The anchored putter makes the game of golf easier for some players.  That is indisputable.  As the USGA put it so well, we do not need statistics for that one, it is self-evident.  No one is forced to anchor, but 100% of those who elect to anchor, do so because it makes the game easier for them.  Whether they make up a majority of the pros, 10%, 1%, whatever, those pros who use the AP use it because it works for them.  Ask the 6 latest Major-winners, a majority of whom (4 of the 6) used the anchored putter.  For that matter, ask the competitive juniors. High-level competitors don’t do it for style, or convenience; the long putters are heavier, clumsier, and awkward in the bag, and they are hardly a guaranty of pain-relief for those with back problems.  No, the fundamental fact is that the anchored putter makes the game easier for some.  Maybe not all, but some.

So, what is wrong with that?  Plenty.  And when you think about this, remember, we are only talking about the pros (plus any other competitive group that opts to adopt the ban); your average 15-handicapper, the person we are trying to court as a continuing consumer of golf, remains free to anchor, use illegal grooves on the wedges, buy a 500 cc driver, and pump up with as much in the way of steroids, alcohol, and other game-improvement techniques as the player – and his or her playing companions – will tolerate.

The problem with making the game easier is simple:  it makes the game less interesting, less attractive, to its audience.  Anything that makes the game easier is, in effect, reducing the significance of the skill component of the game, leveling the difference between the better players and the not-better players.  Improvements in equipment or techniques do not make the game more attractive.  Sure, it is fun to watch what the big bombers are now able to do, but how many people attend your typical long-drive competitions – how many of you have ever seen, or even heard of, Jamie Sadlowski?  For that matter, have you ever been to a professional putting contest? (Did you know the winners are often children?)  A competition in hitting lobs or flop shots with wedges?  No, golf is interesting precisely because it is excruciatingly difficult, and the very best players are almost unbelievably superior to the best amateurs – and even to many of their fellow pros.

Think about this example:  How would you feel about watching pro football if the rules were changed to make it harder to sack the quarterback, kind of like scrimmages where the QB wears a red shirt and cannot be touched?  It would make the game way easier for some (namely, everybody on offense but especially the quarterback), but it would also take away one of the key factors that make pro football such a great game:  it would nullify the “escapability” factor.  RG III, Russell Wilson, and Colin Kaepernick (each of whom uses speed and/or elusiveness to escape the pass-rush) would no longer be so special, or so interesting – nor would players like Aaron Rogers and Tom Brady (who use an extraordinary combination of athletic skills and general savvyness), Peyton Manning (who has no speed at all but reads defenses instantly), and old-timers like Dan Marino (no speed or elusiveness but phenomenally quick release).   Once you reduce a skill component of a game, you reduce some of the differentiators between the great and the not-so-great, and we, the audience, are the losers.  We don’t want perfection when it is achieved through messing with the equipment or the rules, we want difficulties overcome.

The same logic could be applied as well to the 460 cc driver with a trampoline club-face, to the 7-iron with the loft of an old 5-iron but the design and weighting to make it fly higher than an old 8-iron, and – most of all – to the modern ball.  Sadly, that genie left the bottle so long ago that we will never put it back in, but the logical support for putting a stop to golf’s arms’ race is at least as compelling as the logic of the ban on the AP.  With every little advance, there is less of the game left to differentiate the stars from the journeymen.

By the way, can we please stop hearing from the Adam Scotts, the Keegan Bradleys, the Webb Simpsons, all of the AP addicts on the Tour?  This has nothing to do with fairness to them, it is about the welfare of the sport as a whole.  If they cannot learn to putt and win without the AP, that is neither a tragedy nor even an injustice.

