In the rough: ‘Cheater’ chide rocks Reed
How one word saw the penny finally drop — that golf does not easily forgive or forget those who mess with etiquette of game
At a Ryder Cup, Patrick Reed has the luxury of screening out hecklers with a smirk and a cupped ear of defiance. But last weekend in Hawaii, at a normally placid tournament fanned by a soft Pacific breeze, that privilege was denied, with his final putts on the 18th green at Kapalua broken by a lone, drunken cry: “Cheater!”
This time, Reed’s cocksure poise deserted him, replaced by a mask of horror. It was as if he saw how he would now be cast, not as “Captain America” or as a Masters champion who flashed his green jacket wherever he pleased, but as the worst type of specimen his sport could conjure: a transgressor. A cheat.
Cheating in golf carries more malign imputations than in most sporting spheres. In football, a cutelytimed dive can command grudging admiration, even from the offending player’s manager. In rugby, Richie
McCaw has somehow curated dual status as both the All Blacks’ greatest captain and, in the eyes of Australians who accused him of being perpetually offside at breakdowns, the biggest cheat in Christendom.
As a golfer, though, there is no such concept as the dark arts.
If you cross the line into sharp practice, as Reed did in the Bahamas last month by improving his lie in a bunker not just once but twice, your image is indelibly stained.
At first, Reed imagined he could fend off the brickbats with laughter. During the Presidents Cup in Melbourne, he responded to his oncourse tormentors by miming a sweeping motion. Then, his caddie, Kessler Karain, decided to shove a spectator.
Painfully naive, Reed failed to grasp his one way out of this public relations crisis was to offer a semblance of contrition. Instead, he strapped on the armour, playing up to his pantomime villainy. As such, amid the heat of a Hawaiian evening, he learned, through the force of a single word, just what the public made of that tactic.
Reed does not even seem ashamed by what he did at Tiger Woods’ Caribbean invitational, taking a couple of sly backswings to flatten a little sand hill. He has not apologised for the incident, or addressed the issue of why he is being so loudly abused for it.
In his nine years on tour, Reed has been left in no doubt as to his lack of popularity. When he won the Masters in 2018, producing a display of extraordinary resilience to thwart the chasing pack, the soundtrack to the victory ceremony was only the rustle of tumbleweed. What should have been a celebration of a hometown champion instead became an inquest into why Reed’s parents, Bill and Jeanette, two miles away at their house on the northern edge of Augusta, were not even present.
Reed’s estrangement from his family is a sad and little-understood tale. He swats aside any questions about the matter, while his mother and father express only their hurt at being excluded from his life.
Since he severed all contact upon marrying his college girlfriend, Justine, he has cultivated the image of a lone wolf, riling up European Ryder Cup fans with trash talk and shushing gestures.
But this is not the reason the golfing constituency holds him in such disdain. It is because throughout Reed’s career, suspicions of foul play run deep.
At the University of Georgia, Reed represented the golf team for just one year before he was dismissed.
A book by Shane Ryan, Slaying the Tiger, claimed he had cheated and stolen from teammates: allegations he has vigorously denied, insisting he was let go for alcohol violations.
And yet the words of his former coach, Jason Payne, were damning enough.
“A few character issues came to light,” he reflected.
“There is no doubting the ability of Patrick as a golfer. It was Patrick as a person we chose not to associate with.”
With this past dredged up by his behaviour in the Bahamas, Reed has reacted with barely a shrug.
Initially, he contrived a ludicrous excuse, arguing a rogue camera angle had made his rearrangement of the sand, as brazen as an archaeological dig, look worse than it was.
Then, incriminated by the video evidence, he took his two-stroke penalty and moved on as if nothing had happened.
Alas, there is no “three strikes” rule for this type of conduct.
In golf, one lapse is all it takes for one’s good name to be impugned.
Just ask Simon Dyson, who in 2013 was fined and suspended from the European Tour for illegally tapping down spike marks.
Some of his peers quickly made up their own minds. “Used to like him,” tweeted Spain’s Gonzalo FernandezCastano. “Not any more.”
Even Colin Montgomerie, with his eight Order of Merit titles, has struggled to shake off the taint of an incident in Indonesia in 2005, when he replaced his ball in a more advantageous position after a rain break. “That,” said fellow Scot Sandy Lyle four years later, “is what you would call a form of cheating”.
Montgomerie, to his credit, accepted he was at fault in “Jakartagate”.
Reed, regrettably, has done nothing of the kind. He has regarded the attention on his bunker excavation work as a media beat-up, a bump in the road.
What he ignores is that his indiscretion pollutes the very essence of the sport he plays. Rightly or wrongly, golfers are held to a higher standard than most, in that they are expected essentially to police themselves. As soon as that code is broken, the spirit of the game goes with it.
PG Wodehouse’s observation that “in no other walk of life does the cloven hoof so quickly display itself ” is eternally accurate.
Reed’s only answer to his pariah treatment is to accept responsibility. Otherwise, he will be on the path to perdition.