GOUGE: There's nothing more fun than stirring the pot. I don't exactly think that's what Reed Exhibitions was doing when they put together the floor plan for the 2009 PGA Merchandise Show. But the pot was a veritable whirlpool at the end of January after the inhabitants of Booth 1331 peered across the aisle at the inhabitants of Booth 1352. That's right, the floor plan at this year's just-concluded PGA Merchandise Show had Callaway and Titleist just a decent birdie putt, each occupying booth space just under 10,000 square feet.

Only an aisle separated the two companies embroiled in a patent infringement lawsuit over Titleist's Pro V1 ball, a lawsuit in which the courts have clearly favored Callaway's side of the case. Sadly, there was no sabotaging of displays or food fights. Not even golf balls hurled grenade style from one display booth to the next. Of course, like you have said before, this whole incident will have not a scintilla of impact on the marketplace because the old Pro V1 is giving way to the new one which debuted at the show. And no one will ever be the wiser. Unless, of course, Callaway continues to hammer its case (they have to, the thing's still on appeal), demands restitution on the order of several hundred million dollars (entirely possible), and opts to continue running attack ads that make the Swiftboaters look like the Higglytown Heroes (I'm all for it). Push the buttons until someone decides to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Better make sure you're holding all the cards before you do, though. But then that's not going to happen, is it?

Golf is such an environment of civility always. Nothing two-faced or underhanded ever. Never a secret deal, no, not in golf, right, my true, honest and trustworthy comrade in arms.

BOMB: Such proximity of Titleist and Callaway brings me back to the salad days of the PGA Show when mega-booths from mega-companies jockeyed for attention, including the infamous TaylorMade-Cobra battle of several years ago when the show-floor neighbors took turns upping the volume (and the number of floors on their booths, eventually reaching triple-decker status) on their respective videos in a game of "can you top this" that was both comical and ear-splitting. The din eventually became such the folks at the PGA of America finally had to step in like referees and insist on a lowering of the sound, sending both companies back to their corners.

Unlike you, my conspiracy-theorist friend, I do not believe the floor plan was made with anything other than convenience in mind. Still, given the ads Callaway has run, more than a few dirty looks were shot across the aisle the last few days. As for the effectiveness of Callaway's ads, I'm not so sure. My e-mail inbox has had not fewer than a half-dozen notes from readers essentially calling Callaway hypocrites in its "we play by the rules" posturing, pointing out quickly this is the same company that brought out the nonconforming ERC II driver and then had none other than Arnold Palmer tout that it was OK to use a nonconforming club in "recreational" rounds.

Of course, those e-mails may have come from Titleist loyalists.

BOMB: Well, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, "here we go again." We're here in Orlando at the Ginn Reunion Resort to conduct our Hot List golf ball testing with player panelists and after one day here's the conclusion I've come to:

I must totally suck at my job.

This self-loathing has nothing to do with our ball test which went swimmingly. But I was appalled at some of the clubs that are in some our testers bags. I had two fine guys and decent players in my group today--a 14 and 17 handicap--but both had irons in their bags that debuted in a year starting with a 1 and a 9. I mean seriously. If our job is to inform and educate readers on why they should be buying and playing with new equipment and why the new stuff is better, we clearly have failed miserably. That said, I was heartened by this moment that perhaps they will come around. One of my players, Wes, also had an old TaylorMade Firesole driver with a STEEL shaft. After hitting his Sunday punch on one hole I encouraged him to use the Cobra 454 Comp driver my other panelist had. Not exactly the latest and greatest, but at least a hint of modern technology. Making solid contact yet again he airmailed his initial tee ball by a minimum of 20 yards. Another convert.

We may have to get them one at a time, but we have to get them. The pros may be closed to maxed out, but the everyday player has plenty of room to improve. And if I'm not getting it done in my magazine, just what the heck are you doing to help out Mr. Golf Digest, you of the six million readers?

