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Thursday, August 26, 2010
This week in disproportionate penalty in golf
Not signing a 61 card. A one-stroke penalty? Yellow-carded like in soccer? One-tournament suspension? Three lashes at dawn? No, all those would be more proportionate than what happened: disqualification.
Article that parrots my view:
Make no mistake: Inkster’s disqualification was ridiculous; Rodriguez’s, even more so. The absurdly harsh punishment in no way fits the relatively minor crime. Even so, though, if you’re going to play on someone’s course, you play by their rules—nitpicky, counterintuitive and asinine though they may be.
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Or they can take a page from every other sport in existence and bend just the tiniest bit. Let a little bit of light in. Understand that swinging a club weight or forgetting a half-second scribble is not, in tournament terms, a capital offense.
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(Side note: a close parallel to the absurd scorecard rule would be a baseball manager filling out an incorrect lineup card. And guess what happened earlier this year when that took place? Did the offending manager have to forfeit the game? Of course not. The game was played “under protest,” and since the other team won anyway it was a moot point. But even baseball—the standard-bearer for head-in-the-sand officialdom—is able to distinguish between an “honest mistake” and game-altering cheating.)
Excellent analogy. Presenting a line-up card that has, say, the same name twice, doesn’t give the opposing team a win. They work they way through it with a proportionate penalty.
In the end: enforce the rules as written, while protesting (not defending) any penalty that is disproportionate.
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