]]> http://www.mecmoss.com/hooray-for-the-ban-on-the-anchored-putter/feed/ 1 http://www.mecmoss.com/be-my-friend-tiger/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=be-my-friend-tiger http://www.mecmoss.com/be-my-friend-tiger/#comments Thu, 16 May 2013 00:34:25 +0000 michael http://www.mecmoss.com/?p=703 Continue reading →]]>

Well, it did not take long for the bill to come due – the cost of the mass capitulation of the Golf Establishment to Tiger Woods, when it found a way to re-invent the Rules of Golf in such a way as to allow Woods to remain in the Masters after a sequence of events that probably would have led to the disqualification of any other player – and should have disqualified him.  As I warned, once you establish the precedent that the Rules of Golf, like the US Constitution (as understood by the “living document” crowd), can be re-interpreted at any time so as to yield whatever outcome is deemed most useful by the people in power, golf is no longer the same game.

In two simple but grand gestures, Woods has reduced the rest of professional golf to the equivalent of Bonasera, the undertaker, begging the Godfather to “be my friend,” to which the Godfather agrees – on the condition that the undertaker become permanently owned by the Godfather and committed to granting whatever future favors may be asked of him. 

• First, Woods effectively gamed the hapless Sergio Garcia on Saturday by pulling a club during Garcia’s address (generating a predictable, raucous crowd-reaction that wrecked Garcia’s concentration), and later excused his conduct by claiming the marshals had told him that Garcia had already hit his shot.  Woods’s claim highlighted his breach of golf etiquette in failing to do his best to keep aware of his fellow competitor’s position on the course and to avoid affecting that person’s game.  (It also resulted in an argument among various marshals as to whether Woods’s claim was even factually correct).

•  Second, on Sunday Woods pulled an even bigger stunt:  after hitting his drive into a water hazard on 14, Woods, amid lots of discussion about the point at which the ball had crossed the boundary of the hazard, quickly took a drop in an extremely favorable location that was described by commentator Johnny Miller – possibly the last honest man in big-money golf – as “really, really borderline.”  This time, Woods’s version of The Dog Ate My Homework (i.e., It is always someone else’s fault) was that his playing companion, Casey Wittenberg, had told him the drop location was OK.  Wittenberg, a fringe player striving to maintain fully-exempt status on the tour, was probably the last person on earth to whom one would have looked for an honest and objective opinion, under the circumstances; he was not about to say anything to Woods other than the equivalent of, “be my friend.”

So it has taken just a couple of weeks for the bill to come due, for Woods to tell the Tour in no uncertain terms, It is my Tour and I can do whatever I want and from now on the PGA, the USGA, the Masters, the whole golf establishmentcan just get out of my way.  I do not need to observe golf etiquette, I do not need to seek or wait for a ruling on where to drop my ball, I do not need to worry about signing an incorrect scorecard, I OWN YOU.  You need me more than I need you, and I no longer really care about what you – or anyone else other than Nike and my other sponsors – think of me.

And that is what you get when you decide, as the Masters rules committee did, that the Rules of Golf (and the USGA Decisions that interpret those rules, such as Decision 33-7/4.5) can be twisted and re-interpreted and selectively ignored in order to achieve a “fair” result that coincidentally happens to keep a favored player in the tournament.  Gee, that did not take long.

Sorting through the feedback on my earlier posts on the Tiger Woods/Masters rules controversy, I am learning that the essence of the case for waiving the “automatic” disqualification rule for Woods at the Masters was this: 

• Woods screwed up, and under the Rules of Golf he deserved the 2-stroke penalty for an illegal drop (Rule 26-1), and under normal circumstances he also should have been disqualified from the tournament (Rule 6-6d) for signing a scorecard that did not reflect that penalty; but

• the Masters rules committee also screwed up, first by conducting a slipshod investigation of David Eger’s TV-based complaint, and then by allowing Woods to post his incorrect score even though the committee had (or should have had) serious doubts about the correctness of that score; and thus

•  Woods should not be disqualified but should instead be spared under Rule 33-7.  It all comes down to this:  it was the committee’s fault, so Woods gets a pass.

