David Eger On Frank Hannigan

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I'm going to randomly post remembrances and some old Frank correspondences going forward.

Some of the luminaries who have posted here and here have told some great stories.

And there's this from former USGA Director of Rules and Competitions, David Eger:

When I started work for the USGA in 1992, Frank's too infrequent visits to Golf House always included his faithful black lab, Sparky & an invigorating conversation in my office (which was P. J. Boatwright's during Frank's tenure). He persuaded me to bring a putter and golf balls from home so he could practice putt while we solved golf's problems.

My first round of golf with Frank was where we both belonged--Somerset Hills. I complained that some of the tees were in poor condition. His response was that because I could tee up my ball and had a perfect lie, there was no reason to bitch.

When Frank was working for ABC Sports, I stopped in the broadcast booth early one Sunday morning. He was always interested in the European Tour and told me that Padraig Harrington had just won that week's event. I then reminded him that I'd beaten Padraig in the second day singles at the '91 Walker Cup Match at Portmarnock. Frank's response--"He's a much better player now!"

I spoke with Frank just after he returned home from surgery about a month ago. His wife was screening his calls. I remember thinking, after we ended our 35 minute conversation, he valued our friendship of 31 years by insisting with her, to speak with me. My real purpose was to ask a favor. Of course, we touched on all the trigger points of golf. Even in his frail health, he was happy to help.

I really think P. J. Boatwright appreciated Frank being his boss. Frank's presence allowed him to do not only what he loved but, what he did best--the Rules & running the competition inside the ropes. My sense was that Frank understood how to manage & support his staff.

In '72, when a contestant complained about parking at Pebble Beach, Frank's response to him was that he was worried more about his newly planted tomato plants back in New Jersey than where players could park.

R.I.P. Frank Hannigan

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It's with a heavy heart that I have to report the passing of Frank Hannigan. I'll be collecting some thoughts on this great man and occasional contributor to this site.

Letter From Saugerties: Tim Finchem & Anchoring Edition

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Former USGA Executive Director Frank Hannigan saw PGA Tour Commissioner's appearance on Sunday's WGC Match Play telecast and felt compelled to analyze the tour's surprising decision to not support the proposed ban on anchoring putters. You can read Frank's past letters here.


Letter from Saugerties                                                                                    February 27,2013

PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem gets away with murder.

During his endless interviews throwing the USGA under the bus last weekend on the anchoring issue, nobody asked him the right question: when did you first know that the USGA was moving in the direction of a ban on anchoring and what did you say in reaction?

The PGA Tour is represented at USGA Rules of Golf committee meetings by an employee named Tyler Dennis. It is surely his job to tell Finchem where the USGA is heading. My point is this: Finchem last year, long before the USGA made known its position on anchoring, could have stopped the movement cold by telling the USGA and/or the R&A at the British Open that he did not know how his members would react to a ban on anchoring.

The USGA exists to offer a set of rules that it believes make sense, accompanied by an argument that the game is best served if those rules are broadly accepted. Nobody has to buy that argument but virtually everybody does.  As former USGA Executive Director David Fay once said, "We govern by all the power not vested in us."

Albeit unhappily, the USGA recognizes that the influence of the PGA Tour is enormous because golfers think what they see on television is the genuine article. This has been so since the 1960s when the Tour was first invited to participate in the rules making process.  The consequence has been worldwide uniformity, a most unlikely achievement given the money and egos of modern golf.

The USGA would never have moved to ban anchoring had it known the Tour would diverge. The average male golfer has about a 17 handicap and struggles to break 100.  Do you think the USGA cares what method he uses to putt?  Hypothesize that anchoring had somehow caught on in everyday golf but was used by no Tour players. There is no chance the rules would have been changed.

Finchem evidently misread his members - who are his employers. That can happen. He's dealing with 300 relatively young people who have a lot of money and very insular views of the world. Few of them have ever done a lick of work other than hit golf balls. It's a pure recipe for fickleness.

