Home rulings let couch potatoes be part of the action too
It’s just Week Three of the TV golf season and already we’ve had two home rulings. Maybe this is the way of the future. Should the Rules Officials be worried about their jobs?
I doubt it. In fact I think you’ll see both the PGA Tour and the European Tour move quickly to make modifications that eliminate these retroactive disqualifications.
Obviously too late for Camilo Villegas or Padraig Harrington. Or countless other players whose cheating ways were picked up by the viewing public.
The first instance of a player getting caught that I can recall goes back twenty-five years to Craig Stadler, who found his ball under a pine tree and had to make his next shot on his knees. Stadler placed a towel on the ground, knelt on it and hit the shot.
There’s no way that Stadler was trying to gain an advantage by building a stance with his towel – he just didn’t want to get his pants dirty, which is pretty ironic since most of the time Stads looked like an unmade bed.
However, some rules vigilante sitting at home noticed Stadler’s egregious breach. Between handfuls of party mix and well into his second glass of merlot, the couch potato managed to call the PGA Tour office and report the cheatin’ bastard. It was after the round, and more importantly, after Stadler had signed his scorecard, so he was disqualified for signing for an incorrect score, having not assessed himself the requisite two stroke penalty for building a stance.
There was no suggestion that Stadler intentionally cheated, he just had an uncharacteristic bout of poofiness. But apparently that’s grounds for disqualification on the PGA Tour.
The home ruling is distressful in several ways. Only players in contention are likely to get caught with the home ruling because they’re the only ones who get seen on TV. (Unless you’re Tiger Woods but that’s a different topic). So it’s not a level playing field since some players are more scrutinized than others.
In almost every case the player is unaware that he did anything wrong, so he signs his scorecard in the sincere belief that it is correct. The home ruling usually occurs well afterward, so under the current rules, the only option is disqualification. I think this is where the fastest remedy can occur. Both Tours should institute a rule that permits a retroactive penalty instead of disqualification if it can be shown that there was no intent to cheat.
The final issue I have with these home rulings is they almost always involve niggling obscure rules. OK, let’s take a moment for the purists to gather themselves here. Yes, I know – a rule is a rule is a rule. But let’s get real here. The Rules of Golf didn’t get handed down from Mount Olympus, so we’re not heading into uncharted waters here when we suggest some re-thinking of the rules might be warranted.
For those who saw the video from Abu Dhabi last week, Padraig Harrington’s ball did move – about half a dimple. He thought it oscillated, which is OK. A viewer said it moved, which is not. Did it make a difference to Harrington’s position on the green? Obviously not. But, a rule is a rule, so Padraig had an extra few days off to enjoy the sights and sounds of the United Arab Emirates instead of contending for the title after his opening round 65.
In the NFL, even the on-field officials admit they could probably call holding on every play. Can you imagine if they allowed viewers to phone in infractions? They’d need a call centre in India to handle the flood. The same goes for hooking and holding in hockey or travelling in basketball.
Golf is unique among sports for a lot of reasons. Players are responsible for policing themselves. With relatively few exceptions, they make the right call almost all the time, even when it is to their detriment. Until the Stadler incident, professional golfers had the matter pretty much under control. However, constantly improving technology has made it possible for golf to come under greater scrutiny from home based viewers and this will only increase as the technology gets even better. Home rulings are bound to increase too.
I expect announcements maybe as early as this week from the PGA Tour and the European Tour to amend the disqualification provision for players caught retroactively. It’s likely that a 2-stroke penalty will be added to the player’s score but no disqualification.
Of course that doesn’t address the ongoing issue of home rulings. It’s a very strange situation. In a sport that has always insisted it didn’t need referees or umpires, TV has spawned a whole new game where home viewers are part of the action too.
No tournament is really over until the last viewer has signed off.
Equitable isn’t always apparent when it comes to The Rules of Golf
The Rules of Golf have certainly come under some intense scrutiny this past week. First we get the ruling at the PGA Championship that Dustin Johnson grounded his club in a sand trap on the 72nd hole incurring a two-stroke penalty that knocked him out of a playoff.
On Saturday LPGA Tour veteran Juli Inkster gets DQ’d from the Safeway Classic for using a weighted ring to warm up after a rain delay. Inkster was in second place at the time.
And closer to home, Jose de Jesus Rodriguez, one of the hottest players on the Canadian Tour, fired a course record tying 61 on Saturday at the Seaforth Country Classic but left the scoring tent before signing his card. Instead of taking a three shot lead into Sunday’s final round, Rodriguez will be heading on down the road muttering something like, “what a stupid I am!”
There is no doubt in any of these examples that the players clearly breached the rules. The web traffic, blogs and editorials are pretty divided on the issue, especially about Johnson’s bunker gaffe. The video evidence is clear – he did ground his club. However, what is unclear is whether he or anybody else could tell if he really was in a bunker. On TV it looked like hard packed dirt. Spectators were walking all over the area, kids were building sand castles.
The Rules of Golf are very specific and in case there is any doubt about their application, there exists an even bigger book called the Decisions of the Rules of Golf that accounts for virtually every scenario that has been encountered in assessing the Rules. Already there’s probably a new Decision for the Johnson ruling.
