“Any rule that can create a situation that hurts the winner as well as the loser and makes nonsense of a significant championship must be a bad rule.” – Herbert Warren Wind
As every golf fan knows, Martin Kaymer won the 2010 PGA Championship at Whistling Straits in a playoff with Bubba Watson.
The bigger story — the one that makes nonsense of a significant championship — is that Dustin Johnson was not a part of that playoff. He, and millions of people watching the tournament, thought that he had earned a spot in the playoff when he made a bogey 5 at the final hole. After four rounds, Johnson was 11 under par, the same as Kaymer and Watson.
When a rules official intercepted Johnson as he was leaving the green, spoke to him briefly, and escorted him to a small room, the script for this tournament took a hard turn into the surreal. Watching on TV, I couldn’t shake the sense that I was watching Johnson being arrested. He wasn’t put in handcuffs, but he was taken to a small room — an interrogation room! — and the cameras put us viewers in the position of onlookers watching through the one-way glass as Johnson sat there with the tournament committee. Though we couldn’t hear what was being said, the scene had an uncanny resemblance to the scene we’ve watched on innumerable crime shows — the authorities were trying to get a confession out of the guilty party. The camera kept cutting away — to Jim Nance intoning, trying to put this warping of reality into dulcet perspective, to David Feherty stomping about like Rumplestiltskin at the scene of the crime — as the nature of the offense, and its consequences, gradually became clear.
On the last hole, Johnson had driven into the gallery to the right of the fairway. His ball came to rest, as Feherty breathlessly pointed out, on a bit of ground where people had been sitting, standing, and walking throughout the day. There was sand, dirt, grass, bits of what looked like candy wrappers. But the ball was sitting cleanly, the ground was relatively level, and Johnson, after checking the yardage to flag and waiting for the crowd to stand back, settled in to play his approach shot. He had about 230 yards to the flag and he had selected a 4-iron. At this point, he knew that a par on the final hole would win the tournament, and he was playing to win. He addressed the ball, grounded his club . . . Aha! There it was on the video, plain as the nose on your face. Guilty!
Though he didn’t know it, Johnson was playing from a bunker, and it is a violation of the rules of golf to ground one’s club in a bunker. The tournament committee had decreed that all 1200 bunkers on the course – even those outside the ropes, even those that had been well trampled — were to be played as bunkers. The players had received a sheet informing them of this “local rule.” It would come out later that Johnson hadn’t read the rule but, as a professional golfer, knew perfectly well what a bunker was. It hadn’t crossed his mind that he was in one.
In any case, he had violated the rule, and the penalty was 2 strokes. That’s what they were talking about in the interrogation room. Soon, Johnson could be seen erasing something on his scorecard. We were told that he was replacing that 5 with a 7. The 2 stroke penalty, of course, meant that he wouldn’t be in the playoff.
As the news spread through the large galleries at Whistling Straits, thousands of people began to chant, “Let him play! Let him play!” The rules had been upheld, but that was small satisfaction. There’s a world of difference between the letter of the law and the spirit. Legality had been served, but what about justice?
If I’d been at Whistling Straits, I would have joined the chant. I thought Johnson deserved a spot in the playoff. I thought he’d been hosed.
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Excerpt from “Supplementary Rules of Play”
1. Bunkers: All areas of the course that were designed and built as sand bunkers will be played as bunkers (hazards), whether or not they have been raked. This will mean that many bunkers positioned outside of the ropes, as well as some areas of bunkers inside the ropes, close to the rope line, will likely include numerous footprints, heel prints and tire tracks during the play of the Championship. Such irregularities of surface are a part of the game and no free relief will be available form these conditions.
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Before diving into the controversy about the ruling, I want to note what has been largely overlooked in the hullaballoo — Johnson played brilliantly down the stretch. And he wasn’t the only one. The last hour or so of the tournament was a barnburner,, with six golfers right in the thick of it right in the thick of it till the final hole. Rory McIlroy and Zach Johnson both finished at 10 under, and could have made the playoff with a timely birdie on one of the finishing holes. Steve Elkington and Jason Dufner had their chances, too. The golf was daring and mostly dazzling, since all the players knew — with so many others in the race — that they couldn’t just hang on and hope that everyone else would falter. To win this tournament, someone was going to have put on a show.
