Sort out bitter ‘new rules’ row or risk breakaway

HOW ARE the new rules going down at your club? In my regular fourball, we’ve got one man who wants the flagstick left in every time he putts, one who sometimes wants it left in, and two of us who will usually putt with the flag out.

In other words, on several greens during every round, you’ve got the flag being taken out and then put back in again before being taken out once more, rather destroying the purpose of the new regulation, which is to speed up play.

At our level, it’s just a tad irritating and usually leads to some ribald banter. On the professional circuit, it’s hard to overstate how badly the new rules have gone down with the elite on the two main tours.

When you get to the point where someone as classy as Rickie Fowler is joining in the ridicule, you know you’ve got problems.

“We all want to grow the game but you’re not going to do that making guys do unathletic things,” said the American, referring to his pet hate – the new rule requiring players to drop from knee rather than shoulder height.

He illustrated his point by likening the drop to squatting on a toilet.

It has led to a level of rancour I’ve not known in all my years writing about golf, and talk of revolution.

For the first time, it is now possible to see a day where the professional game breaks away from the two governing bodies in charge of the rules – the USGA in America and the R&A worldwide – and forms its own laws.

How on earth has it come to this, where you get a situation on Saturday night when the USGA thinks Twitter is the correct forum to tell Justin Thomas that “we need to talk” and tries to embarrass him by claiming he had cancelled planned meetings?

The new rules were meant to lead us away from the world of silly penalties but we’re seeing practically as many as we had before.

In a smoothly-run sport with one governing body, we’d have had a new set of rules brought in and the pros told to keep any reservations in-house so they can be sorted behind closed doors.

In golf, with so many governing bodies it’s hard to keep up, and with the levels of respect not what they should be, social media appears the place where much of the discourse is taking place.

As ever with social media, most of it is about abuse and vilification.

Judging by what has gone on so far, the Masters next month will feature a final round taking six hours to complete.

The leader will pick up a two-shot penalty on the 17th hole because his caddie stood behind him while he discussed a punch shot through the trees, leaving his playing partner to go on to win by holing a 4ft putt that bounced in off the flagstick.

More seriously, the pity of it is that most of the new rules are good and all of them are well-meaning.

Clearly, the new rule allowing the flagstick to be left in the hole while putting has to be ditched because the flag is being used by some players to aid performance, and the saga regarding caddie alignment needs addressing definitively.

But we need cool heads resolving these teething issues, not people with itchy Twitter fingers.

|