Rory McIlroy and the Ghost of Bobby Jones

During the final round of last week's TOUR Championship, Rory McIlroy was in genuine contention to win the 2012 FedEx Cup, the payout for which is $10 million. Then, on a certain hole, he was setting up to his approach shot when his ball moved. According to Rory, he put his club behind the ball, and then backed away for some reason, possibly because he was afraid the ball would move, and then somewhat more than 10 seconds later it did in fact move. He called an official over to ask whether he had incurred a penalty. In the course of this discussion he said very clearly that the ball had moved because he put his club behind it, though there had been a substantial time delay involved. The rules officials decided the time lag was the controlling factor, and declined to penalize him.

Now, the TOUR Championship is held at East Lake Golf Club these days, which is where the great amateur golfer Bobby Jones learned the game. Among other things, like being the most dominant golfer of all time including Tiger Woods, Bobby Jones was famous for his extreme devotion to following the rules of the game. More than once he called a penalty on himself for having moved the ball at address when no one else on the planet could've noticed the movement, in the heat of competition in major championships. So, being somewhat of a Bobby Jones fan, I commented at the time of McIlroy's ruling that Bobby Jones did not approve, thinking to myself that it would be poetic justice if McIlroy played poorly from that point on. Which he did, and Brandt Snedeker won the FedEx Cup. Good for Sneds*.

But now I'm not sure if I didn't have the angle on Rory's little incident backwards. After all, McIlroy himself was basically saying that he had moved the ball. It was the officials who overruled him on this issue. In my opinion it's wrong for rules officials to hear a player say something like, "it was definitely because I put my club behind the ball" and then conclude otherwise, and I have a feeling that Rory McIlroy might agree with me there, and that this might have been at least somewhat responsible for his poor play thereafter. During a certain practice round with my high school golf team, I hit a beautiful long drive on the second hole to a great position, only to find my ball sitting at the very bottom of a big ol' divot. Now, normally I'd have looked at that as an interesting challenge, but I happened to be playing with my in-general-really-cool coach, who instructed me in no uncertain terms to remove my ball from the divot and place it on some nice ground nearby, on the grounds that the shot out of a divot is not an important one to practice. Of course, I obeyed him, as he had formal authority over me, and of course I hit that shot badly and of course I played badly for the next nine holes. Until, that is, the next round, when on that very same second hole I again hit a really nice drive that again went into a divot. Only this time I played the ball as it lied, I hit a nice shot, and I was back to playing well again.

To those of us who have a deep internal commitment to the rules of the game and to the spirit of those rules, getting an unfairly favorable ruling can feel much worse than getting an unfairly unfavorable ruling. (This is one of the things that mystifies me about a game like baseball, where gaining an unfair advantage by tricking the umpires into thinking you were safe or the other guy was out or whatever is considered somewhere between acceptable and obligatory.) It can weigh on your spirit, and having something weighing on your spirit makes it hard to play good golf. In a way, then, it was the ghost of Bobby Jones that caused Rory McIlroy to play his last several holes of the 2012 PGA Tour season badly, but it was the ghost of Bobby Jones as internalized by Rory McIlroy himself.


*This is actually what he's called. His cap says "SNEDS" on it. The first time I ever heard of him, at one of the majors several years back, one of the announcers said that "his friends and family call him Sneds." I find that quite unlikely, but it's still an awesome line.