That someone seemed to be Dustin Johnson, the long-hitting, white-belted young man who was last seen falling apart in the final round of the U. S. Open at Pebble Beach. Here he was again, playing in the final Sunday pairing, and halfway through the back nine he did what champions do on the big occasions — he lifted the level of his game. He came through with sensational shots. He missed very makeable birdie putts on 14 and 15, lipping out both times. For a moment on the par 5 16th, when he yanked his second shot into the deep rough well beneath the green, it looked as though those near misses had taken the wind out of his sails — but he produced a miraculous recovery shot, a wedge that floated up sweet-as-you-please from the knee-deep spinach. When it landed on the green, the ball took the contours as though it had eyes on the hole, coming to rest two feet away. Kick-in birdie. 11 under par.
On to No. 17, a 230 yard brute of a par 3 with the green benched into the hill rising from Lake Michigan. This hole had spoiled many scorecards during the tournament. Just before Johnson reached the tee, Steve Elkington had shown how easy it was to make bogey — he ripped a 3-iron at the flag, only to see it trickle off the back on the green and fall to the bottom of a steep embankment. Johnson hit a 6-iron that was on the flag all the way and then rolled in his putt, a 15-footer that was breaking hard at the cup. That 2 was a display of power, precision, and nerve. Johnson was 12 under, alone in the lead.
It looked as though this might be his day and his championship. He’d just shown his finishing kick, and he seemed to be on the verge of making a major statement, one that would bury the memory of Pebble Beach. Even when his drive on No. 18 went wildly to the right, he played for the par he needed to win, hitting a towering iron shot toward the flag. It finished in the heavy rough below the green. From there, he could easily have decided to make sure of his bogey– and his place in the playoff — and chop the ball to the middle of the green. But instead of the safe shot, he hit a magical little wedge that just made it onto the putting surface. It was a risky, electrifying shot, and it left him with a putt for a 4 that would have won the tournament outright. I expected him to hole it. This was a shorter, straighter, easier putt than the one he’d just made on 17 — but Johnson hung it out to the right.
Of course, none of that mattered when the 2-stroke penalty was assessed. But that closing burst showed that Dustin Justin wasn’t afraid to win. And it showed that he had all the right stuff — lots of bottle, as the Brits say.
We were soon to learn that he had something else — a dark sense of humor. After the penalty had been assessed, he hung around and answered questions from the media. At one point he said, “I guess the only worse thing that could have happened is if I made the putt.”
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So who’s to blame? Whose fault was it that the 2010 PGA ended on such a sour note? This is not to say that Martin Kaymer wasn’t a deserving winner — he and Bubba Watson both had their moments in the playoff, Watson with an overpowering birdie on the first playoff hole, Kaymer with a surgical birdie on killer 17th. The final hole — Watson in the creek, Kaymer laying up for a winning bogey — belongs in the category of ghastly anticlimax and is best forgotten.
And, in the aftermath of the tournament, it was mostly forgotten as various observers dug into the ruling that had eliminated Johnson. It’s human nature to want to assign blame when anything goes as wrong as this tournament — here I come, taking my turn in the blame game.
Let’s review the potential culprits, one by one.
1. Dustin Johnson.
The first responders — the writers with an immediate deadline — were inclined to pin the blame of Johnson himself. In golf, it has always been a point of pride that each player is responsible for knowing the rules and obeying them. Johnson, so the reasoning went, should have known he was in a bunker and therefore shouldn’t have grounded his club. If he had any doubts, he should have asked the official who accompanied his group. The only problem with this line of thought is that Johnson didn’t have any doubts and didn’t ask. He was absolutely sure that he was not in a bunker. Some commentators faulted him for not knowing the local rules; he didn’t know the local rules, he said after the tournament, but he didn’t need to know them. He is a professional golfer and knows that it is a breach of the rules to ground a club in a bunker. He knows what a bunker is. He just didn’t think — not for a nanosecond — that he was in a bunker on that hillside on the 18th hole at Whistling Straits.