GOUGE: I refuse to believe average golfers show such callous disregard for logic. But then I also was there when one of our newfound testers suggested that he really didn't put much stock in the legitimacy of the Golf Digest Hot List, thought the whole thing was a glorified catalog. Until he saw the way we went about our business today during the golf ball evaluation session. Five hours on the golf course hitting shots from tee to green several times over on each hole, all in the hopes of reaching some meaningful conclusions about golf ball performance. Nothing definitive to report yet. And I will not sit here and tell you that we will turn the industry around with our findings. But through our combination of player evaluations, indoor air cannon analysis and robot testing, we hope to educate ourselves in meaningful ways about golf ball tendencies so we can present that understanding to help the average golfer 1) better understand the entire range of golf ball performance and golf ball construction options and 2) find a group of balls that fit their economic and skill requirements. The Hot List for golf balls, our most comprehensive investigation of the golf ball market, is slated to appear in a spring issue of Golf Digest. What you will not find is a list of balls and the distance they flew on a robot. That is at best incomplete and at worst grievously misleading information that in the end brings only more heat than light to the golf ball selection process. We're looking to help golfers better understand what performance issues are at stake with their choices in the golf ball market today. That comes with solid reasoning and careful explanation, not exclamation points and bold letters.

But a final word on the issue at hand: If you believe that golf technology isn't really worth getting excited about, that nothing that's been introduced in the last few years is all that better than what was already in place, I have to say that what you're really doing is casting a pretty dim view of the relative group expertise at the world's top golf companies (and most of the small ones, as well). As an example, I can offer what I'm hearing about the golf intellectual horsepower being brought to bear in response to the institution on tour next year (and in subsequent years for elite amateurs, etc., etc.) of the new groove rule, which as you'll recall is designed to limit the effectiveness of grooves in generating spin by as much as 50 percent. I have spoken to several in the industry hard at work at attacking this challenge, and the consensus seems to be that through a combination of face treatments and ball developments, whatever spin might have been lost to the newly downsized grooves could be recouped in as little as 18 months. If the boys in Carlsbad, Huntington Beach, Phoenix and Fairhaven (and a few other laboratories) can work that fast to solve a relatively recent technological conundrum, imagine how much they've been able to improve your game in the last decade. Of course, they all could just be blowing smoke. Sort of like they were with the titanium driver, huh?

BOMB: Well pardsy, as we are fond of saying, here we freaking go! NO, I'm not talking about the body blows we will be taking over the next few weeks from manufacturers, uninformed bloggers (I'd love to know how many of those guys blasting us on the equipment websites use clubs that have never appeared on the Hot List) and the like. No, I'm talking about the inevitable questions that were sure to arise from the court granting Callaway's injunction in its lawsuit against Acushnet. In addition to stopping the sales of infringing products, it also apparently deemed tour pros had to use non-infringing balls starting in 2009. Seeing how several pros had played the 2005 and 2007 versions (and, indeed, some even the 2003 versions), some players have some choices to make. Such as Geoff Ogilvy, a Pro V1x player, who was asked which ball he would play and gave this response out in Hawaii:

"The new-new one, I'm not going to use this week," said Ogilvy at a press conference at Kapalua leading in to this week's Mercedes Championship. "And the new one, of the old one, if that makes sense, that one is fine. I don't notice a difference. I'm going to play these two weeks, with the new version of the old one, and then do a bit more testing, and I'll probably -- the new one, there's good reports about the new-new one. So I've got a whole month in Phoenix to test them all out."

Confused? Well, Acushnet reconfigured its Pro V1 and Pro V1x in September so those balls would be outside the patents in question. That's the old one of the new one. The new one of the new one is a yet-to-be released version of the two balls that Acushnet will launch this year. Tour pros can expect similar questions to be asked right through the first few weeks of the year. Is it a big deal? Not really to me. As long as the players can't tell the difference this seems more nuisance than anything. But you may have a different take. In fact, I'm pretty much sure of it.

