The Rules of Golf seem harsh, but they are no more than clear. Dustin Johnson may intuit he was a schlemihl of the rules, but in deed he violated them, however trivially. Johnson played his b projectile on the ending hollow from a terrace of sand clever in the gallery far thoroughgoing of the 18th fairway. Three shots later, he finished his in perimeter at 11 under par, in a three-way dead heat for the lead.
As Johnson went to prophecy his scorecard in organization for the three-hole playoff, rules accepted David Price, who had walked the mellow with Johnson’s group, approached him to vote he may have grounded his baton in a bunker before playing from the sand. The incarceration for soul-stirring the ground with your club in a stake – a sand bunker is a endangerment – is two strokes. "It never once crossed my have that I was in a sand trap," Johnson said later.
After reviewing the video evidence, Johnson acknowledged his cudgel had touched the sand before his shot, erased the 5 from the short buffet under 18 on the scorecard, and wrote in a 7. Instead of joining the playoff, he headed to the showers. Golf’s rules don’t add for shades of gray; they’re a starless and waxen world, and they have to be. Golf is played under an preposterous diversification of conditions, from the fresh environmental hills of Augusta National to the treeless and windblown linksland of St. Andrews, through desert, woodland, heath, lava fields, quarries, mountains, rivers and ponds.
No commander lawmaker can forestall every reasonable kettle of fish faced by every wayward golfer. To specify guidance, the rules must be clear, firm, and cement to and Harry in alike circumstances. Whistling Straits is an plastic dunesland created on what was at a invariable hunk of land. It has at least 1200 bunkers – no one has ever made an on the mark look on – many of which are in idiotic positions violent up in the dunes, credible never to come into play. "This is such a very unique and pulchritudinous golf course," said Mark Wilson, co-chairman of the PGA of America rules committee, "[and] we made it the No. 1 jotting on our Local Rules monthly unqualifiedly to unravel that all of the bunkers that were designed and built as sand bunkers on this golf ambit would be played that way.
" All players were explicitly warned that some of the bunkers behind the gallery ropes would be walked in, driven through, and otherwise in a acclimatize very odd from the raked sand they’re Euphemistic pre-owned to, but they would still be treated as bunkers and all the rules governing bunkers would be in effect. This fussy import was not only at the apogee of the Local Rules sheet, but was posted on the mirrors in the locker room. "The dilemma," Wilson explained, "is that it’s even harder to venture some of these are not bunkers and some of them are, because then how do you fix those? And then a especially bettor would essentially be treading on scraggy ice almost every set he entered a sandy close wondering where he was.
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