Hal, you're letting your loathing of "second rate silliness involving anal old farts in ugly clothing" cloud your judgement. Where are you getting "re-enactment" from? The article linked says: "He had Johnston and Wie show him where the ball was in the bushes, then where they dropped. They paced it off, then used string to measure the distance and determined it to be slightly closer." He didn't get her to drop another ball, he got her to show him where she had played a shot from - and if she can't remember that a day after she did it, she has bigger problems than losing fifty grand. Also, as has already been pointed out by someone else, while the ruling was made the following day, it was still made during the tournament. As for the signing of a card, I feel the work "fucktarded" is particularly well chosen here. However, I would also offer a version of the "it's how it has always been" argument - not as a way of suggesting it should continue to be so, but just to point out that it's a simple system that they have all used in every competitive round they have ever played, and if the player cocks it up, it is the player who is stupid, not the rule. That said, the rule-makers have made provision for idiots like these in the most recent set of rules revisions. You may not consider golf a real sport, but to me it's rules like this that make it a more noble sport than most - rugby, soccer, baseball, and most other "real sports" that spring to mind tend to be about who can cheat the best and get away with it. Not cheat in a steroid-abusing malignant way, but in a way that requires competitors to push the rules, often to breaking point. They run around their respective fields of play having to be constantly supervised by (often) several umpires or referees. Rugby perhaps is the starkest example - the referee is constantly talking to the players and telling them they are about to infringe this rule or that. It's like watching a mother with a young child. The rules of golf are there as a boundary within which to play the game. There are plenty of officials on hand for when you don't know exactly how to proceed, but it is very seldom that the officials need to intervene (as they had to in this case). It is largely self-governed and that is its charm and what makes it a demanding sport to play at a high level.
Look, I respect JJ that you unquestionably have forgotten more about golf than I'll ever know. And admittedly, my statements were made heatedly. I guess what's most offensive is the "gotcha!" aspect of this. If the officials had told Wie of her mistake right away, she would have adjusted her score and she'd have just been two strokes different, and that's that. But it's like some Franz Kafka novel, waiting until they submit their card to then pounce and shout "Neener neener neener, you signed your card wrong, ha ha ha ha you were pwn3d! The PGA is l33+!!!!" on some technicality, disqualifying their entire weekend and tournament on the spot. It's more like setting some bureaucratic trap than it is to prevent cheating or ensure fair and equitable play! I remain unconvinced. It's nice that the "gentlemanly" aspect encodes the spirit of honesty and self-policing (it's not clear how it prevents cheating- I don't believe golf has a monopoly on honest players, or a lack of dishonest ones). But the manner in which this arose, the punishment meted out, and the method by which the ruling was made all stinks something rotten to my sense of "fair play". The round had long since ended, the players on the field, the commentators in the booth, and even the course officials made no comment at the time. Even tv replays (which you haven't mentioned being part of the official rules) are inconclusive: what I saw was a ball drop, bounce and roll, and the caddy point back a foot or so to compensate for the roll by moving the ball back. For all intents and purposes, Wie seemed to make a best effort to take a normal drop and play it where it hit the ground. If there was some discrepancy, it was utterly meaningless and certainly not worth changing a player's standing a whole round later after the tournament has ended. Wie wasn't trying to cheat, the play was immaterial to the end result, and it stinks of bureaucratic blowharded foolishness to demand a different result. I fail to see how the Wie situation is any different than the hypothetical White Sox situation I described above. Besides, anecdotes like zinman's above regarding Craig Stadler, as well as Wie's comments, serve not to hold up this image of golf as a "referee-less sport", but to underscore that all the smart players will simply defer to the officials on every play of consequence. Which JJ is precisely what other, mature sports do already! You have officials on the field who will intervene if some silly rule is broken (such as the dropped third strike rule or the out of baseline rule we've seen invoked in baseball recently) and set things right on the spot. Competitors can appeal decisions as well, and in some sports technology allows for correcting decision, or at least conferring with other officials. For all your talk of reverence and nobility, with results like these it ultimately makes golf sound less like a sport and competition, than like some arcane 18th-century European etiquette rules, with arbitrary and empty gestures and practices. It seems lost in all of this rule-fellating was any interest in who actually played the best game and deserved to place where they placed.