Meanwhile, the USGA is hardly blameless. Given their policy of rules uniformity as the Holy Grail, they should never have gone where they did without an iron-clad agreement from the Tour. Instead, they end up with golf's version of sequestration.

Since the ban was not to take effect until 2016,  along with a 90-day period inviting comments, I figure the USGA was racked with internal dissension. Finchem could have made it easier for them to back off by voicing the opposition of the players quietly - even last week. Instead, he opted to go as public as possible, accompanied with wild specious arguments such as claiming  20% of amateur golfers are anchorers. Evidently he got that number from his new best friends at the PGA of America. Why he chose to play it as he did, whereby there must be a winner and a loser, is beyond my comprehension.

I see much of the USGA clumsiness as a consequence of systemic foolishness. All power is granted to a volunteer executive committee of 15.  Some are golf sophisticates. Some are golf ignorant. The USGA by laws say that the president of the executive committee, who lives nowhere near headquarters and already has a full time job, is the CEO. The same by laws refer to the USGA staff as "clerks."  The executive director of the staff of some 300 has no job description.

But let's suppose that the president happens to be a gem, a genuine prize. (As USGA Executive Director I was lucky enough to have three).  USGA presidents serve two years and then depart. (The USGA has had only one one-year president. That was Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of US presidents, in 1935.  I have no idea why he bailed out early.)

Has anyone ever heard of a viable institution that has a bona fide winner as CEO and then dumps him after two years? Even college presidents hang around for four or five years as their agents search for higher paying jobs.

Letter From Saugerties, Bifurcation Edition

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The latest letter from Frank Hannigan, former USGA Executive Director, responding to the recent talk of bifurcating the rules.

Dear Geoff,

From During a recent exposure to the press tour commissioner Tim Finchem mused about the occasional benefits of bifurcation-, that awful word-, citing instances when the Tour went off on its own, presumably to its benefit.  Specifically, he cited grooves and adoption of what is generally called the "one ball rule."
 
U-grooves were introduced into the Rules of Golf by the USGA in 1984. Finchem's predecessor Deane Beman was obsessed with grooves. He felt the U-grooves changed the essence of the game. The USGA did not agree.     
 
The Tour announced it would ban U grooves. Ping, the first manufacturer to adopt U grooves, sought and received an injunction restraining the Tour. Ping first sued the Tour and a little later the USGA which had ruled that the Ping version of U-grooves alone did not conform to the Rules of Golf.
 
Ping charged the Tour with 9 violations of the law. The case was heard by a federal judge in Phoenix, Ping's home. The judge ruled from the bench that the Tour had acted so outrageously that it was guilty per se of  one of the 9 charges. As a consequence, if the case came to trial the jury's only role on that count would be to determine a dollar amount representing damage done to Ping.
Since it was an anti trust case that amount would be automatically trebled.
 
The jury would consist of 6  local citizens trying to stay awake during a lengthy trial on an arcane matter.   They would have surely have been aware of one factor:  Ping, with about 1500 employees, was good for the economy of Phoenix.Might they have been influenced on the remaining 8 counts by the judge already having labeled the Tour as bad guys?  I think so.
 
Karsten Solheim, the owner of Ping, opted to settle.  The key point in the settlement was that the Tour would not ban U grooves.  Quite simply, the Tour lost. I can think of no other instance  in which a professional sports entity is legally prohibited from determining what its equipment will be.  It's as if major league baseball could not ban metal bats.

The other settlement terms were not announced I have always assumed the Tour had to compensate Solheim for his considerable legal fees. As for Beman, the late Leonard Decof,  Solheim's lawyer, once boasted to a group of anti trust lawyers at a Chicago meeting "He'll be gone soon."      

Ping's suit against the USGA was also settled. No money changed hands, I know that because I was named with others in the USGA hierarchy as an individual defendant and therefore had to sign the settlement. The USGA relented on an important point. All Ping clubs made up to a specified date  would be grandfathered eternally under the Rules of Golf. Solheim, however, changed his grooves on  the same day  so as to conform with USGA rules,  which he had vowed never to do,

The Tour, to this day, flinches when it hears a threat of anti trust behavior.  

