i totally understand and ultimately the blame falls on him. i am just saying that the way the rules sheet read i wouldn’t have even putted without a rules official giving me the go ahead.
and that is kind of ludicrous.
and put 60 or so golfers on the course where every lie has to be ruled on and this sucker would still be going on a week from now. that does not seem to be in the “spirit” of the game.
and just so you know. the way i play golf is self regulating. if i faux up then i call it on myself. i mean i have several instances where a competitor wants to know where a ball crossed a hazzard line. unless they were cheating like hell (which i have never experienced) then we generally reach a reasonable consenus. and then we go on and play.
what happened yesterday was a travesty. he’s got rules officials following along and sure he messed up but to have not one official come and say, hey that’s a hazzard is half ass. crap he was in the middle of the gallery so you know that there were a couple of marshalls around. jeebus if those folks don’t at least interject to some extent, a gotcha doesn’t seem equitable.
If I were a rules official, I wouldn’t have said anything either, because it was so obvious that he was in a bunker. If you hit into the bunker on 18 at Augusta, you don’t want a rules official telling you not to ground your club. It’s obvious. I TIVO’d the end of the tournament and just watched the play in question. There is a clear line of demarkation between the grass and the sand. There is a huge lip to the bunker to the right side of his shotline. Jim Nance even says “He hit it into one of the bunkers where the crowd stands.”
I feel bad for the guy, but I still can’t understand how a professional golfer can make a mistake like that.
Rules sheet:
but c’mon lamar. i have played many not well groomed courses where the sand from a bunker is not in the bunker. i have also played a great many links courses where sand doesn’t mean anything other than oops i shouldn’t have hit it here. that’s all i am saying. and sure we all agree that he messed up but with all the folks around him someone should have said something. c’mon you are getting ready to hit a five iron from 200+ to a tough green to win a major. in an area where the gallery is within a couple of feet from a crappy lie. i don’t know that my first thought would have been am i in a bunker or not. i’d be thinking more along the lines of lets just get this puppy up some place close to make par.
and the photo makes it look more like ground under repair than a bunker.
He was told in the rules sheet that it was a bunker. His caddy DEFINITELY should have known it was a bunker. We can argue about whether it’s a bad rule, but there was no excuse for not KNOWING the rule.
We’ll just have to agree to disagree. This wasn’t Craig Stadler kneeling on a towel to keep his pants dry - this was a violation of one of the most commonly encountered rules in golf.
I’d bet that if you surveyed every player in the field and were able to guarantee anonymity, every single one of them would say “what a dumass!”
Now you’re just making things up.
not a bit. i totally agree that he screwed up. i just think that if you play on a golf course where potentially every lie is a “hazzard” that is messed up. and the idea of having a rule’s official rule on every lie is going to make things a tad bit tedious is all i am saying.
we used to play a lot of golf down at corpus christi. now if every time i whacked one in the toolies and got a sandy lie i requested a ruling on whether it was a bunker or just waste area i would have been kicked off the course.
Ground under repair is marked before a tournament. It is circled with chalk or paint.
Not to mention that there are 1,200 other bunkers around the course that look exactly the same as the one Johnson was in.
The more I think about it, the more I think that his caddy was the most to blame. It’s the caddy’s job to know the arcana of each individual course, and to make himself aware of these kinds of idiosyncrasies, especially in a Major. That’s what they’re for. To do that kind of homework, so the player doesn’t have to.A good, professional caddy should be expected to always read the sheets, no matter how tedious they are, or how much he thinks he already knows, and this is exactly the reason why. I bet he never fails to read a rules sheet again, especially going into a Major.
Absolutely not true. Most are conventional sand traps. Some are very deep . One golfer swung next to one and fell in. They are mostly conventional and there is no trouble identifying them.
It was still a grievous error but understandable.
You must have been watching some other tournament. There were constant shots from the blimp showing the traps all the time. On many holes the players hit their tee shots over fields of bunkers identical to the one Johnson hit into on
18. Hell, the announcers were talking about how nobody knew the actual number of traps on the course because there were so many. They even had taped segments showing the analysts hitting out of them. The sand traps are the signature element of Whistling Staits.
On the telecast, Jim Nantz said that Johnson had hit his ball into a trap. Look back at the picture I linked to earlier and tell me honestly that it doesn’t look like a sand trap.
ding ding ding we have a winner.
i still think the rules officials should have intervened but …
back in the day my caddy was responsible for just about everything. i mean he had to make sure the rain suit was ready and you had extra pairs of socks, etc. in the heat of the moment you are leaning on them to give you the yardage and everything. i mean if you had to feather a shot from 145 you sure as heck leaned on them to make sure it wasn’t 154. crap, he used to get up before the sun and start pacing distances while the grounds crew were setting up the current day’s pin placements. i mean i knew that if it was 135 to the front edge he was telling me that it was 15 paces back and to hit it accordingly.
I am not arguing that there are a lot of traps. But we are talking about one. The traps on the first hole do not figure into whether Johnson hit in a trap at 18.
Johnson is a pro golfer. i suspect he knows what a trap looks like. He honestly thought it was bare ground. It was on a slanted surface and it had no depth. It looked like a bare spot until he hit and then sand sprayed. But the course is built on a sand base. I think he has a decent argument. I also know he would lose . But to pretend that he was wildly off base for thinking it was not a trap is wrong. It sure did not look like one. It required a ruling to determine . How often are traps so unclear they have to be officially determined by the rules committee with slow motion video?
and gonzo to some extent makes my case. did you see the divots that these folks were hitting? jeebus it was like they were on a touch of grass with a sand base. and when the rule’s chairman starts talking about playing everything as if it is a hazzard that is just assinine. seriously, at that point it ceases to be about the competietion and becomes a rules interpretation. shoot, that’s not how i play golf. certainly there are rules but jeebus let the spirit of the competition be the deciding factor not how waste v hazzard is interpreted locally.
Tiger has a share of the clubhouse lead after the morning side of the draw. Maybe our nightmare is over :).
Tiger shot 65 and leads. All is forgiven.
His driving distance was 255.5. Strange golf course.