Daft rules could leave golf in a real fix
Jonny Lee smashed his whisky glass against the wall of his high rise office. He had a lot of money riding on this thing. Lee picked up the phone. He tells his associate in Singapore that he wants everyone, and he means everyone, working through the night. He wants dirt on Lexi Thompson. The American is too far ahead and it is costing Lee a bundle of cash.
So how does the LPGA know that didn’t happen over the weekend? How does the LPGA know that the viewer who emailed in about Thompson’s rules infraction on the 17th hole of her third round wasn’t a front-man for some Asian gambling syndicate?
The answer is they don’t know. The answer is that golf has left itself wide open to manipulation.
I was going to ask in this column – what is wrong with Lydia Ko? But after the pantomime in Palm Springs. After the cock-up in California, the rort at Rancho Springs, the debacle at Dinah Shore, there is a rather more pressing question. What the hell is wrong with golf?
For those of you who spent Monday on Mars, the first major of the year was coming to a quite compelling climax.
Young American Lexi Thompson was playing golf from another planet. Thompson had just hit her 36th consecutive green in regulation with a stupendous combination of ball-striking and craft.
But Suzann Pettersen, who was swinging the club with a fluid grace to make us hackers drool, wasn’t going away. It was shaping up to be another of golf’s great duels.
And then a rules official appeared. Sue Witters of the LPGA intercepted Thompson en route to the 13th tee and told her that she had been assessed a four-stroke penalty. A viewer had pointed out that when Thompson had briefly marked her ball on the 17th green, she had replaced it on the wrong spot.
‘‘Is this a joke?’’ asked Thompson.
If it was, the punch-line, right in Thompson’s face, was a four-stroke penalty. She picked up a twostroke penalty for replacing her ball in the wrong spot and a further two strokes for signing for a wrong score. The poor woman sobbed.
There are a thousand reasons why the R&A and the USGA, the two bodies that rule golf, need to get hold of this situation straight away and not sit on their brains until the next rules overhaul happens in January 2019. The players are appalled, the watching public is cheated and the game is wide open to the sort of manipulation I described above.
There is also the matter of ‘‘equity’’, a word beloved of golf officials. Indeed one of them came on the television to talk about ‘‘protecting’’ the field.
And the comedy festival isn’t due for another month or so. How can you protect the field when television coverage is so inequitable.
Lexi Thompson, during regular play, was probably on screen for at least twenty times longer than the eventual winner So Yeon Ryu. Other players weren’t filmed at all. So there is clearly a way higher chance that Thompson would be caught on camera inadvertently breaking a rule.
In the name of Thomson, can we have some common sense here. Back in 1957 Peter Thomson would have won a fourth consecutive Open Championship - not that he would have accepted it - if the current rules officials were prowling the fairways.
The South African Bobby Locke, or ol’ ‘muffin face’ as the Yanks charmingly called him, had marked his ball on the final green at St Andrews. He was under a metre from the hole and had three putts for the Open Championship.
A posh voice intoned, ‘‘A fascinating display of unruffled concentration right up to the last putt.’’
Only Locke wasn’t unruffled. In the emotion of the moment Locke had forgotten that he had moved his marker a putter’s head because he was on his partner’s line. He played from the wrong spot, although that spot was actually further from the hole. When his error was pointed out after the event, Locke faced disqualification.
The officials thought otherwise and declared: ‘‘This committee considers that when a competitor has three for the Open championship from 2 feet, and then commits a technical error which brings him no possible advantage, exceptional circumstances then exist and the decision should be given, accordingly in equity and the spirit of the game.’’
So what has happened to the spirit of the game in the 60 intervening years? Is it somewhere at the bottom of Poppy’s Pond. Certainly there is no doubt that Thompson replaced her ball on the wrong spot. Indeed, in real time, with no TV close-up, it looked a little odd. But Thompson had played extra holes and was tired and everyone concurred that the error was inadvertent.
The watching public is fed up with these techno meddlers. Tiger Woods, Cristie Kerr, Justin Thomas, Brittany Lincicome and Lydia Ko all condemned the outcome. Paul Goydos wryly remarked, ‘‘That rule is broken every time a ball is replaced.’’
He is right. What’s the margin? It’s not in the rules. 1mm? Peter Uhlein, an American professional and son of ‘Mr Titleist’, tweeted, ‘‘The USGA butchered a ruling last year and the ANA Invitational just saying ‘‘You think that was dumb, watch this s..t.’’
Oh my. How I wish So Yeon Ryu had had the class to turn through 180 degrees and chip into the pond in the playoff. She would have been a heroine for ever in the game. But never mind, I’m calling for a replay.
No seriously. I’ve just spotted that the rules official allowed Yeon Ryu to draw for the playoff honour because ‘‘you had the lowest score, today.’’
Er, no, she didn’t, but crucially she pulled the number to hit first. But Thompson had the lower score, 67 to 68, and should have drawn. So I’m demanding a replay. Or disqualification for playing out of turn.
But I’m guessing the officials won’t be owning up to their own mistake any time soon.