Last week I was the referee in charge of the PGA Quebec championship at the beautiful Chateau Bromont Golf Course. In those two days I had to make many decisions and one of the decisions was to disqualify 3 players. I was impressed by the great integrity and behavior of those professional golfers.
I don’t know any other sport where a competitor will call a penalty on himself.
LET’S START BY THE END:
A player calls me on the 14th hole to tell me that he played from the wrong tees the previous round. This player is in contention in his category. He informs me that the other two players did the same mistake. One of the other two players is the leader of the overall championship…
THE RULE
When a player does not start a hole on the right tee, he occurs a penalty of 2 strokes and must correct the mistake before playing from the next tee. If he does not correct, he is DISQUALIFIED.
THE DECISION
Even if the first round is completed and the players are in the middle of the second round, I don’t have any choice to disqualify the 3 players……a dirty job….
I go right away to the 10th hole and I inform the other player that he played from the wrong tee the day before and did not correct it. He accepts the disqualification with grace even if he knows that he is losing a lot of money.
COMMENT
This tournament had four different set of tees (BLACK, BLUE, WHITE and GREEN), for different categories in the field. On the 14th hole they did not see that the BLACK tee-markers were far back and they played from the BLUE tee markers. With the sun, player must be very careful not to make the mistake between the BLUE and BLACK.
The Rules don’t give us any possibility to waive that type of penalty even it is possible for the players to make that type of mistake.
In a future article, I will explain how Golf Courses should decide the mix of colors with their tees. As an example, GOLD and BLUE is very different. BLACK and BLUE is similar.
THUMBS UP to the pros that confirmed why they are called Professional Golfers. I also appreciate the way they reacted at the decision.
I won’t give you examples of how disgraceful some parents, caddies, relatives or friends are when we have to penalize a player when they have breached a Rule or the Pace of Play policies in some tournaments.
