Clarke gets Faxon off hook over illegal club

Darren Clarke probably meant it as a joke, but his throwaway line in the course of a Monday practice round may have saved Brad Faxon from disqualification in d non-conforming but the Royal & Ancient has not outlawed, but the case at hand involved the shortest club in the bag.

When Faxon's sand wedge was ruled illegal three days before the British Open started came my way last Thursday afternoon when, after an opening-round 68 which left him in joint second place, Faxon visited the press tent for a mass interview. Twenty minutes or so afterwards, Faxon was chatting with my Boston Herald colleague Joe Gordon and myself when the conversation turned to the artful birdie he had made on Lytham's 557-yard seventh after leaving his second shot in a steep-faced bunker.

"What did you use there, the Alien?" I kidded him.

"No," replied Faxon, "but the sand wedge I'd been using was declared illegal on Monday." Three days before the British Open Faxon had played a practice round with Clarke and Thomas Bjorn and displayed a deft touch out of the bunkers.

"Bjorn and Clarke were kind of kidding me, saying, 'No wonder you're so good out of the bunker, no wonder you're so good with the wedge. You've got illegal grooves', " recalled Faxon. "I didn't think they were illegal at all, but I decided to bring them in and have the R&A check them to make sure," said Faxon.

The operative rule on this particular issue isn't so much the width of the grooves themselves, but the spacing ratio between them. "You have to have a 3-1 ratio," explained Faxon. "My groove is .9 millimetres and the space was .25. I missed by .02." The R&A and the USGA specifications are identical on this point.

Faxon noted that not all the new Titleist-forged wedges were non-conforming - just the more expensive milled-groove model.

"There's one machine that mills the grooves and then there's another machine that stamps the grooves," he said. "The machine that mills the grooves cuts them so they're so wide the spacing between them is too narrow." Faxon said he had been unwittingly using the outlawed club for several weeks. He immediately discarded it and replaced it with an older Titleist Vokey sand wedge he'd never used before for the first round.

He had five more wedges dispatched by FedEx from the United States, and had them all tested once they arrived on Thursday night.

"I volunteered because the last thing I wanted to have happen was to use that sand wedge and have somebody say 'check it'," explained Faxon.

In this business one sometimes has to tread lightly in reporting matters like this. Since Faxon is a New England player and Titleist a Massachusetts company, the story was obviously of more than trifling concern to a Boston newspaper.

On the other hand, since Faxon had by his own admission been using the club for some time, one didn't want to be responsible for getting him retroactively disqualified from events he'd played over the last month (which included a joint sixth at the Buick Classic) because he'd volunteered the information in a conversation.

The next day Faxon assured Joe the rules provided for no ex post facto punishment. Ergo, we were free to rat him out.

Once Faxon had submitted his equipment for testing, Davis Love III and Steve Elkington, both of whom had been playing the forged Titleist wedge, also had to dump arms.

A golfing traditionalist as well as one of the game's true gentlemen, the 39-year-old Faxon is a long-time booster of golf both sides of the Atlantic. He first fell in love with links golf when he visited Royal Liverpool to compete in the 1983 Walker Cup. (A photograph of that year's US team still hangs in the clubhouse at Hoylake, revealing it to be one of the more eclectic bunches ever to represent this country, including as it did then-collegians such as Faxon and Willie Wood, the elderly US amateur champion Jay Sigel, and Bing Crosby's son Nathaniel.)

When a few years ago he blasted otherwise-qualified US Tour players who declined to compete in the British Open he earned himself the enmity of a few of his colleagues, at least one of whom, Scott Hoch, opined that Faxon ought to mind his own business.

In 2000, even though he was the defending champion in the corresponding US Tour event that week, he passed up the BC Open and flew to Scotland in an attempt to qualify for the Open at St Andrews. Playing at Lundin Links, he missed qualifying by two shots, flew back to the US, and successfully defended his title.

And after Faxon's first-round performance, one couldn't help contemplating the delicious prospect of his being paired with Colin Montgomerie in one or both of the final rounds. Before the 1997 Ryder Cup, you will recall, Monty had suggested Europe's hopes might be boosted by the fact that Faxon was going through a painful divorce, an indiscretion which caused several Americans to cry foul. (Faxon has subsequently remarried; he and his new wife are expecting their first child later this year.)

Alas, Faxon faltered over the weekend, finishing with rounds of 74 and 75 which left him four over for the Championship, 14 shots adrift of winner David Duval, but he left his mark on the 130th Open. As Joe Gordon pointed out, he managed to get the Royal & Ancient to do something the United States Golf Association could not: ban a golf club.

Even if it was his own.