The Rules Thread............

[paradigm_shift]

Lag, as a traditionalist, what is your opinion on chippers?

Short game is often more art than science. Should a player be able to use what they like within 50 yards in? I looked at the old jiggers and they look like a normal iron. The modern odyssey chippers have a lot of weight and put the hands ahead of the club face.

The transition from persimmon and perimeter weighting clubs could be argued to have ruined the game/courses. Do you have disdain for chippers?

[stevemcgee99]

I've seen some pitch/chip combo clubs that look like a wheel chock for jacking up a car. They were rightly marketed to people whose skills aren't great around the green. Stuff like that should not be allowed in the rules.

My question has been - if tripling the size of a driver, or the diameter of a putter grip is OK, why are 1950's 'reminder grips' not OK?

I'd suggest a solution that is essentially the same for all old bureaucracies - fire 90% of the people involved, cut 80% (minimum) of the rules, and re-introduce judgement.

[lagpressure]

Lag, as a traditionalist, what is your opinion on chippers?

Short game is often more art than science. Should a player be able to use what they like within 50 yards in? I looked at the old jiggers and they look like a normal iron. The modern odyssey chippers have a lot of weight and put the hands ahead of the club face.

The transition from persimmon and perimeter weighting clubs could be argued to have ruined the game/courses. Do you have disdain for chippers?

Most sports have very specific limits or parameters for equipment. Golf should too.
If golf is a game played using "irons' "woods" "wedges" "putter" then those clubs should be easily defined within the rules. I just don't see anything wrong with that.
As far as chippers, it would seem to fall into either or both categories of putters or irons. Chippers are really just putter with significant loft. I think all golf clubs should be heel shafted, with the shaft
coming right down into the hosel. No center shafted clubs, no crazy bends or offset. No reason not to just keep it as simple as possible.

Restrictions on clubface height, width and depth. That could cover all clubs. 3 inches wide max, two inches in height, 3 1/2 inches in depth. Length of shafts capped at 44 inches. No clubs lighter than 13 ounces.
Lie angles: nothing flatter than 45 degrees, nothing more upright than 70 degrees. Grips cannot exceed 1 - 1/2" diameter.
Loft restriction: Nothing less than zero, nothing more than 60 degrees.

That's all similar to what we did with the TRGA. http://trga.info I think we capped loft at 56 degrees.

Something simple like that keeps out a lot of nonsense within golf. It keeps out broomstick putters, frying pan drivers and super lofted wedges with huge heads.
Golf has been around long enough and rich enough in history to warrant it being played as a game of tradition. Most all of those specs above would cover most of the clubs made in both the hickory era and
golf up to the mid 1990's.

There were some crazy clubs in the hickory era that didn't catch on or seemed a bit over the top or out of bounds even for that era.

The invention of the sand wedge was very controversial when Sarazen played it and I don't know for a fact, but would speculate that they started putting silica sand in the bunkers and it became a problem.
If people just couldn't get the ball out, and it slowed up play etc, the SW might have been a good solution. It created something of it's own skillset.

I don't see having to legislate the bounce or flange width on a club as long as it conforms to the more basic club restrictions.

I think shafts could be made of any material as long as the overall dead weight of the club is within lower tolerances.

[lagpressure]

I am 100% convinced that the USGA took a serious look at the TRGA Rules http://http://trga.info/rules.html in their new rules platform.
The TRGA site has had over 150K views over the last few years, so it certainly came across their radar.
Ironically they say it took them 6 years to complete their updated book and that came about right after the last TRGA event. Coincidence? I doubt it.
Glad to see it happen.

Golf now has a modern set of rules for the Royal & Ancient game, an extensive overhaul that took six years and is aimed at making the rules easier to understand.

The R&A and USGA announced the final version of modernized rules on Monday. They take effect in 2019.

''This was out of recognition that in trying to make the rules more fair, they became too complicated,'' said Thomas Pagel, the USGA's senior director of rules and amateur status. ''With 30-plus years of tinkering, they got complicated, and that wasn't good for the game.''

Among the changes will be how to take penalty drops - from knee-high length starting next year, instead of from shoulder height. There no longer will be penalties if a golf ball accidentally moves on the green, if a club touches the ground in a hazard or if the ball hits a flagstick that is not being tended on the green.

Also, caddies can no longer line up their players while they are setting up over a shot.

This is the most comprehensive change to the rules since the first set was published in 1744, only in this case, the book got smaller. There now are 24 rules instead of 34, and ''The Official Guide to the Rules of Golf'' replaces about 1,300 examples in the Decisions book.

''With revised rules being easier to understand, we think committees will be able to reach the right conclusion without having 1,300 fact sets,'' Pagel said.

The modernization project began with a meeting at St. Andrews in April 2012 among the R&A, USGA, PGA Tour and European Tour. They introduced a proposed draft a year ago and during six months of public feedback received some 30,000 comments from 102 countries through surveys, social media and phone calls.

The original proposal was for players to drop the ball 2 inches from the ground. Pagel said there were concerns that it was too close to the ground. The idea was to get the ball back in play, and knee-high length was determined to keep the ball from bouncing away from the right area and keep some randomness to how it lies.

One rule is only for recreational golf. Starting next year, a local rule will let golfers simply drop a ball that goes out-of-bounds in the vicinity of where it went out - even if that means the fairway - with an additional two-shot penalty.

That was done for pace of play and will not be applied in professional golf and other elite competitions.

Other changes include:

- Eliminating penalties for accidentally moving a ball in the green or while searching for a lost ball.

- Players will have only three minutes to search for a lost ball instead of five minutes.

- Players now can repair spike marks or shoe prints on the putting green. Some players expressed concern that this might slow the pace if players spent too much time grooming the putting surface. Pagel said pace-of-play policies would keep that from happening, and it was a rule change that was needed for competition. No one wants to see a tournament decided by a spike mark in the line of a putt.

''It's the skill we're testing,'' he said. ''We're not testing whether you can navigate around a shoe print. Really it allows for great equity across the field.''

- Eliminating the penalty for removing loose impediments in a bunker and the general touching of sand with the hand or club (without grounding the club next to the ball). Also, players can declare a ball to be unplayable in a bunker, take a two-shot penalty and play from outside the bunker.

The modern rules are available at http://www.usga.org/rules or at http://www.RandA.org .

The tours are likely to provide training packages or seminars to get players up to speed before the new rules go into effect next year.

[stevemcgee99]

They probably do two strokes instead of stroke and distance because they don't want to have to move the TV crew and crowd control back 30 yards...