Editor’s note: The following is the third of three stories on the USGA Museum in Far Hills, NJ.
FAR HILLS, NJ – Have you ever wondered what the air temperature does to the golf balls and sticks in the trunk of your car? Would you ever want to swing 2,500 clubs each year? How about testing shoes, tees, or anything else that a golfer carries?

That’s what they study at the USGA’s Testing Center, part of the tour at the USGA Museum in central New Jersey.

“If you keep a ball in the trunk of your car is going to degrade a lot faster,” said Steve Quintavalla, a senior research engineer with the USGA. “A ball kept in a cool place will last a lot longer. Let no one kid you, but the bottom a pond might be the best place because it’s a low oxygen environment that stays cool year round.”

Clubs and balls are submitted voluntarily, every manufacturer looking for that USGA seal of approval. Clubs are kept in their archive; balls are given to visitors who take the tour. Right off the bat, 80% conform, 20% do not.

“We try to help and guide them through,” said USGA Technical Director Dick Rugge. “We just don’t turn a cold shoulder to them.”

Rugge put it in words that are better left unparaphrased: “Our mission here is to maintain the challenge of the game. Why is the game so popular? Because it’s a hell of a challenge. It has been for 500 years and will be for another 500 years or more, we hope. And it’s possible that if we let the challenge become less and less it won’t be so popular. So we have to be careful about allowing it to become easier and easier. To a point that’s maybe OK but we have to really shepherd that in a very careful manner. And that’s what we try to do. We want to maintain that challenge so it’s a healthy game for a long time to come.”

TESTING BALLS

Every manufacturer submits two dozen of each model golf ball they market. There’s been a limit by the USGA on how far a ball can go since 1976. With technology, the test was updated in 2003. Balls can be a minimum of 1.68 inches in diameter, they must weigh 1.62 ounces.

To give them an even field, balls are kept in an incubator which controls both temperature (75 degrees) and humidity, “To make sure that we are as repeatable and as fair as we can be,” Quintavalla said.

There’s a 200-pound flywheel that launches them at 255-feet per second and 90% of the balls tested conform. If you’re wondering if there’s an MIT graduate on staff, there is.
Balls are then fed into a launcher: “It’s like a pitching machine but bigger and more complex,” said Quintavalla.

A sensor gauges aerodynamics and they’ve tested every kind of dimple pattern with the robot swinging machine.

The legendary “Iron Byron” was used from 1972 to 2005. Now, two modern robots swing at about 120 miles per hour.

TESTING CLUBS

While they showed us a 1000 cc driver head, it was just for show. The limit, since 2003, is 460cc. Most drivers have a bigger sweet spot and the measure is for moment of inertia which is the resistance of an object to be twisted.

Scientists test the spring-like effect on the face, comparing it to a diving board. The more flexible it is, the longer it takes to come off the club. A high-tech sensor measures the contact in microseconds – just how long the ball touches the club face. The limit is 257 microseconds.

Rugge says the shaft has little to do with that test.

“The shaft is simply there as a delivery mechanism,” he said.

VISITORS ON THE RANGE

Out back, once the robotic arms are turned off, visitors can use the driving range with old wooden-shafted clubs from the 1920’s.

“Can I get a set of these?” joked one man from the visiting group of the Massachusetts Golf Association. Another, after hitting a winner, said, “I better quit now.”

Rugge says that clubs are a lot easier to hit today and he doesn’t think they need to get much easier.

RUGGE’S TESTING MISSION

“Those who say, ‘Well, we need to make it even easier to get more people to play golf,’ well, I don’t buy it. I think this is fine,” said USGA Technical Director Dick Rugge.

“We are a competent group that is administering the equipment rules in a very thoughtful and careful manner.”

Rugge added, and why should we argue, “The club, at its basic, is a stick with a hunk of metal on one end and a hunk of rubber on the other end. No moving parts, no electronics, but it’s attached to the most complex machine ever invented, a human being, who has a different swing every time and a different person every time and that makes it a very difficult challenge to make that simple stick work well for everybody.”

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