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Sports administrators shoulder hefty responsibilities, demanding deftness, courage and commitment. But above all else, they are custodians of the sports they are charged with governing and their objective should be to leave the sport in a better place than they found out.<\/p>\n
The main reason sports have governing bodies is to minimise individual biases, so decisions are made for the greater good.<\/p>\n
The US Golf Association and the R&A \u2013 together the governing bodies for golf worldwide \u2013 have proclaimed they\u2019re upending the table by forcing manufacturers to detune golf balls to make the game harder and more frustrating for all players, from weekend hackers to professionals. Equipment manufacturers are next in the firing line.<\/p>\n
So the golf ball will fly less distance, and perform worse in 2030 than in 2023 \u2013 all because Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm and co can bomb the ball miles and there\u2019s supposedly no room to make courses longer.<\/p>\n
The decision by the USGA and the R&A seems myopic and poorly thought out. It is a \u201csolution\u201d that ignores every other component of this supposed problem, such as club technology and course design. <\/p>\n
Golf ball manufacturers were never going to be interested in making special, less-performing balls for professionals, and forcing change was never going to be limited to the golf on television. The notion that only pros would play with dumbed-down balls was always a hoax.<\/p>\n
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It won\u2019t just be the likes of Rory McIlroy affected by the rule changes for golf balls.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Getty Images<\/cite><\/p>\n Should FIFA narrow the goalposts in football if there\u2019s a string of high-scoring seasons? Should the NBA install hoops six inches higher? Of course not. As it is with golf, the sport would be poorer for the change.<\/p>\n Conversely, consider rugby. Leave aside the calamities of 2023, the most important decision Rugby Australia made in the past decade came a few days ago.<\/p>\n In a two-year trial starting in February, the laws for all rugby in Australia below the elite Super Rugby level will change so a legal tackle must be below the ball-carrier\u2019s sternum. Before, it was legal for a defending player to tackle the ball-carrier below the height of the attacking player\u2019s shoulders.<\/p>\n The intention of the change is multidimensional. Firstly, it aims to reduce incidences of the defending player\u2019s arms hitting the ball-carrier\u2019s head. Secondly, if the defender must tackle below the attacking player\u2019s sternum, there is less likelihood of head-to-head contact, which is often the cause of the most sickening collisions.<\/p>\n The planned implementation of these rules isn\u2019t a thought bubble from a desperate organisation stumbling to shift the narrative. Rather, they are a product of World Rugby\u2019s research and deliberate consideration. Once the sports administrators had the research that identified the causes of harm, it was their responsibility to act, not least because they can become legally liable for injuries (or worse) that flow from failure to do so.<\/p>\n One of World Rugby\u2019s studies, published in 2017 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine<\/i>, analysed over 600 incidences of head injury assessments in matches spanning a three-year period.<\/p>\n The authors found three-quarters of those HIAs arose from a tackle scenario, as opposed to a scrum or other incident of head trauma. Researchers found the tackler was at far greater risk of head injury than the ball-carrier to a factor of nearly three. That is significant, because the sport\u2019s rules had been designed and tinkered with to focus on the safety of the ball-carrier.<\/p>\n The researchers concluded that all contact types in rugby \u2013 except for head-to-arm, head-to-ground and whiplash injuries \u2013 expose the tackler to greater risk of harm. That invited the possibility that the laws should preferentially protect the tackler, not just focus on the ball-carrier.<\/p>\n Therefore, what\u2019s perhaps not properly understood about the new rules, which Rugby Australia will enforce from 2024, is they aren\u2019t designed with the primacy of protecting the ball-carrier. It\u2019s largely the opposite.<\/p>\n There is no greater responsibility for a sport\u2019s administrators than to construct rules to best protect participants from harm. Rugby can never be made inherently safe but its administrators are obliged to make it as risk-free as possible.<\/p>\n If sports such as rugby, boxing and American football didn\u2019t already exist, they would not get the social licence to be established today.<\/p>\n The governance of sports \u2013 in particular collision and combat sports \u2013 constitutes an endless loop of amending the rules and introducing new ones, to make inherently dangerous practices less risky. Head injuries in sport, and concussion management especially, represent an existential crisis for dangerous sports, some of which won\u2019t exist 50 years from now without considered administration. Society simply won\u2019t countenance their continued existence, without radical change.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a balancing act. You can\u2019t have nursing homes full of banged-up ex-athletes who can\u2019t tell you their names because of repeated brain traumas, yet you can\u2019t remove the contact element from rugby because then it isn\u2019t rugby any more.<\/p>\n Max Douglas takes the full force of a high tackle from Pone Fa\u2019amausili in a Super Rugby match.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Getty<\/cite><\/p>\n Rugby players voluntarily <\/i>assume the risks associated with playing one of the toughest sports there is. One shouldn\u2019t argue that players should not be free to assume those risks.<\/p>\n Therefore, the role of the sport\u2019s administrators \u2013 defining and refining the sport with the times, science and medicine \u2013 becomes one of implementing the safest systems possible, whatever the cost. That\u2019s why RA\u2019s introduction of these regulations is so huge.<\/p>\n Hindsight has a remarkable way of skewering actuality. Ayrton Senna was the second-last person to die behind the wheel of a Formula 1 car at a sanctioned race weekend. His death at Imola in 1994, and the death of a fellow competitor, Austria\u2019s Roland Ratzenberger, in practice two days earlier, ignited a paradigm shift towards safety in F1.<\/p>\n Racetrack architecture changed to include safety features and long run-off areas; driver safety protocols and cockpit designs were radically overhauled. It was at Imola, almost 30 years ago now, that motor racing plummeted to its deepest nadir. If he were alive today, Senna wouldn\u2019t recognise F1 now, even though he was the best driver who lived.<\/p>\n Two deaths in a weekend. Formula 1 could not allow it to happen again. If only it had not taken the awfulness of those three days to turn the sport\u2019s collective attention to safety.<\/p>\n Sports news, results and expert commentary.<\/i><\/b> Sign up for our Sport newsletter<\/i><\/b>.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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