Tiger on the lookout for a 'hot' driver
Joe Logan | KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Issue date: 7/10/03 Section: Sports
(KRT) - When Tiger Woods revealed last week that he had confronted another Tour pro he suspects of playing with an illegal "hot" driver, he said he got all the proof he needed watching the guy hit balls at the range.
"You can tell in the first 100 yards how the golf ball is taking off and how it's flying," Woods, who has declined to identify the player, told reporters on the eve of the Western Open at Cog Hill in Chicago.
If Woods can indeed spot the difference at the range, one expert - who doubts he can - suggests that Woods' eyesight must be even better than his golf game.
"We're talking about two or three yards," said Frank Thomas, who spent 26 years, from 1974 to 2000, as technical director of the U.S. Golf Association, top equipment watchdog for the game's governing body. "Nobody is good enough to be able to tell that by the ball flight."
That said, Thomas, now an industry consultant and chief technical adviser to Golf Digest, doesn't doubt for a moment that equipment companies are unwittingly making and shipping a few hot drivers, or that some recreational and Tour players might end up playing with them.
"When you are trying to work right up against the limit, inevitably some clubs could exceed the limit," Thomas said of the equipment manufacturers.
The limit to which Thomas refers is the physics term "coefficient of restitution," or COR, which measures the "spring-like" effect that gives the ball added distance from the latest high-tech, swollen-headed, thin-faced titanium drivers.
After much controversy and debate, the USGA set the COR limit this year at .830. Thomas and other experts suspect that because of imperfections in the manufacturing processes, some clubs might accidentally slip through that measure .831 or .832, a virtually imperceptible advantage.
Yet, even if a manufacturer deliberately made a driver that grossly exceeded the COR limit, say .840, said Thomas, it would give even a Tour-caliber player just about two to three extra yards.
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