CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The face of the modern driver is as thin as a dime. Much thinner, really. Thin, light, flexible — alive. For the best players in the world, digging length, the thinner the better. They want that golf ball jumping off the face like a kid bouncing on a trampoline. Trampoline effect is a term of the art. So is COR — coefficient of restitution, a term of physics that turns this phenomenon into a number. Bryson DeChambeau is happy to explain the whole thing to you. He can explain COR’s cousin, Characteristic Time, too — the length of time a ball sits on the clubface.
Here at the PGA Championship at Quail Hollow, Rory McIlroy, likely the best-known and most popular figure in professional golf now, is not using the same driver he used last month at Augusta, when he won the Masters and completed the career Grand Slam. Tour players change their clubs all the time, but McIlroy, per credible reports, did not retire his Masters-winning driver of his own volition.
Sometime before the start of the PGA, according to Sirius XM reporting that ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt referenced on the air Friday, McIlroy was told that his driver was nonconforming per USGA standards. How it failed this random inspection is unknown. Sometimes scoring lines are deemed to be too wide or too deep, though this typically happens on wedges. When drivers are deemed to be nonconforming, the problem is typically in the thinness of the face, which can degrade over time and use, and the length of time a ball may stay in contact with the face. There are tests.
McIlroy’s driver at Augusta was a shiny but not new TaylorMade Qi10; the driver he is using here is the same make and model, but with less experience. His driving at Augusta was brilliant. His driving here at Quail Hollow has been sloppy, and he made the cut on the number. The playing characteristics of the driver surely would not account for the difference. The engineering of these space-age clubs is too precise for that. McIlroy’s familiarity with and faith in the club are another matter. Iron Byron was the name of a USGA testing machine. Golf is played by human beings.
Baseball figured this out after the 1919 World Series, which mobsters attempted to fix: If the public does not have faith in the legitimacy of the competition, the whole thing can fall apart. The underlying reason there are thousands of spectators, here at Quail Hollow, spending millions of dollars to watch these players is that we have faith in the results. That they counted every shot, played by every last rule, including all the rules that govern their equipment. Conforming golf balls, conforming heads, conforming shafts.
The PGA Championship is a PGA Tour event. If you win it, it counts as a PGA Tour win. The money and FedEx points a player earns are part of the players’ Tour record-keeping. Same for the Masters, the U.S. Open and the British Open. To say anything other than that is semantical nonsense. The PGA Tour has its own testing system for non-major tournaments, but it is all in accordance with USGA testing requirements. None of this happens in a vacuum or on a silo — it’s too complicated and important and expensive for that. At the PGA Championship, run by the PGA of America, and the U.S. Open, run by the USGA, the USGA’s equipment-standards whizzes oversee the testing.
As he headed to the 10th tee Saturday to start his third round of this PGA Championship at 1:38 p.m., McIlroy, a two-time winner of this event, had not said anything about why he switched drivers. That’s his prerogative, of course. I would say his millions of fans deserve some explanation.
Three minutes after McIlroy’s starting time, the PGA of America, issued its first comments on the situation, by way of a 191-word statement from Kerry Haigh, the PGA of America’s chief championships officer. The statement reads:
“We can confirm that the USGA was invited to do club testing at the PGA Championship, at the PGA of America’s request. That testing program is consistent with the same level of support that the USGA provides to the PGA Tour and other championships, as part of their regular programs for driver testing. The standard process is for about a third of the field to be randomly tested under the program. That was the case at Quail Hollow this week. Finding driver heads that have crept over the line of conformance is not an unusual occurrence, especially for clubs that are hit thousands of times over a long period of time. The results are kept confidential to protect players, who are unaware the club has fallen out of conformance and not responsible for it falling out of conformance other than hitting the club thousands of times. Players are simply asked to change heads if necessary, and all do without issue. To publicly identify players whose club did not conform can lead to that player being questioned unnecessarily. Neither the USGA nor the PGA of America have any concerns about player intent.”
Reasonable minds might ponder why the players burden no responsibility when they are aware that driver faces grow hotter over time. The rapid growth of sports betting raises another sticky question around the lack of testing transparency: If you knew, say, McIlroy was playing a new driver head at a given event, might you be less inclined to wager on him?
When asked about the Sirius XM report Friday evening, the USGA said of its testing process, “the results are confidential.” On Saturday morning, a PGA Tour official offered this:
“The PGA Tour is not going to comment as we are here this week to support the PGA of America. Any questions about testing this week should be directed to the PGA of America or the USGA.”
I believe PGA Tour should support the public’s faith in the “product” it presents to the public each week, including this one.
Nothing here suggests in any way that McIlroy used a nonconforming driver when he won the Masters. It is almost impossible to imagine that a player would willfully use a nonconforming club. It would violate every principle this game is supposed to stand for.
But this issue is only going to become more prominent in the years to come. Here’s a simple solution. It won’t cure all, but it would help:
In addition to random, pre-tournament testing, conduct Sunday morning testing for players in the top-10 and ties. If your clubs are good, play away. If they’re not, go back to the car trunk or the equipment trailer or wherever.
It would be impossible for the players to fuss about such a requirement. After all, they want to play with conforming clubs. Right?
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com.
