OAKMONT, Pa. — There have been calls for more transparency testing from the USGA in wake of Rory McIlroy’s driver failing a compliance test at the PGA Championship and McIlroy’s subsequent annoyance with how the news was leaked. However, don’t expect any changes on the public announcement front anytime soon.
In an interview with Golf Digest last week, the USGA’s Thomas Pagel asserted that elite golf does not have a problem with driver compliance. “If we saw high numbers of failures, which we just don’t see, or we saw a high instance of serial numbers not matching, then perhaps we would consider testing the full field,” Pagel said. “And then also seeing that when these clubs are creeping over, we’re only talking about a microsecond or two when they’re being pulled, we just don’t see it as a great issue.” Pagel also disputed the idea that making results public would be an improvement. “It becomes a distraction for the player, becomes a distraction for the manufacturer,” he said. “A microsecond or two is not going to have any distance gains, but in the court of public opinion, especially those that may not be overly familiar and they’re just watching a major championship, they might assume that that player ort hat manufacturer is trying to get away with something, and we just don’t think that that’s the case.”
Speaking at Oakmont on Wednesday ahead of this week’s U.S. Open, USGA CEO Mike Whan reiterated Pagel’s talking points, and said the fallout from McIlroy’s Quail Hollow incident has only cemented the governing body’s approach to the process going forward.
“As a service to manufacturers, to the players and to the tours, we provide that. If I’m being honest with you, I think in terms of what happened at the PGA Championship, it made us more committed to not wanting to have this be the topic of the town because I think when you talked about a rules violation or somebody who’s playing with a hot driver, that gets so much more sensational than the reality,” Whan said. “I can tell you as a rules body, if we had concern about this incredible advantage, we would change the degree in which we test.
“But we think the testing that we’re doing now is commensurate with the size of both the issue and the size of the reality of the issue.”
Last week, McIlroy said he was “pissed off” about how the news of his test ultimately became public thanks to the media, especially since he knew Scottie Scheffler’s driver also failed at Quail Hollow.
“I knew that Scottie’s driver had failed on Monday, but my name was the one that was leaked,” McIlroy explained. “I didn’t want to get up there and say something that I regretted, either, because there’s a lot of people that … I’m trying to protect Scottie. I don’t want to mention his name. I’m trying to protect TaylorMade. I’m trying to protect the USGA, PGA of America, myself. I just didn’t want to get up there and say something that I regretted at the time. With Scottie’s stuff, that’s not my information to share. I knew that that had happened, but that’s not on me to share that, and I felt that process is supposed to be kept confidential, and it wasn’t for whatever reason. That’s why I was pretty annoyed at that.”
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
