BOMB: Thankfully, I was able to get the last question in to commissioner Finchem yesterday regarding grooves and its possible effect on course setup on the PGA Tour. Here’s what he had to say:
“We have changed our rough heights this year at a number of golf courses and did some fairly meticulous analysis of what happened when we brought those rough heights down a little bit compared to earlier years, and the reason we did that was to set the stage for now measuring what happens on those same golf courses when we shift grooves.
“So this will be a -- you're not going to see us revolutionize our setup the first month next year, but over time we're going to be experimenting with a lot of different ways to set things up because our hope is that this change is going to make the game more interesting to watch from a variety of perspectives, and that would be helpful to us. So we're going to be -- we have more people, more energy, we have this wonderful ShotLink program that tells us everything, so we're going to really, I think, enjoy the process of doing some things differently and playing around with it.”
On the surface, that seems like a great idea. After all, course setups have come under fire in recent years as being too difficult with some hole locations bordering on silly. However, if course setups are relaxed in some manner, isn’t that somewhat offsetting what the groove condition of competition is meant to accomplish? Just asking.
GOUGE: Yeoman’s work, my friend. No, I’m not talking about making the drive to D.C. at the last minute. I’m talking about sorting through Commissioner-speak to get to the meaty details. The question on everybody’s lips these last few days (and on ours for the last few years) is “Will the rule change produce the desired effect?” You can spend months looking at the mountains of research produced by the USGA and even some equipment companies, and still not come to any hard and fast conclusion. Most manufacturers genuinely believe PGA Tour players are great and will adapt. Some players aren't so sure. My favorite came from a conversation I had with Scott Verplank:
"If anybody says they know what’s good for golf, their ego’s either way too big or they’re uninformed.
"For the PGA Tour, that’s a different story. I honestly feel like we should have our own equipment specs. In other words, if you want to play on the PGA Tour, then you’re going to have to conform to the clubs that you have to have more skill to play with. Less effective grooves, smaller driver heads and I don’t think you should be able to anchor a club against yourself in a professional tournament, either. But that’s just my opinion.
And a little later, he added this: "If you went to 240 cc driver heads and V grooves, the whole money list would change a whole lot. There’d be some guys that you would never hear of again."
For Verplank, though, Tiger Woods would still be where he is: "That’s the thing that makes Tiger so good. He still plays with clubs that are old style, and he can hit all the shots. He can change his trajectory and do all that. That’s one reason why he’s so darn good."
Whether some old-school superior set of skills will be more in evidence with the 2010 groove in play is hard to predict, however. Why? Because it's very likely to be a moving target. If course setups, specifically hole locations, aren't as difficult as they have been for the last several years, how will we know exactly what the result of the rule change might be? Will the greens in regulation from the rough percentage (it's about 50 percent right now) be dramatically worse after one event next year? Well, even if it were, there are too many variables in play to know why that might have happened. In fact, I'd bet a year's worth of events aren't enough to know for sure. I'll say it right here: We may never know, and the long run, it might matter in the most subtle ways that make the game better, more efficient, more interesting and perhaps even slightly more environmentally friendly (bye, bye over fertilized rough).
So what to make of what might happen next year with the rule change? I'll let you know the first time somebody's 8-iron approach from the light rough flies over the heads of the gallery behind the green.
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