Go jump in the lake, you pernickety pedant
It’s a real balls-up, says Mickelson
Barcelona have not won five Champions Leagues but four Champions Leagues and a European Cup - has been from a man. If there is an essential social difference between the sexes, it is that men generally like to tell people they are right, whereas women silently know they are. You might even describe Mr Mctwerp’s intervention as a sort of elaborate ‘‘mansplaining’’ by proxy.
The phenomenon of TV viewers enforcing rules on behalf of the officials is one peculiar to golf. This should hardly surprise us. Golf adores its minor infractions to the point of fetish. The more minor, the better, in fact. Perhaps this is why it so often struggles to see the bigger picture.
This is, after all, a sport that will happily disqualify a player for not submitting their scorecard in the designated tent (as happened to Michelle Wie in 2008) but has very little problem with awarding the Open Championship to courses that for centuries have banned from the clubhouse any woman not wearing a pinny and carrying If Phil Mickelson were in charge, Lexi Thompson would have been the one taking the leap into Poppie’s Pond at the ANA Inspiration.
Mickelson tried to avoid speaking specifically about Thompson being penalised four shots for a day-old rules violation for replacing her golf ball in the wrong spot on the putting green. But he couldn’t help himself. And along the way, he raised questions about that happening on the PGA Tour.
‘‘To have a tournament be decided like that, with all the scenarios going around, as far as viewers calling in, as far as it being a one-foot putt with really no advantage, just a little bit of loose marking, if you will, something that happens all the time, intentionally and unintentionally ... I think it should be reversed,’' Mickelson said yesterday.
a plate of sandwiches.
I suppose you could extrapolate conclusions beyond golf, as well. How a culture of pedantry and trifling complaint has slipped into broader society, which is why online discourse so quickly
‘‘I think that she should be given the trophy.’'
Thompson’s violation occurred on the 17th hole Saturday of the LPGA Tour’s first major of the year when she marked her ball and quickly replaced it in a slightly different spot.
‘‘I know a number of guys on tour that are loose with how they mark the ball and have not been called on it,’' Mickelson said. ‘‘I mean, they will move the ball two, three inches in front of their mark, and this is an intentional way to get it out of
descends into rancour.
You are wrong, I am right, and everyone must know this forever. It is why social media is not really a conversation at all, but a cacophony of competing monologues. But space is limited, any type of impression and so forth. That kind of stuff needs to stop.’'
Mickelson said it should be up to the tour to speak to those players and tell them to be more precise in marking and replacing balls on the green. He said the LPGA also should warn players if it notices them being lax with the procedure.
The penalty took Thompson from a three-shot lead to a one-shot deficit, and she wound up losing in a playoff to So Yeon Ryu. But to give Thompson the trophy, as Mickelson suggested, would have meant to ignore the Rules of Golf.
Mickelson said he didn’t want to expand on his comments any further.
‘‘I feel like we’ve all kind of been a little lax at times in the markings of our golf ball and I hate to see it cost somebody a major championship because of that,’' he said.
and there is a certain irony to a column complaining about people complaining, so we will probably leave that one there.
Of course, the ultimate shrine to golfing pedantry - its Mecca, Taj Mahal, Uluru and Western Wall (not the Wailing Wall, as all true pedants will already know) - is Augusta National, where the Masters begins tomorrow. And in its litany of petty proscriptions - no phones, no jogging, no chairs with arms, no backward-facing baseball caps, no black members until the 1990s - it is possible to identify a certain tinpot paternalism, a sense that rules exist not simply to regulate the spectacle, but to regulate the mind. Sport has always been about exploring what humans can do. Golf, at its most rarefied levels, seems to revel in telling them what they cannot.
But back to California, and back to Thompson, who shrugged off her four-shot penalty to force a play-off with So Yeon Ryu, which she lost.
Afterwards, LPGA rules manager Dan Maselli lamented the trouble caused, saying: ‘‘People do see things, and I wish they would speak up more quickly. Because then we could have taken care of this during her round.’’
This, perhaps, is the ultimate act of golfing pedantry: complaining about a prior act of pedantry on the grounds that it was not prompt enough.
Chip, if you are reading this: raise your game, my man. You have a rival.
Telegraph Group