Joel Dahmen was texted his fourth-round grouping at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. “(TEE TIME ROUND 4) Joel Dahmen Rnd 4 Tee 10 @9:56 a Local Time Pebble Beach Golf Links With C.T. Pan & Sung Kang,” it read. He tweeted it from his phone.
Dahmen hit one key with it.
The worried emoji.
On Sunday, at 9:56 a.m. PT, during the fourth round of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am at Pebble Beach Golf Links, Joel Dahmen will play with C.T. Pan. And Joel Dahmen will play with Sung Kang for the first time since Dahmen accused him of cheating just under three years ago.
Eyes-wide-open emoji.
In July of 2018, emotions ran high. During the final round of the Quicken Loans National, Kang hit his second shot on the dogleg-left, 566-yard, par-5 10th into the hazard left of the green, and from there, Kang, Dahmen and an official argued for about 25 minutes over the drop — Kang believed the ball crossed the hazard close to the hole and would drop there; Dahmen believed the ball crossed some 200 yards back. Kang would eventually take his drop about 35 yards away.
After the round, Dahmen tweeted about Kang for the first time.
“Kang cheated,” he wrote. “He took a bad drop from a hazard. I argued until I was blue. I lost.”
“He wanted to drop up by the green, and I said, ‘No, I don’t think it crossed [the hazard],’” Dahmen said in May on GOLF’s Subpar podcast. “I went very political about the whole thing — you’ve got to protect the field. I don’t want to do this, you know. That was the first five minutes.”
‘If you can sleep at night:’ Behind the scenes of Sung Kang’s alleged cheating incident
The Tour said in a statement in 2018 that Kang “is standing by the ruling that was made by PGA Tour Rules officials on Sunday and will have no further comment.” Five weeks after the Quicken Loans, Dahmen said on Subpar, Kang confronted Dahmen at the Canadian Open.
“He goes, ‘Joel, I want you to apologize to me,’” Dahmen said. “I said, ‘Apologize to me? Look around, you should apologize to everybody else that was in that field. You took money from them. You did all this stuff.’ We just went back and forth about apologizing and finally he’s like, ‘You did this; you ruined my reputation,’ and I go, ‘You did this to yourself; I didn’t do this,” Dahmen said.
“Either way this was getting out and everyone knows it so I just accelerated it a little bit, but it was back and forth of five minutes of I told him to apologize to me, he really wanted me to apologize to him and then we have not spoke since.”
Dahmen and Kang very well may on Sunday.