By John Gordon
Reprinted from the National Post
May 25, 1999

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - When you see a seminar called "Spine Alignment" at a golf conference, you assume a chiropractor is the featured speaker.

But Richard Weiss wasn't cracking bones yesterday at the International Network of Golf conference. He was breaking down one of the game's most closely guarded secrets, previously known to only a handful of insiders.

Everybody has a favorite club in their bag. Which one do you choose when you absolutely, positively have to make a critical shot? Maybe it's that 6-iron you always pull out when confronted by a narrow landing area with water on both sides.

Weiss, a wealthy Miami-based entrepreneur and golf professional, says he can give you 14 favourite clubs. It doesn't matter what make they are or what your handicap is.

"I've had men come up to me and say, 'God bless you,' and women kiss me after I've fixed their clubs. I had one fellow tell me he'd rather give up his wife than surrender the 2-iron I spine aligned for him.

"Once it's done properly, hitting each club is like dropping a razor-sharp butcher knife through soft butter. There's no need for special vibration-absorbing inserts in the shaft, and the distance and accuracy are vastly improved."

Spining, splining, or seaming has had the United States Golf Association on pins and needles since a Michigan welder filed a patent outlining the process in 1989.

When Robert Colbert examined the clubs of his daughter, a professional golfer, he detected irregularities running down the length of every shaft.

He disassembled the clubs, identified those "spines," and then reassembled the clubs, aligning the spines to the same position on each club. The spines were most likely where the shaft, which had started out as a flat piece of steel and was then rolled around a mandrel into a tube, had been welded during the manufacturing process. The resulting improvement in performance was dramatic.

Colbert received the patent in 1990. A few weeks later, the USGA issued a notice to all golf club manufacturers that the process violated Rule 4-1b, dealing with the properties of the golf shaft, as well as Appendix II 4-1b, outlining the bending and twisting properties of the shaft.

At the time, the USGA was embroiled in a messy legal suit with Karsten, manufacturers of Ping clubs, over the so-called "square grooves" controversy. With its diminished financial reserves, the last thing the association wanted was to fight a technology battle on two fronts. They decided on a compromise, which did little for the association's image, nothing for golfers, and put Colbert out of the spine-aligning business.

In effect, says Weiss, the USGA told the manufacturers they could align the spines in their shafts, as long as they didn't advertise that fact. Because of the manufacturing and fitting hurdles that posed, spine aligning remained in golf's shadows.

"No golf shaft is round or straight -- steel, graphite, you name it," Weiss, 53, said yesterday. "Due to unavoidable manufacturing deficiencies, there is always a preferential direction in which they want to bend or twist. What my process does is determine precisely where the spine should be aligned in order to allow the shaft to perform as if it was symmetrical."

The next time you watch a Tour pro in action, look closely at the location of the manufacturer's label on their club shafts. Chances are that they won't all be facing up, as they are on your clubs. Instead they will be rotated to various positions; that's the clue that those clubs have been spine aligned. The logos all started out on top, but were moved when the shafts were rotated.

While Tour pros get theirs done by technicians who travel from tournament to tournament in manufacturers' equipment vans, Weiss said that process is relatively primitive, able to locate only the 90-degree quadrant in which the spine is located.

With the help of an impressive battery of experts, he has developed a sophisticated machine that identifies the spine much more accurately -- to within one degree.

Picture yourself at address. The club is at 12 o'clock, the target is at 9 o'clock. Weiss says that by placing the spines in a precise "neutral" position, 9 o'clock or 3 o'clock, all your clubs will perform optimally, resulting in better accuracy, distance, and softer feel.

By placing the spines at other positions, significant performance enhancements can be achieved. Hooks and slices can be corrected, for example. And that's what had the USGA so concerned with the patent that was filed by Colbert and purchased by Weiss in 1991.

In order to receive the USGA's reluctant blessing in February, Weiss had to agree not to align shaft spines in order to create such equipment-related corrections. His spine-aligning process, the USGA decreed, must not be used "for the purpose of unduly influencing the movement of the ball."

That's fine with Weiss. He believes not all shafts are created equal and he simply wants to remedy the situation.

Spine alignment has been used in other sports for years. For example, an arrow that is not so aligned will not fly straight to its target; a fishing rod that does not have its eyelets placed precisely on its spine will twist in your hand when a fish strikes.

In auto-speak, no matter how good or expensive the tires on your car, you won't get optimum performance if your wheels aren't aligned.

Frank Thomas, the USGA's technical director, used to work for Shakespeare, one of the leading manufacturers of fishing rods. You would assume this intelligent man, with his background, would have realized back in 1990 that all golfers should not be denied the same level playing field available to all archers, fishermen, and motorists.

"It is not fair to the industry that a select few surreptitiously use [spining] and that the general public is deprived of its benefits," Weiss told the USGA. Had the USGA itself showed some spine nine years ago, this secretive process would be commonplace in the industry.

Richard Weiss deserves full credit for pursuing his dream to a successful completion against a traditionally intransigent establishment. He anticipates skirmishes with patent violators, shaft manufacturers, and other critics.

But his converts are many and the numbers are growing.

Among them you can count Tom Wishon, chief technical officer of Golfsmith and one of the most respected equipment experts in the world. He used Golfsmith's swing robot, Max Headspeed, to test Weiss' theory.

"Orienting the shaft in four different positions [12, 3, 6, and 9 o'clock] produced noticeable variations in clubhead velocity, ball speed, and launch angle," says Wishon. "This evidence supports the belief that spine-matching might help maximize a shaft's performance. It appears that the perfectly matched set of clubs would be matched for frequency and spine." Frequency matching determines the relative stiffness of shafts.

Listening carefully yesterday, I joined the inner sanctum. I learned how to align the spines to correct slices and hooks, although that's definitely in contravention of the Rules of Golf.

I'd like to share that knowledge with you, but the USGA says if I tell you, I'd have to kill you.

Sorry.

John Gordon's golf column appears in the National Post on Tuesdays and Fridays. His e-mail address is gorgroup@csolve.net