TUESDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2017
The newest golf job to elicit jealousy is this one: TV rules monitor.
Monday’s announcement from the USGA and R&A that call-in “gotchas” from overly enthusiastic television viewers will no longer be permitted during tournament play means that a rules official (or maybe more) will be assigned at each event to watch TV coverage and keep an eye out for any untoward actions.
Call it “the Lexi rule” if you want, after the brouhaha over Lexi Thompson’s mismarked ball and subsequent four shots of penalty that led to her losing 2017’s ANA Championship (a major). In that case, video showed Thompson had been too loose in replacing a marked ball on the green–we’ll never know how intentional this was. She was assessed two penalty shots for the violation and two more for having signed an incorrect scorecard–all a day later than the mismark occurred. Perhaps the better addition than a video official is that players will not be assessed that extra penalty when they signed a card that should have included a penalty they did not know about. In a day when every viewer and broadcaster knows the score in real-time, a faulty card doesn’t needs to be considered the honest accident that it always is on tour.
That said, little changes for the rest of us. With no cameras recording our play, self-policing remains the bedrock of the game’s integrity. Slow motion and still capture will never be called in after the fact for us (even these are inconclusive, as we found out with Sergio Garcia in the final round of the 2017 Masters). If we think we’ve done something wrong, we need to call the penalty on ourselves–or at least ask a fellow competitor or official whether we should.
Of course, if that kind of self-scrutiny doesn’t appeal to you, you might want to start compiling your resume. You can start here: “I’m great at sitting on the couch and watching golf on Sunday afternoons. I even know how to use a remote.”
-Jeff Hopper