"The resulting litigation and subsequent out-of-court settlement in 1990 had a far greater impact on the game than any performance enhancement offered by grooves."
Adam Schupak saw Frank Hannigan's Voices item in the May 23, 2011 issue of Golf World (not online) in which the former USGA Executive Director comments on the recent New York Times story about the Polara ball. John Strege recently reminded us of the settlement the USGA paid, but as Schupak notes based on his study of Hannigan's oral history stored in the USGA Museum, that $1.4 million also permanently changed the way the USGA regulates equipment.
The resulting litigation and subsequent out-of-court settlement in 1990 had a far greater impact on the game than any performance enhancement offered by grooves. Ever since Ping forced the USGA to accept its terms, the ruling body’s willingness to use its power to legislate equipment design has been compromised, said former PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman. The specter of another potential lawsuit has opened the floodgates to a technological revolution in clubs and balls, he said. He added: “They made a choice to protect its treasury instead of the game.”
Monday, May 23, 2011 at 09:21 AM
Reader Comments (18)
Frank was really proteced something (ego, maybe?) but the game.... pullleazze.
What a bunch of squirrels.
Ping Eye 2 clubs made prior to April,1991 (3) All Ping clubs thereafter were produced with grooves conforming with the Rules of
Golf,i.e., the spaces between the grooves were lessened.
Settlement of the Ping=PGA Tour was rather different. Money most certainly changed hands and the Tour could not ban U grooves which it considered harmful to the game. It's as if major league baseball was forced to use metal bats.
What was the theory of liability under which the Polara's manufacturers sued? Anti-trust? Some other restraint of trade?
I don't blame the USGA for fearing jury verdicts; I blame the judges who didn't kick these suits (Ping, Polara, Casy Martin) out of court. While the USGA should certainly not be above the law, neither should courts be in the business of telling the USGA what sorts of rules and regulations it ought to promulgate to people who are interested in playing a game by the USGA's Rules of Golf.
Well said Chuck.
We golfers (and I may be presuming here) are most comfortable when we are playing a "worldwide" game. When we know, for instance, that English and American golf balls are the same diameter; when Ping wedges are deemed conforming in all nations (or not) uniformly; when everybody knows whether or not it is okay to ride on a cart in a Tour competition.
Because laws -- anti-trust, disability accomodations, free trade, etc., and court decisions construing those laws -- are different all over the world, I would think that golfers the world over would be particularly keen to see all courts stay out of the regulation of how golf is played, so that they can all play the same game together.
I have always understood that at the heart of Ping's claim in the 1990's was the notion that the USGA's groove rules had the effect of favoring the older legacy oem's to the detriment of Ping and its innovative new irons.
That alone, however, would not have bothered the USGA's counsel. Without more, that is a feature of any rule change made by any sactioning body in any sport, if motivated by concerns about the betterment of the sport.
What would have bothered the USGA - and what led to the settlement I presume - was that Ping had turned up actual communications between the USGA and the legacy oems that gave plausibility to the claim that the USGA, in enacting the groove rules, in fact intended to protect the legacy oems. That is, Ping was able to make a plausible argument that the rules change was not motivated by concerns about the 'betterment of the game' but rather by the desire to protect the market share of the older oems at the time.
Is that story line off base? It seems to me such a scenario (or something like it) is the only thing that explains the incredibly favorable settlement Ping got. It was a settlement so favorable that it suggests that there were some antitrust guns pointed at the USGA's head that were loaded with evidence of actual bad conduct.
In the meantime, I don't mind telling you that my understanding is that there were never any smoking-gun documents that implicated the USGA as favoring legacy manufacturers over Ping. Rather, there were documents that showed that the USGA's Balls and Implements rules and testing had been a bit sloppy, in the way that groove rules had been promulgated, and in the way that Ping had not been clearly told right away that the Eye Two groove-shoulder-widths were non-compliant.
In other words, the one good theory that Ping had going for it was the general theory that went something like, "the USGA's rule was unclear, and the USGA's notification to Ping was unclear, and Ping was badly damaged by being allowed to go ahead into the marketplace with an important new product, only to be told later that it was non-conforming..."
As far as I know, the story that the USGA was somehow protecting old-school manufacturers to the detriment of Ping has always been an urban legend. If anybody knows better, I'd be interested in hearing about it.
But knowing a bit about Ping's infamous lawyer in the two cases (Leonard Decof) I imagine that there would be virtually nothing that he wouldn't allege, if he had the chance.
I don't have any inside info either, so perhaps I am just repeating urban legends. Dunno. Is the case docket of public record?
Your explanation that the case turned on Ping's relying to their detriment on badly drafted rules makes sense at one level. It would be a basis for damages based on on some sort of implied contract theory.
But my understanding is that the Ping case was about much bigger issues. Big, earth orbit-changing antitrust issues. It is supposed to have raised the larger issue of whether the USGA had the ability to set limits on equipment at all. Certainly that is the scare line you still hear today.
