Originally Posted by
Mal
I agree with everyone that the end result here - golfer who almost undoubtedly innocently made a mistake is assessed a 4 stroke penalty that costs her the tournament, the day after the incident at hand, because a TV viewer called in - feels unjust.
It's helpful to go back and start at the beginning, though, to assess what the real problems are and from where they stem. Because I think at the end of the day, there are a lot of individual components to what happened to Thompson, each of which are minor injustices or feel anachronistic or whatever, but aren't separately enough to justify a huge amount of outrage; it's the collective effect of them cascading on one another that leads to what feels like an overly penal, random injustice. And some of that rests on applying our expectations from other sports to this one.
Golf has always been a sport where players (a) are responsible for their own scoring and (b) need to assess rules violations on themselves. It is unique among all sports in both those regards. That's really out of necessity, though. The nature of the game is individual, rather than head-to-head where another player's actions are in direct response to your own. You play the game by yourself. Think how limiting and ridiculous it would be if you could only head out to the course to play a round if you took a sanctioned referee with you. The rules must be enforced by the player. The only way to ensure fairness in assessment and application, then, is to instill a rock solid culture within the game that creates an expectation of honorable self-enforcement. We can complain about snootiness and insufferability all we want, but golf would be like fishing stories if it weren't for that deeply ingrained culture. I know plenty of amateurs who carry vanity handicaps and pick up from 4 feet and improve their lie if their drive ends up in a divot depression - imagine if the professional ranks looked the other way about that sort of thing. The game would have zero integrity.
Against that backdrop, then, you have a couple of standards/rules that can be problematic in situations like Thompson's, because it sort of creates a Catch 22. The two utmost directives in golf rules in the situation at hand are (i) not placing your ball correctly where it had been marked is a rules violation and a penalty, and (ii) you must call penalties on yourself (on your scorecard which you sign and turn in) or be further penalized, because it's that important to the game's integrity. This all works well enough when the player is aware of a violation. You ground your club in a bunker and feel it, there's no question what's supposed to happen - you're supposed to tell your playing partner and assess a penalty on yourself. If you don't, the penalty doubles if you don't stew in your guilt enough to fix the situation on your scorecard before you turn it in. The problem comes when, like Thompson, a player unknowingly commits an infraction. Their mental innocence causes them to commit an additional infraction by not calling it on themselves. But it's critical to note that the additional two stroke incorrect scorecard penalty is there to allow for the possibility that a violation was innocent and unknown. Otherwise, the old rule of you turn in a wrong score and you're out of the tournament would still prevail. I think we'd all agree that would be even more unjust to Thompson.
As a general matter a rulebook can't distinguish between, allow for different treatment for, or make a judgment call on whether a player knowingly or innocently broke a rule, or got an advantage from doing so. So it has to either go draconian and act on the legal fiction that all violations are intentional/noticed, or risk undermining the backbone of the entire system by allowing players to make their own determination. I think we all know how that would go. And frankly, even if we had impartial judges following every player around a course, it's hard for them to know whether something was intentional or not in most situations. Ergo, there is no difference, as a base matter, between intentional and unintentional rules infractions. Massive can of worms if we start distinguishing. Which can of worms is probably greater than the harm from the occasional perverse result of someone who doesn't even know they committed a violation being punished as much or more than someone who did it on purpose.
As to the calling in issue: imagine a situation where, instead of what Thompson did, some golfer found themselves off in the woods where they didn't see any fans, and used a foot wedge to get out from behind a tree trunk. Blatant, dishonorable behavior. Some fan, however, did see it on TV, as the player was visible in the background while the camera focused on his playing partner hitting, and calls the PGA. Is our response not "They cheated and deserve whatever punishment they get!" Remember, we're in a universe in which, by necessity, (a) we treat all rules violations as equal regarding player intent, and (b) we place a very high value on players calling their own penalties. In that universe it's hard to lay down a bright line about it being OK for a third party to notify officials of a rule violation in one situation but not OK in another. I have to say, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the LPGA head's response on this, which boiled down to: it was a rule violation, what am I supposed to do, pretend it didn't happen? A tree fell in the forest, but someone heard it. Similarly, would we be substantially more sympathetic to the blatant ball mover if officials didn't get an e-mail with a screen capture until the next morning? I mean, they cheated and knowingly signed an incorrect scorecard. Who cares when the penalty comes? Otherwise you're rewarding them for beating the system.
I don't know of a perfect solution for this stuff. I think you can go the route of "Fan input will not be heard" as long as you're comfortable that players can police themselves and one another enough to make the disincentives high enough that you're never in a situation where cheating is seen on TV by millions but there's no penalty assessed because the players and rules officials didn't see it. Or, put enough officials out there that you can justifiably say "Hey, they're gonna miss some things, people" the way you can for a basketball game. The trouble there is that now you've a pro game that's disconnected from the amateur game in that one is effectively policed by players and one by third party officials. I don't think that's a big enough issue to object to it as a solution, though.