I have a Different Question About the USGA Ruling

The USGA is taking heat from all over the world for their handling of the ridiculous ruling about whether or not Dustin Johnson caused his ball to move on the 5th green as well they should.  The only thing they have to be thankful for is that DJ bailed them out from an even worse disaster.

I actually have more than one question about the whole thing.  The first concerns questioning the original decision on the 5th green when Dustin said his ball moved and the official decided that since he had not addressed it there was no penalty.  Then they started looking at the replay and decided there was some question about the original ruling.

My problem is with the replay.

If he had not been near the top of the leaderboard there would have been no replay to look at.  If the same thing had happened to someone at +5 there would have been no replay available and the original ruling would have stood.  That doesn’t sit too well with me that they can apply the rules differently based on how well someone is playing.

My next question is about the timeline.  The incident happened on the 5th hole and Dustin wasn’t informed there was a problem until the 12th hole.  It took that long to come to the conclusion that there MIGHT be a problem.  Why?  If it is obvious then penalize him quickly and get it over with so everyone knows immediately what the leaderboard looks like.  If it is not obvious that there is an infraction, then why question his integrity and the first official’s competence?  But no, let’s make ourselves look even more like bumbling idiots.  Let’s inform him on the 12th hole that we may penalize you are you get in.  Now be a good boy and go play the final six holes of the US Open with this hanging over you.

Now my final question is this:  The USGA finally decided that there was a 51% chance that taking his practice swing that close to his ball was what actually caused it to move.  I now await the USGA’s decision on how far away you need to be to take a practice swing.

Of all of the tweets out about this I think former tour player Joe Ogilvie had the best:

Happiest guy in golf right now is Tom O'Toole…PAST President of the USGA. #USOpen

— Joe Ogilvie (@ogilviej) June 19, 2016

This #USOpen will be an entire psych course in the world's best colleges for next 50 years. We've entered a lab experiment.

— Joe Ogilvie (@ogilviej) June 19, 2016

And he also asked the best question of anybody.

https://twitter.com/ogilviej/status/744672081254686720

In the mean time I am just glad that Dustin won.  He put on an absolute driving exhibition and if his putter had helped him at all he would have run away with it.

Cover Photo via YouTube