"In the book, In Search of the Perfect Golf Swing (eons before box grooves), the researchers discovered that it didn't matter if the club had grooves or not when hit from the fairway."
Tony:
How've you been Pal?
That just may be a pretty fair statement of yours above.
It very well may be that the USGA may pass down some new rules and regs on grooves or on something that may have the effect grooves do on the ball. You'll notice that the USGA has put the manufacturers on notice that they are seriously looking at three aspects with perhaps the idea of doing something about some or each of them. They call those three areas;
1. MOI (Moment of Inertia)
2. Spin Generation
3. The ball
I believe what they are looking at with "spin generation" is how and how much various clubfaces effect the spin rate of golf balls.
I've always been intrigued by what Barney Adams told me one time about what grooves do and all they do on a golf club. Barney referred to grooves as "garbage cans". When I asked him what he meant by that he said their sole function is to displace "junk" off the clubface and the bigger the grooves the more junk they displace. Therefore since U or Box grooves displace more junk off the clubface than V grooved do they simply work better out of the rough.
So you're probably right about the fairway. On most fairways there's no junk to displace off the face of the golf club (unless there's water on the fairway or they're pretty long). Obviously Barney was basically saying with a clean clubface grooves have very little to nothing to do with the spin the clubface puts on the golf ball. If one really thinks hard about what he said it sort of becomes obvious it really couldn't be otherwise.