As for the one ball rule,  it was enacted with the concurrence of the USGA. It was directed at the use of balls performing differently in different conditions. The 2 piece balls of the 1970s had a distance  advantage depending on the angle of launch.  This advantage peaked at about 19 degrees, 5 ironish. (Incidentally, the two piece ball also putted longer.  A stroke producing a roll of l0 feet with the 2 piece ball would roll 9 feet with the softer balata ball).  
 
It was also a time when Acushnet was producing a different version of its Titleist balls.  Seve Ballesteros used the one with larger dimples driving downwind as he won his first British Open at Lytham. He reverted to a  traditional ball on the other holes..  
 
I once had a conversation with Tom Watson when he expressed outrage about ball changing. He had ripped a 3 iron, using a balata ball, to the green of a hard par 3 hole.  Watson said he then watched in dismay as  fellow competitor Rik Massengale unzipped  his ball pouch,  pulled  out a Molitor, and used  a 5 iron successfully.

The USGA felt that the choice of different brands of balls during a round should play no part in the outcome. But it wanted to know what the players felt. So we sent a letter to every member of both the PGA Tour and the LPGA (having obtained the mail addresses from both organizations). The players were asked if they would favor or oppose a local rule which would limit them to use of but one brand of ball during a round,   

Remember, this happened during the days of snail mail. Tour players were not famous for being correspondents.  But they reacted in large numbers.  Overwhelmingly, including those who had taken to switching brands during rounds, the players favored adoption of the one ball rule.
 
During this episode the USGA said not one word to ball manufacturers. The USGA didn't give a damn what manufacturers felt. They are involved in golf for the purpose of making money. The USGA exists in an attempt to preserve a game.
 
Those who favor bifurcation never explain what it is they want to happen. They are in the business of golf, and the golf business is bad.  So they blame the USGA, defining it as a totalitarian entity that does whatever it feels like doing without any concern for or interest in what the rest of golf thinks.   The head of the Taylor Made outfit recently predicted the absolute demise of the USGA, a death which would presumably cause golf to glow again.  I took that to mean that Addidas, the sports equipment colossus that owns Taylor Made, is not thrilled with its subsidiary's performance.
 
In point of fact,  the rules-making process is remarkably democratic.   There are 5 members of the committee proper  drawn from the USGA executive committee. They have no axes to grind.  They are influenced and to some extent educated by the USGA staff. Additionally, there are 4 advisory members representing the PGA Tour, the LPGA, the PGA of America and the country's regional golf associations.  They matter.  I can't conceive of the 5 regular members shoving a rules change down the throats of the advisory people.
 
The Tour representative, named by Finchem, especially matters. For better or worse, the Tour has come to have something close to veto power,particularly when it comes to equipment. If there is a discussion about a rules change and should the Tour's man says "We will not play that rule," the discussion is over.

Frank Hannigan
Saugergties, New York

Letter From Saugerties: USGA Ball Testing In Canada

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After this site revealed a few details about the USGA's golf ball testing (noted by the Wall Street Journal with a USGA/Dick Rugge response), the former USGA Executive Director Frank Hannigan filed this letter in response to the news of rolled back ball testing.


You remember those "short" balls the USGA asked manufacturers to make in limited quantities about 4 years ago?  They just re-surfaced at, of all places, the Canadian Tour where players are being paid by the USGA to hit the balls on days following their events.  Two tests have now taken place.

The USGA, predictably, will say nothing beyond admitting tests in Canada are happening. The results will never be revealed unless there is a rules change, says USGA technical chief Dick Rugge.  He also says they need to protect the "process." A "process" is measuring how far golf balls go?  Please.

The USGA, which gets its funds from the public, and shamelessly accepts 501c3 tax status, has one hell of a nerve in trying to shut down a discussion of a distance rollback, the most critical issue in golf for many of its sophisticates.

The issue is what would golf feel like, be like, if the ball went--pick a number--10,15,20 yards shorter for tour players than today's ball. The point of these tests is not where the balls go, it's how the players feel about what they've done.   