The rap on Dustin Johnson is that he should have known better, but consider this analogy. You’re a guest at someone’s host, and he has to run out for a while. As he leaves, he says, “Help yourself to whatever you want — just don’t drink the good wine.” Later, feeling dry, you wander into the kitchen and see a half-consumed bottle of wine sitting on the kitchen table, with a plate of nibblies nearby. You pour yourself a drink and have a snack. When you host returns, he says, “Oh no — you drank the good wine.”
You reply, “THAT was the good wine?”
2. Pete Dye
Whistling Straits, as we were reminded throughout the telecast, has something like 1200 bunkers. The course was designed by architect Pete Dye, who has been a moving force in course design for the last five decades. At least since the early 1980′s, when he designed TPC Sawgrass, his career has been intertwined with the professional game, and he has produced some of the most fearsome layouts in the world — PGA West, The Ocean Course at Kiawah, and perhaps the most Dye-a-bolical of all, Whistling Straits. The course is Gothic in its complexity (think flying buttresses, soaring arches, gargoyles, secret passageways leading to hidden crypts). Some critics of the course have complained that it is a perfect example of what is wrong with contemporary golf course architecture — crazily over-designed and over-built, with features (those bunkers) that make it ridiculously expensive to maintain. It also costs a small fortune to for an ordinary golfer to play the course, though “play” is perhaps the wrong word; the ordinary golfer doesn’t have a chance at Whistling Straits, and a round is likely to be a six-hour fiasco of lost balls and triple bogeys.
But this course wasn’t built for the average golfer; it was built for the pros. Dye has gotten himself into a position that is comparable, say, to the genius at the Pentagon who has to come up with ever more complicated strategies to defend against the ever more elaborate weapons of the enemy. The professional game, with all the improvements in technology and equipment, has “advanced” to a point where older courses are painfully obsolete. Only a few weeks before the PGA Championship, the pros played a classic course, The Old White, at the Greenbrier Classic, and they took it apart. Stuart Appleby won the tournament by shooting a 59 on the final day. That won’t happen on a Pete Dye course. Dye keeps the pros in check not just with length — though Whistling Straits is ungodly long — but with holes that confound and intimidate even the best players in the world. Considering the quality of play at Whistling Straits, the number of players who were in the hunt and the kind of golf shots they produced, I think that the only conclusion is that Pete Dye gets it right. He knows how to build a course that will provide challenge and temptation for the pros, a layout that will demand their full attention and their full array of shots.
It’s ironic, I guess, that the most prominent feature of the course — its countless bunkers — should prove to be so decisive in the outcome of the tournament, though in a way that Dye never could have foreseen (well, maybe he could; there was a similar incident involving Stuart Appleby the last time the PGA Championship was played at Whistling Straits). To me, though, it seems just plain wrong-headed to hold Dye responsible for the Johnson penalty. Dye’s job was to build a course that bring out the best in the pros, and he accomplished just that. He doesn’t make or enforce the rules.
Yet I understand the uneasiness of the critics of Whistling Straits. They know that’s something is out of whack. I’d put it this way: Pete Dye has been able to keep up with the evolution of modern professional golf while the rules of golf, and the way they are enforced, have fallen far behind.
3. David Price
Price is the official who accompanied the final pairing throughout the round. When Johnson went up into the gallery to play the disputed shot, Price held back. He is reported to have said that he didn’t want to “hover” near Johnson at such a critical moment. He also said, “In hindsight, now that I know he didn’t read the rules, I wish I had taken the initiative to tell him he was in a bunker . . . it was obvious to me he was in a bunker.
In the opinion of former USGA Executive Director Frank Hannigan, the search for a culprit should focus on the instructions that Price was given. In a message posted at GeoffShackleford.com, where this whole incident is exhaustively analyzed and dissected, Hannigan wrote: “On the Johnson drop the search for a villain goes on, yet nobody has identified the most likely suspects, the PGA and its rules committee for the week. The question to be asked of its chairman is this “Did you order your walking officials not to speak to players unless the players spoke first, especially on the matter of rules?” If so, you’ve got your villain.”
