Lexi Thompson's delayed penalty

There are a lot of people in this world who do nothing but sit back and wait to enforce stupid, pointless rules they invented, just to make themselves feel more important than they are.

 

No sport can afford to let fans participate in officiating. It leads to madness like this. Golf really needs to lose the fiction that all of us golfers are one big family, with the only difference between the golfer watching the pros on TV and the pros is their handicaps. I'm an old fart playing a game for fun. Thompson is a superbly conditioned professional athlete competing in a sport for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not the same thing. Letting some outsider enforce your rules is an offspring of the myth.

 

There are rules officials who get paid to do a job. If they miss a call, they miss a call. You can't allow unpaid others to make calls. And you certainly can't overrule their calls the next day. Imagine any other sport where that happened. There'd be riots, and rightly so.

 

A player in the lead on Sunday is concentrating on her game, trying to bring home a championship. An official walks up to her and tells her that because of a missed ruling yesterday (which has been called in!) she is now no longer leading by two, she's down two. I can't imagine what that would do to the player's mental status. It's crushing. Stupid officials. Fix this nonsense.

 

OTOH, if Donald Trump wants to bring jobs back, he should force the NCAA and pro leagues to have 800 numbers so fans can call in and bitch about missed calls and crappy officiating.

You can staff it with out-of-work miners and steelworkers.

Win-win! MAGA!!

 

The way she marked it did look odd.....still......you can't wait 24 hours after fact. Utter rubbish. She handled it as classy as you can. Says a lot about her.

 

How disorienting would it be if you found out that there are only two people posting on this message board: you and another guy who has 20,000 accounts? The Matrix, but with infinitely smaller stakes.

 

Asked some of our staffers about this, including a couple of folks who have scored 100 at rules school. It was enforced correctly, by the letter of the law. Of course, there has to be a common sense factor involved as well. Did Thompson gain an advantage from accidentally misplacing the ball? Devil's Advocate: What if there was a spike mark where the original mark was and she did gain an advantage by moving it an inch on the replace? The new rules will address some of this. A huge part of the modernization process is injecting some damn common sense into the rules. As my co-worker said, the rules officials on site had to be sick to their stomachs informing Thompson of the infraction.

 

I don't get upset by people calling in except for the fact that players are under different levels of scrutiny based on whether they are on TV.

For me, the worst part is the penalty for signing an incorrect scorecard. She never could sign the correct scorecard because the officials didn't do their job. If they are going to allow penalties a day late, drop the scorecard penalty.

 

Did I see that correctly? She marked the ball, picked it up 12 inches, then placed it (an inch over). I was expecting to see a mark, then ball cleaning, etc.