Golf: A gentleman’s game

The Tour Championship made news this week for something deserving of adulation — honest play.

Sahith Theegala called a two-shot penalty on himself during the third round, something quite uncommon, especially with stakes as high as in the playoffs. His honesty eventually cost him $2.5 million, a huge price to pay for an infraction only he saw, or at least he thinks he saw.

What is so amazing about the whole thing — he wasn’t even 100 percent sure.

But that uncertainty was enough for the young golfer to call a penalty on himself. It all happened on the third hole at East Lake on the third round. Theegala was in the bunker with a nice lie. His good lie makes intentionally improving his lie pointless. And even on video reviews, zoomed in, it didn’t seem that Theegala touched and sand.

But his integrity automatically kicked in and even though unsure, Sahith felt it proper to err on the side of honesty. People were quick to compare him to Patrick Reed and his sandy adventure a couple of years back. But we’re here to celebrate honesty so let’s leave Reed alone.

This exemplary display of uprightness isn’t exclusive to high-stakes professional golf. Locally, a similar instance of self-imposed penalty was witnessed at a tournament in Davao. As shared by Atty. Jovi Neri on his Facebook page and then shared by another golf page, the honest golfer, Atty. Marco Mendoza mistakenly signed for a wrong score at the Davao Recovery Tournament.

The error and eventual penalty cost the team a sure win, but Atty. Mendoza chose to do the right thing even when no one noticed, even when it meant that from a comfortable lead, their team would not even place. I’m pretty sure the team format made it even more difficult to remain honest as it would affect others, but this display of integrity is something worthy of praise and emulating.

Too often, a lot of us witness varying levels of “cheating” in golf. It may be something as minor as wrong marking of balls on the green, unintended movement of the ball on address, mistakenly teeing the ball past tee markers, or replacing the original ball and using a “putting ball” on the greens.

In my personal experience, the most common forms of cheating I’ve seen are sandbagging and declaring wrong scores. Sadly, sandbagging seems to affect all levels, even the best amateurs. Too often, I’ve seen and played with really good club players, amateurs that regularly score under par have a handicap of 4 or 5, some even higher.

From my perspective as someone playing off a 5-handicap, I cannot imagine playing even, or worse, give strokes to these elite club players. Maybe they have to “maintain” their handicaps for club competitions, for team golf leagues, or whatever they need additional strokes for.

Somehow, this form of cheating has been universally acceptable among clubs. It would be hard to prove that these cheats purposely submit high scores during practice and magically play better in tournaments, but we can’t just stand by and accept it as normal.

The second, commonly used form of cheating is wrong scoring. It’s simply deducting strokes from what you really made. Cross-scoring can be effective only if we keep track of our flight mate’s every stroke. But usually, we are too busy managing our own games to notice and just rely on the honesty of our fellow golfers.

Protecting the field is something we should all take more seriously. I am not saying we should all be eagle-eyed and sticklers for rules, but we should at least be mindful enough to be able to “clarify” and correct wrong declarations.

As a last resort, instead of getting into a full-blown argument, simply refusing to sign the scorecard of a confirmed cheat should be enough to get our point across and serve as a deterrent. We cannot help it if players resort to cheating just to win a trophy, but doing nothing only encourages them to keep doing it.

Stories of honest golf should be as important as hearing stories of great play, if not more. Sahith Theegala’s self-imposed penalty and Atty. Mendoza’s honesty shows us there is hope. The recent golf boom has brought new friends to the fairways. Unfortunately, the sheer volume also exposes our game to more potential cheaters. To keep golf fun and fair, we should all work together to keep our game honest.