USGA chief insists the 'juice is not worth the squeeze' of changing equipment testing despite Rory McIlroy driver debacle
The Rory McIlroy driver debacle will not lead to a change in equipment testing, according to the United States Golf Association.
The USGA, which carries out the pre-tournament checks, had faced calls from Scottie Scheffler and Xander Schauffele to overhaul their procedures last month.
Scheffler and McIlroy were both forced to change a non-conforming driver in the build up to the championship, after each was found to have become too springy, and the world No 1 went on to argue against the current method of randomly selecting only a third of each field for testing.
Scheffler's view was that the entire field should have their equipment checked if the measure was to be considered fair.
However, USGA chief Mike Whan, whose organisation is running this week's US Open, has dismissed that possibility, saying that the nature of any advantage and the prevalence of failures were both too small to justify.
'With what we're seeing today, it would be a greater interruption,' Whan said. 'The juice wouldn't be worth the squeeze.'
He added: 'If I'm being honest with you, I think in terms of what happened at the PGA Championship, it made us more committed to not wanting to have this be the topic of the town because I think when you talked about a rules violation or somebody who's playing with a hot driver, that gets so much more sensational than the reality.
'I can tell you as a rules body, if we had concern about this incredible advantage, we would change the degree in which we test.
'But we think the testing that we're doing now is commensurate with the size of both the issue and the size of the reality of the issue.
'I know we tested this week. I couldn't tell you if we had failures, and if so, what those failures were at the time.
'I know that if we saw a trend that was alarming in terms of either how many or how far they were moving beyond (the permissible limit), we would change the way we approach it.'
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