The Irish kid and the foot in the sand:
was McIlroy decision a huge break?
AUGUSTA, Ga. –You could call it the luck of the Irish, or perhaps the forbearance and maybe even the mercy of the Masters brass, but Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy might well have dodged a bullet in this Masters. Which would be a pleasing Easter story, given that even though he’s the latest phenom in professional golf and a fast-rising millionaire, he’s only 19. This has to do with the fatal penalty that might have been, but wasn’t. The marvel in golf isn’t that there are so many penalties handed out, but that there are so few. Under the Rules of Golf, you can get two shots for holding your pinky wrong while sipping your tea.
This had to do with a situation in a bunker. To understand how complicated bunker questions can become, consider this event on the European Tour some years ago:
A golfer had hit into a fairway bunker, and while waiting to hit his next shot, he decided to eat an apple. After a couple bites, he handed the apple to his caddie and went off to survey his shot.
The caddie, standing patiently with the bag, was stung on the hand by a wasp, and startled and in pain, he dropped the apple. It landed in the sand. He bent quickly to pick it up, so that it would not sully the bunker. The golfer didn’t see this happen. Later, to his surprise, he discovered that he’d been penalized because his caddie had lifted a loose impediment from the sand.
What could have ended up as a disqualification for McIlroy remained a triple-bogey 7 at the 18th on Friday. The question was, when are you kicking the sand in disgust and when are you merely smoothing it with your foot? McIlroy, reluctantly, finally accepted an official invitation to explain the difference in his case. And thereby received a blessed benefit of the doubt.
McIlroy was doing beautifully for a kid newcomer at the Masters. He was 2 under coming to the 18th Friday. He bunkered his approach, but he didn’t get the ball out on his first try. This can upset the best of golfers. On his second try, McIlroy knocked the ball across the green and then three-putted for a triple bogey-7 and a 1-over 73.
The crucial part of this scenario came after his first bunker shot, the one he didn’t get out. And what happened was clearly up for interpretation, much like a call in the NFL – did or did not the receiver have possession when he came down in the end zone?
Was McIlroy kicking the sand in disgust, or was he merely smoothing it with his foot?
“The Rules of Golf (13-4),” said Augusta’s statement, “prohibit a player from testing the condition of a hazard before playing a stroke in the hazard. .... kicking the ground in a hazard constitutes testing the condition. However, the Rules allow the player to smooth the sand or soil in the hazard …”
McIlroy had signed his card and had left the course. If he had been penalized, the penalty would not have been on the scorecard, and he would have been disqualified for having signed an incorrect scorecard.
“I didn’t even think about what I did until Fred Ridley [tournament official] called,” McIlroy said. Ridley asked, “Do you want to have a look at the tape before we make a decision?”
McIlroy didn’t recognize he’d just been handed an opportunity to defend himself.
“And I said no,” McIlroy said Saturday, “because I’m confident that I haven’t done anything wrong.” Such innocence. If only the rules were so sweet and simple. McIlroy, on this first call Friday evening, failed to grasp that the hammer might be about to fall. Because if the officials ruled that he was testing the sand with his foot, he would be penalized, and if penalized, that meant the penalty wasn’t on his scorecard, and that meant incorrect scorecard, which in turn meant DQ -- disqualification.
The sense is that the officials were reluctant to DQ him, and were hoping for a reason not to. This seems clear, because the officials called him a second time, maybe an hour or so later.
“They said to me, ‘It would be in your best interests to come up and see the tape,’ ” McIlroy said.
Maybe he finally grasped the gravity of the situation, finally got the message that he was hanging by a thread. He went to review the tape with officials Friday night. It was about 8:40 by then. And he explained to them that he always smoothes out the sand with his foot.
“I didn’t kick it,” McIlroy told reporters Saturday. “It was more of a sweep.”
Could there have been a sigh of relief in that room? Had a weight been lifted off the Masters officials? Who would want to DQ a 19-year-old kid on the fast track? Clearly the ruling could have gone either way. Otherwise, why all the bother in trying to meet with McIlroy? Why not just put on the black hoods?
Said the decision, handed down by Competition Committee Chairman Fred Ridley: “Based on the tape and Mr. McIlroy’s statement of what had taken place after he played the shot, it was determined that no violation of the Rules had occurred.”
Did the officials give McIlroy a break? Possibly, but only in the sense that they could have ruled either way, with or without giving him a chance to explain himself. Golf officials, unlike Solomon, never offer to divide a baby. The rules are the rules. But golf is a human experience, and sometimes things hang in the balance and are waiting for a reason to fall, one way or another, rightly.
Was this one of those times? It seems so. It seems a naïve young phenom had just got a huge break. Come Saturday morning, McIlroy might have been grabbing the next flight for Shannon. Instead, he was thinking that something in the 60s would be a nice day’s work in the third round. He settled for a 71, and all in all was doing quite nicely for a 19-year-old in his first Masters.
As to the inside story of that decision, it will forever remain behind Augusta National’s doors.
Return to Man About Golf archives