If this past week was any indication, should the USGA want a Teflon coating at Winged Foot from criticism, perhaps its best move is installing Nicklaus on the greens committee.
Shane Lowry should be at Royal St George’s Golf Club defending the claret jug this week. Instead, he’s at Muirfield Village Golf Club after the Open Championship was cancelled and the Memorial was moved back six weeks.
As golf’s various stakeholders – the PGA Tour, European Tour and LPGA Tour, Augusta National, the PGA of America, the USGA and the R&A – cancel and postpone their own events and explore potential alternative dates, all are working with the assumption that the Olympics would go on as scheduled.
A bit like the Old Course that sits directly below his office window, R&A chief executive Martin Slumbers’ annual sit-down with members of the UK media typically offers up all kinds of angles.
The championship was postponed due to issues related to the Coronavirus and to ensure the safety and welfare of all players, officials and others attending the championship.
Maher’s paper is the first from a major golf company chief executive to explicitly counter the ruling bodies’ conclusions from their Distance Insights research project.
If you’re looking for definitive conclusions in the massive reports that contributed to the USGA and R&A’s recently released Distance Insights Project, they are quite nearly at every turn and occur so often they can occasionally contradict themselves.
With the USGA and R&A having released the preliminary results of their Distance Insights Project – and concluding that something needs to be done to keep the cycle of distance increases from continuing – it seemed a worthwhile exercise to ask the players responsible for much of the handwringing what it is, exactly, they think needs to be done.
Australian Golf Digest
