Players

WHOOPS: Adam Hadwin Admits To Rules Violation While Mic’d Up

Published

4 years ago

June 19, 2020

Let’s just say the quiet/non-crowd and the new mics may be starting to work against the players.

The RBC Heritage kicked off on Thursday as the second event for the PGA TOUR since the COVID-19 outbreak and included the mic’d up feature again as they did at the Charles Schwab Challenge but it ended up backfiring on Adam Hadwin this week. During the opening round, Hadwin had a very unfortunate situation picked up on his mic.

It all happened when Hadwin was teeing off on the 13th hole at Harbor Town and hit his tee shot into a fairway bunker. At that point, Hadwin walked up to his ball and removed a rock that was in his way, which is perfectly legal. But when he went to pick up what he thought was a second rock, it crumbled in his fingers, alerting Hadwin that he just moved the sand, which isn’t legal.

https://twitter.com/GolfBet/status/1273719803904233475

Unfortunately for Hadwin, the mic picked up the whole thing for fans to hear.

“Uh oh, I’m pretty sure that’s a penalty, what I just did there,” Hadwin said on the live broadcast. “I thought it was a rock. So I went to grab the rock and the sand squished in my fingertips. I’m pretty sure that’s a penalty.” Hadwin then did the right thing and called over a rules official to confirm what he had suspected.

For Hadwin’s sake, he did the exact right thing in this scenario. If he had tried to hide his violation, this would have been an even bigger story but once the rules official came over, it was confirmed that Hadwin had committed a two-stroke penalty. Thanks in part to that penalty, Hadwin finished his first round at +1, 8 shots behind the leaders.

While this certainly was entertaining for all of the fans at home to see something like this be worked out, one has to wonder if the players still feel comfortable with fans listening in on their rounds. This will be something to watch moving forward and it will be interesting to see if the PGA TOUR keeps this strategy moving forward.

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