Update, June 20, 12:05 a.m.: The USGA assessed Johnson a one-stroke penalty after the round finished, leaving him at four under par. Dumb. He still won the U.S. Open by three shots.
Update, June 19, 8:00 p.m.: The USGA’s stupidity won’t deprive Dustin Johnson of his first major championship. Johnson hit a 6-iron to a few feet on the 18th hole and closed with birdie to finish at five under par. But the USGA is still dumb. My original post explaining why is below.
Original post: The U.S. Open is one of golf’s greatest events and certainly its most difficult test. This year, the tournament and its governing body have transformed it into a showcase for everything that’s annoying about the world’s nitpickiest sport.
The idiocy began in the middle of the final round, with Dustin Johnson in the lead. As Johnson was approaching the green on the 12th hole, a rules official from the United States Golf Association brought him some news: The USGA had reviewed footage from the fifth hole and determined that, well, maybe, quite possibly, he might be penalized a stroke. Johnson was informed that golf’s rules pedants would let him know what his penalty would be after the round was over. This was akin to the NFL’s replay booth calling down to say that a potential game-winning touchdown might be called back … next Tuesday.
What crime against the game of golf had Johnson committed? Back on the fifth green, he’d taken a couple of practice strokes and addressed the ball. Shortly thereafter, before he’d even placed his putter on the ground, the ball moved about one-sixteenth of a single rotation. Johnson called a rules official over to discuss the incident—yes, in golf this counts as an incident—and insisted that he did not cause the ball to move.
Whether Johnson caused the ball to move matters. The rules of golf are stupidly nitpicky, but the operative rule here was so stupidly fussy that even the hard-assed USGA felt obliged to change it. Before the rule was modified, if a golfer addressed the ball and it moved, a penalty stroke would be applied regardless of whether the golfer did anything to cause that movement. In 2012, the rule was changed so a golfer got penalized only if it’s “known or virtually certain” that he caused the movement. Beginning in 2016, the language of rule 18-2b was further simplified: Did the golfer cause the ball to move, or not? If not, there’s no penalty.
What the USGA did to Johnson today was stupid and damaging for several reasons.
• If the rules officials believe that Johnson definitively caused the ball to move, they’re insane. He did not stomp around the ball or anything. He didn’t ground his putter, and he moved his putter gently towards the ball. The ball moved, most likely, because the USGA picked a (wonderful) course, Oakmont Country Club, with deeply sloped greens and mischievously cranked up the speed of those greens to 14 or 14.5 on the Stimpmeter (i.e., marginally slower than countertops). A teensy zephyr of wind, perhaps from a drunk fan’s late afternoon belch, can cause a ball to move. Or gravity.
• Johnson, who has had so many close calls in majors before and had a playoff opportunity at the 2010 PGA Championship taken away post-round by a (fairer) rules call, was forced to play the rest of his round rattled, believing that he had to win by two to avoid any sort of asterisk. If you’re going to call a penalty on the guy, call a penalty on the guy. Don’t tell him that you might call it in a couple of hours, when everyone’s finished playing.
• The game is having trouble attracting new viewers and players. That seemed to be part of why a strict rule like this would be loosened in the first place. Now, in a U.S. Open, the USGA wants to go out of its way to make a ticky-tacky call like this? Do they want the game to die?
Fellow players seem to agree the USGA massively screwed this up:
Golf’s old-fashioned moral code requires players to call penalties on themselves if there’s even a question about whether they’ve transgressed. It’s possible that, after his round, Johnson will be asked to make the final decision about whether he did or didn’t make the ball move. Given everything that’s happened today, he should avoid the old-school golfer’s rules about humility and decline to penalize himself. Everyone player and golf fan in the world would have his back.
