Trampling the Spirit of the Game

Two weeks ago, Bryson DeChambeau received a highly publicized two-stroke penalty for improving the area of his intended swing during the second round of the Open Championship. Remember that?

Afterwards, R&A CEO Mark Darbon called the decision “clear-cut.” Rory McIlroy concurred, saying there was “no doubt (DeChambeau) improved the line of his backswing” and that the penalty was “justified for sure.” Others, including Max Homa, disagreed with the ruling. Scottie Scheffler didn’t take a stance one way or the other, as he is entitled to (how's that for a Rules joke?). But he did voice that the game could benefit from stricter policing.

We don’t need to relitigate the DeChambeau debacle or whether a penalty was justified. What is worth revisiting, however, is the broader principle of playing the ball as it lies – a principle many people, myself included, have argued that the professional game has drifted very far from. Watch enough PGA Tour golf and you will find examples everywhere. In the aftermath of the DeChambeau ruling, though, anyone making that claim was largely met with the same response: Where’s your proof?

Nobody enjoys playing hall monitor or screengrab warrior, but it took all of two weeks for evidence from this week’s Rocket Classic to make its way across my desk. Somebody must have been keeping a close eye on Thursday morning PGA Tour Live coverage. I’m grateful to whoever he or she could have been…

So, without further ado, I’d like to enter into the public record the video linked here — at least until the DMCA overlords ensure that it is taken down.

As you can see in the video above screenshots below, Keegan Bradley prepares to take a drop, then takes a step back at the direction of his caddie before dropping the ball awfully close to where he had just been standing. Amusingly, you can hear the rules official instruct Bradley to drop from a slightly higher position than he was about to. I appreciate the vigilance there!

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For anyone wondering why Bradley was dropping in the first place, he was taking free relief from the tournament infrastructure visible on the left side of the screen — an appropriate cherry on top of the whole situation.

To be clear, I am not accusing Bradley of anything. A rules official is standing right beside him, supervising the entire sequence. I’d only like to highlight that drops like this have become so commonplace in professional golf – especially on the PGA Tour – that it took less than two weeks to find another on-camera example worthy of scrutiny. It is difficult for any person with common sense to watch the Bradley drop alongside the DeChambeau incident and conclude that there isn’t a problem with the rules, either in how they are written or enforced.

Whether through changes to the Rules of Golf themselves or stricter enforcement of the Rules as currently constructed, professional golf needs a course correction back toward playing the ball as it lies. Between the prevalence of TIO relief, increasingly brazen drop techniques, not to mention the “fargiveness” afforded by today’s equipment, errant swings in the modern professional game are far too infrequently met with any semblance of consequence.

Perhaps the Bradley clip is the product of a misleading camera angle, a possibility worth acknowledging. Or maybe, just maybe, we’ve drifted so far from the spirit of playing the ball as it lies that when the principle gets blatantly trampled, even directly in front of a rules official, nobody even bats an eye.