"Would it make any difference to you if everybody had to play the ball you used today?"

As for the outcome, you can be assured these balls have already been tested to death on the USGA's super-hip indoor driving device  which, essentially, can predict the outcome of any hit.  The balls were also carefully sprinkled around in exalted golf circles. Peter Dawson gave one to a low handicap friend of mine to play on The Old Course.  My friend say he couldn't tell the difference.

So what's going on?  Rugge is a very status quo guy, especially when it comes to his salary, which is not short.  He doesn't need a fight about distance rollback while he's dealing with the consequences of his dramatic groove change this year.  It was billed as a game changer.  So far, on the Tour, it has changed nothing. Worse, there will come a time when amateur golfers will be asked to buy new clubs with new grooves that mean absolutely nothing.

Rugge says all players must play with the same grooves lest we have bifurcation. Really?  So what about the "one ball" rule, a condition I was involved in with the USGA, which permits committees to limit players to one brand of ball throughout a round.  That condition is considered essential on the PGA Tour.  It is virtually never used in amateur golf.   So is that bifurcation and, if so, what's wrong with it?

My wild guess is that there are members of the USGA Executive Committee who don't want to give up on the issue of distance and have ordered Rugge to do these tests so they can say that with X ball the average driving distance on the Tour would drop by 15 yards--something Rugge already knows.

I would also guess that the PGA Tour knows what's going on. The USGA and R&A can't touch equipment without the consent of the PGA Tour.

This is not a matter of science.  BP could surely make a proper shorter golf ball.  The matter is political with perhaps some litigation tossed in.  All throughout golf,  the people who know it best think the ball goes too far.  At the British Open annual dinner for former champions at St. Andrews the champions beat up on the R&A about distance. The R&A listens but will do nothing.

What a deal.  The people empowered to manage a game can do nothing about the game. It's as if in baseball the major leagues were forced to convert to metal bats.

Open Observations From Saugerties

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Former USGA Executive Director Frank Hannigan shares a few observations after two rounds of the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach.

  • The amount of attention paid to the preparation of the Open course is  astonishing   It’s as if the USGA’s Mike Davis, a most capable young man, can control the very essence of the game. He can’t. Setting up a golf course is not onerous work.  Essentially, all the USGA can do is attempt to put a premium on accuracy as opposed to power.  The only way to do that is to penalize the inaccurate by growing heavy rough and establishing very firm greens - which do not accept shots played from rough.
  • So the Open favors a Curtis Strange, who won twice, and three-time winner Hale Irwin. It was brutal for Seve Ballesteros,  a bad driver.  You could make an argument that since Seve was a flat out genius the Open courses should have been prepared to accommodate him.
  • Tiger Woods overcomes the USGA set-ups. I conclude that he has been so good at every other aspect of the game he can overcome wild driving. Most of all, like Nicklaus, he thinks he is supposed to win.
  • I am sick of hearing  analyses of hole locations on the Golf Channel.  There is no data to tell us how hole locations affect outcomes.  Obviously, they influence overall scoring. But just suppose all holes were cut in the centers of greens. Scores would be lower. But would this mean the identities of the winners would vary dramatically. I think not. Jack Nicklaus was going to win four US Opens no matter where the holes were located.  And he was destined to win six Masters in an era where the principles of course set up were opposite to those of the US Open - when Augusta had no rough at all and anybody could put the ball in vast fairways.
  • Perhaps I carry on like this as a means of praising my late colleague, PJ Boatwright, who set up most Open courses of my time. He didn’t get a lot of attention, but he knew what he was doing.
  • The best Open I ever saw? Easy. 1971 at precious Merion. The two best players in the world, Nicklaus and Trevino, tied for first at level par with Trevino winning the play-off.
  • The spreading notion that today’s Opens are more brilliantly conceived and therefore of greater validity is nonsense.
  • The Tiger Woods harsh comments about the greens at Pebble Beach were petulant and without  meaning. His disparagement  is  cruel on the workers at Pebble Beach who have gone though hoops in a futile attempt to draw an understanding, if not kind, word from Woods & company. Excuse me, but Tiger Woods has never done a hard day’s work.

