Despite the top two players in the world having to give up their drivers after creeping into nonconforming status ahead of the PGA Championship and the surrounding hubbub from certain quarters suggesting the driver test needed to be rethought, the USGA will not be changing its plans for testing at next week’s US Open.
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In other words, expect a third of the field again to have their drivers tested and expect those results to be held confidential. The reason? Simple. According to Thomas Pagel, the USGA’s chief governance officer, there’s no reason to believe hot drivers are a problem in professional golf.
In an interview with Golf Digest, Pagel pointed specifically to the testing that’s conducted regularly on the PGA Tour and DP World Tour and the testing that’s regularly done at the other major championships as reason to be confident that hot drivers are not a problem. In addition, at a major like the US Open that has a more diverse field of players from other tours as well as other professionals and amateurs, the field is divided into buckets and certain players from each of those categories are tested to make sure a representative sample of the entire field is reflected in that week’s testing. Pagel also said that players’ gamer drivers are the ones being tested, not some switcheroo at the last minute, hinted at by Lucas Glover in a recent appearance on SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio. (The USGA matches the serial numbers of the drivers it tests with those put in play and it sees those match more than 90 percent of the time, Pagel said.)
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More importantly, Pagel said there is no indication that elite golf is awash in extra springy-faced drivers. It’s simply not happening, and the data from regular testing makes that clear, which includes players on the PGA Tour having their drivers called in for testing two or three times a year.
“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.”
Thomas Pagel, USGA chief governance officer, says at the 2025 US Open the USGA will keep in place the standard protocol for driver testing, with roughly a third of the field tested and the results remaining confidential.
Pagel’s point is that drivers that fail the test aren’t wildly exceeding the limit on springiness. Technically, that’s known as “characteristic time” (or CT) in the portable test the USGA has developed. Legal drivers have a CT limit of 239 with an 18-microsecond tolerance extending to 257.
“Now look, 257 is the line, we have the line, and we need to make sure that we maintain it,” Pagel said. “But it’s not like we’re seeing players potentially coming in with hot drivers that are registering at 270. As you know, the higher that number gets, the more likely that that club might fail, and the last thing a player or a manufacturer wants is to be standing on the eighth tee questioning if their driver’s going to fail with the next swing, right?”
Pagel said what’s often overlooked about driver testing is that the primary beneficiary is manufacturers who are learning about how CT measurements can creep towards non-conformance over time. It’s also the case that the CT testing machine itself often needs to be recalibrated to get precise readings that match with the USGA standard, a process the USGA routinely coordinates with manufacturers.
The intent is not to catch golfers cheating. Pagel said that compared to when CT testing first started, “we have seen the [failure] numbers come way down.”
Even so, he realises the question about full-field testing persists. It’s not a suggestion that won’t be considered for the future, he said.
“Look, it’s always just a question of resources, right?” Pagel said of the test which for a new driver might require 10 minutes. “So could we throw resources at it and get every club on a Monday or Tuesday? There would probably be some challenges with tracking down some players within that time frame, but could we do it? I would like to think we could do it if we put the resources behind it.”
Another thing, Pagel stressed, is golf’s inborn integrity that sets it apart from other sports.
“We’re not a sport where people are trying to get away with holding or some other penalty,” he said. “Golfers want to play by the rules and they want to play with conforming equipment. And so we don’t think that we need to be suggesting that the integrity of the field is in question, and we need to see every driver.”
Pagel also dismissed the idea that it was patently unfair, for example, for one player in a pairing to have had his driver tested and the other to have not.
“I would just go back to the regularity of the testing,” he said. “The guy sitting next to Rory might have had his driver tested two weeks before, right? Again, we’re comfortable that these drivers are seen enough through the testing programs.”
Pagel admitted that some players and some manufacturers tend to live closer to the CT limit but that there is no reason to do so, that “there’s not a magical jump in distance” for those with drivers that have a CT high in the tolerance zone. He also said that when drivers receive a warning light result (yellow, as opposed to green for conforming and red for non-conforming), that driver is likely to fail the next time it comes around for testing.
“That’s why it is surprising that certain manufacturers will want to live so close to that line because any advantage gained is negligible,” he said. “You start getting up above that number, and the failure rate that will happen on course increases, and even though the player is free to exchange that driver for another piece of equipment, that takes time, right? And so that could be several holes of a tournament or a major championship waiting for a new driver. It is not ideal for the player, not to mention when the club fails, it usually doesn’t result in a great shot and guys just don’t want to take that risk. There’s too much on the line.”
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Another thing that Pagel stressed was the desire to keep the results of weekly testing confidential. The results are shared only with the player and the manufacturer, and while other organisations that work with the USGA on testing at their events (PGA Tour, PGA of America, Augusta National) might reconsider the confidentiality aspect, Pagel thinks he would argue the other way. The mischaracterisation of a player having circumvented the rules isn’t worth making the results public, he said.
“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 or that manufacturer is trying to get away with something, and we just don’t think that that’s the case.
“And we’re all aligned on this topic, but with all things, I think it’s fair to say that any time you get through a season, you debrief on everything, and my assumption would be that driver testing will be part of the discussion postseason. … I don’t want to speak on behalf of others, but I am yet to be convinced that it would be a good thing for us to move away from the confidentiality.”
