DAN’S PAPERS
danshamptons.com
April 26, 2013 Page 25
Two Shot Penalty How Hubris, Ignorance and Talking Too Much Cost a Golfer $1 million By Dan Rattiner
I
t was thought that Tiger Woods had a good chance to win the Masters tournament two weeks ago. He has his love life straightened out. He’s hitting the ball well. When he hits it well, nobody can catch him. Well, he might have won if he hadn’t said something he would have been better off not saying to the media. Among other things, it may have cost him more than a million dollars. The game of golf has a set of rules that boggle the mind. As the game evolved from trying to hit a ball into a cup with a stick to something much more complicated, things got way out of control. The rules are quite boring, actually. And I will only bother you with one of them, which is related to how Tiger Woods got involved with losing more than a million smackers. This is a rule that comes into effect when you hit a ball to a place that is not a part of the golf course. I take that back. This is a rule that involves what happens when you hit a ball to a place that IS part of a golf course but which you can’t get to. For example, if you hit a ball into a small pond next to a green, you can’t just wade in and hitShopOnLine it from there. Well, you can.Page But1 you KKG-6414 Strip 4/10/13 12:24 PM
will probably get nowhere doing it, unless it’s right near the edge. So you won’t. On the 15th fairway, during the second round (they play four rounds of golf in the Masters), Tiger Woods was tied for the lead. He had hit his ball down the fairway. It was just 150 yards to the green. If he could hit the ball near enough to the hole to get it in with one putt, he would take the lead. Indeed, Woods hit a spectacular shot. It was so good, if it had come all the way down to the ground it would have hit just two inches from the hole. Unfortunately, the pin was still in the hole, so it hit the pin, bounced back and rolled into this little creek. According to the rules, when a ball is in a hazard or unplayable, one of your options is to hit it again from where you hit it before. Specifically, you are to stand up straight and drop another ball to as close as you can get it to where it was before. In this case, there was a small divot at the spot from which he hit it the first time. Woods, after walking to the creek to have a look, returned to where he had hit the ball the first time and dropped another ball. It came to rest about four or five feet behind where he had hit it the first time. Golf officials are all over the place on a golf
course where a match of this magnitude is taking place. They saw nothing amiss about this. Woods said nothing. He hit it again and this time got it to land just IN FRONT OF the cup. He plays amazing golf. The length of oneand-a-half football fields, and he gets the ball to come down four feet from the cup. After the round was over, the press interviewed the players. Woods, who had gotten a six on the hole because of the penalty inflicted after the ball went into the water, was asked about how he played his shot after the drop. His answer, spoken gently, and with complete modesty, was in keeping with the fact that he can hit a ball to a place with more precision than practically anybody. “I went back to where I was,” he said “and actually took two yards further back and tried to hit my shot another two yards off of what I felt like I hit it.” This is an extraordinary thing to say. He is 150 yards from the cup. He’d have hit it exactly 150 yards and two inches if he hadn’t hit the pin. So he’d back up two yards and hit it two yards and two inches short and it would bounce into the cup. He did fail, actually. He hit it four feet from the cup. Only Tiger Woods can be taken seriously when he says (Continued on next page)
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