It was, said “GolfWorld” magazine, ‘the drop heard ‘round the world.” Indeed, the furor set off by Tiger Woods’ rules mishap at Augusta National last weekend echoed through the golf universe, threatening to overshadow Adam Scott’s stirring playoff victory over a tenacious Angel Cabrera.
Woods’ misstep divided players, commentators and golf fans into opposing camps, prompting allegations that his prominence earned him his own set of rules. Even some of my fellow golf rules officials harbored that suspicion. They were as divided as the rest of the golf world whether Woods should have been disqualified from the tournament.
Players are responsible for following even those rules they do not know. When they don’t, they have to pay the price.
But the rules committee also has responsibilities, including discharging its duties in a timely and proper fashion. The Masters committee’s failure to do that escalated Woods’ predicament from a potential two-stroke penalty to a possible disqualification. The right solution was to waive the disqualification penalty, which is allowed in exceptional circumstances.
Through the controversy, suspicions of special treatment have been reinforced by misinformation. I’ll get to that, but first, some factual background.
The episode started when Woods’ round-two shot into the 15th green was too good. It ricocheted off the flagstick and into the pond near the bridge named for Gene Sarazen, the legendary pro who made the “shot heard ‘round the world,” a double eagle two on the par five hole in the 1935 Masters.
Woods chose to take relief under a procedure called “stroke and distance,” in which the player incurs a one-stroke penalty and plays his ball “as nearly as possible” from where he played his previous shot. As he admitted after the round, he didn’t quite do that. Perhaps confusing the procedure with a second option for a ball in a water hazard, he dropped about two yards behind the right spot.
But he wasn’t purposely trying to stretch the rules. Even those who dislike him – and there are many — aren’t jumping to that conclusion.
While Woods was still on the golf course, rules officials received a call alerting them that he may have played from a wrong place, an infraction which carries a two-stroke penalty. The rules committee looked at the situation and, for whatever reason, concluded — without talking to Woods or other potential witnesses — that he had not played from a wrong place. When he admitted as much later, the committee was in a fine fix.
Woods had already signed his scorecard. A player who signs for a score lower than he made is normally disqualified, even when the higher score is because of a penalty he did not know he incurred. But Woods would not have signed for a wrong score had the committee talked to him after the phone call, ascertained the facts and told him to add two strokes.
Meanwhile, as facts trickled out, misinformation abounded, including the allegation that this type of waiver of a disqualification penalty is unprecedented. It’s not.
As various media outlets reported in June, 2001, two-time U.S. Open champion Lee Janzen received a similar waiver in that year’s U.S. Open. Janzen wiped some dew from an area where he was to drop his ball, all in full view of the rules official assigned to his group.
The rules official said nothing and Janzen signed his card unaware that he should have added a two-stroke penalty for improving the area in which he was to drop his ball. The rules committee added the penalty retrospectively, but waived disqualification. The effect was the same, Janzen missed the 36-hole cut by one shot.
Woods also fell under suspicion because of the widely reported contention that he was given a break under a 16-month-old rules interpretation. That interpretation was designed to address the increasingly frequent circumstance where a TV viewer calls after seeing via high definition or slow-motion video what appears to be a violation.
Because a player can’t always see the same thing with the naked eye, the new interpretation allows a waiver of a disqualification penalty for failing to include a penalty the player could not have known was warranted. Anybody who looked at that rationale could see the high tech video exception didn’t apply in the Woods case.
In the end, Woods was held responsible for his rules violation and received the two-stroke penalty. Disqualification was waived, not because of who he is, but because it only became a possibility after the rules committee failed to act in a timely fashion.
Left to our imaginations is how things could have played out differently.
Had a rules official been nearby before Woods took his stroke from the wrong place, he could have instructed Woods to re-drop in the right place without penalty, shaving two strokes off the four-stroke margin that eventually separated him from the tournament winner.
Had Woods not mentioned that he moved back two yards – I suspect he wanted us all to understand that he is so good that he can calibrate his swing with that exactitude – he may have escaped temporarily without penalty, only to have a major dispute blow up later when people started comparing notes.
Had Woods won under those circumstances, it could have turned into “the feud heard ‘round the world.”
Paul McAuliffe is a golf rules official and a former editor of the Evansville (Ind.) Courier & Press. Published in Courier & Press April 20, 2013