The committee acknowledged that Woods was fully aware of all of the facts of his actions, so he was not eligible for a waiver of the DQ penalty under the new “TV Rule” (Decision 33-7/4.5, which permits waivers where unknown facts come to light via TV and complaints are phoned in by viewers).  But the committee chose to ignore the fact that the TV Rule also provides that waivers are not permitted where – as in the Woods case – the original violation involves ignorance of the rules rather than discovery of new facts.  In the end, despite the clear language of the TV Rule, the committee waived the DQ penalty for Woods because they themselves had caused the problem!  In essence, they said, we should have warned him not to sign the incorrect card, but we didn’t, so it is our fault that he went ahead and signed it.  

Sports fans, think about applying that logic to such rules-infractions as, say, “illegal use of hands” or “defensive pass-interference” in football, or maybe “charging” in basketball:  no warning, no foul.  And maybe think about the next time you see a tour pro searching for a ball he snap-hooked into the woods and his caddy, channeling Oddjob (Goldfinger’s caddy in the match with James Bond), quietly drops another ball from a secret pants pocket and announces, “aha!”  (And hopes no one spots it and warns him he might be penalized.)  You really think pro golfers are more honest than offensive linemen, or have you considered the possibility that the honesty of the golfers might have something to do with the automatic DQ rule?  You don’t think this will tempt players to get away with stuff, knowing they will not be DQ’d if they were not given a warning before signing their card (and that they can always change their card before signing it, if they do get a warning)?  You think anyone will ever again accept a DQ without calling a lawyer and referring to this case?

Here is the exact quote from the committee’s announcement, in which, after admitting that this was not an “unknown facts” case, the committee discloses its own peculiar logic:

“The Masters Tournament Committee concluded that its actions taken prior to Woods’ returning his score card created an exceptional individual case that unfairly led to the potential for disqualification.”  (high-lighting added for emphasis)

There you have it.  The Committee’s actions “led” to the “potential for DQ” – in other words, the committee caused the signing of the incorrect scorecard!  And that is precisely what the commentators have picked up on.  Here are two examples, quotes from emails I received from a high-profile golf writer:

“Obviously ignorance is not a defense. .. .But, again.. they knew, and they didn’t tell him. They made a mistake, for which 33-7 clearly covers….”

“If we have any information that someone possibly broke a rule, and didn’t bring it to the player’s attention — and then disqualified him later? You couldn’t live with yourself. You have to tell him. This was a committee error.”    (Comment apparently made to the writer by a PGA tour official working with the Masters)

So there you have it. The committee made Woods do it.  It wasn’t his fault.  The dog ate his homework. The Woods ruling was made because Fred Ridley, the rules committee chairman and principal screw-upper, couldn’t live with himself if he followed Decision 33-7/4.5 and DQ’d Woods, after failing to warn Woods that he might have made an illegal drop.   Forget the overall welfare of the game of golf, let’s circle the wagons around Fred Ridley.

]]> http://www.mecmoss.com/upon-further-review-the-masters-really-blew-it-with-the-tiger-woods-ruling/feed/ 0 http://www.mecmoss.com/the-usga-and-the-r-a-make-things-even-worse-in-the-woods-case/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-usga-and-the-r-a-make-things-even-worse-in-the-woods-case http://www.mecmoss.com/the-usga-and-the-r-a-make-things-even-worse-in-the-woods-case/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 00:08:47 +0000 michael http://www.mecmoss.com/?p=694 Continue reading →]]>

Here is a message I sent to a couple of golf writers who have been big supporters of the Masters Rules Committee in its decision not to disqualify Tiger Woods from the Masters – and who are similarly on board with today’s announcement by the USGA and the R & A Golf Club.  I was commenting specifically upon the USGA/R&A announcement:

                                    *******************************************

They did not put enough lipstick on this pig.  Here is the essence of what they have said:

• The Committee concluded that its actions “created an exceptional individual case that unfairly led to the potential for disqualification.“   Translation, the Committee made a mistake (by making its 26-1 ruling that Woods violated the rule, and by making that ruling without first seeking information from Woods and informing of the intent to make that ruling), and the mistake led to Woods’s signing an incorrect card.  In other words, the incorrect scorecard is not Woods’s fault or responsibility, it is the Committee’s fault.  And thus Woods is to be exempt from a 33-7 DQ because his violation was someone else’s fault.  The dog ate his homework. Good grief, do you people know what you are saying?    I mean, it is not like Woods called over an official and the official told him it was OK, so he went ahead and hit the next shot; that situation is already addressed by an earlier decision.  But that is not this case, not by a long shot. 
• And by the way, said the two august organizations, don’t expect us to do this same thing again.  “Further, although a Committee should do its best to alert competitors to potential Rules issues that may come to its attention, it has no general obligation to do so; and the fact that a Committee may be aware of such a potential issue before the competitor returns his score card should not, in and of itself, be a basis for waiving a penalty of disqualification under Rule 6-6d.”   Well, that would be welcome news, except that that is exactly what you just did, for the benefit of Mr. Woods.

So, we are to accept that, even though Tiger took no actions whatsoever in reliance upon anything said to him by the Committee, and signed his own scorecard without the 2-stroke penalty even though he knew full well he did not drop his ball in “as nearly as possible the same place from which he hit the previous shot,” we are letting Tiger off the hook because the whole thing was the Committee’s fault.  And by the way, even though no future player should expect a waiver when a Committee has failed to do its best to alert him that there might be a problem, we hope you will ignore the fact that we just acknowledged, in writing, that we did exactly that for Tiger Woods because the Committee failed to do its best to alert him.   Well, you guys might get away with this, but I am hardly the only one who knows exactly what you are doing.

A. The Background

If you want to understand the Tiger Woods vs Rules of Golf controversy, you need to master the basics:  the USGA rules and decisions that apply to the situation.  If you don’t understand these four edicts, you will never understand the controversy.  Here are the four key items (with italics added for emphasis):

•  Rule 26-1, paragraph a. of the USGA’s Rules of Golf, prescribing one of the four options available when a player hits a ball into a water hazard:  “Proceed under the stroke and distance provision of Rule 27-1 by playing a ball as nearly as possible at the spot from which the original ball was last played (see Rule 20-5).”  As you will see, Woods violated that rule, by dropping his replacement ball too far from that spot.

•  Rule 6-6 of the Rules of Golf.  The pertinent part of Rule 6-6 is:  “The competitor is responsible for the correctness of the score recorded for each hole on his score card. If he returns a score for any hole lower than actually taken, he is disqualified.”  Because Woods returned a score that did not reflect the proper (2-stroke) penalty for violating Rule 26-1, Rule 6-6 came into play, and Woods should have been disqualified, unless he qualified for a waiver of rule 6-6.

•  Rule 33-7 of the Rules of Golf (so critical to this discussion, it will be called the “RULE”).  The pertinent part of the RULE is:  “A penalty of disqualification may in exceptional individual cases be waived, modified or imposed if the Committee considers such action warranted.”  The RULE is the USGA publication that was indicated by Fred Ridley, head of the Masters rules committee, as the basis for the committee’s decision to impose the 2-stroke penalty for a 27-1 violation but to refrain from disqualifying Woods under 6-6 – in other words, it was the basis for their decision to waive the disqualification penalty..

•  Decision 33-7/4.5 of the USGA (it will be called the “DECISION”), adopted in 2011 by both the USGA and the Royal & Ancient Golf Club (the “R & A,” the organization that runs the British Open).  Note that the number of the DECISION (33-7/4.5) is similar to the number of RULE (33-7), but that the DECISION and the RULE are two different things. Decisions are essentially interpretations of Rules.  They are like federal Regulations issued by the government to explain or interpret federal statutes – the “Regs” are not exactly laws, but you are still in trouble if you do not obey them. The DECISION is the USGA edict that has been (mistakenly) referred to by nearly all the commentators as the basis for the Masters rules committee’s decision to give Woods a waiver of the disqualification penalty for violating Rule 6-6, even though he signed an incorrect scorecard.  (The commentators are mistaken because it was Rule 33-7, not Decision 33-7/4.5, that was the the rules committee’s announced reason for its ruling.  This is a critical point:  the commentators have been fooled into thinking the waiver was based on the DECISION, not the RULE.)  Here are the pertinent parts of the DECISION (with italics added for emphasis):

