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Well, everybody, it’s time. It’s time for golf to embrace technology and fans to understand that it’s 2016 and what we have is what we have.
Not only have we had rules violations at both the U.S. Open and the U.S. Women’s Open — both caught on cameras better than anything that has ever been used to capture professional golf shots — but these types of things have been going on for years and years and it’s time to get everybody on the same page so the next time it happens, we all agree on the process that follows.
On Sunday at CordeValle, Anna Nordqvist, fresh off the round of her life, a bogey-free 67 that landed her in an unlikely playoff with American Brittany Lang, violated a rule that has been around much longer than any of us. Love it or hate it, it’s a rule, much like holding and double-dribbling and airplane mode on flights. You might not like it, but it’s as much a part of the this sport as tees and post-round beers.
Unlike the situation with Dustin Johnson — a ruling that was interpreted a certain way and massively debated — this was an obvious rules violation. You can’t ground your club in a hazard.
When that occurred and the FOX cameras caught the situation, it was universally known that Nordqvist would get penalized two strokes for breaking the rules of golf. That was crystal clear.
And then social media started.
They waited and waited, seconds after seconds, an eternity when it comes to Twitter. In a world where things happen so fast you almost forget what happened last week or last hour, fans had to wait 10 minutes knowing what they thought was a black-and-white rules situation.
And that is where the fans got it wrong. They screamed and typed and wondered why the players hadn’t been told what happened yet, a similar reaction when a shot leaves an NBA player's hands two beats too late yet the league referees take their allotted time to make sure they are 100 percent, without a doubt, correct. Missing a call is one thing. Messing up a review with dozens of angles is a whole other (remember Packers vs. Seahawks?!).
So the USGA, who just so happened to govern both instances that have come up this year, watched and reviewed and made sure that the penalty was a certainty. It was, they agreed, and then the plan unfolded. Nordqvist had hit her third shot into the par-5 18th, tied with Lang at the time and thinking that an up-and-down might win her this major championship. Lang had not hit her shot. And therein lied the problem to some.
But the USGA did it right. They did the best they could with the system we have in place, which has everyone in unison thinking, “Why don’t we refine this process?”
Our system has to change. Not just for the USGA, but for the PGA of America, the R&A, Augusta National and the PGA and LPGA Tours. This is a universal change to how we review golf shots moving forward. The USGA has had to deal with the last two instances, but the same could happen this week at the British Open, in two weeks at the PGA Championship, or later on at the Ryder Cup or the Barclays. It’s part of golf now, not part of certain championships.
Here is my plan.
Everybody has a Review Center
Immediately, before the Open or the PGA Championship or any other big golf event, a review center has to be implemented. Remember those high definition cameras I mentioned earlier that continue to bring us sports so clear it’s almost like we all got some sort of TV-watching Lasik surgery? Those things aren’t going away.
Every governing body needs a three-person review center either on site or back at their headquarters that spends the entirety of each broadcasting day keeping their eyes on the action. Much like the NHL, when a questionable call happens, they are the three we go to.
The key to this? One of the three people in the booth needs to be an outsider, not from the governing body in charge of the event (so if it’s the U.S. Open in 2017, we have two USGA officials and someone trustworthy from the PGA of America or the R&A). This helps take the bias out of the situation.
The review center is the end-all be-all with the rules, and the moment they make up their mind about the ruling, it’s relayed down to the walking rules official and the players are told immediately, no matter the situation on the golf course. This is how it has to be done. Take your time (no shot clock here), get the ruling right, and then get that word out to everyone as fast as you can. Fire it out on social media, tell the walking officials, let everyone know that needs to know, no matter if they’re in the middle of a hole or on the tee.
This is the world we live in now, a technology-driven Earth where cell phones are king and everything else matters a bit less than it used to. Twitter, Facebook, Vine, Snapchat, Instagram ... it’s too easy to see everything for everyone. The governing bodies need to be ahead of all that, and in conjunction with the broadcasting partner of that event, have to be in front of these situations. Social media is fast. They have to at least be able to place in the race.
Have a system in place for rules call-ins
A unique situation to golf is the rules call-ins. We’ve seen it happen for years, with fans calling in questionable situations to governing bodies.
Remember back in 2013 when Tiger Woods was in the hunt at the Masters and was a birdie away from tying the lead on the 15th? And then the golf gods wagged their fingers Mutombo-style at Tiger, batting away a nearly perfect wedge shot by the cruelty of the flagstick, back into the pond and leading to a questionable drop?
