This is a mistake in my opinion, a player should always be informed if something he did is under review.
OK, so all this bullshit about how golf is a “gentlemen’s game” can now be discounted? Good to know. 
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All the time. But what I don’t see is fans calling up, then the review committee/officials reviewing the play, changing the outcome of the game. The closest I’ve seen this is… well, never, outside of golf. Even in the NFL when the officials clearly made a bad call (two bad calls, actually) in that Seattle-Green Bay game, the NFL didn’t reverse the decision, even when the ref in question admitted he blew the call.
It’s been reported that the officials did disucss it prior to his signing his card and found that there was no penalty - whether or not they discussed this with Tiger becomes irrelevant.
In Tiger’s mind - correct or not - he did not mis-drop the ball at the time - after the decision was made - it became ‘clear’ that he did.
ETA - he either conflated the two options or thought he was on the right line that allowed him to ‘go back’ the steps. He has no reason to “cheat”. That he took the option he had available to him (his mistake) is not ‘cheating’.
Are some folks actually of the belief that Tiger knew he was breaking the rules to gain an advantage and then talked about it to the press? I mean, lets be serious here, he thought he was acting lawfully, after all, the corrective action of dropping no closer but as far back as you want is in the rulebook, just not for this case. So he screwed that up. But to make it sound like he is a devious cheater is ridiculous, or he really, really sucks at it.
Multiple times in this thread he has been called a cheater and “knowingly broke the rules of golf” - I’m with you that he did neither.
I heard Fred Ridley, the rules guy at the Masters give the run down… essentially, they became aware of a potential problem with Wood’s drop at the 15th and checked it out and found no problem. They then heard something else and checked it again and found no problem again. Only when they heard Wood’s post round TV interview did they call Wood’s in to chat. Then they penalized Wood’s based on his (possibly incorrect) admission that he stepped back a few feet for his 2nd shot.
Heard a USGA rules guy this morning on John Feinstein’s radio show say Ridley screwed up because if there is a potential rules violation the first thing you do is stop the player from signing his card. They didn’t do this.
So several things come to mind.
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Since a golfer can be DQed based on a post round interview golfers should not answer any questions about their play.
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When is a round official?
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When is a golfer required to sign his card? How many hours after he finished play. No golfer should ever sign a card until the very last minute as long as him signing could result in DQ because he’s being investigated for a possible rules violation without even knowing it.
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Since Watching-TV-Guy is allowed to influence the officials shouldn’t all either all players shots be shown or none be shown. It isn’t fair to only have the top guys checked/officiated by Watching-TV-Guy, it seems to me.
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When Woods went in to talk to the rules guys, what if he said… he had nothing to say?
Statute of limitations on the PGA tour? AFAIK, there is none. Months after Greg Norman and his amateur partner Kerry Packer won the AT&T National Pro-Am (and Norman got some money for that), it turned out that Packer had fudged some scores he had submitted for handicapping purposes, and actually had a handicap lower than what he was given, so he was disqualified long after the fact and Norman gave back the money.
I can only imagine what would have happened if Tiger’s penalty would have been called after Tiger had won by two strokes.
Yes, it’s irrelevant in the sense that it has no impact on the rules that should have resulted in a DQ. Tiger (and all players) is responsible for knowing the rules and for his own scorecard. That they reviewed it in advance is embarrassing for them, in that they could have and should have avoided this mess by talking to him before he signed. But they didn’t. And they had no official obligation to, and the fact that eyeballing the tape led them to conclude there was no infraction just doesn’t matter, not according to the rules.
Yes. But his belief that he did nothing wrong at that time (and I personally believe he acted in good faith and wasn’t trying to cheat) is irrelevant to the rules. I provided the cites earlier if you’re interested.
The rules have changed. Before 2011, signing an incorrect scorecard (that improved your score) was an automatic DQ. Now, it isn’t, so it’s a waste of time to bring up examples of guys who were DQd before.
But there has always been one exception, even before 2011 — if you get a ruling from an official, and sign for an incorrect score based on that, you are not DQd, even if later review shows that the official was wrong. You aren’t even penalized; you get to keep the score you signed for.
The new rule says nothing more than the committee can waive a DQ if it feels the circumstances warrant it. All the stuff about ignorance of the rules being no excuse is in the decisions, not the rule itself, and the decisions are added as new circumstances arise. They don’t cover every possibility.
This was a new circumstance. In the HDTV era, it was apparently the intent of the people who wrote the new rule that a ruling based on videotape is the same as a ruling on the course. In other words, when Tiger was still on the course, they reviewed the tape and ruled that there was no infraction, so Tiger signing for a score based on that ruling could not be DQd based on a later review.
I don’t claim to have inside knowledge of their thought processes; I’m basing it on the facts in evidence
– Ridley said that DQ was never a consideration
– Ridley said they felt no need to discuss the incident with Tiger after the video review
– the rules officials from five different governing bodies all agreed that the decision was correct, citing rule 33-7. If anybody knows what the intent of the rule is, it’s the guys who wrote it — the USGA and the R&A. And they say a penalty, not a DQ, was the correct call.
You correctly point out that one of the decisions under 33-7 says ignorance of the rule is no excuse, so that’s not why they did it. And I think it’s ridiculous to suggest, as some have, that they did it because it’s Tiger Fucking Woods. Augusta showed its contempt for Tiger very clearly when Payne trashed him in his 2010 Chairman’s Address, so he is the last person they would compromise their own integrity for.
