Keep your head on a swivel because every kind of take on this bit of drama bubbled to the surface the last two days. I have had a bunch of conflicting thoughts on it, which I’ve been running through my head since it happened. I’m still not sure what’s right and final but I try to run through them, a little stream-of-consciousness, below. Here we go:
- What Phil did can be a disgrace. It can be entertaining and funny, too. I’m not a golf purist and generally find completely unexpected madness like this enjoyable. This was enjoyable because of the fallout and stupidity. But there’s really no other reading of it than it was wrong and bad.
- You’re not going to believe this, but there’s room for nuance here between “OMG, golf is so soft” and “Phil should be arrested.” Saying he should have been disqualified does not immediately mean you think your kids are now scarred forever. Nor is it some indictment of golf being too uptight.
- Phil should have been disqualified. You can attach some histrionics and modulate your voice or use some intense language that can make that a hot take. But the premise is not. He should have been tossed.
- He did something that’s just outside of how the game is played. The rules covered his ass and they were technically applied correctly, but this is also a case where applying a common sense or reasonableness standard would yield a different result. There’s an “I know it when I see it” element here.
- The move was far over the line of this whole arrangement and how this game is ordered and structured. It’s a dirty hit in football or a flagrant 2 in basketball. Just because there wasn’t violence associated with this doesn’t make the call for having him tossed some sort of soft, only-in-golf notion. It was just so far beyond how the game is played and the two-stroke penalty did not feel commensurate.
- I watched it, and then listened to his comments that it was a deliberate move to try and gain an advantage and then I spent much of the rest of the day walking around Shinnecock Hills thinking about the slippery slope implications of the whole thing. I don’t think it’s going to start happening with regularity, but the fact that Phil did it, outlined his motives, and came back to play again opens the door for it. That seems less than ideal and I could see another rule change down the line to officially slam the door on this kind of f**kery happening more often. The slippery slope argument IS enough for the DQ, in my opinion.
- It was a “serious breach” and it sounds like many of the players who do this every day for a living think he should have been DQ’d too. It’s not some media outrage to feed the content beast during a major championship.
- I love Phil, I was entertained. I enjoyed the circus and I was amused by his defiance, but it also bummed me out. Can I have all those conflicting emotions? Thinking it was a disgrace but also loving the circus around it? I don’t know, you can yell at me for being a ball of contradictions but that’s where I was at Saturday. Giggling while saying “holy shit, that was insane and wrong.”
Image: YouTube
