This well-meaning golf rule has pros sweating cheating claims

On Friday evening local time in Portrush, the Royal & Ancient issued a 252-word explanation of the ruling that for a couple of hours anyway turned the 153rd Open Championship on its head. (If you’re just tuning in, Shane Lowry took a practice swing on the 12th hole in the second round that caused his ball to move, ultimately leading to a two-stroke penalty that turned his par 5 into a double-bogey 7.)

The R&A’s statement said that three questions needed to be answered before a ruling could be signed, sealed and delivered:  

1. Did the ball leave its original position and come to rest on another spot?

2. Was the ball’s movement to another spot discernible to the naked eye?

3. If the ball did come to rest on another spot and the movement was discernible to the naked eye, is it known or virtually certain that the player’s actions caused the ball to move?

Question 1 was a layup. Video footage conclusively showed that, yes, Lowry’s ball had moved. The answers to the other two questions, however, were less certain, because ultimately whether the movement was discernible to the naked eye hinged on the opinion of one person and only one person: Lowry.

Watching the replay from home, perhaps you felt there was no way Lowry could have noticed such a minor rotation. Or perhaps you felt the opposite: that there was no way a golfer couldn’t have spotted that shift, subtle as it was. But frankly it didn’t matter what you thought; or what Lowry’s two playing partners — Scottie Scheffler and Collin Morikawa — thought (after reviewing the tape, Scheffler said “it looked like it was very difficult to see if the ball moved”); or, for that matter, what some of the world’s most respected rules officials thought. It was Lowry’s call alone. Put another way, as an official told Lowry after the round, “If you don’t see it moving, it didn’t move.”   

So, what did Lowry see or not see?

“I told them I definitely was looking down towards the ball as I was taking that practice swing, and I didn’t see it move,” he said.

Case closed, right?

Umm … not so fast, and this is where the well-meaning “naked-eye” rule gets messy.  

That’s because while Lowry said he detected no movement of his ball in real time, he also worried that others might cast doubt on that claim. In other words, he took the two strokes to protect his rep. “I had to take the penalty because I can’t have my name talked about or tossed around like that,” he said. He later added, “The last thing I want to do is sit there and argue and not take the penalty and then get slaughtered all over social media tonight for being a cheat.”

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Bit of a pickle, eh? Jon Rahm thinks so. When asked about the Lowry ruling on Saturday afternoon, Rahm said, “I can relate.” Rahm said he has been in similar situations at tournaments when a rules official has presented him with an iPad and asked him to review footage.

“You’re in a no-win situation,” Rahm said. “Because if you say I didn’t see it — therefore I don’t think it should be a penalty, even though the rule says it should be visible to the naked eye — you always run the risk of being called something you don’t want to be called. And if you take it on the safe side, you’re taking a two-shot penalty.”

Rahm added: “From what I understand from the whole thing, and I haven’t seen the images, this is just from what I heard, it needs to be visible without a camera. If the rule says visible to the naked eye, we need to uphold that more than anything else.”

That’s exactly what the rule says; it’s right there under Decision 34-3/10, which the governing bodies implemented in 2017 in the form of two standards that permit committees to limit video-replay usage. The first of those standards: “when video reveals evidence that could not reasonably be seen with the ‘naked eye,’” and the second: “when players use their ‘reasonable judgment’ to determine a specific location when applying the Rules.”

When the rule became official, Martin Slumbers, then the R&A’s chief executive, said in a statement, “We have been considering the impact of video review on the game and feel it is important to introduce a Decision to give greater clarity in this area. Golf has always been a game of integrity and we want to ensure that the emphasis remains as much as possible on the reasonable judgment of the player rather than on what video technology can show.”

Perhaps overlooked was the impact a different kind of judgment would have on players.