"It does seem like we should have been prepared for this."

Padraig Harrington's entire press conference is worth a read. But a few highlights on the groove topic:

It's an interesting one, and as I said, I did the testing, and I still -- every ten minutes it's in the bag, it's out of the bag. That's basically how it's been going. I haven't settled at all on what I'm going to do, but I'll have to -- it could be ten minutes before my tee time and not know what I'm going to do this week.

As I said, I'm hoping for some good clarification this afternoon from Tim Finchem. I'm hoping something comes out of that that makes the decision and takes the decision out of my hands, really.

And my question...

Q. Listening to you talk about this, you've given this a lot of thought, and it's an interesting topic and a lot of people view this as a negative discussion, but it's actually an interesting conversation, isn't it?

PADRAIG HARRINGTON: It is interesting, because there is no -- even going back to the actual change, you know, it was -- you've got to think that the rule was changed because it was a soft one to change. Nobody could come out and say, oh, no, we don't want the players -- we don't want any advantage given to a player that's hit it in the rough and we want the guy who hits it straight -- it was a very easy rule change to make. It would have been a lot harder rule change to go and say, well, we're going to ban long putters because then you would have had people coming out and saying no.

But there was very dissenting views, very few people who had a dissenting view, and certainly a dissenting view publicly to the groove change. But it is a significant change to a lot of people. I know I've been testing during the winter, and it's quite significant.

You know, I'm surprised that -- I don't know, when did it first come up that this was going to happen? I only heard it in Hawai'i, as I said. I finished up last year selling them off thinking that was the end of those clubs. It does seem like we should have been prepared for this. That's probably the -- who had this idea first? I'd love to know who was the person --

Q. You mean the Ping part?

PADRAIG HARRINGTON: Yeah, did they know six months ago that there was going to be an issue with these box groove clubs?

Q. Well, it was announced in August of 2008 that these would be okay.

PADRAIG HARRINGTON: It wasn't announced to me.

I'm curious how the Irish press views this move by Harrington, or even the fact he's contemplating using PING wedges. Note Karl MacGinty's strong views on Phil Mickelson's decision.