Life By The Drop...

... is a favorite Stevie Ray Vaughn song of mine.  The following started as a bullet point in yesterday's Masters post, but I soon realized that there was easily enough new information to warrant, paraphrasing Virginia Woolf, a post of its own.

Alan Shipnuck takes us on a nostalgic trip down memory lane to revisit the dramatic win by Adam Scott improper drop taken by Tiger Woods in last year's Masters.  The set-up:

The 2013 Masters was supposed to be a return to glory for Tiger Woods. Four weeks earlier he had reassumed his spot atop the World Ranking, a significant milestone on the long journey back to dominance. Woods had rebuilt his life and golf game since his fall from grace in 2009; a win at the Masters would complete the journey. Few athletes have as much freighted history with a venue as Woods does with Augusta National. It is where his legend was born with a record win in 1997.

Tiger's perfect form shows his work with Sean Foley is paying off.

After detours through Billy Payne taking Tiger over his knee in his 2010 presser and Guan Tianlang's slow-play penalty, Shipnuck gets to the crux of the matter:

The Guan debate highlighted the tournament's idiosyncratic rules infrastructure. The Masters rules committee consists of 40 officials who are cherry-picked from ruling bodies and golf organizations worldwide. They fall under the domain of the powerful three-man competition committee, which is chaired by Augusta National member Fred Ridley. However, the vast majority of rules officials are not members and thus, unlike Ridley, not beholden to the club. And even though it has by far the smallest field of the four majors, the Masters is the only one that does not assign a walking rules official to every group.

How crazy is this? They have more than enough officials to cover every group, or to place two officials on every hole. Then there was this:

About Augusta National's flagsticks: Though a club spokesman says otherwise, one caddie suggests there was something different about them in 2013. "All the players and caddies were talking about it," says the veteran caddie, who requested anonymity. "They were like twice as thick as usual. I had a feeling someone was going to get a bad break and have a ball bounce hard off the flag."

That's completely new to me. Has anyone heard this before?  Tiger in playing his third shot to No. 15 gets one of these breaks described above, hitting the pin and bouncing back into the water.  He fails to call for a rules official and takes his relief near where he had played his third shot, hits an equally good shot and seemingly minimizes the damage by saving bogey.  Had this been the end of it, he may not have been penalized.  But it wasn't the end of it, because in a post-round interview with ESPN's Tom Rinaldi, he spoke of intentionally dropping two paces further back from where he hit his third shot, thereby ultimately sealing his fate.  To briefly explain, Tiger could have legally taken his relief further back, but it had to be on the line where his ball entered the hazard, but that was after it had bounced off the flagstick.

Now, enter David Eger into our tale:

David Eger, 62, has long been one of golf's preeminent rules experts. After going broke trying

Tiger seemingly saves bogey with this shot.

to play the PGA Tour in the late 1970s, he became a high-level bureaucrat, serving as director of tournament administration for the Tour and later as its vice president of competition; in between he was senior director of rules and competition for the USGA. He has gone on to have a successful career on the Champions tour, winning four times. "The rules of golf are like a religion to David," says his contemporary Mike Donald. "He has a lot of conviction in his beliefs." 

Eger was at home in Charlotte watching the Friday action on his 60-inch high-def television. As Woods was playing the 14th hole, Eger's wife, Tricia, asked for help in the garden. He set the DVR and walked outside. Woods was putting on the 16th green when Eger settled back in front of the TV. He noticed that Woods had dropped a shot on number 15, so he rewound the telecast to see where Tiger had erred. "The thing I saw immediately," Eger says, "was that there was no divot hole when [Woods] played his third shot, but when he dropped the ball to play his fifth shot, he was several steps in back of an obvious divot hole. I kept replaying it to make sure I was seeing it correctly. I realized he had played from the improper spot—there was no doubt it was a penalty. The question was whether [officials] would get to it before he signed his scorecard. That was my only motivation—to prevent Tiger from being disqualified [for signing an incorrect scorecard]. Because I had no doubt other people would catch the infraction too."

Eger texted his concerns to a friend that he knew was working the Masters, and this concern ultimately gets conveyed to Fred Ridley.  But it turns out that Eger and Ridley have some history:

"We've had a few disagreements through the years," Eger admits. He played for the 1989 U.S. Walker Cup team, which was captained by Ridley. In an opening-day foursomes match Eger recalls conceding a 10-inch putt, earning an admonishment from his captain that he found insulting. Eger competed at the U.S. Open nine years later, and during a backup in play he practiced his putting on the vacant 7th green. Though it is allowed at the Open, Ridley, who was then the USGA's treasurer and working the event as a rules official, approached Eger and suggested he was committing a violation. Eger told him to check with another official and continued putting. Ridley returned to acknowledge his mistake, but the hard feelings endure. Eger recounted these episodes in a first-person piece in the October 2013 Golf Digest and concluded with the kind of public put-down that is rare in the chummy world of golf administration: "In my view, Ridley's knowledge of the Rules of Golf was, and is, suspect."