GOUGE: If ever there was a compelling reason to roll back the ball and make all tour players use the same unmarked model, Ogilvy's linguistic gymnastics might be it. He also said, "There's a new-old one, and there's a new-new one, which is the new one -- (laughter) -- which is the model in front of the old one. The other one is a 2007 ball and this is a 2009 ball. There's a version of the 2007 ball, but doesn't breach the patent, so I'm using the non-patent-breaching version of the 2007 ball, these two weeks." The sad thing is we understand this perfectly. What I'm curious about, though, is if the balls were unmarked, could Ogilvy tell the difference? Moreover, if we had some of our Hot List technical panel cut them open and spend a few weeks in the labs dissecting the rubber compounds, the polymers and the urethanes, could they tell the difference? Or is that something for the courts to decide?

The thing is I'll bet you can still find plenty of "breaching" Pro V1s out there. If you look on ebay you can find 1,695 sales ongoing under a search for "Pro V1," and not one of them is for a non-converted Pro V1 model, I'll bet. Who knows where it's going to lead to but I'm reminded of a story Greg Hopkins, the cordial and enlightened gentleman running Cleveland Golf once told me about patent issues. He was troubled where it was headed because he saw how completely incompetent the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was. But he said the best way to solve a problem was to sit down and talk about it. He said he once had some issues with the folks at Ping, so he called John Solheim and the two hashed out their differences like, well, adults. I don't see that happening here. Callaway doesn't believe it needs to have a bouncer stand on the first tee and police whether players are using converted Pro V1s or older models. It would be nice if that faith was confirmed by reality. Perhaps it will be. But right now, it doesn't look like Callaway's folks and Titleist's folks are going to share a drink and a handshake any time soon. Probably because patent lawsuits are in the end a lot about making mountains out of molehills. Unfortunately, golf innovation itself has gone from mountains to molehills. That's a sure way to make everyone from innovators to lawyers scared. And no one looks his best when he's afraid of losing the nest egg.

GOUGE: It's a new year, and I suppose in the spirit of New Year's resolutions we could promise to post our thoughts a little more regularly in 2009. It's not a promise, just something to shoot for. Making it a little easier are stories like the one out of Scotland floating across my desk yesterday. Seems a bunch of physicians based in the home of golf think thin-faced titanium drivers "may produce sufficient sound to induce temporary or even permanent cochlear damage in susceptible individuals." One physician recommends the use of earplugs or even reverting to thicker-faced steel-headed drivers.

Well, friend, every day I lose faith in something else. Now, it's the medical profession. Seriously, though, there's no question sound is one of the great concerns in modern driver design. We are presented with entire papers on the engineering of sound in driver heads when we look over company research for the Hot List. Speaking of which, the 2009 Hot List is on newsstands now, and in a few days, an amped-up web version of the Hot List will be on golfdigest.com. And wouldn't you know? One of the changes in this year's process is adding a new criterion for our judging, a little thing we call Look/Sound/Feel. Rest assured, if you didn't do well in Look/Sound/Feel, it hurt your score.

BOMB: There's no doubt that Look/Sound/Feel is an important criteria. Need evidence? How did Callaway's C4 driver fare? It wasn't a horrible club, it merely sounded that way and it was one of the biggest busts in the company’s history. I also remember a number of years back that Vijay Singh hit a drive with a prototype of Cleveland Golf's original Launcher driver. When the shot produced a tinny echo, the TV announcer said the ball sounded like it was struck "with an empty Pepsi can." Not exactly the reaction clubmakers are seeking. But the difficult part of all this is that Look/Sound/Feel is a tangible intangible. It's there, it's just difficult to grasp.

As such, manufacturers spend endless hours and resources to get the sound just right. In addition to computer and acoustic testing, TaylorMade, for example, employs experts in the area of engineering vibration and acoustics, including several PhDs with expertise in those fields. I know at one time they even employed one versed in oceanic seismic activity. It’s this kind of brain power that has led to some significant advances in this area that we saw during this year’s Hot List process.