Unless you believe that none of those people are acting in good faith, then the explanation for their decision has to be something like what I’ve just outlined.
IMO Tiger was so frazzled by the shot that should have given him the lead in the Masters clanking off the flagstick and into the creek, that he made TWO mistakes — he got confused about the rules, and he got confused about where he dropped the ball. He incorrectly thought he could go back on the line from the hole to where he hit the shot from, instead of where the ball crossed the hazard line, and he incorrectly thought he dropped the ball two yards back, when the videos (taken from different angles) make it look more like two feet, and the still photos (taken from the same angle) make it look more like two inches. So his two mistakes cancelled out, and he made a proper drop.
That’s why they didn’t contact Tiger before he signed his card. He dropped his ball only a foot or two from where he hit the last shot, and for something as imprecise as a drop, that’s close enough.
If you think his intent is irrelevant regarding the place he dropped when it comes to knowing the rules, then to be consistent, you should think his intent is irrelevant when he’s intending to drop it two yards behind the original spot, but really drops it only a foot or two behind.
But Tiger pulled a Bobby Jones – he insisted that no matter what anyone else saw or didn’t see, he broke the rule, and essentially penalized himself. The choice the committee had was not penalty or DQ, it was penalty or no penalty. They chose penalty, and Tiger gracefully accepted their decision.
I don’t see what more you want from him.
I’ve answered this several times already in this thread.
Yes. It’s a reasonable rule. If you rely on an incorrect ruling, you aren’t penalized. That’s not what occurred here, however, since Tiger was not aware of it. There was no official ruling becuase none was requested.
No, it doesn’t. I’ve explained this, with cites, several times in this thread. Don’t have the energy to do it again. You’re wrong. That’s not what the new rule says. I even supplied a Q&A that details how the rule should be applied. Take a look.
Excellent post - the bolded part is the only bit I would take issue with. Dropping on tour can involve using the longest club in your bag, the placement of multiple tees, eyeballing the specific spot where the ball hits the ground, the specific manner in which you drop the ball… Personally, I think many aspects of the Rules of Golf bullshit - especially when aped by 20 handicappers in a 5-hour round at the public goat track. But they certainly aim at some considerable degree of precision.
I find myself quite ambivalent about this situation. My fallback position keeps ending up that the rules are exactly what the enforcing body says - nothing more or less.
This doesn’t explain what happened after the phone call from Random TV Fan, and after Tiger’s statement that he dropped a couple of yards back. If they had determined that the drop was correct, they’d have said so: “Sorry, Mr. Woods, but you appear to be confused about your drop. We reviewed it, found it to be acceptable within the rules and thus no penalty applies. Had we judged it to be wrong, we’d have notified you before you signed your card.”
Why would they later apply a penalty to a drop they had earlier taken the trouble to determine was correct, knowing this would inevitably lead to strife and controversy?
I still think the real problem here is the lack of any strict review guidelines. A review should be official, the player should be informed, the decision should be final. Something. As it looks it seems so random.
How do you ensure that every questionable case is formally reviewed?
It looks like this would require a qualified official to watch every shot of every player - probably with access to video review. Short of that, there’s always the chance something happens that is noticed only after the fact (perhaps by Random TV Fan).
I think there’s little doubt that golf’s scheme for the player to keep his own score (which includes enforcing the rules on himself) is largely due to the impracticality of the alternative.
It’s the committee’s job to protect the field. They thought the drop was correct, but Tiger said it wasn’t. They can’t ignore that, even if they think he’s wrong. Tiger called the penalty on himself, and they honored it, but because the scorecard was signed in accordance with their previous ruling, they did not DQ him, just like they would not DQ a player who signed an incorrect scorecard based on a ruling he got from an official on the spot.
It seems like an either/or. This is not criminal law and an intent to evade the rules wouldn’t apply unless he actually did evade the rules. So I see only two correct rulings:
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Tiger, you idiot. You thought you dropped further back, but you didn’t. You dropped in the right spot, no penalty, no DQ.
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Tiger, you dropped in the wrong spot and your statements showed that you intended to drop in the wrong spot. Should have been a 2 stroke penalty, and since you signed an incorrect scorecard, a DQ.
I can’t see how it is a 2 stroke penalty, but no DQ.
Most golf tournaments only have one broadcast feed (the majors have featured groups and featured holes, but that’s only four times a year). So all they’d have to do to eliminate the problem of call-ins is have one official watching the same feed the home viewers see. If HE sees something, he notifies the other officials and they review it, and they ignore the calls from couch potatoes.
That still makes it more likely that guys with a lot of air time, like Tiger, will be caught in mistakes more often, but I think that’s the best they can do.
This should verify my hypothesis posted yesterday, for anyone trying to be objective. There are slightly different versions of this article you can find by googling, that say that the official observed the incident, but did not realize he was seeing a violation until later. That would correspond even more closely to Tiger’s case, where the committee reviewed the incident on videotape, found nothing wrong, and only second-guessed themselves after Tiger insisted his drop was incorrect.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/THE+101st+US+OPEN,+SOUTHERN+HILLS,+TULSA,+OKLAHOMA%3A+WIPE+OUT+FOR…-a075596170
Emphasis added.