly as far as one hit by an aluminum bat, or further. Then, Mark McGwire’s home run balls would still be going up when they left the park.
Why won’t this happen any time soon? Quite simply because baseball and baseball players have a natural sense of just how much a bat like that would alter the game, most obviously by obsoleting all of the MLB ballparks. This sense has so far eluded golfers.

We see PGA players routinely reaching par 5 holes in two shots, the second usually with an iron, and we say why not? We see high school kids hitting the ball well over 300 yards with conforming titanium clubs and balls and we say why not? Distance and its pursuit has long been our passion in golf.

How long can we keep it up? We have already obsoleted courses that have hosted U.S. Opens that Ben Hogan won. The barons of Augusta National have taken to growing rough to defend the work of Jones and Mackenzie. Of course, length also comes from bigger and fitter players. But since we’ve never seen Tiger Woods hit a real balata-covered ball over 300 yards with a persimmon driver, we will never be quite sure what counts more, the swinger or that which is swung.

The scofflaw-actions of Callaway and the rest do nothing but bring out the conformist in me. At 39, I’m just starting to lose a bit of the distance I had in my wild youth. But I won’t resort to an illegal club to get it back. That would be too much like using a corked bat.