Fitzpatrick and tournament rules official Mike Peterson analyze a gash on the driver’s face.
It all started on the 8th hole with an observation and a question: “It must be important, surely?” Matt Fitzpatrick told a PGA Tour rules official as the two got a close look at his Titleist TSi driver. A crack was now present on Fitzpatrick’s face that was considered significant enough to alter the club’s performance negatively. The rules official disagreed.
“I don’t think (the crack) is enough yet,” the rules official replied. “They made the rule, so it has to be, like, fold in on itself.”
Thanks to Model Local Rule G-9 in the USGA Rules of Golf, which states that a club is not replaceable because of a crack, Fitzpatrick wasn’t going to win the argument—not unless it was important enough to was opposed.
“There’s an obvious crack there that’s causing a ball flight defect,” said Fitzpatrick, who confirmed he had a few spare driver heads in his locker.
Shortly after the rules official refused to let Fitzpatrick swap heads, the 29-year-old, most likely trying to prove a point, stuck with the driver and watched as the ball snapped and went away before coming to rest in the foul.
“This is wild,” Fitzpatrick said as he walked the fairway next to a rules official in a golf cart. Social media erupted as #GolfTwitter slammed the decision. No one seemed to understand why Fitzpatrick was being forced to play the wrong driver for the remaining 10 holes.
As the decision was televised, several former caddies and tour pros offered their thoughts on the situation, including John Wood, a longtime golfer and current course reporter for NBC, who highlighted the most pressing problem. great by allowing professionals to exchange continuously. their driver’s head whenever a crack was present in the ultra-thin face.
“The rule is written this way to counteract the ‘spring effect’ or the ‘characteristic time’ rule that measures ball speed with a driver, or basically how thin a driver’s face can be.” Wood said in X. “A driver must be ‘significantly damaged’ to be replaceable, which basically means cracked all the way through or completely crashed/collapsed. If pros were allowed to replace a driver with any kind of rift, manufacturers would build the faces as thin as legally possible. It’s a roundabout way of controlling distance.
“Written this way, manufacturers should build their drivers with a ‘buffer zone’ so they don’t crack more often. The thinner the face, the faster the ball is removed, the more often they will crack and be replaced by another that is also pushed to the limit. Yeah, I think it’s funny. Matt’s driver was obviously unusable after finding the crack. I don’t think it’s a good rule either, but that’s why.”
The current rules set around the spring-like effect of the driver’s face are intended to add restrictor plates to the fastest technology in the bag. Equipment manufacturers are already pushing the speed limits, which doesn’t allow much wiggle room in terms of face thickness. And there is no chance that the governing bodies will adopt a thinner face in the future.
The simple truth is that driver faces get faster, not slower, over time, increasing the chances of cracks at inopportune moments. After all, that’s a risk golfers take every time they do it, especially with an older model driver, TSi a la Fitzpatrick.
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What needs to be cleared up, regardless of the model in question, is the gray area around the definition of “significantly damaged,” which is only defined as a crack that causes full face cave-in. In the most recent episode of waves Fully equippedGolf Laboratories founder and podcast co-host Gene Parente said there’s an easy way to clear up the confusion.
“The thing I don’t understand about the rule is that someone is making an arbitrary judgment saying, eh, it doesn’t look too bad. I think you can go ahead — without evidence,” Parente said. “As someone who does this for a living and has had countless cracks on countless devices, I can tell you that as soon as there’s a crack, there’s a problem. There are bulge and twist gauges that you can put on your face and see what your target curvature is. This is our first sign before you see cracks. We’ll put this gauge on and take a look at the face. If there is a gap, this is the first indication that there is a problem. In a very short period of time, there are cracks.”
Measuring the bump and roll of the driver’s face during play won’t happen, but if the face has a visible crack, there’s a good chance it will negatively affect performance, making it “significantly impaired”. As Chris McCormack, True Spec’s Vice President of Tours and Educationsaid on the podcast, it’s like being forced to play with a cracked baseball bat.
“Look at any other sport,” said Fully Equipped co-host Kris McCormack. “That would be like saying to a major league baseball player, ‘Hey, I know your bat just broke, but we’re going to make you carry it to your next at-bat.’ is a deprecated rule. If it has been changed from its original design state, it should be able to be replaced.”
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