Men in Green by Michael Bamberger Page A

woods on the tenth hole of his Friday round and didn’t count it, according to a caddie who was there that week. McCumber made the cut by a shot, but his caddie quit on him before the start of the third round. A whiff is a tricky matter because a player can always say he decided, at some point during the downswing, that he no longer intended to hit the ball. Under the rules, that is not a swing. By custom, the player’s word is accepted unless the evidence against him is overwhelming. Still, that ’78 event followed McCumber for his entire career. F. Scott Fitzgerald would understand.
    Whenever golf is played for keeps, the rule book sees all. It directs all the action. That was true long before Bobby Jones ever played, and it will remain true long after Tiger Woods has holed his final putt.
    Every legend on my list, even if he or she has never read the Rules of Golf , understands the wisdom of this passage from the first page:
    Golf is played, for the most part, without the supervision of a referee or umpire. The game relies on the integrity of the individual to show consideration for other players and to abide by the rules. All players should conduct themselves in a disciplined manner, demonstrating courtesy and sportsmanship at all times, irrespective of how competitive they may be. This is the spirit of the game of golf.
    In any system of belief, an unshakable faith can be instilled at a tender age. There are surely people who accept the importance of golf’s rules as an act of blind faith. But it is much more common and much more powerful to find religion on one’s own.
    In August 1972 Mike played in the fifteen-and-sixteen-year-old division of the Crutchfield Invitational, a junior event in Sebring, Florida. Mike won. He was seventeen. He won his age division and every age division. Had he been honest about his age and played as a seventeen-year-old, another kid could have had the pleasure of being named the fifteen-and-sixteen-year-old champ. Over time, that tournament became a do-the-right-thing wake-up call for Mike. His career has had various moments when he called penalties on himself that only he could see. Don’t give him a medal. All he was doing was playing golf by the rules.
    In the spring of 1976, 1977, and 1978, I was on my high school golf team at Patchogue-Medford High School on Long Island. (I am still embarrassed about voting for myself for captain.) Our season began in late March, and the courses were raw and unkempt. We played under a local rule by which we were allowed to lift, smooth, and place our balls in sand traps. The purpose of this rule was to get relief from animal dung, hoof prints, rocks, sticks, and the general detritus of winter. One raw day, I was playing in a nine-hole match at Timber Point, a beautiful old bay-front public course. On the eighth hole of a close nine-hole match, I was in a greenside trap. I lifted, smoothed with my foot, and placed. However, I placed my ball not in the smooth pathway I had created but on a little ledge just above the path. In other words, I had teed my ball up to make my bunker shot easier. I cheated. Man, is that hard to write.
    In 1986, when I was caddying for Mike at the Colonial in Fort Worth, he was grinding it out in the second round, trying to make the cut. On the par-three eighth hole, Mike hit his tee shot in a greenside bunker. I got to the bunker ahead of him and saw there was a rake in it, some distance in front of Mike’s ball but in his line of sight. On tour, rakes are typically left outside bunkers. I picked up the rake. The sand was soft and the rake left an indentation. I smoothed it out with the rake.
    Mike started yelling, “You’re testing, you’re testing!” His face was red. One of his caddie-yard nicknames was Mad Dog.
    The caddie, by the rules, is an extension of his player. A player cannot “test” the surface from which he is about to play. Raking a bunker before playing a shot