Sunday, October 20, 2013

Rulings change because of call ins, is this right?

Now that it's happened to Tiger, and a couple years ago it caused Dustin Johnson to lose the PGA Championship. You would think that the rules committee for the PGA and USGA would discuss a rule against call ins. The real question is if it can't happen in football or basketball, then how can it be legal in golf.

You don't see call ins in professional or collegiate football and basketball. You don't see a foul in basketball that wasn't called, or a holding in football down the wire, where a fan calls in, and they change the outcome of the game. So why can you see a player get penalized by a fan seeing the player unknowingly ground his club in a questionable bunker on television. It’s idiotic, golf is a game of integrity. For as long as golfs been around it has been the players vs. the course, not and the spectators.

My biggest objection, is that they only show a select amount of the players. Unlike basketball or football where they show the whole field and all of the competitors, they don't show every single player and every single one of their shots. So in my eyes, the ability to call in a penalty or an infraction on one player isn't fair to him or to the field. This especially hurts the better, more popular players aka Tiger Woods because they show every single one of his shots, and the players in contention because they also show a few of their shots when not showing Tiger.

I feel like the call in against Tiger at the 2013 Masters was the last straw. Tiger, who had just hit a great shot, but was too good and hit the pin and rolled back into the water on #15, decided to drop from the same spot. Tiger ended up dropping about 3-4 feet in front of where he originally hit his shot, the rule is you have to drop the ball as close to the original spot as possible. Tiger should have known this, he is the greatest golfer to live, but he made a simple mistake, not one worth of a post round penalty, and luckily one that didn't get him disqualified. How could they penalize him, not knowing if any other golfer that day had done something similar, it's not right, and it needs to be changed.

No other sport allows the ability of fans watching the game to call in and penalize a player. The other thing is, you don't know who the person calling in is, they could be someone who hates the player that they are calling against. This is just unfair to the players in the tournament. Golf is a game where the players have to be honest, and usually the players are. The call ins are taking that great aspect away from the game.

1 comment:

  1. I totally agree with what you're saying in this blog post. It seems wrong for the spectators to be the deciding factor in a game. It would be like baseball fans yelling strike after a pitch and the umpire agreeing with them every time or a fan at a basketball game yelling foul and the ref giving it to them. There's no reason for the fans to get involved with something that they shouldn't be involved with. They should just leave it to the certified officials and just enjoy watching the sport that they know and love so well.

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