Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus agree on it. So do more than 500 upscale private country clubs and thousands of their members. So what is the United State Golf Association's problem with legalizing electronic yardage finders? As the USGA continues to prove (see Walter Driver and the Shinnecock Hills-U.S. Open greens fiasco or Fred Ridley and his I-don't-see-any-conflict attitude about being a member at Augusta National Golf Club, which excludes women from being members), it is an organization that remains populated with stuffed shirts.

Rob O'Loughlin, who runs the Madison, Wis.-based company that makes Laser Link range finders, would laugh the USGA's attitude off it if this wasn't about business. 

Maybe you haven't heard of Laser Link (Laserlinkgolf.com), but it's the biggest no-brainer since carry-bags with legs and plastic spikes in golf shoes. Coincidentally, this is O'Loughlin's second chance to dramatically change the face of golf. He was one of the founders of SoftSpikes, the company that pushed the radical idea of replacing metal spikes on golf shoes.

"We used to stand in the booth at the PGA Merchandise Show with a handful of those plastic spikes and people would say, 'you're kidding, right? You're not serious,'" O'Loughlin recalled. "We just about gave up at one point, but at the end of the game, we sold over one billion of those plastic cleats and completely changed the game, at least in North America. There are still some metal spikes in Europe but for the most part, this country is done with metal spikes. If everybody in America went back to metal spikes for one afternoon, they'd built a monument to SoftSpikes the next day. We were in the right place at the right time."

Laser Link may be, too, if golf's governing body can get its head out of its blue blazer. It is one nifty and dare I say, fun, gadget. Just aim the Laser Link, which is hand-held and looks like some kind of science fiction gun, at the pin and click on a button. Two seconds later, after the laser reflects off a prism located in the pin, you have the exact yardage to the hole. It's good for golf because it speeds up play. There's no walking around looking for the yardage on a sprinkler head, then pacing off the distance back to your ball. There's no looking at a pin sheet and doing mental math to figure out the distance. There's no need, even, to look at the GPS system on your high-tech cart which is inconveniently parked on the path 30 yards away. Just aim and click.

The difference between a written yardage marker, which gives you yardage only to the middle of the green, and a laser that gives you exact yardage to the pin is, what? Nothing. No difference. Both supply the same information, but in different formats.

Nicklaus has told O'Loughlin that since the Laser Link devices began being used at Muirfield Village Golf Club in Dublin, Ohio, the club has knocked 15 minutes off its pace of play. Hey, USGA, what's not to like about that? Yeah, I know. They're still trying to figure out how to get rid of motorized carts, metal woods and replace them with caddies and mashie niblicks. It's a battle the USGA is going to lose, sooner or later, because the Laser Links and other devices like it, make way too much sense, are simply way too convenient and ultimately, players will want them.

Meanwhile, a little company from Wisconsin is trying to swim upstream with its unheralded device that features two heralded spokesmen -- Palmer and Nicklaus. It's an unusual story about a man, O'Loughlin, who's trying to make lightning strike again after having success with SoftSpikes. When O'Loughlin became chairman of the board for SoftSpikes, the management guys went him looking for the next big thing to invest in. O'Loughlin said he looked at every GPS company, tee time company, exotic driver and shaft and, well, you name it. He said no to all of it until he ran across Laser Link, which the company bit on. Then SoftSpikes was sold to a financial partner so O'Loughlin asked to buy Laser Link from the firm and start his own company in 2000, which he did. He has spent the last four years trying to get Laser Link to follow in SoftSpikes' footprints. He's off to a good start, having landed his product in 500 private clubs and hooking up with golf's two biggest names from the previous century, Nicklaus and Palmer.

Charley Meacham, a friend and former LPGA commissioner, played a course in Palm Springs that used Laser Links and he loved it. He asked O'Loughlin if Palmer knew about it and O'Loughlin answered, "I don't know, but I'd love to tell him." Meacham said he'd set up a meeting. O'Loughlin said, "yeah, right." A few months later, O'Loughlin got a call from an assistant in Palmer's office who asked if he'd consider coming to Latrobe, Pa., for a meeting. "You mean tomorrow? Because I'll come this afternoon if you want," O'Loughlin joked. After a three-hour meeting later in the week, O'Loughlin had a deal to make Palmer the firm's spokesman. "I thought, I'm Walter Mitty," O'Loughlin said. "This deal is going so good, I can't believe it."

