The golf match at Stoke Park between James Bond and Goldfinger was a riot of wrongdoing. For Bond, the golf course was a deliciously subversive arena for a joust with a villain. In his day job, 007 wasn’t bound by rules whereas golf has no greater obsession.
The cheating story that emerged from St Louis last week would have disappointed Bond, though. Have you heard? In a members’ competition at WingHaven Country Club a pot of money was on offer for a hole-in-one, prompting one of the members, Zach Holland, to hatch a dastardly plan.
Knowing that he was in the first three-ball on the time sheet, Holland arrived early at the course and dropped his ball in the cup on the fourth green, a par three. To embellish the fiction, he created a pitch mark where the ball might have landed if any of this were true.
Before he teed off, he told his playing partners that his grandmother had been hospitalised and that he was expecting a phone call. When they reached the third green, he informed the others that the call was imminent, so he went ahead to the fourth tee on the pretence of keeping up the pace of play. By the time his playing partners arrived, he claimed to have hit his tee shot.
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His playing partners were stunned witnesses to the ball being found in the hole, but because they hadn’t seen the shot their suspicions were aroused. When they made these known later, the course superintendent checked the security camera next to the green and Holland’s grand deception was exposed.
And Bond? He would surely have disabled the camera.
Golf’s relationship with surveillance is different to every other sport, which gives the rules a different status. It is an odd dynamic. In field sports, where there is an abundance of match officials and an increasing oversight from technology, players feel no responsibility to the rules. It is an entirely transactional relationship: the rules exist to give them something or to take something away.
Heavier surveillance has not reduced the number of infringements or the levels of cynicism. Trying to beat the rules or bend the rules or test the arbiters of the rules remains integral to the game, all games. The sanctity of the rules is somebody else’s concern.
Golf could not exist like that. Every golfer is expected to be a guardian of the rules. It is an explicit responsibility. “Play by the rules and in the spirit of the game,” it says on the first page of golf’s rule book. No other game is more exposed to the inherent failings of human nature than golf because no other game depends so much on good conscience.
At professional level, referees are only called if a player is looking for a ruling, although TV footage is more interventionist now. It used to be the case that viewers who spotted an infringement watching from home could email tournament officials and raise a red flag, but that practice was outlawed by all the major tours at the end of 2017.
Instead, they all agreed to assign one or more officials to monitor the TV broadcast of tournaments and pick up breaches that might have been missed. It was in this way that Bryson DeChambeau was penalised two shots for “inadvertently” improving the path of his backswing at The Open in July. He didn’t call the foul on himself and his playing partners failed to intervene.
But TV surveillance has obvious limitations. The players that viewers want to see spend disproportionately more time on screen than also-rans and journeymen.
What was interesting about the incident in St Louis last week was that Holland’s playing partners had the gumption to speak up. They didn’t allow their experience to become just another line of lurid clubhouse gossip, the kind of stuff that every club golfer has heard a thousand times.
But this is the crux of a game that depends on self-policing. How many people who regularly play club golf have witnessed cheating of some description? National Club Golfer asked that question in a survey of its readers last year. Of the 3,250 respondents, over 2,000 said they were either aware of: known cheats at their club but couldn’t prove it; known cheats at their club and had proved it; or knew people who deliberately cheated at golf.
What the survey didn’t ask was how many club golfers have reported an offender or refused to sign their card.
In the professional game, the numbers are more remarkable. In an anonymous survey conducted by Golf magazine a few years ago, 44 per cent of players said they had witnessed a fellow professional “cheating” during a tournament round. How many of them had called them out? That question wasn’t asked.
How often do professional players challenge one of their peers on the rules? So rarely that famous incidents have become embroidered into the lore of the game. Tom Watson tackled Gary Player after the 1983 Skins Game – a lucrative, star-studded staple of late-season TV golf in the United States. In that inaugural event, Player walked off with $170,000, which was $35,000 more than the largest first prize on the PGA Tour that year.
About an hour after they finished, though, Watson accused him of moving a leaf next to his ball that was not a loose impediment; anything growing must be left untouched. At that time, on the 16th hole, $120,000 was at stake.
Dave Anderson from The New York Times was standing about 30 feet away when the row flared up and overheard Watson’s accusation: “I’m accusing you Gary . . . you can’t do that . . . I’m tired of this . . . I wasn’t watching you, but I saw it.”
Player was adamant that he had done nothing wrong. For Watson to confront Player took guts, but what the rules of golf expected him to do was to confront Player in real time before he hit his pitch shot to eight inches from the hole.
It is easy to say that Watson should have spoken up during play. But in a Sunday morning fourball, would you be so inclined to intervene?
Part of the difficulty with self-regulation in golf is that no other game on earth gives you more opportunity for wrongdoing. You don’t even have to mean it – although, just like in the criminal justice system, ignorance is not a defence. Golf’s rule book was streamlined a few years ago and some of the nettles were cut down, but the official pocket-sized edition of the Rules of Golf, designed for in-play use, still runs to 160 pages.
The spirit of the game, though, is a different thing. Despite our worst failings, it hasn’t died.
