Final Four preview: WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play

Click here to read the full article…

Rules officials enforce the laws of the game at every PGA TOUR event. The rulings they hand out can range from the mundane to the truly bizarre. While the countless cart-path drops each week can start to run together, there are some unique situations that are truly memorable. We had several of those this year. Before we close the book on the 2021 PGA TOUR season, let’s revisit some of the rulings that sparked plenty of discussion among golf fans. By highlighting these rulings, I hope to bring more awareness to the process our officials undertook to properly enforce the Rules of Golf. 1. TO OB OR NOT OB This situation occurred during the final round of the World Golf Championships-FedEx St. Jude Invitational, after Bryson DeChambeau’s tee shot on the par-4 sixth hole came to rest under the meshed fencing that defined the out-of-bounds on the hole’s right-hand side. With DeChambeau in the final group alongside Harris English, this was a crucial ruling that received plenty of airtime and incited its fair share of debate. The immediate inclination of many watching was that the ball was indeed out of bounds. In reality, it was still in play. Let’s explain. For a ball to be ruled out of bounds, the entire ball must lie beyond the boundary line of the course. This imaginary line runs at ground level on the course-side edge between the two boundary stakes on either side of DeChambeau’s ball. The referee on site correctly laid a string between the two stakes and found that a small portion of DeChambeau’s ball intersected with the string. Thus, the ball was ruled to be in-bounds. Since the ball was determined to be lying in-bounds, it was now up to DeChambeau to determine how he would like to proceed. Because this fence was a boundary fence, relief was not an option. Would he try to play the ball lying under the mesh fence or would he take an unplayable lie? A cart path situated adjacent to the OB fence added another wrinkle to this ruling. DeChambeau would be standing on the cart path if he tried to play his ball from under the fence. A player is entitled free relief from a cart path, unless, under 16.1 (3), the shot “would be clearly unreasonable because of something other than the immovable obstruction because of where the ball lies.” The immovable obstruction, in this example, was the cart path. DeChambeau would not be given relief from the cart path if a rules official determined it was unreasonable for him to play his ball from under the fence. That’s why the rules official asked DeChambeau, “If the cart path wasn’t here, how would you play your ball?” Without hesitation, DeChambeau explained that he would punch his ball from underneath the fence back into the fairway. Attempting to play this shot, he would have to stand on the cart path. Since the shot described was reasonable, DeChambeau was granted free relief from the cart path and was able to use the Rules of Golf to his advantage. 2. PLUG LIFE Southern California is known for its sunshine, but bad weather can be an issue when the TOUR visits in the winter month. This year’s Farmers Insurance Open was no exception, as the scenic South Course at Torrey Pines was closed because of high winds Monday and hit by hail in the second round. With the ground saturated by rainfall, embedded balls became one of the storylines over the final two rounds. It started Saturday, after Patrick Reed pulled his approach shot on the par-4 10th hole into deep rough left of the green. The ball landed outside of Reed’s field of vision. That is an important detail in this ruling. Prior to arriving at his ball, Reed asked a volunteer if she saw his ball bounce. The volunteer did not see the ball bounce after it landed in the rough. Based on the volunteer’s assessment, and the fact that the turf was soggy, Reed wanted to check to see if his ball was embedded in the ground. Reed informed his playing partners that he was checking his lie and called for a referee’s assistance to provide the final determination. Under the Rules of Golf, Reed correctly marked and lifted his golf ball to determine if it was indeed embedded. When the referee arrived, he inspected the pitch mark caused by Reed’s ball and confirmed that the ball was embedded and free relief was available. Due to the wet conditions at Torrey Pines, McIlroy had almost the exact same situation occur on the 18th hole. He believed his ball was embedded in its own pitch mark and correctly marked and lifted his golf ball to determine if the ball had indeed embedded. McIlroy confirmed that it was embedded and was also able to take free relief. In these two situations, one player acted with the help of a referee and the other acted on his own. Both situations are allowed and both players are viewed under the Rules of Golf, to have proceeded correctly. 