It got better when he got a call from a course owner in Indianapolis who said Nicklaus was smitten with Laser Link. It was at the grand opening of Sagamore, a Nicklaus signature course, when Jack showed up to play and discovered the gadgetry. Jack asked the owner for a yardage book. "We'll get those in next week," the owner said. "Well," Jack said, "you've got sprinkler heads marked with yardages, right?" "No," the owner said, "we'll get those done next month." "How are we going to play golf," Nicklaus asked. When the owner mentioned a certain laser device, Nicklaus gasped. His caddie was shown how to work it, but by the eighth hole, Nicklaus had taken it from him and was not only getting yardages for everybody in the group, he was showing club members and media types in attendance how it worked, practically making a sales pitch. Jack's people called O'Loughlin to express interest, and bingo, Jack was on board, too.

Now O'Loughlin is focused on getting Laser Link into golfers' hands. He's trying the old SoftSpikes plan. "With SoftSpikes, we focused on upscale private clubs and sold them to only about 400 clubs, but they were clubs like Winged Foot, Pine Valley and Augusta National," O'Loughlin said. "We had the right guys, then the other 12,000 courses followed suit. It's funny, but daily-fee courses, renting them out, none of that has worked. I thought clubs would put one Laser Link in every cart or hand them out as an amenity, but they're more like 7-wood. A guy wants to have his own. We put the system in at Prairie Dunes and they've sold 130 units to the members, one at a time."

The Laser Link units sell them for $239. O'Loughlin thinks his product is superior to the range-finder binoculars sold by Bushnell because those were geared to hunters. With the binoculars' crosshairs, you're never sure if you got the yardage to the pin or to that tree just behind the green. The Laser Link, bouncing off flagstick prisms, is more precise. Among the 500 clubs using them are some big names, including Castle Pines, Shadow Creek, Olympia Fields, Crooked Stick, Cherry Hills and Wade Hampton.

"The only thing between us and selling a million of these is getting the story told," O'Loughlin said. Oh, and maybe that whole USGA controversy.

"They allow these devices for daily play, but not for competition at the highest level," O'Loughlin said. "That starts the argument -- what is competition at the highest level? The club championship? The ladies on Wednesday afternoon when they play for a pickle dish? Jack and Arnold both asked me to explain why the USGA has a problem with it and I'm at somewhat of a loss. They just don't like electronic stuff. They've always hated golf carts. Like 'em or not, carts have been great economically for the game. They allow guys like my father-in-law, who's 78, to play three times a week. (His father-in-law, by the way, is Jim Fitzgerald, former owner of the Milwaukee Bucks.) They take this elite, aristocratic view and lump everything together -- golf carts, range finders, and decide they're not in the tradition of the game.

"The cat is out of the bag, but they don't want to give up. I've heard that change is imminent and it's coming in the next 24 months, but where I'm trying to sell my product, whether it's Maple Bluff Country Club in Madison or Bluemound Country Club in Milwaukee, it's not a factor. Getting SoftSpikes done was like winning the lottery. At the end of the day, I think this will be more important than SoftSpikes. Slow play is the biggest enemy of this game today and that's why the USGA is missing the boat here. And the single most-asked question every day on a golf course is, 'what's the yardage, how far have I got?'"

In the middle of his discourse about the USGA, O'Loughlin stopped speaking when Jack held up one hand, then rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. "Jack said, 'this isn't feel, this is information,'" O'Loughlin said Nicklaus told him. "He said, 'I've always had terrible vision. I haven't seen a golf shot land for 40 years. Feel is knowing that it's 75 yards and the wind is whatever and you know what kind of shot you want to hit. You could take Hogan out in a field, point at a fence post and say, how far is that? He'd be no better at answering that than you, but he's a better player.' That's pretty profound stuff and I think he's right."

In golf, as in the world, technology marches in. "Nobody's going back to metal spikes or golf bags that lay on the ground or bags with single straps," O'Loughlin said. "This is just about information and 140 yards means the same to me as it does to Phil Mickelson, we just have different ways of getting there."

There's one more thing, O'Loughlin feels, in his company's favor. "If you don't like it," he said of Laser Link, "don't get one. Play by feel. But the guy who's pounding you on Saturday morning will have one."

Sports Illustrated senior writer Gary Van Sickle writes for the magazine's Golf Plus section and is a regular contributor to SI.com.