Men in Green by Michael Bamberger Page B

was testing. Mike called for a rules official. I went into a hole.
    Mike Shea, a PGA Tour rules official and a former player, arrived by cart. Mike told Shea exactly what I had done. Shea had a reputation for being a stickler, for going out of his way to call penalties on players. But without hesitating, he said there was no problem with my action. I didn’t know why, and Mike didn’t, either, but he was in the clear.
    Shea’s ruling gnawed at me for decades: Was it fair? Had Mike Shea, for reasons I could not fathom, given us a break? That prospect was troubling. The rules cannot allow for a break. Mike made the cut on the number. It was a quiet weekend all the way around.
    Years later, I asked David Fay, by then the retired executive director of the USGA, about the ruling Shea had given Mike. When he was running the USGA, David spent many hours during U.S. Opens sitting in the NBC broadcast booth, ready to answer any rules question that might arise. David’s presence, sitting in those elevated green plywood boxes with Johnny Miller and Dan Hicks, had the effect of putting a human face on the USGA, not an easy thing to accomplish. David’s presence, even if it was subliminal, helped make the rules a central character in the story unfolding below, as they must be.
    David knows golf’s rules like you know the route home. His first instinctive answer was that Mike should have received a two-shot penalty that day at Colonial for my bunker-raking with Mike’s ball in it. That was his second answer, too, after checking in with a fellow rulesman.
    Several days later, I heard from David again, by e-mail. He wrote that he had been troubled by the whole thing and dug out a copy of the 1984 rulebook, the one in use in ’86. He found something called Exception 3 to Rule 13-4. It reads: “The player after playing the stroke, or his caddie at any time without the authority of the player, may smooth sand or soil in the hazard, provided that, if the ball still lies in the hazard, nothing is done which improves the lie of the ball or assists the player in his subsequent play of the hole.”
    I was that caddie, smoothing sand without the authority of the player. Nothing I did improved Mike’s lie or assisted him in his play. Shea knew what Mike and I did not: Exception 3 to Rule 13-4 from the 1984 rule book. My raking was fine.
    â€œThat destroys the mercy-on-the-hapless-caddie angle,” David wrote. “If Shea had determined that your action had improved Mike’s lie, he would have nailed Mike with two shots and you probably would have been sacked at the conclusion of the round, if not right on the spot. Ain’t the rules of golf entertaining?”
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    In the space of eight months in 2013, Tiger Woods incurred penalties on four different occasions. The first one was in Abu Dhabi in January, where he took embedded ball relief in a sandy area covered with vegetation, with the approval of his playing partner. But you can’t take embedded ball relief from any sandy lie, and he was given a two-shot penalty, which caused him to miss the cut. The second was at Augusta, when he dropped incorrectly after his third shot on the fifteenth hole in the second round hit the flagstick and ricocheted into a pond. That resulted—after the most torturous half-day in the history of golfing jurisprudence—in another two-shot penalty. The third episode came at the Players Championship in May. On the fourteenth hole in the final round, Woods drove it into a pond that runs down the left side of the fairway. Under the rule option he chose to use, Woods was required to drop within two club lengths of where the ball last crossed that water hazard. With the ball in the air, Mark Rolfing, an NBC reporter who was standing on the tee, indicated that Woods’s ball last crossed the hazard about seventy yards in front of the tee. Footage of the shot from a blimp seemed