Marital fidelity was a previous rule Tiger thought was stupid. Nike must be so proud.
The fact that Tiger Woods finished fourth in the Masters was a stroke of moral luck that will allow, in all probability, the memory of his lack of sportsmanship and the PGA’s lack of integrity to cause a bit less harm to professional golf, at least until the next time Tiger tries to cut ethical corners. He is, after all, a shameless cheater with a deeply flawed character. It was just a matter of time before he managed, as the sport’s biggest name, to corrupt it. Now, he has.
During the tournament, Woods improved his lie after a stray shot by taking an illegal drop, and did so in such a blatant and obvious manner that TV viewers noticed it. Based on his experience and the rules of golf, Tiger should have known that what he was doing was a violation; based on his later statement to ESPN, in which he admitted that he placed his ball “2 yards” behind where it belonged to give himself a better shot at the green, he did know. USGA rule 26-1 says a golfer must “play a ball as nearly as possible at the spot” from which he or she originally hit it. As Christine Brennan correctly explained in USA Today, previous golfers who have committed far less serious infractions have withdrawn from competition to preserve golf’s status as the last major sport that expects competitors to police their own conduct. Golf has an honor code. There is nothing honorable about Tiger Woods.
The tournament directors, desperate to find a loophole that could keep Tiger in the Masters (ratings, sponsors and cash are always corrosive to an ethical culture) used a tenuous argument to avoid kicking Woods out. Though the head of the Masters’ competition committee stated that the advantageous drop “would constitute playing from the wrong place” and would thus be a clear violation of Rule 26-1, the committee applied a two-year-old amendment stating that a player would not face disqualification when he or she “has breached a Rule because of facts that he did not know and could not reasonably have discovered prior to returning his score card.” Never mind that this rule couldn’t possibly or credibly apply to the incident at hand, since Woods had every reason to know that his drop was illegal. This was the Star Syndrome at its worst and most damaging. Rather than holding golf’s biggest star to the highest standard of conduct as they should and must, the craven and venal brass held him to a lower one, thus ensuring that the rank-and-file, not to mention young golfers who revere him, would soon descend to his abysmal ethical level. If Woods cared one whit about tradition, honor, integrity or fairness, he would have removed himself from competition, as so many lesser golfers (but superior human beings) had done before him. Instead, and so predictably, Tiger Woods kept playing.
Brennan has it almost right, writing,
“Golf is a game that is played by the strictest set of rules, and is loved and admired for it. Woods’ refusal to disqualify himself the moment he found out about his mistake forever changes his reputation, and the game’s.”
“Almost right,” because anyone who couldn’t see this coming hasn’t been paying attention to Woods life. He cheats. He’s a phony. He doesn’t care about the game or anyone else, other than Tiger Woods.
Naturally, he has his co-corruptors and enablers, like Slate writer Josh Levin. In the words of Levin, “golf is stupid” because it has maintained a culture of integrity through the centuries. There is a very good reason why this has been true, of course, not that Levin is willing to drop his hipster contempt for anyone so un-cool as to follow rules long enough for him to ponder it. Golf is an individual sport, without referees, that is notoriously easy to cheat at, as any James Bond fan knows. While major cheating scandals have degraded baseball, college football, the NFL, college basketball, the NBA, international soccer, track and field, swimming, boxing, horse racing and even bridge, professional golf has remained clean and trustworthy, precisely because of the culture and tradition that Levin derides. Critics of Woods, you see, are “holier-than-thou.” Golfers who follow the rules and hold themselves to high standards of conduct and sportsmanship are engaged in “moral grandstanding.” Levin even endorses the Star Syndrome, the corrosive practice whereby the best in a field not only think they can break the rules the rest of their colleagues have to follow, they are allowed to do so. It is Levin and those ethics rot-afflicted writers, pundits and commentators like him who encourage Barry Bonds, Tom DeLay, Debbie Wassermann-Schultz, Joe Paterno, Mike Rice, Michael Steele, Bill Clinton, and so many others to corrode our culture’s values from without and within. Don’t follow the rules, he brays; only “pedants” care about that. You decide whether the rule makes sense to you, and violate it at will.
Just like Tiger Woods.
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Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at jamproethics@verizon.net.
Ethics Alarms 
I’m surprised you didn’t cross reference the article on Blayne Barber, who is more fit to play in the Masters than Tiger is.
Nike probably doesn’t care…remember “Winning Takes Care of Everything”.
You forgot the “or” in the rule. The ball can also be placed anywhere in a straight line behind where in crossed the hazard. It can be played from closer than the shot or behind the shot. The drop spot wasn’t in a straight line back from where it went over the hazard, but confusing the clauses doesn’t seem unlikely to me.
Tiger did sign the invalid scorecard, and I think that should have led to DQing. That rule is harsh, but it’s there for a reason, and should have been enforced. If Tiger had written the 2 shot penalty on his card, he would have been fine.
I get frustrated with the star syndrome, and think little of most pro ports and players. I’d rather watch paint dry than enable all the exploitation in and around professional non-heroes. What is the point of sports if it’s not a fair match, scripted acts don’t deserve my time.
I’m not buying it.
The one error I saw here was that of golf officials not penalizing or DQing him in the first place; it shouldn’t have needed his tv interview to make that decision, and as you point out, the fact that they had to change after the issue became more public certainly casts doubt on their motives.
And while Tiger is far from a saint, in this case I don’t see it. Why in the world would he blatantly improve his drop by a few feet, in full view of the cameras, and then later in the evening blatantly admit that what he’d done? You seem to chalk it up to conscious, intentional, cynical lying. I am far less confident in the ability of human beings to remain consistently logical. He simply forgot a rule of golf.