I love SpoFi! Being a golfing 'never-was' gives my opinion no special claim - I hope I wasn't up myself enough to suggest that it did. If I did, I apologise unreservedly. The gotcha aspect of all this was caused by the reporter, not the officials. The officials acted as soon as they were aware of the problem. The thing that makes this look and feel like entrapment is the fact that Wie was not disqualified for a wrong drop, she was disqualified for declaring a wrong score. I have no problem with that rule - you make six but sign for a 5? You should be disqualified. The rule itself isn't there to entrap people and get them thrown out of the tournament - evidenced by the fact that if you sign for a higher score, you are not penalised (but the score you signed for stands). It's there so you can disqualify cheats like Vijay - but that's a whole other rant. On the one hand, yes, you would think that a game so closely examined on TV could dispense with card marking - on the other, there are many instances where only the player knows if they did something wrong. Bobby Jones once called a penalty shot on himself at a very crucial stage of a match when he grounded his club behind the ball and the ball moved a fraction. No one but Jones saw (or could have seen) it happen, but he stood off the shot, told his opponent, took his penalty and moved on. A newspaper reporter commended him for his sense of fair play and Jones snapped back "Don't be ridiculous - you might as well commend someone for not cheating." The marking of the card is a device to make you sign your name to your score as an honest reflection of your day's play - it keeps you honest and keeps everyone playing to the same rules instead of saying "Well, that nearly went in, I nearly did that right, so let's call that a four, OK?" Wie didn't cheat - she didn't try to gain an advantage - but whether she meant to or not, and whether it was an inch or ten yards, she did gain an advantage. She's not bigger than the game, and whether you agree with the rules or not, she was in contravention of them. She will learn (probably now has learnt) that when you're taking a drop, it's wise to call an official to watch what you're doing and sanction it. That's a perk of the pace of play in golf verses other sports - it's not like in rugby you can freeze everything and call the ref over to explain that you'd like to stick your boot into a ruck and try to move someone's head out of the way and ask him if that's going to be all right. Golf (and snooker now that I think of it) is different from many sports because it doesn't have an aspect of sailing as close to the regulatory wind as you can in order to gain the edge on your opponents. The comparison to the ball game isn't a good one - it's not like coming back after a game, it's like coming back after a play within the game and reviewing a decision. makes golf sound less like a sport and competition, than like some arcane 18th-century European etiquette rules, with arbitrary and empty gestures and practices The R&A should put that on the first page of the rules. As a footnote, Stadler was kneeling on a towel, not his waterproof trousers, and was done for "building a stance" - again, while he may have been simply trying to avoid finishing "the round looking like a gardner", he did gain an advantage in having a dry surface underneath him while a player who had adhered to the rules would have run the risk of slipping. Torrey Pines later invited him back to help them chop the tree down, but I can't find a picture of that sadly.
When I was a kid, my dad was briefly a lap counter for some Indy-style racing circuit in Texas. Golf's celebration of player scorekeeping makes me think that racing missed an opportunity by not making drivers count their own laps. Would any of this be a controversy if Wie had simply been penalized two shots after the tournament, rather than being disqualified? I think it's wrong to call a post-round penalty "signing the wrong scorecard," when Wie had no reason to believe her score was incorrect after the third round.
What she believed has nothing to do with it - does a batter in a ballgame's feelings about whether or not he was out or safe come into the umpire's reckoning? Her score was wrong, she signed for it, out you go! And, just to be pedantic, she didn't sign the wrong scorecard (which the rule-makers have now acknowledged is a silly reason to get disqualified and changed the rule), she signed for a wrong score.
JJ, you continue to impress me with your contributions to the golf threads. Thanks. Since I can't "add" to the discussion of the rules (stupid or not...they are what they are), isn't it just so odd that it happens in her first professional tournament? Isn't it also odd that a spectator of the event, not a participant, not a caddy, not an official, had such a profound influence on the outcome? If Grace Park intitates this series of events, it's not the classiest of moves but at least she's in the event.
What she believed has nothing to do with it ... Why not? Isn't the point of the "signed for the wrong score" penalty to punish intentional efforts to cheat? After Wie's DQ, all pro golfers should insist upon an official ruling on any situation that's open to interpretation. Otherwise, they risk the same fate. Is it really beneficial to the sport of golf to slow things down that much?
I hope I wasn't up myself enough to suggest that it did. Who would leave the house if they could manage that? Isn't the point of the "signed for the wrong score" penalty to punish intentional efforts to cheat? Given the lack of a First Person Narrator in golf, signing for the wrong score mistakenly and on purpose must be considered the same thing.
Amen - on both counts. You can't make that judgement - was she careless or does she aspire to Vijay's magic pencil greatness? I believe she was the former, but saying she should be let off because she didn't mean it doesn't work. It's too subjective. Either you get disqualified for signing for a wrong score or you don't. Wie doesn't seem to have a beef with it - not in public anyway (although her comment about the ball being "an inch" closer reveals a certain displeasure) - I'm sure she's livid, but mostly with herself for not getting an official to watch her take her drop and tell her "it's back in play" (thus absolving her from retrospective punishment even if she had dropped it in the wrong place). Better it happened now than having won a tournament or, worse, a major. YukonGold - thanks - for years I thought I'd wasted my youth by spending every waking (and the odd drunken sleeping) moment of it on a golf course. Finally I have a channel for my vast font of completely useless information.