And it's well past time to introduce our other protagonist, Fred Ridley:

Ridley and Craig Heatley meet the press on Saturday.

Fred Ridley is the answer to a trivia question: Who is the last U.S. Amateur champion not to turn pro? He claimed that title in 1975, shortly after graduating from Florida, where he played on a team that won the '73 national championship. Ridley competed in three consecutive Masters beginning in 1976, the start of his enduring love affair with Augusta National. "He revered Bobby Jones and everything he stood for," says good friend Tom Shannon. "That played into his decision not to turn pro." Ridley went to the Stetson University College of Law and built a successful practice in Tampa. He became the insider's insider, holding a number of positions within the USGA, including president from 2004 to '06, and often helped resolve rules disputes at USGA events. "Fred was not our most knowledgeable person on the rules, and I think he'd tell you that," says Mike Davis, the USGA's executive director. "But what made him so effective when it came to resolving sticky rules situations was that he was quick to solicit advice and counsel from other experts."

So, how did this go horribly awry?  Do read Shipnuck's long piece as it fills in much important background on ANGC's history with the rules.  With Arnold Palmer in 1958, they gave the appearance of cutting slack for a big star, overruling the rules official on the scene and allowing him to play a second ball after making double bogey with the first.  Read this Bob Harig piece from the time of Ken Venturi's death to see why Venturi remained bitter about it his entire life.  On the other hand, they were needlessly harsh with Roberto de Vincenzo's scorecard mishap, but then again he wasn't a star of the same magnitude.

Back to Shipnuck:

As Ridley stared at his TV screen, reviewing the drop, the moment of truth arrived for him, for Woods and for a tournament they both venerate. Ridley may have had a history of being a consensus builder, but Augusta National has long clung to an autocratic style. Did Ridley choose not to see a violation because he knew the tip had come from Eger? Was he hesitant to create more bad headlines while the tournament was being pilloried for the Guan penalty? Did Ridley think his chances of succeeding Payne as chairman—he'd long been considered the heir apparent—would be jeopardized if he DQ'd Tiger Woods from the Masters? All we can do is wonder, because Ridley has retreated behind Augusta National's traditional wall of silence: Through the club he declined to be interviewed for this story. 

Ridley's initial mistake in not spotting the violation was compounded by an even bigger one: Although consulting with a player is standard procedure in such a situation, he chose not to talk with Woods before he signed his scorecard. "I fully expected to see a half-dozen guys in green jackets intercept Tiger as he walked off the [18th] green," says Eger. No one materialized.

That was obviously the critical mistake as you always talk to the player.  Unaware of Woods' comments to

Tiger's six morphs into an 8.

Rinaldi, he couldn't identify a violation from the tape and, with the appearance of hindsight, appears to have been overly eager to have this issue go away.  There's also some good stuff in Shipnuck's piece about Golf Channel's coverage, with Brandel Chamblee figuring prominently.  Good stuff in view of Chamblee's critical comments later in the year and the resulting feud.

In view of Tiger's comments to Rinaldi, the illegality of the drop is unassailable, but because of Ridley's failure to talk to and advise Tiger of the issue, Tiger has by now signed this scorecard, raising the issue to Defcon 5.  So, naturally he will be disqualified for signing an incorrect scorecard, right?

Not so much, as it turns out:

It would not be made clear until a few hours later, but the competition committee had acted not under the revision to Decision 33-7/4.5 but under 33-7 itself, which dates to 1952 and has been untouched since '88. It states, "A penalty of disqualification may in exceptional individual cases be waived, modified or imposed if the Committee considers such action warranted."

Is that rule intended to cover the laziness or indifference resulting from a petty feud of rules officials?  There's no answer possible, though that's obviously the favorable interpretation of the Rules Committee's action (the less charitable one is that they were protecting their primary show pony).  

I'll let Alan take us out:

A year after the drop, many of those involved wish the whole thing would just go away. Augusta National's culture of stonewalling has a chilling effect—no print reporter would speak on the record for this story, while Woods, Steinberg and LaCava declined interview requests, just as Golf Channel execs silenced their on-air talent. What we do have are the words from Ridley's press conference, and one mournful line rings even more true now. Asked if he wished he had spoken to Woods before he signed his scorecard on that fateful Friday evening, Ridley replied, "There's not a day that goes by that there are not some things I wish I would have done differently."

So do we.