At 07:21 AM 1/28/03 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
ArnieMy problem with all this is Charlie's last point about being legal. Face grinding attacks the whole structure of golf club conformance enforcement.
I have to disagree with you as far as it doesn't due anything. If are able to measure ball measure ball velocity before and after the procedure you will definitely see an increase in ball speed. I forgot what the distance increase is per 1 mph increase but to tour pros every yard of carry is significant. Face thickness can be measured but the equipment costs a couple of thousand dollars. A friend of mine has it and I have been doing it for a few years. As far as being legal you have to maintain the .83 COR.
Charlie
Golf club conformance is based on "type testing". The USGA (and tournament staffs) do not test every club at every [important] event. They test a small sample (probably a sample of one) of the model from the manufacturer. This is based on an assumption that modifying the head is difficult to do, and especially difficult to do undetectably.
If people start modifying the COR of the clubheads with milling machines or grinders, then the whole notion of type testing goes out the window. Clubs will have to be measured at every significant tournament. And, as Charlie notes, it is expensive to measure face thickness. Moreover, there isn't a simple mathematical relationship between face thickness and COR. So the USGA and the PGA tour may have to carry around an air cannon to their events and measure COR directly every time.
This is not an idea I'm inventing on the fly. When I raced sailboats, I was also a fleet measurer in the Albacore class (15-foot planing sloop), was on the specifications committee, and was on the national championship measuring staff a few times. At the national championships, all boats were measured before the regatta, in any dimension that was:
* Changeable from the original type test. (The hull molds were approved by the class before Albacores could be manufactured from them, so overall size and shape of hull was OK by type testing. That was all that was type tested.)
* Affected performance.
For lesser regattas than the nationals, there were spot check measurements for one or two dimensions on all boats.
Things that were checked included position of the centerboard pivot, ALL controlling dimensions of sails, overall weight of the boat, critical dimensions of spars (mast and boom), and a few other dimensions. We often found transgressions that had to be corrected before you could race. If you arrived a day early for measuring, you had a chance to fix things up. If you showed up the morning of the race with an outaspec boat, you were SOL. (Well, the technical term is DSQ, but SOL is so much more colorful.)
I'd hate to see this happen to golf. But I see two trends pushing in that direction:
(1) Milling the head to increase COR. This is just begging for a rule to disallow clubs that show visible tampering. Mill or sand the face so it looks different from the head as manufactured, and the club is automatically illegal. (In the days of wooden heads, I'd scream bloody murder about such a rule; I modified clubfaces all the time. BUT... such mods did not affect the COR, or any other rule-based item.)
(2) The USGA is about to bring one on itself: the overall length rule. This is something that EVERYBODY changes. If you put a rule on it, you will HAVE TO measure every club at every tournament for conformance.
Yecchh!
DaveT