Certainly he knows the rules; but that doesn’t mean you remember all of them at all times. Particularly moments after a disastrous piece of luck in his shot hitting the stick. Particularly just after having looked at the drop zone, at which a drop anywhere along a line would be legal; in that mindset, he returned to the original shot line, and behaved as if it were a drop on the dropzone line, i.e. legal to move back along the line
And if, as you suggest, he intentionally lied, why in the world would he casually admit it on television hours later? Did he slip up then? Much more reasonable that he simply blanked out in the heat of the moment.
And that having been the case, why exactly would Tiger contradict the arbiters of the rules of golf? It’s one thing to call a DQ on yourself if you inadvertently move a ball in the woods and no one noticed. It’s quite another to say you know better than the entire golf establishment after they’ve reviewed everything with a fine-tooth comb.
Honor sounds great, but his DQing himself would also constitute his putting his own interpretation above that of golf’s arbiters. Where would golf be if every player felt morally entitled to second-guess the officials? I think it’s quite reasonable that Tiger said, “I abide by the rules of golf, and the rules of golf say I should get out and play the last round.” He’s right about the interpretation of the rules of golf, as stated by officialdom, and his personal character shouldn’t be an issue in debating the validity of that judgment.
I think that’s the best possible interpretation of the facts in Tiger’s favor. Here’s where we disagree…
1. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Whether he forgot the riles or not, he’s a professional, and charged with knowing all of them. If I, as a lawyer, “forget” that I’m bound to protect my clients’ confidences, the Bar Discipline Committee will treat it as if it was intentional, and should. Either way, I can’t be trusted as a lawyer.
2. Admittedly, I think Tiger’s a sociopath. I think he was counting on the Star Syndrome saving him, and he was right.
3. He would DQ himself for the good of the game, knowing that as the #1 figure making a tyro’s mistake, he put the sport in the position of embarrassing itself by violating principles of fairness to save him, and its bottom line. And that’s in the best interest of the sport. If Ryan Braun was an Ethics Hero, he would have suspended himself after a technicality saved him from suspension, even if he believed he wasn’t guilty (but, of course, he was).
4. If golfers dispute incorrect, biased or wrongful decisions by arbiters and refs that go against them, they should dispute similar decisions that go in their favor. That’s how golf is different from the other sports. (In tennis, it is expected that players who know that a point was wrongly awarded to them rather than their opponent give the point to the opposition anyway, and golf has a stricter honor code than tennis.)
5. It is widely believed that any other golfer, certainly an unknown one, would have been disqualified by the PGA for what Tiger did. That alone obligates Tiger to withdraw to protect his sport from its own bias.
6. Why would Tiger say in another interview, about a player penalized for slow play, “Rules are rules”? I think he was rubbing everyone’s face in his ability to get away with what everyone else can not, because “Winning is everything.” Yes, I think he’s that much of a jerk.
@charlesgreen
That was my take on it too. I’m no golfer, but I’ve spent enough time browsing my father’s old issues of Golf magazine to have seen a heaping helping of stories about golfers who misapplied some intricacy of a rule (Any sport that has different ways to deal with your ball being covered by a leaf, a potato chip bag, and a caterpillar is just begging for it).
I do think there’s some star syndrome on the part of officials here- from what I’ve heard, although he signed an incorrect scorecard (normally a DQ) he was not given the boot because his drop had initially been ruled correct, before further analysis ruled it out. While the drop has the look of a brain fart to me, the ruling seems a bit fishy. Not that they DELIBERATELY cheated on his behalf, but like the mindset started with “Tiger can do no wrong, so he must have made a legal drop” and then changed to “oops, will you look at that.”
Luke,
That’s better said than I managed. Brain fart and fishy ruling; that sounds about right to me.
You’re right, Jack. Thanks. All the “ends justify the means” excuses for Tiger proffered by typically younger, non-golf people are awful. I don’t even think the new rule the “competition committee” cited applies in this case. I’m not sure a viewer called in as contemplated by that rule. Tiger just went on the air and explained how and why he made an illegal drop to Tom Rinaldi.
Tangentially, I’m fairly convinced that ultimately Tiger will be revealed as a Barry Bonds-like product of steroid use. I think the end of his dominance coincides with his having to get ready for Tour required drug tests. Again, this is tangential to the case at hand, but I suspect he’ll ultimately be found to have been just another product of the steroid era. Of course, if asked, he’ll doubtless say “I wasn’t cheating back then because it wasn’t illegal, you know?”
What strikes me is how similar the thinking of Josh Levin and David Drumm is. The idea that any morality of ethical value that is more than 10 years old is out-of-date, antiquated, and somehow invalid seems to permeate large segments of society. When I did deeper, it seems that the reason these people object to morality and ethics is because they don’t believe that anyone has ever REALLY believed in them. They believe that ethics and morality are fronts put up to control others and disguise people’s true motives and intentions. I can only assume that such people are so devoid of principles and so used to lying about their beliefs and motives that they are incapable of believing that some people actually have them. The thought that people actually would disqualify themselves for unintentionally violating a rule is inconceivable to them (but I didn’t MEAN to). The idea that someone could make the outcome of a game different from what they wanted because of some minor rule violation is soooooo unfair. Basically, we have a society with way too many overgrown, spoiled, teenagers.
The best illustration I have for this attitude comes from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. In one episode, Kai Winn, the religious leader of Bajor realizes that she has never truly believed her religion and is in danger of being consumed by the ‘demons’ of her religion. She claims to be repentant and wants absolution, but she is angered and confused when she is told that she needs to step down from her position. Why should she step down, she said she was sorry. She worked hard for her position, for her prestige, and for her power. Why should she have to give it up just because it was all based on a lie? She is going to be good NOW. Isn’t that enough?