Thought you had heard the last controversy involving square grooves a couple decades ago? Well, the spotlight is back on grooves, and this time the square kinds really are on their way out.
The U.S. Golf Association released a proposal Tuesday with new regulations for grooves. According to its findings, square- or u- shaped grooves in clubs produce higher spin rates and steeper ball landing angles than v-shaped grooves, when used with urethane-covered golf balls. That makes it easier for golfers to hit shots from the rough and stop them on the green.
"We're proposing new restrictions on groove configurations to maintain the element of skill at the game's highest level," said Dick Rugge, USGA senior technical director.
Fewer amateur golfers than pros use urethane-covered balls. Most casual golfers -- about two-thirds of those in the U.S. -- use less-expensive Surlyn covered balls. As well, few weekend players have the skill to take advantage of the benefits the USGA says square grooves provide. That's because amateurs aren't especially skilled at hitting greens from 100 yards away -- something that tour players must do to keep their jobs.
The new restrictions won't actually limit the shape of grooves, but will require groove edge sharpness to be no more than 0.010 inches. The size of grooves will also be regulated (the total cross-sectional area of a groove divided by the groove pitch must be 0.0025 square inches per inch).
Don't worry -- you'll have time to adjust. The proposed changes won't take effect until the beginning of 2009 for competition, and 2010 for the average golfer.
The last time square grooves were in the news, the controversy centered around Ping Eye 2 irons. The USGA made a rules change in 1981 that allowed square grooves, which would make manufacturing a little easier right at the time that cast stainless heads were starting to be used. Over at Ping, company founder Karsten Solheim began to make legal square groove clubs.
But he kept getting feedback that the grooves would damage the soft balata ball covers used by better golfers at the time, so he rounded the corners of the grooves just a bit. He felt this didn't make a difference under the Rules of Golf as to whether they conformed. But when the USGA tested the Ping clubs in the late 80s, they decided differently.
During this battle, in the early 1990s, PGA Tour players voted to ban the clubs from use in Tour events. The ban was later dropped, because eventually, Ping sued the USGA and a settlement was reached. Ping had also made subtle changes to the spacing of the grooves that allowed them to conform, and golfers who already had the clubs were allowed to continue using them.
Why is the issue being revisited 20 years later?
The previous debate over square grooves that pitted Ping against the USGA never decided whether square grooves were an advantage - they just determined what the spacing of the grooves had to be. So with today's technology that permits more thorough testing, the USGA was able to settle the question of whether square grooves are an advantage. For some highly skilled players, from some situations, using urethane-covered golf balls, the grooves do improve spin.
"The skill of driving the ball accurately has become much less important in achieving success on Tour than it used to be," Rugge said. "Our analysis of statistical data measured by the PGA Tour since 1980 shows that historically driving accuracy was as comparably correlated to winning as putting. Beginning in the early 1990s, however, driving accuracy became much less important. Today, the correlation between driving-accuracy rank and money winning rank on the PGA Tour is very low."
In other words, PGA Tour players need some restrictions on equipment to slow down the "grip it and rip it" mentality. A mis-hit shot should carry more penalty than it does to keep Tour scoring from getting even more ridiculously low than it currently is.
