Bifurcation, Ball Rollback Out In The Open

Photo: Courtesy USGA

Nothing is happening right away. Thomas Pagel, the chief governance officer of the USGA, wanted to make that clear.

“The most important thing to note is that we’re not proposing anything today,” Pagel said Wednesday morning when the USGA put out a notice to manufacturers announcing new areas of interest.

“We’re resetting the area of interest to say, we threw a lot at you last year,” Pagel said. “We issued an area of interest to manufacturers that had a whole lot of topics to explore as it relates to this cycle of increased hitting distances. As we did our research last year and worked with manufacturers, we continued to refine our focus. Now we want to narrow our focus and research these specific topics and have conversations before we get to the point of proposing anything.

“It’s really in two spots: the first is golf balls and the overall distance standard, which is how we measure the distance a golf ball tra...