As 26-year-old Dustin Johnson sank his gimme putt on the 18th hole of the final round of the 92nd PGA Championship yesterday, the last thing he was expecting was David Price of the PGA's Rules Committee to confront him just beyond the green. Sure, he could've won the entire tourney with a better putt a minute earlier, but now he was on his way to a sudden-death playoff - or so he thought.
Price led him to the Contestant Scoring area - a room where players go to sign their scorecards and make their round official - where Johnson met with PGA officials. After some 15 minutes, the ruling came down: Johnson was given a two-shot penalty for illegally "grounding" his club - i.e. placing his club head down in the sand before moving it up to strike the ball - within the confines of a bunker. Mind you, this occurred on Johnson's second shot on 18, but instead of advancing to the three-hole, sudden-death playoff with Bubba Watson and Martin Kaymer - who would eventually prevail for his first major championship victory - Johnson stayed behind in the clubhouse, conducting impromptu interviews with media, obviously shocked by the decision. The "bunker" in question was not a well-defined, concave lip of sand, as we typically associate with sand traps. It looked more like what's usually referred to as a "waste area," surrounded by throngs of spectators, a patch of earth that just happens to have some sand in it.
Some members of the media are already calling it Bunkergate, but beyond the question of whether it was in fact a bunker at all - that fact will forever be open to interpretation - did Johnson actually ground his club in the first place? For that, we can thank CBS' pervasive high-def cameras that, much to Johnson's detriment, had every angle covered.
As Johnson was sitting in a conference room just off the 18th green, he watched CBS replay the shot over and over on a HD plasma screen, as he held his scorecard under his left hand, unsure if he would be scribbling down a bogey-5 or a triple-bogey-7 as his final hole score. Indeed, the high-def cameras - likely from Sony, CBS' longtime broadcast partner - proved invaluable in proving that Johnson's club head had made the oh-so-slightest groove in the loose sand adjacent to the ball. Ergo, the PGA officials' hunch that he had illegally grounded the club was confirmed.
As Watson and Kaymer readied near the 10th hole to start their playoff round, Mark Wilson, the other co-chair of the PGA Rules Committee, was commandeered by a roving CBS reporter and admitted the network's role in offering up conclusive evidence of Johnson's trangression. Wilson said that he offered to bring Johnson into the CBS broadcast center truck "to see an even bigger resolution image" than what was being shown on the in-house sets, but that he ultimately declined. In Wilson's mind, "we were going to do anything we could to satisfy him." That is to say, anything to satisfy Johnson that the PGA was, in fact, making the "correct" call in denying him a chance to win his first major tournament after his implosion at the US Open in Pebble Beach seven weeks ago.
Widespread high-definition coverage is relatively new to golf. The first global golf tournament broadcast in HD was the 2006 Ryder Cup, just four years ago. Compared to the National Football League, which has enjoyed pristine high-def for some 12 years now. Indeed, the British Open - another one of golf's four major championships - only saw its first HD broadcast this summer. And having just been to the US Openat Pebble as well as the MLB All-Star Game, I can tell you that the difference is stark when it comes to the back-end resources each sport is employing to push out its high-def and 3-D broadcasts. Whereas the All-Star Game in Anaheim was a swarming operation of engineers and technicians working to assess QA nonstop, professional golf still seems to be playing catch-up.
And yet, when word of Johnson's penalty reached the thousands in the gallery at Whistling Straits, boos rained down from the spectators. It was a shocking sound, for sure, but had these people been at home, watching high-def coverage on CBS, would they have booed from their couches? The course at Whistling Straits that played host to the PGA Championship has more than 1,000 bunkers, and players were warned repeatedly before play began Thursday that anything hit into sand would be considered a bunker. "I never once thought that I was in a sand trap," said Johnson afterward, before finally admitting that he should have played closer attention to the rules sheet passed around to every player.
Many are comparing Johnson's blunder to that of Roberto De Vicenzo in the 1968 Masters, who signed his scorecard incorrectly after coming out on top and was (per the rules of golf) disqualified. OK, but Johnson's mistake both transcends the very nature of traditional golfing etiquette and flies in its face. Even 10 years ago, PGA officials would have been stuck with a fuzzy, standard-def feed, which would have in no way confirmed that Johnson had grounded his club. It would've only taken a gentlemanly admission from Johnson that he did, in fact, break the rules. But this is the high-def, camera-centric age that we live in now, where managers in the Little League World Series can appeal umpire rulings via instant replay and where 3-D camera rigs are giving new and unparalleled views into baseball's field of play.
The PGA Championship will come once again to Whistling Straits in 2015. The more prestigious Ryder Cup will be held there in 2020. While many are hoping the PGA clarifies its stance as to what constitutes a bunker, you can be sure that, as slow as golf has been to embrace high-definition, it'll be most everywhere on the course come five years time. Maybe not in every one of Whistler's 1,000-plus bunkers, but we know one where it sure will be.
Photos: Top: AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall; Bottom: Courtesy Golf.com
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