Thomas led the USGA’s equipment rules-making efforts from 1974 to 2000 and contributed mightily to the way the game is enjoyed today by developing the graphite shaft in 1969, a component that is part of clubs in the bag of nearly every golfer. Its lighter weight enabled golfers to start the game earlier, play the game longer and swing the club faster than they ever had before.
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.
He also helped to conceive the USGA’s Slope system for rating golf courses so handicaps were tied more directly to the relative difficulty of the course.
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.” (...)
Thomas, who with his counterpart and friend R&A technical expert Alastair Cochran kept an academic's focus on equipment guidelines, confessed that while he oversaw more than 6,000 equipment decisions in his time at the USGA, he enjoyed it very little because each one involved nettlesome record-keeping, paperwork and occasionally lawyers.
“Fortunately I had good people working with me, which made the task bearable,” he wrote in his memoir Just Hit It, “but I knew I had to be excruciatingly thorough because I did not want to do something wrong or make a decision that I couldn’t defend later.”
There were notable vexing moments in Thomas’s quarter-century steering the equipment ship. Among them was a decision outlawing the Polara ball, which was designed to self-correct hooks and slices with its pattern of six rows of full dimples around the equator of the ball and extremely shallow ones on either end. Thomas disallowed the ball under a broad interpretation of the rules prohibiting artificial devices that might assist the player making a stroke. Thomas also employed a stipulation that reserved the right of the USGA to change club and ball rules at any time, left the Polara off the list of conforming balls and then added a rule about golf ball symmetry. But the USGA later had to settle out of court with the maker for a reported $1.375 million.
Thomas wanted to stay ahead of a future in equipment in innovation he couldn't always clearly see by defending the game's enduring challenge, said Jerry Tarde, Editor-in-Chief of Golf Digest and global head of strategy & content for Discovery Golf/Golf Digest. “Frank symbolized golf equipment innovation for 30 years and gave terms like 'coefficient of restitution' a popular following to the extent that he became known as ‘Dr. Strangeclub,’ ” Tarde said. “The words that I always associate with him are ‘We don’t want to put a ladder up the Matterhorn,’ which perfectly encapsulated his goal to preserve the challenge while promoting the mountain-climbing spirit of the game.”
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.
Thomas called Solheim a friend, writing, “His tenacity and stubbornness impressed me and made Karsten one of the most successful innovators in the game,” Thomas wrote, remembering fondly how Solheim bought a Thomas self-portrait as part of a Golf Digest charity auction. “I shed more than a few tears at his posthumous—and belated—induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame.”
Karsten’s son, John A. Solheim, who took over the reins for his father, remembered Thomas fondly.
“I’m very saddened to hear of Frank’s passing,” said Solheim, Ping chairman and CEO. “He was a respected friend to both myself and my father. We were on opposite sides of the table with Frank during the ‘square groove’ era and a few other issues over the years, which led to countless disagreements and spirited debates, but in the end, we walked away as friends. We remained close over the years as he continued his passion for golf research and product design. He will be missed.”
Of course, for a time, the grooves controversy may have tempered the ruling bodies’ willingness to aggressively limit equipment companies and their innovations. At least that’s how Thomas saw it. In the mid-1990s, Thomas saw the approach of thin-faced titanium drivers and realized the game was at a kind of crossroads. The thinner faces, Thomas believed, violated the earlier rule he had written to prevent metal drivers from having a spring-like effect. While he said he privately advocated the drivers be disallowed after demonstrating the spring-like effect existed, he helped develop a limit on “coefficient of restitution” in 1998 that was in line with where drivers were at the time. He wrote in Just Hit It, “I was a little upset at being asked to compromise the enforcement of a rule I had written, and especially at being told that I was not really interpreting it correctly. Perhaps I should have just accepted it and kept my mouth shut. This is not my nature.”
The new enforcement procedure for the rule required a limit on spring-like effect involved a somewhat complicated air cannon test and a numerical average for coefficient of restitution that carried to the third decimal. He later wrote, “I came to realize that the rules should in most cases express principles that cover intents and purposes rather than trying to anticipate every innovation that may arise someday and specify it out of existence. The rules that do this are effective and tend to remain so; the ones that are overly specific often have unintended consequences.”
by Mike Stachura and E. Michael Johnson, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: John B. Carnett