That was a call by a Champions Tour player named David Eger, who continued to rewind the illegal drop until he phoned PGA Tour rules official Mickey Bradley, and the wheels of the review system started to roll.
The issue with what happened with Woods and the drop at that Masters is say Eger had been just a random golf fan with an expert knowledge of the rules of golf? Would he have had Bradley’s phone number, or a place to get in touch with the Tour? No, probably not.
That’s why I hate the idea of a call-in system, but I do love the idea of a place around social media that fans can send in all the things I’ve talked about.
Have one account where fans can send in videos, Vines, and photos of possible rules infractions. This will actually help the officials in the video booth be aware of situations and address them accordingly. Not all claims would be credible, of course, but more eyes on the action would be a net positive. Three people in a booth are helpful, but they can’t see everything happening at a golf tournament.
I’ve talked to multiple people in television who say covering golf is the hardest sport in the world because unlike a soccer pitch or a basketball court, it’s all happening all over the course in different spots and different areas. At Wimbledon it might be tough to cover Court 17 when you’re at Centre Court, but a fixed camera can at least give you an idea of what’s happening. Serena Williams doesn’t have to play a bad first serve outside the stands. In golf, you do. A bad drive could have someone well out of position, so a handheld camera is needed to catch the coverage and see what’s going on.
I think allowing people a singular place to communicate, gripe and be honest about what’s going on both helps the fans and helps the people in charge of that event.
If video is inconclusive, you have to defer to the player
I am going to use the Dustin Johnson situation here because it’s fresh on everyone’s minds.
Did the putter make the ball move? I have absolutely no idea. Honestly. I’ve gone back and forth on this about 40 times. He did place his putter extremely close to the ball and a couple of seconds later the ball rolled. He had moved his ball out of Lee Westwood’s line and moved it back, meaning the chances of it being in the exact spot it was when he first marked it are pretty slim. The process a golfer goes through when moving a ball out of a player’s line and moving it back is to pick out a fixed object, use your putter to measure and then do the reverse of that to move it back. It’s as exact as a tired husband trying to eye the middle of a wall as he hangs a poster for his kid. He probably can get pretty darn close, but it isn’t exact.
Did the USGA, the governing body at the time, believe it was him who forced the ball to move? Yes, they did, but they came to that conclusion on interpretation alone.
The NFL, the NBA, the MLB ... they all go about reviews the same way; it has to be indisputable evidence to overturn. Golf is a game about morals before anything else. Well before a rules app on the phone and video cameras, golf was played internally, and you were in charge of yourself. If you said you didn’t cheat, you didn’t cheat, and you had to live with the consequences.
If we are going to use cameras and monitors to review the codes of golf that’s fine, but it still needs to be 51 percent on the player in the situation.
In the Nordqvist situation, it was 100 percent a violation. We saw her club touch the sand, we saw her pick it up and an imprint lay in the un-raked sand, and if 100 percent were asked if that was a penalty, 100 would say yes (as the rules dictate it as a rule).
With Dustin, it was different. We couldn’t 100 percent say what made that ball roll a couple of millimeters. It might have been Dustin, it might have been the greens, it might have been the wind, or it might have been a small seismic shift between tectonic plates in the Pacific Ocean or a butterfly's wings halfway across the world. We cannot 100 percent say what did it, and in that case, we must side with the player, and the people in that group, on the ground at the time.
We can’t totally take the power away from the player, and the morals, of the game. We have to allow that player to make the call if the three-booth can’t say for sure what went down. I think this makes the players happy, just as much as it does the fans.
We must do this fast
I already said it, but this needs to happen, and happen swift. After what happened at Oakmont, nobody in their wildest dreams (or, if we are being accurate, nightmares) could have imagined another rules situation possibly, or in this case, absolutely determining the outcome of the biggest golf tournament LPGA players compete in.
And it happened in the span of less than a month!
Let’s get this going now. A group of people that sit in front of a television for 10-12 hours during the telecast and are the end-all on video reviews. Let’s jump on this before another situation occurs. Golf is in such an amazing place right now, it’s so fun to watch and with all the technology we are seeing in these telecasts, it’s as interactive and cutting-edge as any sport out there.
The rules should catch up. I know that these governing bodies bust their humps to get things right, and are trying to make sure everything is fair and honest at each and every championship, so merging with technology to find a middle-ground that allows the fans to understand and the players to feel more comfortable seems like a lay-up. Let’s just hope that lay-up happens before the buzzer sounds.
