[Copyright 1991,1996 Raphael Tennenbaum. All rights reserved. This file may be downloaded ONCE and read by an individual but may not be otherwise reproduced, reprinted, or published in any manner without expressed permission of the author. Direct inquiries to Raphael Tennenbaum.]
The hardest thing about this difficult game is the rules. Other sports change rules as often Ken Venturi says to change grips, once or twice a year. While instant replay or designated hitters are brought in as a way of livening the game up for the sake of the fans, the rules of golf are more like ancient, unchanging ethical principles.
But as the game has grown more popular, and space-age engineering has put golf balls in orbit -- and with more money than ever at stake -- things are changing, and the future of at least some of the rules and the governing bodies is no longer clear. Other questions about equipment and conditions may not be spelled out in the rules, but still have an impact.
You would have thought that the PGA Tour has the most reasonable claim to regulating its own equipment, but as we all know, it wasn't so simple. A good guess would be that the Tour was forced to defer to Solheim not so much thanks to Deane Beaman's purported megalomania, but because the corporate relationships at the top of the Tour were inseparable from policy decisions.
But the history of golf for the last fifty or sixty years has been largely about the refinement of equipment. (What are the chances Hogan or Nicklaus, let alone Mr. Daly, could have hit it that way with hickory shafts? For all we know, if it wasn't for steel, Snead might have won four Opens.) Moreover, while the level of play has surely improved, no sane person doubts that changes in shafts, components, and balls has made the average amateur better, as well as the average pro. Now more than ever, equipment is the biggest threat to par. The workaround that the settlement started could be the solution -- or it could start more problems than the one it solved.
Which brings us to the keepers of the par flame, the USGA, which has been more or less forced to resort to fashioning ever more punishing conditions in the name of competition. Besides governing all our national open championships, its other primary role is that most gentlemanly and altruistic one of maintaining and promulgating the rules of golf.
But is the USGA a non-profit organization which is seeking a) to foster a good image for golf, or b) to man the battlements against the barbarians who threaten the game? In a burst of what can only be described as administrative crusadesmanship running amok, for the last year or so, Open telecasts have featured a commercial showing a pretty little putting surface apparently fading into oblivion as Jack Lemmon worries about what would happen to golf without the USGA. You expect the Devil to appear and move his ballmarker.
The point is clearly to open up the purses of golfers and get them to make golf their favorite charity, and it might just be an odd little ad if the USGA were not perhaps showing other signs of overzealousness. (Memo to television announcers, purveyors of significant events staged at prestigious clubs, and all frustrated preachers: golf may be humbling, inspirational, beautiful, and positively divine -- but a religion, it ain't.) Regulating the rules means regulating equipment, and even if the issue of what constitutes "generally plain in shape" raised in the Bullet Golf fracas is not an unfortunate one to test the USGA's muscle, the issue of the "intellectual property rights" of the handicap formula ought to be settled ASAP. To try to maintain control over a formula, instead of simply (for example) asserting the trademark and stipulating a disclaimer, is the sort of type-A behavior no one likes from a non-profit organization any more than on a golf course, especially since sooner or later everyone with a computer is going to want to be able to toss in his last ten scores and figure out what his index is, official or not. The USGA ought to find a way that the formula can work in a casual way, while ensuring that its authority is not compromised.
We'd all be well-advised to tread lightly. For instance, nobody should suggest that the work of the Greens Section, (especially turfgrass research) is not among the most vital services the USGA provides, or that their work with the Audubon Society is anything but a tremendous boon. But there's a chance that the soon-to-be-released report on pesticide use will place the USGA in the uncomfortable position of being seen by environmentalists on the one hand as golf apologists, and on the other a sort of socialist fifth-column, to extreme laissez-faire partisans.
Are we going in a circle here? We've seen 1) conditions improve because amateurs no less than pros demand not only superslick greens, but billiard-table fairways; so that 2) golf finds itself besieged with environmental concerns based on conditioning practices, forcing 3) the USGA to fill the breach and be the environmental conscience of golf, as meanwhile 4) thanks to conditions, scores plummet, requiring courses such as Augusta National to tinker with certain holes such that hitting to the wrong part of the green essentially costs a stroke.
You don't think pro golfers give two hoots? How many times do we hear them ascribe a lackluster performance to the design of a course? The revolution in course conditions that came about in the 1960s were partly a result of the grousing among the top pros, especially Nicklaus.
Every so often they inveigle to be allowed to roll it out of a divot hole in the fairway; and the per capita local lift, clean, and place rulings on the pro tour increase annually. Currently, many professional golfers don't mind playing the ball as it lies -- so long as it's a good lie.
Golf anthropologists have a theory that once upon a time -- long before you and I were born -- there must have been an attitude that a bad break in golf was simply something to be overcome. It is believed that these primitive golfers thought that such are the vagaries of life, and to be able to recover from a bad lie was part of being a good golfer. Not that I would know. . .
Which brings us to golf writers, the only ones you can trust. No? You mean, you the course you play every week is every bit as good as that fancy resort that makes all the top 100 lists every year? You mean you don't need to read instruction stories that contradict one another? Don't you feel you can trust equipment stories written in magazines which run equipment advertising?
The point here is that in the end, the only best way to make a buck or a reputation off of the game of golf is by beating the guy you're playing with -- preferably straight up. Which is of course where Michael Jordan comes in. He may have lost a lot of money, but at least it was where his mouth was.
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