3. ARBOR DAY During this year’s Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard, Jason Day’s tee shot sailed toward the trees right of the fairway on Bay Hill’s 16th hole. Day’s ball was heard rattling around the trees. No one saw it fall to the ground, however. Upon reaching the area where his ball was likely to be, a search by the volunteers, spectators and the players and caddies in the group began. In 2019, the time allotted for a player to search for his ball was reduced from five to three minutes. The clock starts when the player or his caddie begins to search. If the ball is not found and identified before the three-minute window expires, the player must return to the site of his last shot under a stroke-and-distance penalty. In this case, Day would have to go back to the tee and play his third stroke. If “a” ball is found in the tree, it must be identified by the player as his ball. Simply finding a ball with the same brand and number do not automatically make that specific ball the player’s. The specific markings on the ball the player used to signify that it was his ball, need to be seen. If the player can identify the ball as his, he can declare it unplayable proceed under the rules for an unplayable lie. This would allow Day, under the penalty of one stroke, to drop a new ball within a club length of the spot on the ground directly beneath where his ball sat in the tree. This option is much less severe than going back to the tee. As the 3-minute search wound down, someone spotted a ball high up in the tree. Not knowing if it was his ball, Day had various means to try and identify the ball as his. He could climb the tree, throw something at the ball to dislodge it or use a rangefinder or binoculars to identify it. Unfortunately, the ball was too high in the tree for any of these options to work. Just prior to Day’s three-minute window expiring, a photographer was spotted in the crowd with a very large zoom lens attached to his camera. Per the referee’s request, the photographer snapped a photo of the ball in the tree and was able to enhance the still image to check the markings on the golf ball. This allowed Day to identify the ball just as time expiredwas able to proceed under his unplayable options. This was an extremely fortunate result due to the nearby photographer. The same issue arose for MacKenzie Hughes on the par-3 11th hole in the final round of the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines. 4. BUBBA’S BUSTED DRIVER Bubba Watson’s massive clubhead speed has been an asset throughout his PGA TOUR career, helping him to 12 PGA TOUR victories, including two Masters. But his driver couldn’t handle it anymore in the second round of this year’s Travelers Championship. The head of his driver snapped off the shaft as Watson took one of his mighty swings on the second tee at TPC River Highlands. Because Watson had made a stroke at his golf ball, it was counted as a shot. Fortunately for him, the ball traveled down the center of the fairway. Because the club was broken in the normal course of play, Watson was able to replace his driver (as long as play was not delayed). He immediately requested a referee to see if it was possible to put the same clubhead on a shaft that was in his car. This was a very unusual, and confusing, ruling. The PGA TOUR utilizes Model Local Rule G-9 for this specific reason. The rules state that “if a player’s club is broken or significantly damaged during the round by the player or caddie, except in cases of abuse, the player may replace the club with any club.” Therefore, Watson was allowed to replace his driver with any club he chooses. Watson’s request to assemble a new shaft into the existing driver head created a separate situation. A player is not allowed to assemble a club during play with other components. However, the rule specifies that a club cannot be assembled from components carried on the course by or for the player. Since the driver shaft was in his car, the driver could be assembled at his car and then brought to him. But Watson opted, instead to replace the broken club with a driver that had already been assembled. That club was retrieved from his car for him to use for the remainder of the round. 