Checks and Balances
In the sweep of history, the new groove rule rule is significant but hardly revolutionary. Equipment advances -- and ensuing decisions by governing bodies -- have been going on for decades
Herd (top left) utilized the new Haskell ball to win the 1902 British Open over Vardon (lower right). J.H. Taylor (top right) and James Braid complete this 1905 photo.
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Hale Irwin was at a charity outing recently that included a number of current PGA Tour members, golfers who weren't even born in 1974 when he won the first of his three U.S. Open titles. At 64, Irwin already knew that trying to describe to this generation of golfers what it was like to play with the balls and clubs of his prime can come off like a "When I was a kid, I had to walk in the snow for a mile to get to school" kind of sermon.
But he got a gentle reminder nonetheless when giving his take on Jack Nicklaus' excellence using the gear of yesteryear.
"I told 'em you guys all hit it long -- you don't have to throttle back -- but you would learn if the ball you used curved," Irwin says. "It was a friendly discussion, but they looked at me like I was a triceratops. They have no clue what I'm talking about."
The grooves rollback for 2010 might provide a glimpse to today's elite players of the world in which Irwin and his contemporaries plied their trade decades ago and force them to tweak their strategy. Placed in the evolutionary timeline of equipment advances and rules modifications that have affected golf over roughly the past century, however, the new groove rule seems more of a blip than a sea change despite being one of the rare instances when something has been "taken away" from a golfer's equipment arsenal by a governing body.
"A wedge from the rough is still a wedge from the rough," contends Irwin, who has 65 combined victories on the PGA and Champions tours. "You can still hit it high and drop it straight down."
While flyers could prove more problematic, especially for younger players so accustomed to the bite that the outlawed grooves have routinely provided, one thing is certain: From the time, more than a century ago, when Coburn Haskell balled up some rubber bands and saw how lively the improvised sphere bounced, to the NASA-like research-and-development labs that mark modern equipment innovation, inventive minds have looked for a better way.
In turn, the best golfers (who occasionally were also the ones designing the better tools) have adopted technology in an attempt to play better, and even adapted their games to suit improvements in balls and implements. These proclivities go back a long time, along with the accompanying debates about whether "progress" is good for the game.
Consider Walter J. Travis, the late-blooming star of around the turn of the 20th century, who won three U.S. Amateurs and, in 1904, became the first American to win the British Amateur. Travis was an effective early user of the wound ball and his success with the unusual center-shafted Schenectady putter prompted a ban of the model by the R&A that lasted 41 years. Moreover, he sought increased distance in a manner some might think is only part of the modern quest to hit the ball farther.
As Bob Labbance points out in The Old Man, his 2000 biography of Travis, the golfer employed, as early as 1905, a driver with a 50-inch hickory shaft, seven inches longer than the period's standard. Travis' novel approach to longer tee shots was the talk of the sport more than 80 years before players such as the senior tour's Rocky Thompson put a driver with a 56-inch graphite shaft in his bag.
"He claimed that by simply standing further from the ball, shortening his backswing and exaggerating his follow-through," Labbance writes of Travis, "he could swing the long-shafted clubs and gain 10 yards on each drive," but he acknowledged that the extra power cost him some accuracy. Still, Travis was an influential figure, and stars Willie Anderson and Alex Smith were among the converts to elongated drivers in 1905.
Travis, of course, wasn't the only golfer who took advantage of the wound rubber-core ball that supplanted the solid gutta perchas. Harry Vardon clung to the worth of the old-style ball, winning the 1900 U.S. Open with the "Vardon Flyer" he was promoting for Spalding. Two years later at the British Open at Hoylake, though, Vardon was beaten by Sandy Herd, one of the minority of contestants who played a Haskell. Herd had criticized the new technology prior to the Open, according to John Stuart Martin's The Curious History of the Golf Ball, but "scrounged" one wound ball from eight-time British Amateur champion John Ball and used it the entire 72 holes.
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- golf world,
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- grooves,
- rules,
- Tom Kite,
- Loren Roberts
