The last couple of days have been tough ones for golf fans. That’s because we’ve been forced to defend our sport and its rules in the wake of the stunning finish at the PGA Championship on the weekend. In the span of just minutes, Dustin Johnson went from putting for his first major championship, thinking he was headed for a playoff, to finding out he was penalized two strokes, missing the playoff and joining golf history.
(Oh, by the way, Martin Kaymer beat Bubba Watson for his first major title.)
At the heart of this stunning result is Rule 13-4 (b), which states before playing a stroke, a player cannot touch the ground in a bunker with his club.
At every tournament, whether major championships or club championships, golfers are given a sheet containing the local rules. These are special rules or conditions that exist at the course being played.
At Whistling Straits, the stunning and intimidating Pete Dye design along Lake Michigan in Wisconsin, players were told that any area that was designed and built as a sand bunker would be played as a hazard, including areas outside the ropes where galleries would be. On a course where club officials can only estimate there are some 1,200 bunkers, that’s seemingly everywhere.
So Johnson hits into the gallery on the 72nd hole of the tournament with a one-shot lead. His ball is sitting on an innocent-looking patch of sand where thousands of fans would have walked during the week. He later admitted the idea this sandy patch was a bunker never crossed his mind.
He grounded his club, played his shot, missed his putt to win and expected he was headed for the playoff when a rules official broke the news: Johnson, we have a problem. (Imagine the heartbreak if Johnson had made the putt and thought he had won, then found out he lost.)
To a casual fan, this is what is wrong with golf. Johnson was denied a chance at victory by a silly rule, one of many in the sport. (Signing an incorrect scorecard always gets folks riled up.) Even diehard fans at Whistling Straits were chanting for Johnson to be allowed to take part in the playoff. Sports commentators, even golf commentators, think it all stinks.
The Rules of Golf are there to protect the player, but it is the player’s responsibility to know them. Johnson did not.
Tiger Woods knows the rules and used them to his benefit in the 1999 Phoenix Open. Stymied behind a boulder the size of a bar fridge, Woods called on a rules official to ask if it was a loose impediment. Since it wasn’t embedded in the ground, Woods — actually, a bunch of men from Woods’ gallery — was allowed to move the rock, estimated to weigh 500 kilograms.
Wouldn’t you rather see Rules of Golf administered with black-and-white clarity than some of the spectacles officiating in other sports has provided: France advancing to the World Cup on a hand ball in the penalty area by Thierry Henry, the Dallas Stars winning the Stanley Cup on a Brett Hull goal with his skate in the crease, and Jorge Orta being called safe at first when replays showed he was out in Game 6 of the World Series between the Royals and Cardinals, allowing Kansas City to win and take the series in seven games.
Those were blown calls. The penalty against Johnson was correct. The sport and its players should be proud golf administers the rules equally, regardless of the circumstance.
-The Chronicle Herard
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