Q&A With Frank Hannigan

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Former USGA Executive Director Frank Hannigan was part of the first three U.S. Opens at Pebble Beach and kindly answered a few questions on the eve of this year's event.


GS: It's hard to fathom today that it was a leap to take the Open to Pebble Beach in 1972. Was it really that risky?
 
FH: The USGA had played US Amateur Championships at Pebble Beach.  The place was virtually empty.  Odd, but it seemed remote and inaccessible.   So we inserted a clause in the agreement stipulating we would get $250,000 as our share of admissions no matter what. In 1972 $250,000 felt like real money.  The attendance turned out to be fine.


GS: Besides Jack's 1-iron shot Sunday, what else do you recall from the week?
 
FH: Bing Crosby's brother called to ask for a cart for the great man.  Grace Kelly may not have been able to say no to Bing Crosby, but I could. On Sunday two anti-Vietnam war protesters chained themselves to a tree in the drive zone on 18. They just sat there.  

A marshal on the tee with binoculars informed the players.  So Arnold was seen on television using the binoculars and some idiot called in to say that Arnold was using an artificial device and should be penalized.   


GS: In 1982 you were in the booth with Peter Alliss on 17 when Watson chipped in. Is that correct? And what was your role with the USGA at that point?
 
FH: I was then the assistant director, the #2 bureaucrat. I sat in a booth with Peter supposedly to say pithy things.  Crazy.  It was like putting a hack with one piano lesson to play with Horowitz.

 
GS: You were with ABC in 1992, what was that like when Monty came in and Nicklaus told him he had it won and just about everyone else thought he had the thing wrapped up?
 
FH: Nicklaus congratulated Monty on winning the Open while we were in a commercial and then Monty told everyone in the  press tent what Jack said. Nearly half the field was still on the course. I did not regard it as a prediction but rather Jack sneering that everybody else was choking so badly that Monty's score might hold up.

Letter From Saugerties, Wally Uihlein Edition

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Former USGA Executive Director Frank Hannigan emailed this letter in response to Acushnet CEO Wally Uihlein's recent interview with John Huggan. I emailed Mr. Uihlein to ask if he wished to respond but have not heard back as of this posting.

What a week of glory it was for Acushnet CEO Wally Uihlein!

First, he gives an interview to the always entertaining golf site, "Golf Observer."  What it amounts to is a tribute to himself and his company.  It is longer than "War and Peace."

Then, better yet, the man accused of blackmailing David Letterman wears a Titleist cap in various photos that surfaced. The whole world sees "Titleist" and it doesn't cost Acushnet a dime. (By the way the USGA handicap processing system shows one Joe Halderman, a resident of Connecticut, as bearing a 16.8 at the Longshore Golf Course,  a muni in the posh town of Westport).   

Wally is special.  He would like it thought that he was found in a manger outside the door of the dean of the Harvard Business School.  In fact,  he was a left-handed New England golfer with a modicum of talent who became somebody's assistant pro.  The USGA welcomed him back by granting him reinstatement to amateur status.  He jumped over to Acushnet where he displayed a tremendous ability to sell stuff.

His company owns more than 50% of the golf ball market plus Foot Joy shoes and a couple of lines of clubs.   It is now more than a billion dollar operation.  Wally is not satisfied.  He thinks he should BE golf.  There is nothing he is unwilling to foresee. He predicts there will be no more successful incursions into the golf equipment business by outsiders.  That's an expression of resentment toward the late Karsten Solheim and the late Ely Callaway who came from nowhere to dominate the club business and kick Acushnet's butt in the process. 

