Masters 2025: Augusta chairman will face golf ball rollback questions as industry showdown looms

“We act with all the authority not vested in us.”

So said David Fay back in 1989, when he was the USGA’s executive director and Karsten Solheim was filing a $100 million lawsuit against the ruling body’s ban of the Ping Eye 2’s so-called U-grooves.

Fay’s pithy switcheroo, which has somehow never been included in compendiums of golf quotes, became itself a turning point moment, articulating a conundrum innate to the organization, but which until then had not been tested. Golf’s stakeholders in the professional game have traditionally acceded to the Rules of Golf, old and new, but they have never had to. And lately, they have been markedly less acceding.

And especially when it comes to equipment regulation, which Fay, toward in the end of his term in 2008, called “a thankless job … our Black Hole of Calcutta,” a description that has unfortunately only grown less hyperbolic. Consider that even if, as expected, Augusta National chairman Fred Ridley on Wednesday expresses support for the USGA’s and R&A’s ambitious, protracted but still uncertain proposed rollback of the golf ball for professionals in 2028 and recreational players in 2030, it won’t end golf’s current less attention-grabbing but perhaps more far-reaching stalemate.

Of course, 35 years ago Fay’s comment seemed more funny than ominous. For its previous 95 years, the USGA’s equipment decisions were governed by a kind of gentleman’s agreement. Pragmatic deference was paid to rules poohbahs like C.B. Macdonald and Richard Tufts, who presumably knew better, and, anyway, this sprawling, multivarious game needed some kind of educated oversight. When it came to equipment—from Walter Travis’s Schenectady putter to Arnold Palmer’s ERC driver—while there was complaining, there was always compliance. Golf saw itself as above unseemly conflict; the sport in which competitors were expected to call penalties on themselves should also self-govern without lawsuits and the like.

Not that equipment decisions aren’t by their nature messy. When the USGA in 1931 tried its only previous ball rollback by going to a larger (from 1.62 inches in diameter) and lighter (1.55 ounces) ball, golfers complained of loss of distance and control. That rollback was rolled back the very next year, leading to the golf ball’s current dimensions, 1.68 inches and 1.62 ounces, being first adopted in the U.S and eventually everywhere.

Conversely, doing nothing when there is equipment innovation can be worse. There’s a good argument that the distance explosion would not have happened if metal hadn’t been approved as an accepted material for driver heads back in the early ’80s and quickly replaced wood.

Such a move might have been difficult then, but it would be impossible now. Perhaps taking its cue from political disruption, professional golf seems to have suddenly gotten close to ungovernable. The emergence of LIV as a profligate rival league has thrown pro golf into disarray. And as golf equipment has become big business, its regulatory issues have become increasingly delicate, with no simple solutions and too often no good ones. These days, the USGA’s catch-all response to such situations has become “governance is hard.”

It’s definitely been the case with the USGA/R&A’s Distance Insights Project. Begun in 2018, the effort is to definitively address the organizations’ serious concerns that the golf ball traveling farther would make recreational play more expensive because new or lengthened courses take more land that requires more upkeep and water and fertilizer. And the bigger courses make for longer walks and potentially slower play. Meanwhile, at the professional and elite amateur competitive level, there was evidence that greater distance was compromising challenge and in essence de-skilling the game.

But after six years in which golf’s stakeholders—players, tours, course owners, equipment manufacturers et al—had more participation in the process of offering and finding solutions than ever before, both of the ruling bodies’ proposals have been met negatively by some.

The USGA/R&A’s first proposal, delivered in 2023, was a model local rule to be adopted in professional and elite competition employing a rolled back ball that would have cost the longest hitters about 20 yards off the tee. It was vehemently opposed. Manufacturers argued it would damage their business model and profits; the PGA Tour worried about a shorter ball lessening the entertainment value of its product, and players felt the loss of distance as too drastic. All used the boogeyman of bifurcation, a crucial departure from the unified set of rules they contended is the indispensable glue of the game.

The ruling bodies, pragmatically but discouragingly, backed off and offered a new proposal featuring a unified ball with a rollback that would cost the longest professionals about 12 yards. But more significantly, it forced the USGA to touch golf’s third rail—taking distance away from recreational golfers. Never mind that in most cases it would involve a loss of less than five yards with a driver. The magic word is “loss”.

Still, the opponents of a rollback have not been satisfied. PGA of America leaders have had the temerity to not only say they had not been sufficiently brought into the decision-making process, but, after insisting on a unified rollback, used their voice to make sure to say they didn’t know any recreational golfers who want to hit it shorter. Quite a bait and switch.

Meanwhile, interviews with PGA Tour players who are now testing rolled back balls revealed negative reactions to their performance, and a general disapproval of changing the ball—as opposed to possibly altering drivers—to reduce distance.

Augusta National chairman Fred Ridley speaks on Monday during the 2025 Masters.

Augusta National

At least the USGA and R&A have had an ally in Ridley, a former USGA president. That support of a rollback, presuming it continues, is vital to the USGA and R&A cause, as it evens up the power players on both sides of the issue—a sharp-elbowed 3-on-3 game against the PGA Tour, the PGA of America and the manufacturers, with the golfing public, which is now directly affected by the rollback, as the wild card and perhaps the ultimate arbiter.

Augusta swings the balance of the majors toward rollback. If the Masters, U.S. Open and British Open are all played with a new rolled back ball, will the PGA of America, already fourth among the majors in status, have the nerve to go it alone?

Likewise, will the PGA Tour, which has already lost ground to the majors because of the fracture, run the risk of not following what the three most important majors do. Which would tacitly acknowledge that it plays by less demanding standards. Not the way the presumptive best tour in the world wants to be perceived or portrayed.

The tour’s position is made trickier by LIV, which, if there were a rollback, would likely choose not to go along, enabling it to sell itself as a more entertaining power game that would further differentiate it from the tour.

What golf doesn’t need at this moment is more delay that further hardens positions, contrary to PGA CEO Derek Sprague’s plea to “just hit the pause button.” Although USGA CEO Mike Whan has firmly asserted that the ruling bodies remain committed to imposing a rollback in 2028 for professionals and 2030 for everyone else, a protracted continuation of the current stalemate could make fulfilling another USGA mantra on the distance issue—“Doing nothing is not an option”—dishearteningly difficult.

In the end, the success or failure of implementing a rollback will come down to how much power an authority that has never been vested still has.