I still get what you're saying, JJ, I just am with rcade- if it's not the question of reality but of ensuring a player isn't cheating, then it seems having a tour official stand by to officially sign off on every swing, every move, every putt should be required. That seems to be the only logical result of this embracing of arcane rules, which date back to a time when the capability- in man power, money, time, and technology- of tracking every player's every move didn't exist. Now that it does, seems some of these rules should be dispensed with. :) Okay, tangent time JJ- you've ranted about Vijay a little here without going into details. A buddy of mine, golf aficionado, often rants about Vijay and seems to just hate the guy- I think he said something to the effect that Vijay cheated while in Indonesia to get a tour card, or something. So... what's the back story on Vijay us non-golf-fans aren't aware of?!
In all fairness, without wanting to create a love-in, I absolutely see your point (but, as I mentioned, I love Spofi, and for exactly the reason that there are people like you and rcade about with whom I can shoot my mouth off about stuff like this without it becoming a fight). Perhaps we should get together over beer some night and design a new game of golf with precisely that bend-the-rules-as-much-as-you-
can theme in mind. I can see it now - Tiger pointing at non-existant flying objects in order to distract everyone while he leather-wedges back to the fairway. Vijay is a big cheating gypsy. I've ranted at length about it before in this thread. In a nutshell, for those who can't be arsed to follow that, he was (in 1985) disqualified and subsequently banned from the sport for quite a long stretch for changing his scorecard after his marker had signed off on it to ensure he made the cut in Jakarta. My reasons for continuing to hold that against him are outlined rather vehemently in the thread. I have several other stories about Vijay, but they all involve (incredibly racist) things a certain famous Scottish coach has said to him on the range, and as stories they don't work unless everyone is drunk, you can hear the impersonation of the thick Scottish accent, and I'm fairly sure that no one is going to get too upset about me repeating the hideous comments of an aged, alcoholic racialst. One that I can share without offending too many people involves some advice said coach gave my former university team-mate on the range at Augusta one year - "Move your fucking legs, lad! Move your legs! You've got to move your legs when you're swinging a golf club! Look! Look down that line of players - who do you no see? Douglas fucking Badder! Now move your legs!"
Hey JJ, Thanks for setting me straight on Stadler. It has been far to long ago for me to have had remembered it as well as you. Also thank God for the rules of golf since without them pro golf would look like a weekend country club calcutta with bad golfers thinking they are good. Foot wedges here a little roll over there...get the point. Thanks
as a foot note, let us not forget about Stadlers kid being dqed from the Vegas tournament this weekend. Any comments on that?
What'd he do wrong? *too lazy*
Stadler had a "non-conforming club" in his bag. Apparently a club,(not disclosed which one) had a bent shaft. Said shaft had not been bent during the current round. When Stadler found it in his bag after the round started, he went to the rules official and he was disqualified. I am sure that he could have said nothing and no one would have known, but he knew and that is what is important. Sort of like the Bobby Jones story you relayed earlier. Potential cost to Stadler, had he shot a round of par he would have cashed about 136k. He had been in the chase to win the tourney. Winners share around 750k. Would not have wanted to be his caddie after that.
I believe Mr. Bamberger wanted to the one to burst the bubble of a very good person with extreme talent. I always heard that a reporter is to report the news not make it. He should said something at that moment if he really cared about the sport. But, NOOOOO he had to be an a** and destroy Miss Wie's debut. He should be severly punished by SI, if they have any character. Also he should lose his tour reporter card.
That'll be Rule 4-1(a) - I hate that rule - I've been disqualified by it myself (there wasn't so much money at stake mind you). I kicked my 5 iron the day before, bending the shaft (all right, breaking the shaft). Stupidly, I put both bits back in my bag and then forgot to remove them before teeing up in the next round. I found the two halves three holes in, asked for a ruling (like Kevin Stadler, I expected a couple of shots at the very outside) and nearly swung for the official when he smugly told me I was out. The irony of the rule is that I was fine for the round before when I'd snapped the thing during play. No wonder Bobby Jones retired to return to his law career - it was the less complicated profession.
So, JJ, what's the penalty for breaking the official in half and stuffing both halves in your bag? During the round, of course, not after. Just curious.
You don't get penalised for that, you get bonus points. Feherty (when he played) to rules official who wouldn't give him a drop: "What would happen if I called you and asshole?" Official: "You would be disqualified." Feherty: "What would happen if I just thought you were an asshole?" Official: "Not much I could do about that I suppose." Feherty: "In that case, I think you're an asshole."
