More Groove Follow Up

Lost in my heckling of Barbaric and Gamy's heckling of Jim Achenbach over his U-groove column (still not online), I may have noted that GolfDigest's intrepid bloggers failed to note the R&A's possible role in slowing down the groove rule change, but Ryan Ballengee is above all the frey in parsing Jim Vernon's words more closely.

But the column made it a definitive--that the decision had already been made to implement a rule of some sort. Again, when posed to Vernon, he said, "There has been no prognosis made on when a decision will be made and there has been no prognosis on what that decision may or may not be." In plainspeak, not only hasn't a decision on timing been made, but there hasn't been a decision at all.

What does this mean? Is there new research to indicate that the proposed rule change is a bad decision? Would testing compliance on Tour be next to impossible? Might they be considering doing something to the ball instead (and kick Titleist in the pants while they're down from the Callaway lawsuit)?

I think we need some answers.

It does seem that in just a few months we have gone from a foregone conclusion on a U-groove ban or modification, to a much less certain outcome.