I’ve been watching the golf at the Open
Championship at Carnoustie, or Carnastie, as Johnny Miller likes to call it. To
my American eyes the course is visually ugly, but nearly all the golfers think it’s
an excellent example of a links course. Okay, but it’s still pretty unpretty. I’m
also closely watching to see how the players mark their balls on the green. I’m
trying to see if they all mark fairly, or if some of them sort of mark to the
side and then place it down in front. I don’t mean they would do it deliberately
and unfairly to gain some advantage. Hell, an eight or sixteenth of an inch
nearer the cup would hardly be an advantage or make the slightest difference in
the outcome of the putt. Someone jokingly said that if you marked and remarked
it often enough, you might get it to tumble into the cup all by itself. I also
remember quite a few years ago when some European golfer accused Mark O’Meara
of placing his ball an inch or more ahead of his marker. Ridiculous. But in
this age of such advanced camera technology, the cameras can scrutinize a
player’s every move in extreme slow-motion close-up.
That’s
what happened to Lexi Thompson in the third round of the 2016 Ana Championship
when she marked her ball from one foot away, a virtual gimmie putt. And some
zealous tv viewer called in—THE NEXT DAY!—to say that Lexi had replaced her ball
a tiny bit nearer the hole. The tournament officials viewed the tape—THE NEXT
DAY!—and determined that she had put the ball down directly in front of the
marker instead of infinitesimally to the side. So they assessed her a
two-stroke penalty for the improper placement of the ball and then another two
strokes for signing for an incorrect score—THE NEXT DAY!— before she had been
informed of the first two-stroke penalty. The score she signed for at the conclusion
of the third round was correct at the time she signed for it and became
incorrect only after the first two strokes had been added as a penalty—THE NEXT
DAY! Although the first two strokes for misplacing her ball may have been
deserved under the current and too often archaic USGA rules of golf, the second
two strokes for signing for an incorrect score were not. Her score wasn’t
incorrect when she signed or it. Only after the officials assessed it—THE NEXT
DAY! There is no way in hell she should have been given a four-stroke penalty
and then been informed about it when she was nearly finished with her fourth
round on Sunday.
I can think of only three other
examples of what I would call unfair penalties in professional golf—Roberto DeVicenzo’s
signing for a score higher than he actually shot in the 1968 Masters, Dustin
Johnson’s two-stroke penalty in the 2010 PGA Championship for grounding his
club in what looked to him and the rest of the world as nothing at all like a
sand bunker, and Anna Nordqvist’s two-stroke penalty in the 2016 U..S Women’s
Open for touching on her back stroke from a sand bunker two or three grains of
sand.
First,
there’s the sad state of affairs in 1968 when DeVincenzo signed his card in the
fourth round of the Masters for one stroke higher than he’d actually shot,
because his playing partner, Tommy Aaron, had recorded for him a 4 on the 17th
hole instead of a 3. The score stood as signed for even though the entire world
and all the CBS cameras and commentators knew what he had actually shot. Why
did they then and still even bother with such outdated scorecards? Let our
electronic scorekeepers keep it for them. But that didn’t help poor Roberto
fifty years ago.
Dustin
Johnson, on the final hole of the 2010 PGA in Wisconsin, stepped to his ball in
what looked like trampled-down sand and grass in the rough. He put his club
down behind the ball, hit it, and found out later that he had been given a
two-stroke penalty for grounding his club in a bunker, a penalty that kept him
out of a playoff for the championship. Unfair.
The
three grains of sand disturbed by Ann Nordqvist in her bid to win a playoff
over Brittany Lang in the 2016 Women’s Open could be seen only after the camera
showed the shot in extreme closeup slow motion. The human eye couldn’t detect
those grains of sand; Anna couldn’t feel them; and they had absolutely nothing
to do with the flight of the ball. And yet, bye bye Open Championship.
It
seems to me that if they’re going to use such close camera scrutiny to police
golfers, then they should do so for every contestant, not just the leaders. Or
not use such Big Brother slow-mo at all.
Oh,
yes, and by the way, Tiger is now in contention at the Open after shooting a 66
in the third round. Go go. Tiger.
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