Jon Rahm Did Nothing Wrong: USGA Decision 34-3/10 Exonerates

After one of the rules brouhahas in the last few years, the USGA decided to make a change in the way the rules are applied. Everybody forgot about it until Jon Rahm on Sunday.

Now, I remembered the rules change, but I thought it was one of the Tiger Woods rulings or the Dustin Johnson U.S. Open ruling. A little research showed me it wasn’t either of those.

The modification the USGA made, according to The New York Times, is called Decision 34-3/10.  It was made as a result of the penalty given Lexi Thompson at the ANA Inspiration in 2017.   (This is why I always look things up.  My memory is decent, but not infallible.)

Plenty of players have been caught up in extreme close up of golf ball issues. And unfortunately, nobody remembered Decision 34-3/10 on Sunday afternoon at The Memorial.  It would have been a shame if a wrong ruling by the PGA Tour changed the outcome of the tournament.  Usually, they are spot on, but in this case, it seems they blew it.

The exact wording by the USGA is:

"“… if the Committee concludes that such facts could not reasonably have been seen with the naked eye and the player was not otherwise aware of a potential breach of the Rules, the player will be deemed not to have breached the Rules, even when video technology shows otherwise.”"

EVEN WHEN VIDEO TECHNOLOGY SHOWS OTHERWISE.

The naked eye rule is supposed to be how these situations are viewed.  Nobody was sitting six inches behind the ball with a magnifying glass to try to see a ball which was half buried in Kentucky bluegrass. Yes, with an extreme magnification, the grass moved.  Maybe the ball moved with the grass. But unless you could see it with the naked eye, it doesn’t matter.  If you couldn’t see it in real time with the naked eye, there’s no infraction of the rules, and there should have been NO penalty.  As far as the rules are concerned, nothing happened.

PGA Tour Rules Official Slugger White has a different opinion.  “The rule is 9.4,” he said in an interview after the conclusion of the tournament.

“It was a ball at rest by the player, moved, and since he didn’t put it back, he was assessed a general penalty, which is two strokes. That’s pretty much the bottom line.”

Well, is it?

Anybody who has played out of thick bluegrass knows what happens in this situation.  Before you hit the shot, you tap the grass behind the ball to find out how far down the earth is located.  Is it four inches?  Is it six inches?  Is it three inches?  Because by doing that, you get some idea how hard you are going to have to hit the darn shot to extract the golf ball. In addition, you don’t want to scoop the ball up with a tiny bit of grass because it won’t go the right distance. You want to take a whack at it.  You don’t want to whack it for six inches of grass when there’s only three because you could break an arm.  And you don’t want to whack it too softly because the ball rolls up and over the blade of the club and goes nowhere.  You’re back in five or six inches of grass.

Now, granted, twenty-twenty hindsight, Rahm might have been better off putting his club down a bit farther behind the ball to gauge the grass thickness, but he didn’t.

But because of Decision 34-3/10, even if the ball moved, because it was impossible to see it with the naked eye in real time, he should not have been assessed any penalty at all.

The long and short of it is, if the golf ball moves, but the movement couldn’t be seen except by magnification with a zoom lens and replays, then a player should not be penalized.

So all those so-called golf experts and television producers need to take a little refresher course in Decision 34-3/10.  Just because they thought they saw something doesn’t mean it was a rules infraction.  Just because the Twitter universe went crazy, it doesn’t mean it was a rules infraction.  In fact, it wasn’t.  And that’s not my opinion. That’s the USGA’s.