More?Yes, MORE?Grooves research?
BOMB: Well, say this about the way the R&A and USGA are going about their work on grooves?it's inexhaustible. Latest project: A 15-question survey on grooves asked of players at this week's Open de Espana on the European Tour. Although neither the R&A nor European Tour would provide the questions asked, I got the following from a tour rep who spoke to one of the players interviewed. But get this: it was a verbal interview with the questions asked and answers written down by Mike Stewart of the European Tour. I mean, is there a reason the players couldn't write down their own answers?
Not that Chris Matthews has to worry about losing his job on ?Hardball.? Not with questions such as these:
What type of grooves do you use?
What do you think would be fair in terms of which grooves?
What do you like about square grooves
Do you think it would be harder to play shots with V-Grooves from
the: -
Rough?
Fairway?
Sand?
Tight, bare lies?
Where are the biggest benefits of square grooves seen:
Rough?
Fairway?
Sand?
Tight, bare lies?
I?m sure you have more than a thought or two on this.
GOUGE: Here's my take: We're talking about potentially the first rollback in rules in 75-plus years and you've got one of the two organizations charged with effecting this rule asking questions that someone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the rule in question would dismiss as laughably useless. How is this moving the debate forward in any meaningful way? Besides, you're asking players about something they have no chance at all of understanding. How would they know what the proposed grooves might play like? And by the way, are you asking them could a different type/length of rough create the same level of difficulty? And, really, what do you suppose the answers might be to the ill-phrased question, "What do you think would be fair in terms of which grooves?" You might as well ask them, "If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?" Every golfer in creation thinks it would be fair if the rough was a penalty. You need a survey to answer that?
The issues are clear about what grooves can and can't do in terms of spin. What remains less clear is how they might affect play, if at all. You don't need any more knowledge or data to make an informed decision about this, unless you're just afraid to step up and stand your ground. I don't know what answer makes the most sense about grooves, but I do know that a verbal survey is a complete waste of time, given that your survey group is certainly likely to be an ill-informed collection of tour players (and only those dumb enough to stand still and answer questions from some tour flunkie). At some point, you have to stop and say why are these things being done now, let alone at all. Important decisions require courage, even the courage to decide not to do something. They require intelligent discussion by people with a clear sense of not only the game's history but its future, as well. Half-witted surveys, as the Monty Python boys used to say about a dead parrot's plumage, don't enter into it.
What would happen if I tried to crash a USGA or R&A Bats 'n Balls committee meeting and tell them a thing or two? Would they drag me out to the Redan Hole at Somerset Hills and shoot me?
The USGA groove study strikes me as an extremely well-conceived, elegantly designed, succinctly reported group of experiments. It's tremendous, and is indicative of some pretty significant brain power at the USGA.
So where does all that brain power go when it's time to make a decision?
If they really want to do the right thing, they should change the rule for the tours only for 5 years and do a comprehensive statistical analysis afterwards. But organizations like the USGA and R&A don't seem to like to operate this way. Maybe they don't want to run the risk of proving themselves wrong.
Either way, I suspect we'll never know whether grooves or bomb&gouge style golf is really a poison on our game. And maybe that's ok, maybe we should just not care...just ignore these people and get back to playing the game.