By Ken Van Vechten
Pick a popular sport, and someone associated with that sport has uttered that line. Because when the fine line might be the difference between titles, coin, and accolades, is crossing it and not getting caught then even a problem? Hey, not so surreptitiously throw spitballs and you, too, might end up in Cooperstown.
Enter golf, where the Rules are extant and always a topic of conversation – and sometimes debated – from PGA Tour players all the way to casual weekend golfers. Sure, every human endeavor has cheats, including golf, but the far-far-far more likely outcome in our game is a player calling a penalty on herself for an offense no one else even saw. A “corked bat” in golf is not seen as a badge of nod-nod, wink-wink, red-faced-for-a-second honor.
“Wait a minute,” you ask. “What about Rory and Scottie’s drivers?
What about ’em? The clubs were tested at the PGA Championship at Quail Hollow in May, and when they did not meet the accepted standard promulgated by the USGA, the players put new ones into play.
End of story.
But let’s run the tape back a bit.
It’s not exactly man-bites-dog news to state that golf’s governing authorities here and elsewhere – the USGA and R&A – have limitations on, among other things, the shape, construction, and/or performance characteristics of most everything that goes into our bags.
Of the various requirements placed on manufacturers of drivers – from head volume to shaft length and whatever else – perhaps the most critical bit of the secret sauce is what science calls coefficient of restitution, or trampoline-like effect for those of us with liberal arts degrees, with relative CoR equivalence measured in CT or characteristic time. In a few words, CT measures how long the ball and driver face are in contact, using a portable device – hence easy in-field testing – with a pendulum striking the clubface. The law of the land says that can be 239 microseconds with a tolerance factor of an additional 18 microseconds. Anything over 257 µs – 257 millionths of a second – means more pop on the ball and a stick that is non-conforming.
Really, a handful of excessive millionths of a second and one’s gamer has to go to the scrap heap?
Be it anchoring or massive grooves, the Rules are the Rules.
If you’re banging on your old driver with a ball-peen seeking that game-changing hot spot, consider yoga or more time on the putting green; that will do more for you than the yard or so, per the USGA, that an accomplished player would get going from compliance at 239 to the gulag at 258.
Why all the lather over Rory’s driver at the PGA Championship?
The consternation more righteously should’ve been about whoever it was who leaked the failed test. By organizational – tour, association, tester – protocol, those are to be confidential.
It shouldn’t have been leaked – his wasn’t a crime. There is the expectation in our game that neither he nor his manufacturer even knew it had gone from legally hot to just past the tipping point. Why would you do all that over 1.5 yards when 370 is already in your wheelhouse?
Exactly, Hank Aaron didn’t need ’roids, either.
“Driver wear is expected,” says Carter Rich, head of equipment standards for the USGA. “Drivers have a life cycle. There isn’t an expected life cycle. It depends on driver construction, and it varies from manufacturer to manufacturer to manufacturer. One of the reasons why such a high percentage of drivers submitted to us conform is because we license the software. They can build their own hardware, or we can sell it to them – the pendulum tester – the same test that we use. Manufacturers are doing quality control; they’re testing during the design process, during the production process, to make sure they are staying within the limits. … Neither the manufacturer nor any player wants (a driver) to fail. This is not something where we’re trying to get anybody.”
Two testing protocols are in play here: manufacturers submitting clubs for testing prior to release to the market and the random, spot-check testing the USGA does of a third of the field at majors and as a service provided to the PGA Tour and other organizations at their request, the results of which are kept private. (The LPGA has not implemented at-tourney testing.)
Call me naïve but our game is interested in keeping it between the foul poles. Perhaps grudgingly at times but also mostly voluntarily.
The constant impact of a relatively hard ball and a club moving at 95 or 110 or 125 miles per hour can cause fatigue in the metal but up until the clubhead fails or cracks, that fatigue can induce higher CT and a rather insignificant amount of additional distance, though at a certain point will run counter to the regulations.
Rich adds that manufacturers try to get new drivers on the conforming list coming in somewhere around the 245 µs mark, pushing the envelope but keeping it within tolerances and allowing for the inevitable “creep or CT creep,” a phrase he doesn’t necessarily adore but one that is used across the industry to denote the inevitable material fatigue – and increased face flex – over time.
From limit to tolerance-max to non-conformance, creep can span thousands of impacts. Slower-swinging recreational players might be able to induce metal fatigue, but it’s really the domain of speed and gobs and gobs and gobs of smacks that eventually might produce a few more yards. Then, at some point, the club might fail. Like a perfect smash-factor, caving a driver face is something most of us never will experience. We don’t play or practice enough, we don’t swing hard enough, and we’re fickle and don’t keep equipment long enough.