R.I.P. Frank Thomas, USGA Technical Director And Golf Inventor

Mike Stachura and Mike Johnson pen a lengthy remembrance of Frank Thomas, longtime USGA technical director and inventor. While the story goes into great depth on some of the fascinating moments in his career, Thomas’s accomplishments were well summed up by the USGA’s Mike Davis:

Thomas earned the respect of both those who worked with him at the USGA and those whose products he ruled on sometimes negatively. “Frank was such an important part of the USGA and the game,” said Mike Davis, CEO of the USGA. “He was an innovator who created golf’s first graphite shaft and played an integral role in creating the Slope System for golf course rating, among many of his incredible achievements. Most importantly, he was a friend of so many in our game. He will be sorely missed.”

And this on the graphite shaft:

Prior to coming to the USGA, Thomas earned an engineering degree from Western Michigan University and was working for Shakespeare Sporting Goods. He developed the filament winding technique for graphite fibers around a mandrel to control the demanding torsional bending properties of a golf shaft.

Thomas took on several pieces of equipment during his time, including the Polara ball and Ping’s square grooves. Both got the USGA sued and Thomas was named by Ping in the Eye2 iron case.

But it was the USGA’s knockdown-drag-out fight with Ping and its founder Karsten Solheim over the “square grooves” in his Eye2 irons that was a kind of Cuban Missile Crisis event for equipment rulemaking. It led to a $300 million antitrust lawsuit in 1985 that named Thomas personally and hinged on the interpretation of the measurement of a groove, a measurement that for all intents and purposes constituted the width of a human hair. Thomas initiated a change in the rules that provided updated and practical guidelines that in essence prevented more than half the irons on the market at the time from being ruled non-conforming. But the new specifics on groove width and spacing ran into measurement challenges, and the ruling bodies eventually blinked—albeit with no money changing hands and, perhaps most importantly, the USGA’s authority to make equipment rules was upheld.