GAILES, SCOTLAND | Forget Carlota Ciganda and her much-publicised refusal to accept a penalty for contravening the pace-of-play regulations at the recent Amundi Evian Championship. There are plenty of other top-notch professionals who are not as rules-savvy as they should be.
Because of it, these players are no different from Ciganda in contributing to a situation in which slow play is getting worse. It could be because they, too, are faffing around on the greens, but what of those whose knowledge of the rules is so vague that they are forever calling for a referee? In other words, taking the easy option.
“They’re there, so I call for them,” said Angel Yin, who will be featuring in the U.S. Solheim Cup team next month at Finca Cortesín in Spain. “It makes sense.”
Her comment brought back memories of what Michelle Wie West had to say when she was disqualified while making her first appearance as a professional at the 2005 Samsung World Championship in Palm Desert, California. Her mistake was one of having taken a drop which happened to be 12-15 inches away from where it should have been.
“I learned a great lesson,” said the then-16-year-old Wie. “From now on, I’ll call a rules official no matter where it is, whether it’s 3 inches or 100 yards. I respect that.”
All of the above prompted GGP to ask a random selection of players at last week’s Freed Group Women’s Scottish Open at Dundonald Links how they would fare were they given 20 questions to answer on the rules.
South Africa’s Ashleigh Buhai, who is defending her title in this week’s AIG Women’s Open at Walton Heath Golf Club in England, did not seem particularly proud of herself when she said she might score 15 out of 20.
England’s Charley Hull, who tied for second in the recent U.S. Women’s Open, did not like the sound of it. With a delightfully apologetic smile, she suggested that she might get nought out of 20 on a bad day. (Bearing in mind that she would have collected 43 points or more of the 50 she needed to pass the theory side of her driving test at the start of this year, you can only suspect that she was being unnecessarily hard on herself.)
Sweden’s Linn Grant, who won the LPGA’s recent Dana Open, was not so very different. Looking more than a tad uneasy, she gave herself an eight out of 20. Next, the aforementioned Yin decided that she might get 10 of 20. Yin says she grew up using Rule 20.1c (3), which states in part: “… when a player is uncertain of what to do and decides to play two balls, they get no penalty if one of the balls played was their original ball that is no longer in play.” Nowadays, though Yin says she calls for a referee, there are occasions when she might look for a decision from a playing competitor who is renowned for her rules knowledge.
South Africa’s Ashleigh Buhai, who is defending her title in this week’s AIG Women’s Open at Walton Heath Golf Club in England, did not seem particularly proud of herself when she said she might score 15 out of 20. As for those 15 marks, she thought she owed them to a wonderful father who had been drawing her attention to the game’s rules since she first started to play.
On to those at the top of the class.
America’s Lucy Li, a child prodigy who played on five winning sides – one Curtis Cup, two Junior Solheim Cups and two Junior Ryder Cups – in her amateur days, had no hesitation in giving herself 18 out of 20. She attributed her likely score to the AJGA and the USGA, both of which would add rules sessions or tests to every junior event.
Meanwhile, there were two more players in that 18-20 bracket who have learned the hard way. The Czech Republic’s Kristýna Napoleaová, winner of this year’s Amundi German Masters on the LET, said that her lesson came on a day when she was penalised for taking forever over a putt. Until then, she had been under the impression that referees did not start to time anyone until he or she had done the reconnaissance work and was actually standing over the ball.
It was when Napoleaová, once an international footballer with AC Sparta Prague, went to St Andrews to do a master’s in international business, that she suddenly found herself thinking that the rules of golf were every bit as important as any subject on her international business agenda.
She busied herself with the various R&A rules quizzes and soon found herself getting the best of marks.
Then there was American Emma Talley, whose lesson came when she picked up an out-of-bounds post when she was playing for her high school in a Kentucky state event. From the look on her face, she had let her school down.
Finally, congratulations to Pauline Roussin-Bouchard, who learned her golf at the Valence Saint-Didier club in France. There, the juniors were given classes in golf and the game’s rules every Wednesday afternoon.
Roussin-Bouchard remembered the rules’ tests so fondly that it was almost as if they were up there with her two wins on the LET: “We got handsome little badges every time we passed – yellow, green and red, in that order.”
“Slow play is not just bad for the culprit. It’s bad news for everyone. I’m someone who loves golf but am finding that watching golf on TV is getting boring, what with all the standing around on the greens.” – R&A rules official
So well did the club instill the importance of the rules in their charges that, today, Roussin-Bouchard puts herself through a daily test in which she studies how she will handle a putt before standing over the ball and giving herself no more than five seconds to hit it.
Last week, at Dundonald, a prominent R&A-qualified rules official who preferred to remain anonymous said that all the players need to take responsibility for themselves. “If only,” she said, “they were to spend a bit more time on the rules, they would realise that knowledge is power. If they do the right thing, they’re not going to find themselves in trouble like a Carlota Ciganda.
“Slow play,” she continued, “is not just bad for the culprit. It’s bad news for everyone. I’m someone who loves golf but am finding that watching golf on TV is getting boring, what with all the standing around on the greens.”
She suspected that Ciganda would do everyone a favour were she to watch her Evian incident on television instead of suggesting that she, along with the friends and family members who seemed to have taken her side, were up against referees who did not know their stuff.
A final word from David Rickman, the R&A’s chief of staff and the chief referee at last month’s Open Championship and this week’s AIG Women’s Open: “It would help if players were to take a more dispassionate view of the rules instead of looking at a situation purely from their own point of view.”