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Hot-driver issue may explode into titanium shrapnel

Golf's hot-driver issue keeps getting hotter. And when voluntary testing begins on the PGA Tour in January, it might explode in titanium shrapnel.

Tiger Woods, who would prefer mandatory testing before every round in a PGA Tour event, has charged that at least one pro, whom he declined to identify, is knowingly using a driver that does not conform to the US Golf Association's restrictions on the club face's springlike effect. Woods said he has also privately confronted that pro.

Woods is wrong in putting so many other long-hitting pros under suspicion, but he is correct in putting this unidentified pro, who he believes is getting extra distance off the tee with an illegal driver, on notice as a suspected cheater -- the worst insult in golf.

Although testing next year will be voluntary, it will also be on demand. With a portable testing device at every PGA Tour event, Woods or any other pro can request the rules officials to test the driver of a certain player, or the drivers of several players. Even if the driver proves legal, it could provoke some angry rivalries.

Snitching on a schoolmate being late for class would be kid stuff compared to a touring pro's snitching on another's cheating driver.

Among the pros, they can call each other almost anything and, in most cases, it's all in fun. But don't call a golfer a cheater. When an obscure touring pro, Richard E. Meissner Jr., now in a Missouri prison for having robbed golf equipment stores, confessed in 1978 to having robbed two banks, he sternly denied ever cheating at golf.

Throughout its history, golf has prided itself on the integrity of its honor system. Without an umpire or a referee looking over their shoulders, golfers accept the responsibility of assessing themselves penalty strokes for infractions only they might be aware of -- a ball that moved slightly, for example, after the golfer had addressed it.

In golf, your conscience is more than your guide. Your conscience is known as protecting the field -- the other golfers who would be affected if the penalty strokes were not assessed.

That honor system is one reason Tim Finchem, the PGA Tour commissioner, announced last Tuesday that testing drivers next year would be voluntary rather than mandatory.

Golfers on the PGA Tour have already used the right to go to the rules officials to request that another golfer's equipment be tested before or during a tournament. In the commotion over the square-grooves controversy two decades ago, the irons of several golfers were inspected.

As a group, the pros are conscious of checking with rules officials to make sure their own equipment is legal: the grooves on their irons, their putters, or their livelier-than-ever golf balls.

In 1996, Greg Norman, as the defending champion in the Greater Hartford Open, was in contention after two rounds when he disqualified himself for having used an unapproved ball.

And beginning in January, when the portable Pendulum Tester, as developed by the USGA in its Far Hills, New Jersey, technology lab, is available at every PGA Tour event, a wise pro will have his driver tested for his own peace of mind, just as Woods or any pro can go to the rules officials that week and request that another golfer's driver be tested.

If the driver flunks the test before the tournament begins, that golfer will be allowed to replace it with a legal driver.

But if the driver is ruled illegal after the event has begun, the pro will be disqualified. And, worse, branded a cheater.
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