Baffoe: Golf Finally Shuts Up Narcs

By Tim Baffoe--

(CBS) Chalk one up to good sports rules over bad ones. Score one against fans who think they're as influential on games as players and coaches. The people who like to blur the lines between spectator and participant just got shushed.

On Monday, the United States Golf Association announced that rules violations can no longer be called in by spectators:

"A working group led by the USGA and the R&A has unanimously agreed to adopt a new set of protocols for video review when applying the Rules of Golf.

The group, consisting of the PGA Tour, LPGA, PGA European Tour, Ladies European Tour and The PGA of America, as well as the governing bodies, will implement the following measures from January 1, 2018:

• Assign one or more officials to monitor the video broadcast of a competition to help identify and resolve rules issues as they arise 

• Discontinue any steps to facilitate or consider viewer call-ins as part of the Rules decision process"

So turds on their couches will no longer be able to narc on professional athletes for in-game rules violations. It boggles the mind how this was still possible, even if it's a relief that it's finally, rightfully being remedied. You'd be hard-pressed to make a solid argument that allowing spectators to literally impact the outcomes isn't the worst rule in sports.

Think for a moment about how awful one's life must be to 1) know the rules of golf by memory without being paid to know them and 2) to be moved to contact a league when you see one violated on TV. After considering such a sad sack, suppress the urge to beat that person with tack hammers.

Thankfully, sports can occasionally be a world in which the worst of us will be righteously excised like a tumor. And golf hall monitors are the worst of sports fans. Sure, they'll cry "integrity" and "slippery slopes" and "I live with cats named after the New Kids on the Block," but golf loses nothing by cutting off these massive dorks from being able to influence scoring.

In April, Lexi Thompson was informed she was being assessed a four-stroke penalty in the middle of the final round of the ANA Inspiration when some self-wedgying idiot emailed the LPGA about Thompson improperly replacing her ball on the putting green the previous day. She got two strokes for the misplacement and two more for signing an "incorrect" scorecard while not knowing she was being penalized the next day. (The USGA and R&A also got rid of that inane rule -- penalizing unaware scorecard signers.) Thompson lost that tournament in a playoff.

Everyone who doesn't complain about the restaurant not accepting expired coupons saw how what happened to Thompson was obvious garbage.

Woods himself was penalized two strokes in the 2013 BMW Championship after callers let TV staff and officials know that Woods' ball moved less than a hair when he removed debris near it. The butterfly effect by not penalizing Woods would, of course, have been immeasurable.

At the time, broadcaster Peter Jacobson said: "I don't mind people calling it in. It's unfair for Tiger because Tiger's got a camera on him everywhere he goes ... But it only keeps us sharp.''

No, it empowers insufferable rules fetishists who tell on people for sneaking a free refill when restaurant policy forbids them. It makes self-important people think they have a right to interject themselves into situations to which they were not invited and operate under the misbelief that a fan should matter in a game scenario.

"I was informed of the two rule changes this morning," Thompson wrote on social media Monday. "I applaud the USGA and the R&A for their willingness to revise the Rules of Golf to to (sic) address certain unfortunate situations that have arisen several times in the game of golf. In my case, I am thankful that no one else will have to deal with an outcome such as mine in the future."

A few weeks after Thompson got hosed, the USGA and R&A modified rules to not penalize players when video evidence reveals something that couldn't reasonably be seen with the naked eye and when a player has made a reasonable judgment. That still didn't take the power away from losers at home at the time.

I don't know if this victory is small or large in the grand scheme, but it's really satisfying to have a hobby of terrible people taken away from them. It's sort of a microcosm of the communication situation of today in which fans have access to sports figures like never before. Calling in golf fouls predates social media, and it's almost like it's the grandfather of the dissolution of boundaries that social media has caused, where a "fan" can erroneously let an athlete know they "pay his/her salary" and operate under the belief that their opinions about someone's performance have been solicited just by the "fan" having a Twitter account.

A decent person can tell themselves that such an existence in which someone with an avatar of a team logo typing about how the NBA was better in the 1980s is punishment enough. But the problem is that the sewer people have mobilized through the illusion that the opinions they have that get ignored by family and coworkers suddenly have more value online. That anything they see online is an invitation to a conversation nobody will have with them in person. That the star athlete or the league official or lowly sports blogger genuinely want to hear from them. At least golf woke up and let them know that feelings of unmerited entitlement like that shouldn't matter as much as they feel they do.

"Be a fan," advised Thomas Pagel, USGA senior director of the Rules of Golf and Amateur Status, of dweebs who a crushed by these the rule changes. "Enjoy the game."

If not being a tattle-tale prevents you from that enjoyment, tough. You no longer matter.

Tim Baffoe is a columnist for 670TheScore.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not Entercom or our affiliated radio stations.

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