It was January 2010, and John Daly was standing on the first tee at the Sony Open in Hawaii. He pulls a wedge from his bag, and it's older than half the caddies on Tour.

Officials glanced over, but Nobody said a word, since there was nothing to say.

And that wedge was a 1986 Ping Eye 2; actually, it is a 25-year-old one. Square grooves, the whole deal. The same square grooves the USGA had literally just outlawed.

The 59-year-old golfer knew something they'd rather he didn't, and a legal clause tucked inside a decades-old settlement that makes those clubs permanently exempt. Dean Wilson knows it, too. Both men play that week with vintage equipment, both completely within the rules.

Square grooves are nastier at impact than conventional V-grooves. They dig in, grab the cover, and load up backspin. A wedge shot that checks hard and stops cold gives a Tour pro a massive edge around the greens.

Bigger spin numbers, tighter windows, more birdie looks. The USGA banned them specifically because they tipped the scales too far.

Trouble was, banning them didn't erase what had already been signed in court.

The backstory goes back to Ping founder Karsten Solheim, who spent years locked in a dispute with the USGA over how grooves were actually supposed to be measured.

The PGA Tour got impatient and banned square grooves outright in 1990. Ping sued both. The USGA permanently settled and grandfathered Eye 2 clubs made between 1985 and 1989. The Tour followed with the same terms in 1993.

Those agreements had no expiry date, and nobody had bothered to revisit them. Daly found the gap, and then he went straight to the press about it. "I know a lot of guys are buying them off eBay," he told the Associated Press.

John Daly and his Vintage Wedges Gold Rush

When that eBay market John Daly described, it actually barely moved. Tracking down 30-year-old wedges in good enough condition for Tour play turned out to be far messier than logging onto a laptop.

Most surviving sets had been sitting in garages and sheds for decades. The grooves were worn down, the shafts sketchy. Not exactly Tour-ready.

Ping couldn't ride to the rescue either. The settlement banned it from making new versions of the grandfathered clubs; what existed was all there would ever be.

Meanwhile, Tiger Woods had already been playing conforming grooves throughout the 2009 season, months before the rule took effect for everyone else. The rest of the Tour largely followed without a fuss.

Throw in the fact that the R&A never signed those 1990s agreements, meaning the vintage Ping wedges were flatly illegal outside USGA jurisdiction, and the window was even smaller than it looked.

Golf moved on, the way it always does. But that week in Honolulu, John Daly reminded everyone that knowing the rulebook cold can be just as useful as knowing how to hit a sand wedge.

So what do you think of John Daly's loophole play? let us know!

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Written by

Sneha Abraham

Edited by

Kalp Thaker