That Time a Rules Loophole Made Some PGA Tour Pros Use 25-Year-Old Wedges
What happened actually traced back a couple years earlier, to 2008. That's when the USGA and R&A announced new rules regarding the grooves on the faces of irons. The governing bodies adopted new specifications for the allowable volume of grooves (their width and depth) and the sharpness of the groove edges. The new specs called for less volume and less sharpness.
As with many changes to the rules governing golf clubs and other equipment, the grooves change was met with a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Alarmists declared the governing bodies were ruining the game. But, as with many changes to the rules governing golf clubs and other equipment, once this change was implemented, the brouhaha quickly died down and everyone just got on with playing golf.
Except for a few PGA Tour pros who realized they had a way of getting out of abiding by the new rules that had the effect of lessening the amount of spin generated by wedges.
The most-prominent golfer who exploited the loophole was two-time major winner John Daly.
At the 2010 Sony Open, Daly played with a 1986 set of Ping Eye 2 wedges. Another player in that field, Dean Wilson, also used Ping Eye 2 wedges from the late 1980s. Both players did so despite the fact that the old Ping Eye 2 wedges sported square grooves, the kind of grooves that the 2008 update to the equipment rules outlawed.
How did Daly, et.al., get away with it? The reasons seem pretty arcane now, but date back to what was a major brouhaha in the golf world in the late 1980s and early 1990s — an earlier adjustment to the rules about grooves on clubfaces.
In the early 1980s, the USGA first ruled square grooves conforming. Ping introduced square grooves to the marketplace with the Ping Eye 2 irons in 1984. In 1985, Ping founder Karsten Solheim made a tiny adjustment to the shape of his square grooves (very slightly rounding the edges). With that adjustment, Solheim unwittingly sent the irons out of conformity with USGA regulations.
Or did he? The conformity or non-conformity of those new Ping Eye 2 irons and wedges in 1985 hung on interpretations of USGA regulations over the spacing between grooves on the clubface. Solheim and the USGA disagreed over the proper way to measure groove width and spacing. Solheim, measuring one way, felt his irons still conformed; the USGA, measuring a different way, disagreed.
While that was going on behind the scenes, Ping tour staff members were winning.
Bob Tway and Mark Calcavecchia won majors. Strangely, no other major manufacturers jumped on the square grooves train. Today, every other club company would have clubs on the market in no time sporting the latest innovation. In the late 1980s, only Ping was making square grooves.
Then the PGA Tour got involved. The PGA Tour ruled that starting with the 1990 season, square grooves would be illegal for play in PGA Tour events. Remember, the USGA at this point said square grooves were legal. So the PGA Tour was in effect trumping the USGA's ruling with one of its own.
So Ping was faced with the technical dispute over groove measurement with the USGA, and then the PGA Tour just banned square grooves outright. Ping went to court, suing both the USGA and the PGA Tour.
Ping and the USGA reached a settlement fairly quickly. The USGA developed a new point-by-point procedure for measuring groove width and spacing; the USGA agreed to grandfather in the Ping Eye 2 irons and wedges made from 1985-89, allowing them to continue being used; and Ping agreed to make all its irons and wedges conform to the new measuring procedure going forward.
The PGA Tour, however, fought on until 1993, when it finally agreed to an out-of-court settlement with Ping. In that settlement, the PGA Tour essentially just agreed to agree with Ping's 1990 settlement with the USGA. The Tour would allow square grooves going forward, and, like the USGA, grandfathered in those 1985-89 Ping Eye 2 clubs, allowing them to continue being used in Tour events.
Fast forward to 2010, and the USGA initiated new groove rules banning square grooves, and the PGA Tour adopted a condition of competition enforcing the USGA ruling on the PGA Tour. But the details of those 1990 and 1993 legal settlements were still in place — meaning that Ping Eye 2 irons and wedges made between 1985 and 1989 were still permissable in USGA and PGA Tour competitions, despite the 2008 update and 2010 implementation of new groove rules.
And that's what John Daly and Dean Wilson knew at the 2010 Sony Open, and why they used Ping Eye 2 wedges more than 20 years old that week.
But there were some catches for Daly, Wilson, and any other golfers who wanted to exploit the loophole. For example: Ping Eye 2 clubs from that era whose grooves were still sharp enough for a PGA Tour player's liking weren't that easy to find (especially if Tour players start hoarding them). And Ping wasn't allowed to make any more of them, although it was allowed to adjust lie angles, loft angles and make shaft repairs.
Daly told the Associated Press that he expected more Tour players to try tracking down old Ping wedges. "I know a lot of guys are buying them off eBay," he said.
But Daly's prediction didn't pan out. Most players switched to clubs that conformed to the 2010 groove rules months earlier (Tiger Woods' clubs conformed to the new groove rules throughout 2009).
It should also be noted that no golfers outside the USGA's jurisdiction were able to take advantage of the Ping Eye 2 loophole: The R&A was not a party to those 1990s settlements, and the old Ping Eye 2 irons and wedges were non-conforming in competitions played under the auspices of the R&A.
Eventually, as noted near the top, the kerfuffle over the 2010 groove rules and the banning of square grooves settled down ... and simply went away. Equipment companies adjusted, introducted new techniques and designs, and the game of golf moved on.
But for a brief moment in 2010, some pro golfers really did find and exploit a loophole in the rules.
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