The Most Pointless Rule in Golf
A couple weeks ago, Thomas Detry was disqualified from the BMW PGA Championship on the European Tour. The reason, he had signed an incorrect scorecard.
On the surface, the rule (Rule 3.3) makes sense. Removing a player who tries to post a score that’s lower than their actual score is obvious cheating. Any player who tries to do this must be punished. Without consequences like removal from the event, more players would try to do the same.
Right?!
That was the original intent of the rule, after all; to make sure scores were accurate and players weren’t trying to shave strokes after the round was completed. It was a necessary part of the sport to protect the field.
In this case, however, Detry was not trying to cheat and neither was any other player that’s been penalized for the same thing in the modern era. At the top level of the sport, the rule is antiquated and pointless.
Counting scores
Like I said, the purpose of the rule is to make sure scores are counted correctly. In a golf tournament, no player keeps their own score. Instead, there’s a marker, which is typically a playing partner who keeps the other player’s score. Then, at the end of the round, the players swap scorecards, check to make sure the scores are correct, and both sign them before turning them into the scoring table.
That’s pretty much how it’s always worked, but that doesn’t mean it has to be that way. That’s how, in the beginning, scores were posted on the leaderboard and followers of the event learned who was leading.
Today, it’s a little bit different. Not only is this system still in place, but there are additional measures that the PGA Tour and European Tour have set up to make watching an event more enjoyable.
Think back to the last time you watched an event. You didn’t have to wait until everyone finished their round to learn who was in the lead, did you? Of course not. Fans have the ability to learn about every single shot hit by every player the moment it happens. There are scorers and cameras that catch every shot and relay the information back to numerous sources, including the leaderboards.
Requiring a marker (playing partner) to keep track of another player’s score is duplicating a job that’s already done by several others at the exact same moment. When a player walks off the 18th green, everyone watching already knows what they shot. Going to the scoring tent, checking to make sure the marker recorded scores correctly, signing a scorecard, and turning in an official scorecard is a meaningless ritual.
It’s Math
Not only is the process no longer necessary, but it doesn’t help us to do what the rules are there to do; figure out who the best golfer is. Hypothetically speaking, let’s say a player finishes a tournament and wins by 5; a fairly significant margin. Then, he heads to the scoring tent, signs a wrong card, and turns it in. The result as it stands would be that he’s disqualified.
How would you feel about that outcome?
The player obviously showed that they were the best that week and by a wide margin. The victory would go to the player who came in 2nd. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t feel right to me. It feels like it failed to do exactly what we hope the rules were created do; create a fair playing field for the best player to be revealed.
Let’s take it one or two hypothetical steps further. What if you had a player who was mathematically illiterate? That player would not be able to check or confirm that the scores are correct. That may be a slightly ridiculous scenario, one might say. But it’s just a thought experiment. Is literacy a requirement to being a great golfer? I don’t think so.
The point is, the rule is regulating something that isn’t, and shouldn’t, be a requirement in the sport.
Personal Error
Now, let’s think back to whose initial error this was. In the original example, was it Detry? No. It was his marker, or playing partner, who originally made the mistake by marking an incorrect score. All Detry did was look over the scores and confirm that they were the same as the ones he wrote down. It’s a very simple and honest mistake.
Continuing with the obscure thought experiments…
Let’s say this rule is about stopping a player from cheating. In the early days of golf and at lower levels of competition, that’s what it is. But in this case, it actually rewards another player for trying to catch their playing partner in an error.
Think about it like this, as the marker, what’s stopping you from intentionally marking one or two scores wrong on every scorecard in hopes of your playing partner making a small mistake that’d cost him big? Other than a person’s integrity, nothing is stopping them from doing that. I’m not saying Detry’s playing partner did that, not at all. All I’m doing is pointing out that the same level of integrity is not expected from the marker for messing up in, essentially, the same way.
Lesser Than
The interesting thing about this rule is how and when it’s applied. Many people say that it’s very simple to make sure your scores are correct, which I agree with. But the rule is not about the ability to count your scores correctly. It’s just not.
If it were only about the ability to accurately count one’s scores correctly, then the rule would be applied to both scores that were counted too high and too low, but that’s not that case. In this rule, a player is only disqualified if they turn in a score that’s lower than their actual score. So, in our current example, Detry would’ve been better off turning in a scorecard that showed him shooting 89 instead of 69 (Detry shot a 70). If he’d turned in a score that showed an 89, the scoring officials would’ve just corrected it and posted it, no harm done.
Because the intent is to catch players trying to cheat, and you’d only do that by trying to go lower, the incorrect high score doesn’t matter.
So, the purpose of the rule is to catch cheaters, not test math skills. We shouldn’t be punishing someone who made a math mistake and wasn’t trying to cheat because it’s impossible to cheat, in this way, in our current system with cameras and additional scorers.
Note that all this happened in an event that was the final one to score points towards the European Ryder Cup team. Detry was in 24th place in the event after two days and had a very real shot at making a run. Instead, he’s DQ’d for an outdated reason and missed out on a nice paycheck as well.
It’s time to eliminate this rule at the highest levels of golf because it serves no purpose.