5. RUSSELL’S ROLL Russell Knox started the final round of this year’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in second place, just two shots off the lead. Having a rules situation on the opening hole is not the way any player wants to start a Sunday in contention, but Knox needed a ruling before striking his second shot of the day. Knox’s ball moved prior to him beginning his swing, after he addressed the ball by placing his club just behind the ball. Knox immediately recognized that his golf ball had moved and correctly asked for a referee’s assistance. If a player’s ball at rest moves (i.e. comes to rest in a different location), he is not penalized if natural forces caused the ball to move. He would then play the ball from its new position. He is subject to a one-stroke penalty if he caused the ball to move, however. How do we know if the player caused the ball to move? The determining factors are made by speaking to the player and reviewing the actions the player took prior to the ball moving. The timing of these actions relative to when the ball moved are factored into the final determination. For example, did the player make a practice stroke next to the ball and the ball immediately move? Or perhaps the player lightly grounded his club and the ball moved after he did so. If this was the case, how long after he had set his club down behind the ball did the ball move? One or two seconds? Five seconds? Ten seconds? How soon after these actions does the ball have to move for the player to be penalized? The referee handling the ruling asked Knox to show him the actions he took and how much time he thought elapsed before the ball subsequently moved. The player believed that the ball had moved a few seconds after his actions and felt nothing in his actions could have caused the ball to move. Because of the pressure PGA TOUR players are constantly under, it can sometimes be challenging to recall an incident in real time. Everything has slowed down in their minds and their focus of hitting a perfect shot and winning a golf tournament is all that they are fixated on. Upon hearing the description from Knox, the referee explained there would be no penalty and the player should play his ball from its new location. Shortly after the ruling, a video clip of the ruling was presented to the PGA TOUR’s Rules Committee. After reviewing the replay, it was clear the ball moved immediately after the player grounded his club behind the ball. The player should have been penalized for moving his ball at rest. As a result, a one-stroke penalty was later added to Knox’s score for the second hole and the player was informed by the rules committee as soon as possible on the golf course.

Click here to read the full article…

Nothing like pondering the inexorable passage of time to inspire a former phenom’s best play. Brian Harman, a teenage star before social media destroyed our collective sense of context, used the occasion of his 30th birthday as motivation to produce the best play of his PGA TOUR career. It happened earlier this year. Jan. 19, to be exact. Harman was among friends and family in the California desert, the first round of the CareerBuilder Challenge making it a working birthday. He was 2-1/2 years removed from his lone PGA TOUR win and ranked 136th in the world. Off the course, his life was filled with joy – married in 2014 to wife Kelly, and blessed with their daughter Cooper, now 14 months old. But was his golf career offering the same kind of contentment, the same kind of joy? By now, he had expected multiple titles, heck, even major championships, on his mantle. Instead … one TOUR win. Time to take stock. “It’s kind of morbid, but I think about the end. I think about the end of my career. I’m not a spring chicken anymore. I want to realize that. I want to appreciate that. I don’t want to let anything go by,â€� Harman said. “You’re born, you’re a kid, you’re a young adult, you’re an adult, you get married, you have a kid and then what? The end. These things are happening without me slowing down time. It’s real. It keeps ticking.â€� When asked what a 16-year-old Brian Harman – the one who won the U.S. Junior Amateur at Columbia Country Club, an event televised on ESPN – might have said to himself at the start of 2017, he imagines a sharp exhortation. “Get with it, bud. How are you not contending more? What happened?â€� Harman’s best play has often been in response to a challenge — both real and imagined — and this was no exception. Days after that milestone birthday, he finished third in the CareerBuilder, two shots behind former Georgia teammate Hudson Swafford. Then in May at the Wells Fargo Championship, he won his second TOUR title, holing a 20-foot birdie putt on the final hole to beat the world’s top-ranked golfer, Dustin Johnson, by a shot. A month later, he entered the final round of the U.S. Open with a one-shot lead. Playing in the final group of a major for the first time, Harman hung tough until some costly back-nine bogeys led to a 72 and a tie for second behind Brooks Koepka, who made four consecutive back-nine birdies. Harman’s seven top-10 finishes this season are tied for fourth-most on TOUR. If he can muster up some more strong play over the season’s final six weeks, even more accomplishments could be added to his resume. He’s 10th in the FedExCup and 12th in the U.S. Presidents Cup standings (the top 10 on Sept. 4 will earn automatic spots on the team). He’s never played in the TOUR Championship or played for the U.S. since turning pro. And of course, there’s this week’s PGA Championship. He’s hoping the confidence and experience he gained at the U.S. Open can spill into the season’s final major at Quail Hollow. As he said after his final round at Erin Hills: “I feel like I am trying to make up for some time lost.