THE GREEN JACKETS NEED TO OPEN EYES

There are few places more suitable for a discussion of the finer points of golf rules than Augusta National Golf Club.

The Masters is the tournament that requires its paying fans to be called patrons, and which has barred television broadcasters when their commentary became too cheeky. And the club itself is about as exclusive as they come. It took the better part of 80 years before it invited a woman to join.

You want rules? Members of the press are barred from using cellphones anywhere except in the press building, and only in certain parts of it. There is a specific prohibition from using one on the walk from the parking lot to the press building. Augusta National: very much pro-rules.

So it was that, as the 2017 edition of the Masters opened with a practice round Monday, the talk of golf was still centred on what happened a day earlier at the LPGA’s first major of the season, when Lexi Thompson was assessed a four-shot penalty midway through the final round of the ANA Inspiration for an improper ball placement during Saturday’s third round, after someone who watched on television emailed the LPGA and complained. I swear none of the preceding sentence is made up.

The penalty, two shots for putting the ball in the wrong spot by an inch or so after she marked it on the 17th hole, and two shots for signing the resulting “incorrect” scorecard, was applied when Thompson was heading to the 13th tee with a two-shot lead. She managed to force a playoff, but lost to So Yeon Ryu.

Negative reaction was fairly unanimous among golf professionals on social media on Sunday night, and it was the same at Augusta on Monday, where driving rain cancelled late practice rounds and allowed players the chance to come in and vent.

Rickie Fowler, once the kid in the flashy clothes who always wore a hat that was three sizes too large, was now the voice of calm reason. “I think we’ve seen some stuff in the past year that is not making the game look very good at all,” Fowler said, alluding to the late penalty — for a ball that wobbled ever so slightly on the green — that dinged Dustin Johnson at the U.S. Open last year, although in that instance, Johnson still hung on for the victory.

Fowler also hit on the nub of the problem: “There’s no other sport where people can call or email in or contact officials regarding an issue.”

Justin Thomas had similar complaints. “First off, I don’t know where this number or email is found. I really don’t,” he said. “I think I’ve even Googled it before because it’s just bizarre to me that someone can do that, and it cost her a major championship.”

Thomas, who went to the University of Alabama, said he would have liked to call officials during the college football championship to complain about offensive passinterference on the play that gave Clemson the title. “I would say that last one was a pick play (on) Clemson, and Alabama won the National Championship. Then I’m happy and everyone else is mad.”

In a sport that has pages and pages of hilariously arcane rules, this does not seem like a particularly complicated fix: do not accept outside complaints while a tournament is in progress. Fowler suggested a system whereby tournament officials could designate a video-watcher who could monitor play as it unfolded, as is the case now in most major team sports. This would still lead to inequities as certain tournaments and certain players have much more camera coverage than others, so someone who committed a foul on the third hole of the Puerto Rico Open would be much less likely to have it noticed by an official than someone who did the same on the 16th hole at Augusta. But those same inconsistencies are now the case in every sport that has an element of video review. Once that door is opened, there’s no way to hold every contest at every stadium to the same standard.

For golf, anything would be better than the current system, where officials are willing to accept outside counsel even after a day’s play is completed, as happened four years ago here when Tiger Woods was penalized for an improper Saturday drop on Sunday morning, and now, with Thompson, who was six holes from victory when rules officials dropped the hammer.

Eventually some player is going to be penalized on Sunday for something that happened on Thursday, because a retired rules pedant is finally going to get around to watching the first-round coverage that he had on the PVR.

“There’s no other sport where anybody could call in and say, ‘oh, that’s a foul,’ ” said Jimmy Walker on Monday. “I mean, I don’t know why we’re the exception.”

If any tournament was going to blaze the trail of refusing to accept phone complaints, you’d think it would be this one, where they are not exactly unfamiliar with banning outsiders.

Make it happen, green jackets. Use your exclusionary tendencies for good, for once.