What is unclear and what has never been explained to my satisfaction is the part about the Rules of Golf being equitable. OK, so Johnson grounded his club in a bunker – technically a breach. However, it’s clear from the video that he didn’t test the sand, didn’t drag any material away from the back of the ball to provide for a cleaner hit and in fact didn’t do anything at all to gain an advantage over his fellow players. So how is it “equitable” to assess him a two stroke penalty for something he wasn’t even aware was a bunker.
The Inkster situation is even weirder. Inkster could have taken a couple of wedges from her bag to warm up if she wanted to swing additional weight. Instead she uses the lead donut and gets the bum’s rush from the premises.
Not signing a scorecard is something probably every competitor has done once in their lives. And just once, because forever after, in every tournament you play, it will be indelibly etched on your brain to sign the damn thing before you get up from the table. I don’t know the specifics of the Rodriguez situation but he was undoubtedly excited after shooting a 61 and breaking the course record, he would be thinking about having a three shot lead and there would be a pile of media people waiting to talk to him. However, his caddie would be there, his fellow competitors and at least two officials of the Tour would be at the table, yet not one of them checked to see if his scorecard was signed.
It happens and I get it but it’s another golf technicality that makes no sense. It’s certainly not equitable. Rules purists will blame the player alleging that it’s his responsibility. They’re correct but that doesn’t make it right.
All of these rulings stir the pot and make for great debate but if you read the input from casual golf fans and players you’ll note an almost unanimous sentiment that they think the rules are stupid and should be changed. Most casual golfers play by their own rules so these infractions are very curious to them.
In the case of Sarah Brown, a month or so ago, the officials at a Duramed FUTURES Tour event were so convinced that Brown was using wedges with illegal grooves that they DQ’d her mid round. Turns out they were wrong and the grooves were OK. Too late for Sarah though.
To me it seems like the Rules of Golf have resulted in a lot of players being penalized for things that didn’t give them an advantage over their fellow competitors. There’s nothing equitable about that.
Someone once said, and I’m paraphrasing here a bit, “if the law results in one innocent man being hanged then the justice system is not working.” Maybe it’s time the Rules of Golf had a do-over.
There’s no room in golf for cheaters
A friend of mine recently competed in a tournament with a player who was cheating. As he described it the player would mark his ball with a toonie in front of the ball and then replace the ball in front of the toonie. In so doing he gained a couple of inches, hardly a major infraction but cheating nonetheless.
My friend discussed it with the third member of his group who was also aware of the rules violation. Both players then watched for several holes to ensure they had not been mistaken but the cheating continued.
Neither player felt comfortable confronting the cheater so nothing was said. Ironically, if it had been a friendly game with golfers they knew both players would probably have said something – maybe a casual remark or joke, maybe something more serious.
It reminds me of an incident a number of years ago during a club team match play event. One of the members was notorious for marking and remarking his ball. In the course of lining up his putt he could turn a 15 footer into a 10 footer so smoothly you had to think hard to be sure you had really seen what you thought you had seen. At one hole he had a 6-foot putt but re-marked his ball four or five times as he ”looked” at the putt from all possible angles and that 6-footer had miraculously become a 3-footer. Finally my partner commented, “mark that one more time and it’s good!” We never had another incident during that match but it was only a temporary fix as the player persisted with his antics elsewhere.
Even though gaining a couple of inches on a long putt doesn’t seem too serious, it’s still an infraction and has to be pointed out to the player. Ignoring it would be similar to a linesman in hockey not calling an offside because the player was “pretty close” to the blueline.
A golfer has a responsibility to protect the rest of the field. The great majority of players don’t cheat but if a player is trying to gain an advantage on the putting green when everyone is watching, what’s he doing when no-one is looking? There are no gray areas when it comes to the rules of golf!
Some rules are just too inconvenient
I’m convinced that most golfers are colour blind. White stakes, yellow stakes and red stakes all seem to have the same meaning, which is: take a one stroke penalty, drop another ball close to where the ball lies in the hazard or out of bounds and play on. No such thing anymore as stroke and distance. No question of whether a ball crossed the margin of a hazard way back there or up here – since the ball is in the water up here, just drop it here. Not even a remote thought of walking back around that pond because it has yellow stakes – just take a drop here because the ball is only a foot from this side.
I have to admit one thing though – it sure speeds up play. Courses understand this too. Many of the areas that should be white staked for out of bounds are in fact red staked and played as lateral hazards. Dropping one 200+ yards up the fairway with a one stroke penalty sure beats reloading on the tee and running the risk you might jack another one over the fence.
The really interesting aspect of all of this is that players generally know they’re not adhering to the rules and many will often ask what the correct ruling is. When you explain the rule to them and what their options are, most of the time they look at you like you just arrived from Mars. Then they usually shrug and say, “I’ll just drop one here.”
Whatever!
Peter Mumford is the Editor and Publisher of Fairways Magazine in Toronto. Fairways is intended for avid golfers and this blog site is an extension of that same philosophy - we don't dumb it down for the uninformed!