Scott McCarron wants to set one thing straight. He never called Phil Mickelson a cheater.
That should help keep the lawyers at bay, as if there was ever going to be any. Mickelson's implied threat of having his legal team deal with the biggest story in wedges since Gene Sarazen invented a club to get out of the sand was almost as laughable as his claims that he was slandered by his fellow golfer.
Besides, McCarron has a valid point. He never called Mickelson a cheater.
What he said was that Mickelson cheated.
The semantics of that can be argued all the way up the Pacific Coast as the PGA Tour gets underway in earnest in uncertain times made even more uncertain by the absence of the game's biggest star. The stop this week is at the storied Riviera Country Club, where Lefty would be a big story no matter what he had in his bag.
Mickelson is the two-time defending champion, and the only player who can even attempt to fill the huge void the tour faces with Tiger Woods not around. McCarron is a journeyman who barely cracked the top 100 money winners last year and is recognizable only because he wields a putter almost as tall as he is.
In more civil times they might have changed shoes on the same locker room bench without more than a cursory nod. Now they're pitted against each other in a battle that neither can win.
At issue are some 20-year-old wedges that would still be gathering dust in someone's garage had the USGA not taken it upon itself to try and put some skill back in the game by making it harder for players to control the ball from places they shouldn't be hitting it, notably the rough.
The bigger issue, though, may be the integrity of the sport itself. This is, after all, supposed to be a gentleman's game filled with people of honor who want only to do the right thing.
Mickelson, though, seems to want to do only what's right for him.
To that end, Mickelson has declared he has every right to play Ping-Eye 2 wedges which were grandfathered in by a lawsuit from new rules designed to limit spin off the clubface. He's not alone, as a handful of players have scrounged around to find the old wedges and stick them in their bags.
To McCarron and others, though, the black and white that Mickelson sees is a very gray area indeed. They believe anyone playing the old clubs is, at the very least, violating the spirit of the rules of golf by gaining an unfair advantage over those who don't have the old wedges.
``I am still appalled by the fact that any player would make the choice to put this controversial wedge in play,'' McCarron said Monday.
A lot of other people are probably appalled that McCarron plays with a putter as long as a broomstick, something that no one in golf would have considered proper until it came into vogue in recent years. The big putter helps a player control small muscle and calms nerves, which has probably allowed McCarron to keep his spot on tour all these years.
And every player who has ever asked for a questionable drop has tried to use the rules to his advantage. Woods himself once had spectators in Phoenix move a huge boulder in front of his ball, saying it was a loose impediment.
But this is about grooves, and it's more complicated than just that. There was speculation that Mickelson, who argued last year with the USGA over the new limitations on grooves, was more concerned with sending a message to the USGA than he was with spinning the ball at Torrey Pines.
Whatever the case, Mickelson clearly didn't expect to be blasted by a fellow pro for doing so, and certainly didn't expect to be labeled as a cheater. Predictably, the tour came out on behalf of its biggest remaining star by basically saying it was a bad thing to say bad things about fellow players.
The big question now is to see how far Mickelson will take this. Was he just trying to make a point to the USGA or does he really think better grooves will help him vault to No. 1 in the world in Woods' absence?
His main sponsor, Callaway Golf, surely can't be too happy Mickelson is playing a competing company's lob wedge, especially since Callaway is spending a lot of money for an ad campaign featuring Mickelson on the Super Bowl pregame telecast. Hard to convince duffers to play their wedges when Mickelson himself isn't.
The irony is that Mickelson is one of the great wedge players ever. He can play shots other players can only dream of, regardless of the size of his grooves.
He didn't have to pick this fight, but for some reason he did.
Now he has to deal with the consequences.
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Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlberg(at)ap.org
