Fore please! Running Masters thread

Scott is the first Australian to win the Masters, coming 10 years after Mike Weir became the first Canadian to win it. In fact, five of the last 11 winners (Weir, Immelman, Cabrera, Schwartzel and Scott) have been from outside of the US. And not one of them from the UK. How ya doin' Rory, Luke Donald, Lee Westwood, Justin Rose, Ian Poulter, etc.

Frankly, Nick Faldo is the only Brit to have done much at Augusta in the last 30 years. (Yes, I know Sandy Lyle and Ian Woosnam each won once, but were hardly ever heard from again.)

 

Woosnam is Welsh, not British.

 

Wales is part of Great Britain, no? He is not English, but he is British. So is Sandy Lyle, who is also Scottish, I believe.

 

I can't speak for others buy my Welsh ancestors did not consider themselves Brits. They told me Brits are English, not Scots, Welsh or Irish. Others are free to disagree.

 

That's all well and good but folks living in Wales are residents of Great Britain.

 

Perhaps Briton rather than Brit would have been more appropriate?

 

They most certainly are, but I'd bet most consider themselves Welsh, and let the English call themselves Brits. Minor quibble anyway.

 

I thought anyone from anywhere in the UK could be considered British. Scottish, English, Welsh, etc.

 

The Andy Murray rule holds that they're British when they win and Scottish/Welsh/Northern Irish when they lose.

 

Is this like a Brit calling a Southerner a Yankee?

 

What some of you folks don't understand is the governing bodies of golf, while not actually planning to set up 800 numbers for fans to call in violations they think they saw, are also not going to discourage it. The PGA Tour's stance is this: 1. Fans calling mean they're watching on TV. Watching on TV is a good thing for them. 2. Fans calling in at least shows they're passionate enough about the game to go through the trouble. 3. They're not always wrong. 4. It's one more safeguard in protecting the field against rules violations, of which the vast majority are unintentional actions by players who didn't know or forgot the rules.

The Tour has people in the rules staff check into every call they get. Most of the time, people are confused on the rules themselves and call in something they thought they saw, but wasn't a violation.

And people, please stop saying stupid things such as "gee why can't fans call in about holding that wasn't called in a football game." Pro golf to team sports is apples and oranges. Team sports are in a confined area, with referees, umpires and other officials there whose only charge is to call the fouls, the scoring, out or safe, ball or strike. Players in those sports have never been expected to call penalties on themselves. Golf is in a very large area, with as many as 70-75 guys playing at the same time (morning and afternoon waves), and while they have rules officials out there, they obviously can't see every little thing. Since it's an individual sport, players are supposed to police themselves. If they see another guy committing an infraction, on purpose or unintentional, they're not tattling when they inform an official or the player: they protecting the other 142 guys in the field.

 

There's no rule that says a group has to finish 18 holes in a set time. Never has been. There are tournament guidelines where based on the difficulty of the course and weather conditions, a target finish time is set. The rules come into play when a player takes longer than 50 seconds to hit a shot, if he has honors, or 40 seconds to hit for the next guy (on the theory that he should be getting his yardage and pulling a club while it's the other player's turn). In the club release, it said that Guan was taking "considerably longer" than 40 seconds, and there was a hole and a half to two holes open in front of their group.

He deserved the penalty. If you're asking me of 40 other guys in the field deserved one too, I'd agree. But the group's total time to finish 18 holes is never the issue, at least in pro golf.