But that has never made sense to me. At least based on what I know about what happened in 1990.
I think a couple things happened. Frank Thomas is a supremely confident, arrogant, smart guy. But he was completely outgunned in this war. He wasn't funded to the point that he could foresee that other engineers would be smarter and harder working to surpass what he thought plausible.
Hannigan is right. Money talked. The USGA caved to the realities of the cost of litigation. And so here we are today. The game is near broken. Foreign companies are making gajillions of dollars. And the game languishes here in the US and Europe. But it's thiriving in Asia.. And Wally Ulheim is thrilled because anybody US-centric will be road kill. Nice. Really, really nice.
So Pandora's box was opened back in the day of the Ping grooves thing. So let me as a question. With all the television money that has been generated since then, couldn't the USGA and the R&A have built a war chest of legal funds to stand fast and keep the game as it was envisioned? But, of course, they didn't.
I"m glad I'm sort of old. I don't want to watch this go the way it's going much longer.
The second lawsuit was also filed in in the U.S. District Court in Arizona, and was captioned as "Bob Gilder, Ken Green, Rafe Botts (and others) and Karsten Manufacturing, versus PGA Tour, Inc., et al" And again, among the personally-named defendants were the individual Executive Board and Tour Policy Board members. This second case presented a different theory than the USGA case. At that time, the USGA actually had equipment rules, and its suit with Ping involved some highly technical applications of the rules. Angles of measurements, definitions of landmarks on the club face, etc. But the PGA Tour was at that time just kind of winging it, and they decided, in the wake of the USGA making a decision, that they would just ban all U-grooves, period. That was an even bigger threat to Ping, and arguably more arbitrary.
Frank Hannigan, who was (laughably, though not so much at the time) a named defendant in the USGA case has said that the USGA's case was actually easier to defend, and I believe him. The Tour case, on the other hand, was fought bitterly, with lots of pretrial motions and intermediate appellate decisions, right up to the eve of trial, when they settled, and agreed that in the future, the Tour would defer to USGA equipment decisions and also that Ping would get some money for its trouble in pursuing its case. By that time, the USGA had already settled with Ping, and had agreed to grandfather the Ping Eye Two, in a settlment agreement that lasted all the way to last spring.
Here is Frank Hannigan (an authoritative source) explaning some things, correcting me on a few things, and giving me a passing grade on my recounting of most things:
http://www.geoffshackelford.com/homepage/2010/1/17/letter-from-saugerties-ping-edition.html
Very helpful. Thanks. Even with a fuller picture of the Ping litigation, I see no legal reason for thinking that the USGA can not exercise its rule-making authority to limit balls and implements. Which what you seemed to be saying higher up in this thread. The USGA can do it and the courts should uphold it (absent unusual facts).
The litigation expense thing is a red herring. The USGA can clearly afford the litigation. Check out its most recent financial statement. More important is that USGA would likely prevail on the law. In fact, the legal basis for their rules-making authority strikes me as a no-brainer. And if individual officers and directors are personally named, the USGA should indemnify them and make sure they have insurance to back those indemnities. All pretty much standard corporate s.o.p these days.
So the mystery remains for me. Why did the USGA stand aside and let b & i get so far out of whack over the last two decades? If the reasons weren't legal or financial, what were they? What's with the passivity?
But the first versions of them tore up golf balls something awful, so he dulled the edge of the grooves a tiny bit to help with that problem.
He didn't make the grooves wider or the lands between them narrower, at least not in the tradtional way of measuring grooves. So he didn't see any reason to submit them for further tests.
But in the interim, the USGA invented a way of measuring grooves that no engineer or machinist had ever seen before. They didn't measure the grooves from wall to wall, they measured them at a point on the radius created when Karsten dulled them.
And the already-in-use Eye2 irons suddenly became non-conforming. Karsten's main argument was that the USGA's measuring system was bullshit. At the time, I figured he had a pretty good case, but thought the USGA also had a right to make rules for the game.
In the end, itd seemed as if the non-cash settlement that allowed Ping's customers to keep using their sticks made the most sense. Karsten, said after all, his main concern was for his buyers to be able to keep their clubs, and to be able to trust Ping.
K
Don't know about the urban legends cited, but I always liked the one about the hook on the door, and of course, Largr Marge. :)
Now back to our regularly scheduled litagation review.
Good information. It only deepens the mystery about why virtually everyone today seems to assume that the Ping case undermined the USGA's ablility to set rules for b& i. The Ping dispute was about mismanaging the implementation of changes to equipment standards. I assume the USGA learned from the episode.
The key, however, is that the issue was not about the USGA's authority to promulgate equipment standards generally. There is no reason to think that, after the Ping litigation, the oem's had gained some sort of veto over rules that the USGA might enact. Or even, post-Ping, that oem's have a right to damages when new rules are enacted.