â€� Parents are usually a player’s pathway into the game, but neither of Harman’s played golf in Savannah, Georgia, where Harman was born and raised. A week off of school in February 1997 gave him a serendipitous start. He watched every minute of the telecast from the 1997 Phoenix Open, seeing Tiger Woods’ famous roof-raising hole-in-one and an 11-shot victory from Steve Jones, the reigning U.S. Open champion. That was enough to inspire him to pick up the game. Soon he was stealing $6 from his mother’s change jar in the laundry room and riding his bike two miles to Southbridge Golf Club. “When I first picked up a club, I knew it was what I was going to do the rest of my life. I knew it right then. And I say that with all conviction because I believed it. I absolutely believed it. I knew there was nothing else that I was going to do,â€� he said. The question soon became: Could he do it better than anybody else? The early signs were encouraging. He was still in high school when he played his first PGA TOUR event, the RBC Heritage in 2004. He was 17 years old when he made his first PGA TOUR cut (T71, 2004 Travelers Championship) and remains the youngest player ever to represent the United States in the Walker Cup, amateur golf’s version of the Ryder Cup. He was the world’s top-ranked amateur before he began his college career at the University of Georgia. Every golf career has its ebbs and flows, though the severity of the fluctuations can differ drastically. The peaks of Harman’s career often can be attributed to moments of motivation that follow perceived slights. The hard part has been overcoming the periods of complacency in between. This time may be different, though. The fact that a large portion of his career is now behind him – this is his sixth PGA TOUR season – has inspired him to make the most of his time. “I’ve been out here awhile,â€� he said. “Now it’s really time to start doing the things that I thought I should be doing.â€� It may be cliché to say that smaller players – Harman is listed at 5-foot-7 and 150 pounds — have the proverbial chip on their shoulder, but that toughness is also necessary in today’s bomb-and-gouge game. “The TOUR, the way it’s going, everybody is huge and driving it 350 yards,â€� said former Georgia teammate Kevin Kisner. “Guys like us are less and less. If you don’t have that attitude, you’re going to get run over out here.â€� At Erin Hills, Harman told the story of his first football practice, when his father dropped him off and told him to not be disappointed if he didn’t play much. “And I said, ‘We’ll see about that.’â€� Then there was the debate in Savannah about who would be the better player, Harman or Tripp Coggins, who was several years older. “I’ll never forget, and I’m friends with this guy now, and this is a grown man. He was like, ‘Well, what happens if you level off, if you plateau? What happens then?’ He was in the Tripp camp. My golf career probably would not have been as good if I hadn’t been trying to prove that guy wrong my whole life,â€� Harman said with a laugh. And, of course, there’s the famous match with Rickie Fowler at the 2009 NCAA Championship. It was Harman’s senior year, and the first year that the tournament used a match-play format. Harman and Fowler were in the deciding match between Georgia and Oklahoma State. Harman made a 7-footer on the 15th hole to stay 1 down. “Apparently, Rickie and I inadvertently walked off the green and forgot to put the flagstick in the hole, leaving Brian to replace it,â€� then-Oklahoma State coach Mike McGraw wrote in his recent memoir, “Better Than I Found It.â€� “He would later say that our lack of common courtesy really upset him, and made him even more determined to win the match.