No way. No $&#%(*%^#*%^*()#% way.
The PGA of America just made one of the two worst calls in
the history of sport (the other being the 1972 summer Olympic
basketball fiasco where the game was wrongly awarded to the
Soviet Union). Outrageous. Crazy. Wrong. Unfair.
By denying Dustin Johnson a spot in the playoff at the PGA
Championship because he (barely) grounded his club in what was
deemed a bunker, the PGA showed itself not an entity protecting
the rules and honor of sport, but instead a group of
zero-tolerance nimrods who don’t know the difference between “no
grass” and a hole in the ground.
For those who missed it, Johnson had a one-stroke lead when
he hit his tee shot well right of the 18th fairway, into an area
where the crowd was about 15-deep. When the ball landed, there
were people literally standing over it on all sides, no more than
a foot away. It was on a hillside where all the grass was
trampled down in all directions. When Johnson got there, the
announcer on the scene described it as bare soil. It looked like
nothing other than a bare patch of ground.
Johnson, in taking his stance, barely — barely,
infinitesimally — seemed to touch the ground with his club,
perhaps disturbing about five grains of sand, if that. He then
hit his shot, went on to make bogey to tie for the championship
and apparently therefore qualify for a three-man playoff. Then,
though, the nimrods decided that Johnson violated the rule
against “grounding” a club in a bunker. They penalized him two
strokes, thus keeping him out of the playoff.
The decision was utterly unnecessary. The lie was not
improved. The outcome of the stroke (a bad pull to the left, into
the rough) was not affected. And the ground where the ball
lay was not a bunker! There was no way, none at all, to
identify the area as a bunker. People were standing there before
Johnson’s ball landed there. (How often do fans stand in a
bunker? Never.) People were still standing there as he was
playing his shot. Announcer David Feherty went back there
afterwards and stood in it and still couldn’t identify
it as a bunker. There was no lip. There was no definition. It
looked like just part of the hillside.
But the PGA cited a local rule, published at the very top
of the rules given to all the players at the start of the week,
which explained that any bunker on the course was to be
played as a hazard (where the no-grounding-the-club rule
applies), rather than as a “waste bunker” where club grounding is
allowed.
Wait. Rewind. It is one thing to make
clear that all areas that look like bunkers, even behind gallery
ropes where bunkers usually don’t exist, are to be played as
normal, yes, bunkers. It is quite another thing to declare that
something that doesn’t even look like a bunker should be treated
as a bunker just because loose sand — on a ground made entirely
of sandy soil — happens to be there.
The definition of bunker in the Rules of Golf is as
follows: “A bunker is a hazard consisting of a prepared area of
ground, often a hollow, from which turf or soil has been removed
and replaced with sand or the like.”
Read that again. The ground must be deliberately designed
— “a prepared area of ground” — to be a bunker in order for it
to be considered a bunker and a hazard. It must be a place “from
which turf or soil has been removed.” And it must be a place
where the removed soil has been “replaced with sand.”
Where Dustin Johnson’s ball rested, there was no evidence
that the ground had been “prepared” as a bunker. There was no
evidence that turf or soil had been deliberately “removed” rather
than just naturally eroded due to thousands upon thousands of
feet of fans trampling it during the week. And there was no
evidence that sand had been added — that the soil had
deliberately been “replaced,” which indicates outside action —
with sand, rather than just being a natural part of the
terrain.
Not “prepared.” Strike one against the PGA officials. Not
“removed.” Strike two. Not “replaced.” Strike out.
At the very, very, very least, the situation was wide open
to interpretation. It wasn’t clear that the ground was a hazard
known as a bunker. For that matter, it wasn’t even clear that
Johnson “grounded” the club anyway. And even if he did, barely,
do so, he also was standing on the side of a slope trying to keep
his balance. No, he wasn’t exactly “falling,” but he wasn’t
standing in balance by any means, either. Rule 13-4 provides that
there shall be no penalty “providing nothing is done which
constitutes testing the condition of the hazard or improves the
lie of the ball… as a result or to prevent falling.” The common
application of this rule is that if a player has a funny stance
and is wobbling and inadvertently touches the sand without
improving the lie, there is “no harm, no foul.” Granted, this is
the PGA, not a club social, so the rules must be stricter. But
for these purposes, the clause about “nothing [involving] testing
the condition… or improv[ing] the lie” is more the point of the
rule than is the precise definition of “falling.” The rules are
intended to protect against unfair advantage, not to provide
bureaucrats a reason to invalidate the actual results of the
human effort involved in playing the game.
In most systems of law, there is an overarching rule that
always applies: Laws are not to be considered as if in a vacuum,
but rather are to be read in conjunction with all the other
laws or rules in the code being applied.
In this case, there is some question about the “grounding”
of the club, serious disputes about all three operative clauses
(“prepared,” “removed,” “replaced”) defining a bunker, and no
doubt whatsoever that Johnson neither tested the condition of the
hazard nor improved his lie. Read in conjunction, all of those
rule anomalies mitigate against a penalty even if only one of
those anomalies would not allow any discretion.
All of which brings into play Rule 1-4. It reads as
follows: “If any point is not covered by the Rules, the decision
shall be made in accordance with equity.”
Equity. “Equity” is defined by my
Webster’s as “justice according to natural law or right” and as
“… rules developed to enlarge, supplement or override a narrow
rigid system of law.” There can be no doubt, no doubt whatsoever,
no doubt under the heavens, that equity requires that Johnson’s
score on the hole be scored according to the number of strokes he
actually took. Equity overrides “a narrow or rigid system of law”
especially when that system itself provides for “equity” in the
case of a point being not definitively covered by the Rules as
written. In short, equity allows for the good discretion of
common sense.
The lawyer Philip K. Howard is known for his best-selling
book The Death of Common Sense, the main point of which
is that the area of equity ought to be expanded in the civil law
and the expanse of narrow rigidity of senseless rules. In a game
where sportsmanship reigns supreme, the sportsmanship should
trump a rules rigidity of blindered and blinkered
officials.
This is not like the famous cases involving scorecards
mis-signed. While a penalty for a mis-signed scorecard may lead
to a result that doesn’t seem fair, at least it does not involve
any interpretation. Either the card was signed or it wasn’t. The
official has no discretion. But in Johnson’s case on Sunday,
there did indeed exist at least some discretion in adjudging what
happened, on what sort of ground. Where discretion exists, and
where equity overwhelmingly favors a ruling of “no harm, no
foul,” then equity should prevail.
The PGA blew it. The fans were robbed of the three-way
playoff that should have ensued. Victor Martin Kaymer was robbed
of the sure knowledge that he had won fair and square, and of the
recognition by the public that his win was untainted. And, of
course, Dustin Johnson was robbed of a chance of a golfing
lifetime to hoist above his head one of the four greatest
trophies in the game.
The PGA has something on its face, and it may not even be
egg. It smells a lot worse than rotten eggs. The game of golf was
not ennobled yesterday (except by Johnson’s classy acceptance of
his fate); it was polluted. Call it the Polluted Golf Association
Championship, and banish its Sunday decision-makers to the outer
realm of darkness where all officious, invasive, commonsense-less
nimrods should reside.
