"You can never have too much interaction of information amongst stakeholders in any endeavor"

I see I missed a barnburner of a teleconference when Commissioner Finchem and John Solheim congratulated themselves for having addressed the PING Eye 2 situation. Maybe it was just that post-Oscars buzz, but boy did the Commish sound extra jovial. For him, anyway.

On the new USGA equipment forum, which was a product (or not) of this agreement, depending on who you ask at the USGA.

We look forward to taking part in that and hopefully have some constructive things to add when we get to that point about -- from our perspective. I think the process has improved over the years, but I think all of us believe that, and certainly the USGA believes, that you can never have too much communication and you can never have too much interaction of information amongst stakeholders in any endeavor, and certainly that's true in this sport, where you have a variety of different golf organizations. This is a global sport, Tours all over the world, different golf organizations just here in the United States, not to mention the manufacturing community. So I think it's a very positive step.

You can just feel the glee.

Q. Commissioner Finchem, I'm just wondering if this forum had been in place prior to this groove implementation, do you, A, believe that the problems that you had with the implementation would have been dealt with at that forum; and B, is it possible that we wouldn't have had grooves implemented by 2010?

TIM FINCHEM: Well, that's an impossible question to answer because I just don't know. I think when you make a rule change of this magnitude, there's going to be obviously -- the potentiality for things that were not foreseen, but from a PGA TOUR perspective, even though last year, as you know, we went through this process of talking to the manufacturers ourselves about possibly delaying implementation, it's been a reasonably -- it's been a good transition to this new rule, but it could always be done -- because communication is important. As I said earlier, you can't have too much communication.

Especially when it's as eloquent as that! Or this:

So I think that John's enthusiasm speaks to that kind of communication. I think the USGA recognizes that an institutionalized way to not just seek communication from individual aspects of golf but to have an interchange is very positive.

Comments

[F. X. Flinn]

He can't help himself, can he? He's just a interchangin', facilitatin', platformin', process driven kinda guy.

[bsoudi]

Funny how while the word "communication" is used over and over, there's no actual communication. Just jibber-jabber.

[Mike T.]

I didn't see it in the transcript, but was there a chorus of Kumbaya at the end?

[Rodrigo]

Macalena, Macalena.