The PGA’s Mark Wilson noted that walking officials were instructed to speak to players only if asked for advice, but Hannigan’s point cuts to the core. Why doesn’t the responsibility for complying with the rules rest with the officials?
The answer, I think, has to do with tradition — specifically, with the tradition that the individual player bears the ultimate responsibility.
For me, for most golfers I know, this tradition is a point of pride. It provides the game with its solid foundation of a code of honor. It’s hard to imagine that it might be dangerously anachronistic — but it just might be.
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There ‘s a famous story by Shirley Jackson called “The Lottery.” Set in a New England village, the story describes an annual gathering of townfolk who meet to observe an ancient tradition. They greet and gossip and generally conduct themselves like normal, rational, small-town citizens. The mood of the story darkens, however, and turns to horror as it becomes clear that the “winner” of the lottery must be sacrificed. Stoned to death, to be precise. That is what the ritual calls for. When the victim’s name is announced, she cries out in protest that it isn’t “fair,” but no one pays attention. The rules are the rules. No one can remember how they came into being, or why, but they have existed forever and they must be observed.
The moral of the tale, obviously, is that it is sheer folly to adhere blindly to tradition.
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Back in 1968, Herbert Warren Wind, writing about the Roberto De Vicenzo debacle at the 1968 Masters, noted how golf had evolved as “gentleman’s game” with rules that made sense, given the dimensions of the playing field. Since no one could keep track of what his opponent was doing, it was necessary for each man to obey the rules and report his score accurately. In the professional game, with hundreds of spectators watching virtually every shot and cameras trained on the action, the situation had changed. Now the correct score was known to the millions who followed tournament. Roberto de Vicenzo signed a card showing a 66 when he had in fact shot a 65, and the higher score stood. Reflecting on the situation, Wind wrote: “The score that the player makes on the course should be the score that he should be credited with. It should be the responsibility of the tournament officials as well as of the golfer to see that the score he returns is the right score. If an error is discovered the important thing is to see that it is corrected. No penalty should be imposed. Golf, like every other sport, is meant to be a test of athletic ability . . . Granted, it will take many, many sessions (for the USGA) even to being to develop the machinery necessary to take into account both the game’s traditions and the realities of present-day tournament golf, but I trust this matter is on the current agenda.”
In those remarks, there’s plenty to chew on. I’m not as sanguine as Wind; I wonder if the USGA and the other powers-that-be are addressing the question of how to make and apply the rules in today’s high-stakes, high-pressure, high-powered events. Other sports have struggled with the same issues and come up with ways to use technology to improve the officiating of their games; even hockey, the proud caveman of the sports world, now uses the overhead camera to determine whether the puck has crossed the goal line.
Dustin Johnson didn’t sign an incorrect card, but Wind’s general remarks, written 42 years ago, still apply. In golf, surely, there has to be a way to insure that responsibility for following the rules is shared by players and officials, and to use the all-seeing TV cameras, to prevent a repeat of what happened to Dustin Johnson. And there has to be some way that decisions, where they are so sickeningly wrong and everybody knows it, can be avoided.
The local rule that Johnson violated was based on USGA rule 13-2, which covers ” Improving Lie, Area of Intended Stance or Swing, or Line of Play.” Yet in the replay, shown over and over in slow motion, it was apparent that Johnson had not improved his lie, nor had he intended to do so.
He didn’t attempt to improve his lie — to cheat — but he was penalized as though he had. Unlike the laws of the land, which hold that one is innocent until proven guilty, the rules of golf sometimes work as though one is guilty even when he can be proven innocent.
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Dustin Johnson has been spending time on his boat in South Carolina. He says that he is moving on. He’s handled the whole mess with poise and aplomb. I hope he comes back strong and wins the PGA next year by 10 strokes. Golf owes him a big one.
