Honestly, the supply of these clubs is pretty short, why bother?

I can't believe that 20 year old wedges, even with square grooves, will perform better than brand new wedges with conforming grooves. I think this is all in the players' heads. Of course, golf is played mostly in the head so I can see why they're jumping at this loophole.

I'm a rank and file golfer, except for the "and file" part.

Just found two PING Eye 2 + SW in Dallas at a well known used club shop for $20/each.

Ghost of Karsten:

I'll give you $100 each for them, and a $50 gift card for Hooters.

You take PayPal????????

Is re-grooving these after worn down legal?

I've got a few but the faces are so worn they are almost shiny!
More than happy to make an embarassing profit from some gullible soul if anyone's desparate!

My impression has long been that Ping irons cannot be re-grooved. . . The 17-4 metal is too hard. . . Ping factory always refused to re-groove . . . They would re-head (brand new.) . . . It would seem unlikely that they still are warehousing 20 year old wedges in any significant quantity?

Geoff, I my advice to the Tour and to you and your devoted followers; let it go.

Chalk it up to, "Well, that whole groove-regulation thing didn't go so well, did it? We had the old Ping settlement to deal with, and we had the far worse embarassment with the Callaway prototypes that had the right total groove volume but which we had to outlaw on the basis that they still spun too much. And then there was all of the popular misconceptions about 'conforming' and 'non-conforming' club lists, and the widespread misunderstanding stemming from the whole bifurcation thing, which was a crummy solution all by itself, and... well, you get the idea..."

Let it go; we'll see how many 1980-something Ping Eye 2 wedges light up the tour this year.

I'm not so sure. Pink-Eye wedges sound pretty contagious to me.

I doubt these clubs spin any more and believe they probably spin a good bit less than current conforming wedges.

I called Ping and tried to get my I-2 9 iron re-grooved and they said they don't regroove clubs...

I gave this a little thought; I think I'd be on the wining side of a sucker's bet by claiming that not one single Ping Eye 2 wedge will be in a winner's bag on tour this year.

Let's look at the possibilities. So far, John Daly and Dean Wilson have put them in play. Let's say that in addition to those guys, half the other Ping staffers with any realistic hope of winning and who have previously played with old-model Ping wedges (Cabrera, Westwood, Calcavecchia-ha!, DeMarco-ha!, Riley-ha!, Maggert-ha!, Chopra, Mahan, B. Watson) - and add a couple of guys (like Timmy Herron, like John Daly) who play with Pings without Ping staff status. The sucker in the bet would need to get a Tour win from a member of a very small and unlikely group.

I think that very few if any younger players, who are too young to have played with the Eye 2 in their youthful past, will put them in play.

I won't rule out a possible Champions' Tour win. A lot of those guys might have picked up an old Ping wedge or two along the way. In any event, I say that this story makes for wonderful golf-writing, and is otherwise a huge non-story.

GHOST, it's the model prior to the + that they are using.

Eric, I think you are right.

Chuck, there are a lot of players that aren't on the Ping staff that will have one or two of these wedges in their bag, or already do.

Some one just paid $5,000 for a hickory shafted bafflewammick that had been in the corner of grandma's garage for 275 years. Rumour is it was John Daly.

Geoff, did you ever think that if Golfers didn't have "maximum performance," that golf participation wouldn't be stagnant, but would be significantly DOWN, considering how much the culture has changed? Kids activities, neverending work hours, etc.

Again, this just proves how dopey this rule is.

I honestly doubt these will make much of a difference in Daly's game anyway.

I don't remember the details, but I believe the PGA Tour got beaten a lot worse than the USGA in the Ping lawsuit and probably can't ban them.

To Farmingdale, and others;

My only point is that while some players will use the old Pings, and it is undoubtedly a great story for writers like John Paul Newport or Jaime Diaz (who actually covered the original Ping lawsuit as a correspondent for the New York Times -- how old was Diaz then?!?) to write about, I am not aware of a single player who is using them now, or is likely to use them in the future, who hasn't used one of the Ping wedges in his long-ago past. Hence, Daly. Hence, Dean Wilson. And, for sure, Herron and Calcavecchia. Probably Jeff Sluman. They've all got years of experience using the Ping Eye 2 wedges on Tour for years. Sluman, and Azinger, used Ping wedges at the same time that they played with Mizuno blades. Which was so weird, I could hardly imagine it. Of course, both those guys are better players in reality than I am in my imagination. I seem to remember Bob Estes, or maybe Bob Tway, using Ping wedges also.

So, the point is that there are some guys who will have used those wedges in competition, and might now go back to them. They are so weird looking, I don't think that there'll be anybody else who does, just for the 1980's grooves. I see this as a kind of a comfort move, and not some great leap backwards in technology, or some massive subversion of an important rule. It's a slightly laughable exception to a slightly laughable rule.

It is kind of interesting to go back and read the details of the Ping suit versus the USGA and the R&A, and the very different and entriely separate lawsuit Ping (actually, in the names of Bob Gilder and some other Ping staff tour pros, as lead Plaintiffs; the federal case is captioned as Gilder v. PGA) filed versus the Tour. The technical details are significant, and instructive as to what is and is not applicable to today's grooves.

The TOUR could ban such wedges but doing so would put them 'outside' the Rules of Golf which would cost them some legitimacy.

The implications w.r.t the lawsuit are beyond my area of expertise.

I don't know Chuck,Phil is using one and he could certainly win this year. I have been playing Ping eye 2's for about fifteen years. While my buddies have been getting new sets of clubs all along, they notice I can still spin the ball more than them. Is there any talk of someone maybe using more than just wedges?

Note the Ping Eye 2 + irons do not have the notorious square grooves...