â€� Harman birdied the final three holes for a 1-up victory. “You don’t want to give him an extra reason to get mad because he usually plays better,â€� said former college teammate Harris English. It’s no coincidence, Harman says, that his first TOUR victory came just weeks after he chastised himself for blowing an opportunity to win in Memphis, at the FedEx St. Jude Classic. “It’s almost always someone saying something, unknowingly and innocently, that gets me going,â€� Harman said. “Or just a revelation, just like that Memphis tournament. I really should have won that. … There’s always that catalyst, that one thing. And I’m hoping that’s what the U.S. Open was. I could have had that one. “It’s still tough to think about. As much as it was a learning opportunity, and there’s plenty I can learn from that going forward, that was an opportunity to win a tournament and I’m not going to get that opportunity back. I can see far enough down the road to know it will help me, eventually. I poured everything I had into it. And when you come up short, when you don’t get it done, it hurts because you’re like, I just wasn’t good enough this week. You have to be really honest with yourself in those situations. But I was present. I was ready. A couple more putts go my way, and I’d have been holding that trophy.â€� Harman said spending more time with Zach Johnson, a fellow resident of St. Simons Island, Georgia, has helped him this season. They see similarities in their games. Both are undersized players in today’s power game. Toughness and tenacity have gotten them this far, as well as strong wedge play. “I love the way he operates and cognitively processes things. Here’s the beauty of Brian. He works really hard and he’s hungry,â€� Johnson said. “He’s not trying to reinvent himself to play good golf. He’s taking what has been given to him and trying to polish his strengths. Everyone says, ‘I need to work on this because I’m not very good at it.’ Well, what are you really good at? Make that even better. I feel like he does a really good job of that.â€� The relationship with Johnson helped him add structure to his practice time, also a necessity when you have a young family at home. Johnson has helped him prepare for courses and, most importantly, own his identity. But Harman also has turned to the two-time major champion for advice on how to balance family life with the demands of the PGA TOUR. “It’s so hard out here because so many guys are so talented, it’s hard not to say, ‘I wish I could hit it higher, I wish I could hit it a little further.’ Zach doesn’t care. He says, ‘I have this game and I’m going to beat you with this game,’â€� Harman said. “I haven’t quite had an identity out here. This year, I’ve putted well, but I’ve putted well because I’ve given my putter more of a chance. I’ve started to hit it a little straighter. I’m going to let that be one of my strengths. It’s figuring out who you are, what kind of golfer you want to be instead of, ‘Well, today I’m going to try to hit it as far as I can. And the next day, I’m going to see if I can fade everything.’ No identity, no plan.â€� Like Johnson, Harman wants to keep the ball in play off the tee and then take advantage of a strong short game. Harman ranks fifth in Strokes Gained: Putting (+0.67) this season and 30th in Strokes Gained: Around-the-Green (+0.29). Harman and Johnson, who earned his first PGA TOUR card at age 27, both cut their teeth on the mini-tours before making it to the PGA TOUR. The bulk of Harman’s college career didn’t live up to his standards, but he rebuilt his game before his senior season. “I had to pick myself up by my bootstraps. I had to re-learn how to do it,â€� he said. He was picked for his second Walker Cup team shortly after graduating with his finance degree, but flunked out of Q-School’s first stage that fall. So in 2010 he headed to the eGolf Professional Tour, which is based out of Charlotte, North Carolina, the same town he returns to this week to compete in his third PGA Championship. He never had to borrow money to compete in golf’s minor leagues, making ends meet with $20,000 a year from a club endorsement deal and his on-course earnings. “I look back fondly on those days, even though I was broke,â€� Harman said. “I made $6,000 in my first tournament and I thought I was rich. I thought I couldn’t spend it. Then I enter five more tournaments and it’s gone. “When it’s $1,200 per tournament, it costs $50,000 to play those mini-tours, but I reveled in that. I didn’t have a safety net. I never took a dime.â€� He drove the F-150 he’d received before heading off to college and ate “a lot of Wendy’s, the No. 6.â€� And there was the occasional turkey sandwich for breakfast to avoid the hotel’s powdered eggs. After two years in those minor leagues, Harman graduated from Q-School to earn his PGA TOUR card. “The sense of urgency was, ‘I gotta get somewhere.’ I can remember being in Q-School and (thinking), ‘It’s time,’â€� Harman said. “When I put my mind to something, I know I can accomplish anything. But as I’ve gotten older, it’s gotten harder to set my mind to something. I can remember when I was a kid, being so hard-headed. You couldn’t tell me I couldn’t do something. As you get older you get beaten down, you fail, you lose, things happen. It becomes a harder and harder emotion to find.â€� He found it on his 30th birthday. A turn of the calendar may have been all he needed.  

Click here to read the full article…