Tour Monitoring Ping Loophole Situation
That's what John Paul Newport reports.
In settling a 1990 lawsuit with Ping, the USGA agreed to treat all Ping Eye 2 clubs built before then as "conforming" in USGA competition in perpetuity. The PGA Tour, which follows USGA rules, said Friday it was aware of the loophole and will "monitor the situation."
Lawyers, rules junkies and other experts: could the PGA Tour insitute a local rule banning the wedges in a way that effectively supersedes the USGA-Ping settlement?
Newport also uses his Saturday column to explain the groove rule change and writes:
But in rolling back existing technology, as with the new groove ruling, the USGA and R&A have entered new territory. One concern is that if the rank and file of golfers object to losing performance characteristics they once enjoyed, and continue to play with nonconforming equipment, the regulators will lose authority. "The only power the USGA has is the consent of the governed," said Frank Thomas, Mr. Rugge's predecessor as the USGA's technical director, "and the game of golf needs a strong governing body."
I'll take this opportunity to suggest that rank and file golfers have never had greater performance characteristics and yet play has been stagnant for years.
Saturday, January 16, 2010 at 09:10 AM
Reader Comments (22)
I'll give you $100 each for them, and a $50 gift card for Hooters.
You take PayPal????????
More than happy to make an embarassing profit from some gullible soul if anyone's desparate!
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.
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.
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.
Again, this just proves how dopey this rule is.
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 implications w.r.t the lawsuit are beyond my area of expertise.