The golf police will soon be looking for those `hot drivers'

It's golf's version of baseball's corked bat. They are known as hot drivers, high-tech clubs that propel a golf ball distances once thought humanly impossible, that threaten to make some championship courses obsolete, that are illegal according to the US Golf Association's high-tech standards. But the golf police are coming.

The USGA has developed a portable testing device for drivers that will probably be used on the PGA Tour as soon as the Mercedes Championship in Hawaii in January.

Not a tee shot too soon.

Several high-profile touring pros have quietly complained for months that some of their brethren, perhaps unknowingly, must be using hot drivers. During a PGA Tour event earlier this year, an older pro launched a tee shot so high and so far that when he returned his driver to his bag, a younger pro inspected it as if it were a UFO.

In the US Open last week at Olympia Fields in Illinois, drives often soared far beyond 300 yards. At the 460-yard 18th hole, one golfer needed only an 80-yard lob wedge to reach the green.

And when Tiger Woods griped publicly after the Open's final round on Sunday that "everyone should be tested, period, first tee, every day," he put the issue in the public domain.

When Woods arrived here at the Buick Classic on Wednesday, he resumed his campaign, pointing to the young pros and the amateurs who are hitting their tee shots awesome distances.

"Look at all the young kids now," Woods said. "Every one of them, they are cut, they are ripped, they hit the ball a long ways, and the game has changed that way. You don't see too many players coming up playing the way Corey Pavin used to play. Now it's just, `Bombs away and we'll figure it out from there.'

"I think that's where the game has really changed. I think the PGA Tour needs to be on the forefront and make sure everything is regulated and we are all playing with the proper equipment. They need to be tested, a lot like NASCAR. First hole, here's my driver, make sure it's legal. Green light, red light."

Woods had put golf-club ethics under a microscope even though golf may be the most ethical of all sports.

Tournament golf has no umpires or referees, only rules officials who render a decision when requested. Golfers usually police themselves. Over the years, numerous golfers have called penalty strokes on themselves if, for example, their ball moved after they had addressed it or they realized they had, say, 15 clubs in their bag, one more than allowed.

Tom Kite, while among the leaders in the final round of the 1978 Colgate Hall of Fame Classic at Pinehurst, North Carolina, called a penalty stroke on himself because his ball had moved on the green. Ian Woosnam received a two-stroke penalty after his caddie discovered a 15th club, an extra driver, in his bag after playing the par-3 first hole in the final round of the 2001 British Open at Royal Lytham and St. Annes.

For all the soaring distance of some tee shots, no golfers on the PGA Tour have been accused of deliberately using illegal drivers, but the general feeling among the pros is that some might be using illegal drivers without realizing it.

The high-tech boundaries on a titanium driver are so minute that its illegality might not always register on the tests used by the equipment company that supplies a pro with several drivers, only one of which he might use in competition. That one driver might not conform to the USGA's high-tech standards.