Remembering What The Tour Is Dealing With, John Solheim Edition

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It's been suggested by PING that they warned the USGA and PGA Tour of the potential for a groove rule debacle on several occasions. Those were private letters, but in CEO John Solheim's lengthy, rambling and at times bizarre June, 2009 statement voicing opposition to the grooves, he did not warn of any potential oddities with interpretation of the rules.
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The Next Phase Of The Groove Debate...

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...means hearing about the massive financial hardship this has caused for the manufacturers to retool their assembly lines. Joe Ogilvie on Twitter today:


Of course, if they didn't lobby the USGA for the right to give free equipment who can break 75, they'd be able to recoup the cost of the new grooves by selling the top amateurs the new, conforming wedges.

Now Ogilvie's first point is a great question. Don't most players want to be known for their skill instead of their ability to obtain a PING wedge?

"Since last summer Phil has been feuding with the blue coats over a groove developed by Callaway that was called the multiangle wall (MAW) design."

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Alan Shipnuck offers this background on Phil's decision to play the PING wedges and what motivated the stunt:

Since last summer Phil has been feuding with the blue coats over a groove developed by Callaway that was called the multiangle wall (MAW) design. The MAW adhered to all of the USGA specs governing the new grooves but still imparted spin comparable to the old square grooves. In profile the MAW looks a bit like a martini glass, with sharp edges where the groove wall meets the plane of the clubface. "The language in the USGA rule allowed edges to become sharper as the groove sidewall becomes less steep," Roger Cleveland, Callaway's design guru, told SI in an e-mail. "Despite the fact our MAW groove design fit within the USGA's original specifications, we clearly invented something that they didn't anticipate. It performed so well that they decided to reject it, claiming the MAW groove violated the spirit of the rule."

Contrary to reports, the face of the MAW wedge did not look like this.

Meanwhile Lawrence Donegan agreed with me that this little PR firestorm is a good thing for the game, taking issue with Tim Rosaforte's assertion that this was the last thing Tim Finchem needed to be dealing with.

Excuse me but how can 464,000 Google hits on a golf-related story be a bad thing? And what is so awful about a golf story being featured on Sportscenter (which is the nightly sports news show broadcast on ESPN)?

As for PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem having to deal with a great, big, fat controversy not long after his most famous PGA Tour member was revealed to have been leading a double life - isn't that why he gets paid the ridiculous sum of $5 million (or so)? To handle, or rather capitalise on, these things?

And because golf is a gentlemen's game where the players police themselves and therefore don't need drug testing, E. Michael Johnson reports that players are bugging their tour reps for a dealer who can supply them with some old PING wedges. They can also just go on ebay, as Ryan Ballengee explains.

But Padraig Harrington reportedly has some in his bag though he hasn't decided whether to engage in cheating (which is different than being a cheater!).

"It's a rather convoluted rule and fairly contentious right now about exactly whether or not it should or shouldn't have been promulgated."

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Callaway CEO George Fellows talks about the groove rule to Bloomberg TV and is now suggesting there is some question as to whether the groove rule change should have happened. Why didn't he speak up sooner? And why is everyone so in love with the word promulgated all of a sudden?