US PGA TOUR SET TO OPPOSE BAN ON LONG-HANDLED PUTTERS

FROM THE DAILY TELEGRAPH WEBSITE
By JAMES CORRIGAN
The US PGA Tour is set to announce its opposition to the proposed ban on long putters here in Arizona today and so force the game’s governing bodies to reconsider the prospective rule change.

Reports indicate that Tim Finchem, the commissioner of the US PGA Tour, will appear in the NBC commentary booth during the final day of this WGC Accenture Matchplay Championship to urge the USGA and RandA to scrap their plan to outlaw “anchored” putting.

How the USGA and RandA react will be intriguing, if only to discover who holds the real power in the game. 
Meetings between the players and US PGA Tour officials this week have made clear the resentment to the rule-makers over this issue. They will fight the ban.

Their threat will go unsaid for the time being, but the message will be stark: if the rule change is enforced the US PGA Tour will move to ignore it and allow its members to continue using the belly putters and broom-handle putters. Golf would essentially have a split between the amateur game and professional game.

Golf would then have the farcical situation of young athletes employing what are seen as a game-improvers, while hackers, not to mention veterans who use the implements because of back problems, would be barred from doing so by the rule book.

Would the RandA and USGA dare to allow such a scenario, and furthermore would they ban the putters from the majors they control – the Open and US Open? The answers to these questions will almost certainly be “No”. They would be acutely aware of how quickly their authority could be eroded.

So they would have to lose face and backtrack. They would not have envisioned the strength of opposition when they announced the 90-day “comment period” back in December.

The controversy has done its best to overshadow the matchplay action in Arizona.