GOUGE: You can check out the Hot List on our site, and look for an expanded, interactive version in the coming days that will let you set your own budget. But the technology of what makes a significant club has been my personal fascination, and this year’s list is chock-a-block with technology stories. No. 1 is the idea of customization. We want every golfer to have the best chance to put together the perfect driver, and we think the best companies do that with expanded fitting systems. But our leader in technology is the combination of square and traditional (DYMO) drivers from Nike that feature a system called STR8-FIT, which is basically an adjustable hosel that changes orientation of the club in eight ways to produce eight different ways of correcting ballflight. Furthering the optimization game are the new IWI line of putters from Ping, which incorporate a weight kit that allows players to manipulate weight to better match up with conditions and stroke type. Not just an idle bunch of screws, Ping researchers determined the precise weight differences golfers feel and built their kit based on those differences. And in irons, you have to like the initiative shown by TaylorMade in trying to find a way to improve the distance for iron shots by average golfers without resorting to shovel-like clubheads. Sadly, not all the new technologies were available for this year’s Hot List. Our friends at TaylorMade chose not to show us their new driver, the R9, that’s all the rage on the webosphere.

BOMB: First, you're a piece of work. This time last year you're giving me all sorts crap for being all in on adjustability. I swear, with all the grief I got you would think I was using something as evil as a chipper or long putter.

I said then that the early efforts were cursory at best, but I wanted to see what the second wave of adjustable clubs brought. The Nike Dymo-STR8FIT is a great example of adjustability that works. Now here comes The TaylorMade R9, with the following recently posted on one of the chat sites. Notice the use of the word "we" within the copy so clearly this was posted by a TM staffer seeking to create early buzz. Sounds eerily similar to the STR8-FIT tech story, but we all know the equipment world  which begs the question of whether someone is infringing someone’s patent in all this:

"In stores mid March. Retail street price: $399 (R9 TP will be $499)

This is the most advanced and finest performing driver in the history of golf club design. The R9 will feature full adjustability in that it will combine 3 moveable weights with our newest technology-Flight Control Technology (FCT). FCT gives the golfer the ability to adjust the club head to affect face angle and loft. MWT and FCT give 75 yards of left to right adjustability, 3 degrees of launch angle adjustability, and up to 1800 rpm of spin adjustability. The club head can be rotated into one of eight positions, giving the ability to adjust from 2 degrees closed to 2 degrees open (actual measured face angle will be square to four open, though visually, 4 open looks 2 open to the golfer). This is done by a wrench and turning the club head onto the axis of the shaft. The three moveable weights are in similar positions to r7 Limited. The result to the golfer will be the ability to have an open club face while still promoting a draw, for example. It's really 24 drivers in one.

The club head has a large address, similar to the r7 SuperQuad, though we did not make this as large a clubhead as Burner, for example. This is, we believe, the optimal size demanded by the most discerning players.

We are launching this on Tour at the end of January, though many of our Tour pros have been testing the club already. They have declared this the best driver ever produced. We agree.

The stock shaft on it will be Fujikura's brand new Tour platform, called "Motore" and it will be the only club in the market with Motore in the stock offering. TP shafts will be offered at a $100 ($499 street retail) upgrade and will be assorted offerings from Fujikura, Mitsubishi, Matrix, and Aldila.

In addition, we will also launch an R9 fairway, though the fairway will only have FCT, no MWT. It will also have the ability to use 8 positions and can affect up to 35 yards of left to right workability. This club will have the ability to go from 2 closed to 2 open. Retail price on this will be $229 and will have a traditional shape and have the stock Fujikura Motore shaft."

What’s next? Adjustable lofts?

GOUGE: Like usual you attack when we all know I'm a lover not a hater. OK, nobody knows that because, well, I hate everything. Fact is, there is a difference between adjustability and meaningful adjustability, just like there’s a difference between recreational drug use and, well, medicine. Having the ability to change shafts isn’t meaningful adjustability. It's gluttony. Meaningful adjustability is intriguing and possibly beneficial. Turns out Trevor Immelman used a prototype version of the Nike adjustable driver when he won the Masters last year. We’ll see where this takes us, but I don't think we're all that far removed from the end of loft. Fitting is going to be all about the wrench. All of which means a greater emphasis on finding a qualified fitter. But we've sung that song before (and it still rings true). In the meantime, keep those cards and letters coming. We'll respond to any Hot List questions as quickly and authoritatively as we can. Or at least Bomb will.