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If you turned back the calendar to 1997, you’d find the best players in golf using wound balls with liquid centers and balata covers. While most pros had switched to metal drivers, Davis Love III was still rocking persimmon. Callaway launched the “Biggest Big Bertha,” which sported a mammoth 290cc titanium head. Things have changed a lot in the last 27 years, and I’ve been blessed to have a front-row seat as a member of the USGA Equipment Standards (ES) team.
The USGA has invested heavily in Equipment Standards over the past quarter-century. Five people with engineering backgrounds were hired to bolster an already seasoned staff, and little did any of us realize what we were in for. Technology had taken over equipment design and manufacturing, and each new feature had to be carefully studied to determine its effect on the game we all love.
Over the next few decades, the ES staff became something of a highway patrol – creating and enforcing speed limits on the new technologies with the goal of ensuring that the player, not their equipment, remained the key to on-course success. In 1998, the USGA announced an intention to “implement tests for golf balls and clubs to strengthen standards designed to limit the distance that the most highly skilled players can drive a golf ball.”
With that mission launched, the USGA began the test for spring-like effect to limit the Coefficient of Restitution (CoR) of drivers as well as the initiation of golf ball testing using our Indoor Test Range in Liberty Corner, N.J. In 2004, standards for clubhead size (460cc; nearly 60 percent larger than the aforementioned Bertha) and maximum club length were adopted. A limit on the clubhead moment of inertia (MOI) was added two years later. The CoR test was replaced with a simpler test for spring-like effect in 2008. In 2010, the groove rules were revamped to limit the spin that could be produced on shots from the rough.
In each instance, manufacturers and pundits opined that such limitations would ruin golf and stifle participation. That never happened, and in fact the limits led to better equipment.
We are now embarking on limiting the distance that the ball can travel by changing the test conditions at which balls conform to the Overall Distance Standard – and we’re hearing the same cries that the sky is falling. Don’t believe it! No, this won’t bring distance back to the wound-ball era. In fact, some 30 percent of today’s List of Conforming Golf Balls will still conform in 2028. And for those ball types that do change, the effect on the vast majority of us who don’t play for prize money will be minimal.
You can see how all these tests are conducted by visiting the USGA’s new Research & Test Center in Pinehurst, N.C. But don’t look for me there; after 27 years, I am passing the torch to Carter Rich and Steve Quintavalla, who will lead the talented group of ES staff members with renewed energy, passion and expertise. I’ll still be watching – just from the comfort of my family room with a beverage in hand!