Editorial
Front Page - Friday, April 23, 2010
I Swear...
Golfer’s honor
Vic Fleming
The sports headline on Monday read, “Golfer’s honesty costs him chance at playoff win.”
I knew immediately that I was about to read a story about a contender calling a penalty on himself.
Been there, done that! It is part of the game of golf as taught to me by my father, as taught to us by our ancestors.
Golf is a game in which the ball often lies poorly but the player well, one old saw has it. But that refers to one’s tendency to stretch what was and what might have been out of proportion.
“A good walk spoiled” is how Mark Twain summed up golf, in the days before electric and gas powered carts.
But golf, if nothing else, is a sport of honor. A player who will cheat at golf will cheat at anything. Let’s take it a step further and insert a direct object.
A person who will cheat at golf will cheat you at anything.
When Daniel Petrocelli assembled his law firm to take on O.J. Simpson in the civil case on behalf of the estates of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, he had someone on his team do something that he said the District Attorney’s Office had not done when preparing the now infamous State v. Simpson criminal case.
That something was to interview Simpson’s golfing buddies. And those interviews yielded interesting information.
According to those with whom Simpson regularly played, he was a cheater, others knew it, and he didn’t know that they knew.
Read all about it in Petrocelli’s book, “A Triumph of Justice,” which should have been a best-seller, but wasn’t.
But back to the sports page.
Dateline. HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. Byline, Pete Iacobelli. Lead line: “Brian Davis couldn’t deny what he saw and knew he was honor-bound to tell the world.”
It took slow motion replays of footage captured by TV cameras to confirm what Davis told officials after he had hit his chip shot onto the green on the first hole of a sudden death playoff.
In his backswing, Davis ticked a loose reed, thus violating Section 13.4 of the rules of golf:
“13.4 Except as provided in the Rules, before making a stroke at a ball that is in a hazard (whether a bunker or a water hazard) … the player must not: …(c) Touch or move a loose impediment lying in or touching the hazard.”
The penalty? Two strokes.
The result? Jim Furyk wins, more easily than he otherwise might have, the Verizon Heritage Golf Tournament, including the first prize money of $1,026,000.
Davis’s second place take was $615,000.
PGA Tour Tournament Director Slugger White opined that what Davis may have lost, in terms of an opportunity to continue the playoff, “will come back to him in spades, tenfold.”
I recall two times when I called penalties on myself during significant tournaments. One of those was similar to Davis’.
On the tenth hole of a match play event, I brushed a few grains of sand during my backswing from a fairway bunker – not right behind the ball, but on an upslope that I’d overlooked three feet behind the ball.
My opponent did not see it. In match play, the penalty is loss of hole. I informed my opponent on the green that he had won the hole, even though he was not playing it any too well at that moment. I lost the match by one that day.
On the other occasion, in a very close match, I was even with my opponent when, on the 16th green, my ball moved ever so slightly after I had addressed a tap-in putt. Again, my opponent had not seen it happen.
The penalty of one stroke cost me hole. And I lost the match by one.
Did my actions on those occasions pay me back in spades, tenfold?
You betcha!
Vic Fleming is a district court judge in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he also teaches at the William H. Bowen School of Law. Contact him at judgevic@comcast.net.
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