I will now present an abbreviated list of items worthy of comment from the interview:

  • On the prospect of rolling back distance,  he says any change is bound to be good for some tour players and bad for others.  How come he didn't weep for the prospective losers when he dramatically changed his ball to the HD line in the early 2000s?
  • Wally says there is no precedent for rolling back performance - not in golf or any other sport.  Excuse me, but in 1931 the USGA changed the minimum diameter of the ball in its rule to 1.68 inches - up from 1.62 inches. Writing in the late 1930s, Bobby Jones reckoned that the 1.68" ball was about 5 yards shorter than the ball he played with during the 1920s.
  • He says the distance explosion is due in part to bigger and stronger people.  Look, distance was stable on the Tour between 1980 and 1995.  It then shot up every year until 2002 when it again became stable - after the horse left the barn with an overall driving distance increase of about 9%.  For the size of people to matter, you'd have to believe that something dramatic happened to the species for an 8 year period only.  Darwin wouldn't buy that.
  • He hints at the possibility of litigation on the heels of any equipment rules change by the USGA. That's odd because a few years ago he told me personally that suing the USGA is very bad for business.  Wally said that both Ping, which did sue, and Callaway, which threatened to sue, were singed.

Is the USGA frightened by threats of an anti trust suit?  Perhaps, even though I make them about a one touchdown favorite in such a clash.

What does scare the USGA is the fear of general non-support, which would render the USGA irrelevant. Just suppose the USGA did muster up the courage to do what it knows is right - roll back distance.   If that were to happen I am sure that Wally and other manufacturers would continue to turn out today's balls.   What would the customer do - buy the ball announced as being shorter?   Sure, the pro shops at Seminole and Cypress Point might only carry the new ball.   How about WalMart?  I can't envision the boys from Arkansas acting on the basis of what the USGA says is good for the game.  There would, for a time at least, be chaos, the exact opposite of the uniformity prized above all by the USGA.

The ongoing tension between equipment makers and the USGA is both sad and unnecessary.  It wasn't always so. I remember the day when an earlier CEO of Acushnet, John Ludes, came into my office at the USGA bearing a $10,000 check as a gift for a USGA building fundraiser.  Mr. Ludes understood that the USGA had created a climate in the sport that put all manufacturers on a level playing field and was doing so without any ax to grind. Naturally, I could not accept the check.    

Equipment gets nearly as much play as instruction in commercial golf media because of ad budgets.  Nothing gets the attention of a publisher quicker than a message saying, "You didn't give us enough space last month.  My money is itching to go elsewhere."

So the consumer is led to believe that his or her search for a driver counts more than the choice of a spouse. The truth of course is that equipment does not determine outcomes in golf on every level of the game. If it were otherwise you would see only one brand of ball in use on the Tour. Hostility is meaningless in that equipment simply doesn't matter.  By that, I mean that the choice of equipment on all levels of golf does not determine who wins or loses.  The performance of today's clubs and balls is remarkably similar with minute variations that are almost impossible to discern.   Why is it you never see blind test results in golf?  Because even the greatest of players can't tell one ball from another if the markings on the balls are wiped out.

For reading this far, I reward you with a tip.  The plastics used in modern golf balls do not decompose.  So if you are in a pro shop that has used balls in a bucket for $1.25 each, don't hesitate to reach down for a few. As for the decay issue,  I do not fear climate change.  My fear is that eventually the surface of the earth will consist of nothing but Pinnacles.

Uihlein says no Tour player will use equipment he does not favor. Right on. Tour players are influenced by how much they can extract in endorsement fees.

Remember when Tiger Woods turned pro in the fall of 1996?  He quickly scored a deal with Acushnet granting him $4 million per year.  In no time at all he was recognized as the best player in the world.  Fast forward a few years.  Nike, which dwarfs Acushnet, snatched Tiger away by doubling or tripling Tiger's fee. Tiger remained the best player in the world.  The same would happen if he developed a yen for Callaway or Taylor Made or whatever.    
 
It's astonishing how much attention is paid to equipment now.   The truth is if Acushnet was gobbled up tomorrow by Nike or Adidas nobody would care other than the players on the Titleist staff.

We have to put up with manufacturers since the game requires clubs and balls. But we shouldn't pay much attention to them and it surely doesn't matter which of them prosper and which fail.

Frank Hannigan
Saugerties, New York