Wake up, USGA

If you don't like or care about golf, please ignore my following rant...

As an avid golfer and former competitive golfer, I follow the annual US Amateur Championship (run by the USGA) very closely. The tournament field is always a great mix of future professionals on the way up and moonlighting 50-year old accountants with a dream, which makes for an intriguing dynamic. But this year, I've already come across something that piques my anger at the USGA. In yesterday's first round of stroke play,

Members of four groups – a combined 12 golfers – were assessed one-stroke penalties for failing to meet the pace-of-play standard at hole checkpoints through their round.

“That’s not necessarily abnormal for the U.S. Amateur,” said Mike Davis, the USGA’s senior director of rules and competition.

That's all well and good; I understand the reasons for pace of play guidelines. I'm a baseball fan and former player, and I think that baseball would do well to take a page out of the USGA's playbook here. But that's not what upset me.

At the first checkpoint, the group was one minute behind and received a warning. At the second checkpoint – the ninth hole – the players lagged behind three minutes, and were given the penalty.

Really? Three minutes over nine holes gets you a penalty? This wouldn't be so egregious if not for the details. First of all, USGA rules dictate that penalties are assessed to all players in the offending group, no questions asked. This alone is a problem. I've played plenty of recreational and competitive golf, and I know that some players are simply slow. There's not much you can do if a member of your group is playing slowly--he's not your teammate, he's your competitor. You can't grab the club and hit the ball for him.

This is compounded by the course in question, and the way that the USGA insists on setting it up. Chambers Bay is a beautiful course in Tacoma, WA. Thanks to a good friend of mine, I had the opportunity to play there earlier this spring. It's long, difficult, and very hilly. Bring on the USGA, who has the course playing to an unheard of distance of 7,700 yards, with long rough and fast greens, and slow play shouldn't be surprising. A whopping 94 of the 311 players to tee off yesterday shot 80 or above. Of those, 6 shot over 90, with 2 unfortunate guys carding 95s.

I'm sorry, but you can't trick out a course to a ridiculous degree (remember, USGA, these guys are AMATEURS), then penalize a whole group because one guy shot 92 or 93 and dragged the whole group down. That's not the point of pace of play guidelines. Players are being penalized for something that the USGA created, and that's patently unfair.

The concept of penalizing many for the sins of a few (or one) is one that continues to make me scratch my head. What's next? Forcing millions of taxpayers to subsidize a few over-leveraged people who are underwater on their mortgages? Oh, crap.

[The News Tribune]