Decision 33-7/4.5 is a “new interpretation of the rules . . . where disqualifications have been caused by score card errors identified as the result of recent advances in video technologies. . . . This revision . . . addresses the situation where a player is not aware he has breached a Rule because of facts that he did not know and could not reasonably have discovered prior to returning his score card. . . .  the disqualification penalty still applies for score card breaches that arise from ignorance of the Rules of Golf. . . . this decision reinforces that it is still the responsibility of the player to know the Rules.”   

B.  The Facts

You do not need a law degree to understand why the DECISION should not have helped Woods, because it did not apply – it does NOT describe the Tiger Woods case.  There were no facts that Woods did not know.  Woods knew he had hit his ball into a yellow-staked water hazard (regardless of how zany a path it took to get there), and – most importantly – he knew that the place from which he chose to drop a replacement ball was NOT as close as possible to the spot from which he had played the unlucky shot.  Apparently he did not know, or perhaps temporarily forgot, the yellow-stake rules – specifically, the rule that, if you elect not to play from the hazard or from the designated drop area and you also reject (as Woods did) the geometrically complicated option of playing from “behind” the hazard, the yellow-stake rule leaves you with only one other option:  take a penalty stroke and “play a ball as nearly as possible at the spot from which the original ball was last played.”  (The option identified above as Rule 26-1 a.)  What Woods actually did, and publicly acknowledged after his round – indeed, bragged – that he did, was that he played his replacement ball from a spot that was a couple of yards back from the spot from which he had played his original ball, in order to make sure his second effort would not hit the flagstick or go over the green.  In essence, he rejected the first three options and settled on an incorrect attempt at the fourth option.  Partly as a result of Woods’s own words, it is now 100% certain that Woods’s breach of the rules was based upon ignorance of the rules (whether permanent or based upon a temporary memory lapse), not upon any lack of awareness as to factual circumstances – like the place where his unlucky shot bounced into the water, the spot from which he had hit that shot, and the different spot from which he hit his replacement ball.  (The Rules of Golf themselves, are certainly not “facts,”  and apparently no one has yet had the temerity to suggest that a Rule of Golf is a fact, certainly not in the context of the DECISION.) 

Alas, the only thing of which Woods was ignorant – even if his ignorance was just temporary obliviousness under duress – was the Rule of Golf (Rule 26-1) that required that if he chose the stroke-and-distance penalty, he had to drop his replacement ball as close as possible to the spot from which he had hit the first ball, not one or two yards behind that spot.  It has been suggested that Woods might have temporarily confused the options for red-stake (lateral) hazards with the options for yellow-stake hazards and mistakenly chosen an option that was not available to him under the circumstances.    More likely is that he forgot (or did not know) that when your shot bounces backwards from the flagstick into a yellow-stake hazard, your options on where to drop your replacement ball can be quite different from your options if your initial shot went directly forward into the water rather than caroming backwards into it.   In other words, he did not think he was electing “stroke and distance,” he mistakenly thought he was doing a legal drop under the “behind the hazard” option under Rule 26-1 but was picturing the wrong line backwards from the flagstick.  In either case, whatever his motive or state of mind, and whatever the duration of those mental conditions, Woods broke the rules and did not do so because of lack of knowledge of the pertinent “facts”  but because he forgot or did not know the pertinent rule, and therefore he should have been disqualified.  End of discussion. No possibility of a waiver.  Neither the RULE nor the DECISION should have done Woods any good at all.

C.  The Action By The Rules Committee

It is remarkable that Fred Ridley, a lawyer as well as a golfer, never referred to the DECISION, not even once, in the press conference in which he announced the committee’s ruling or in its press release.  Virtually all of the announcers, journalists, and commentators have persisted in talking about the DECISION as though it were the basis for the committee’s ruling, probably because it is the DECISION that contains all the talk about video technologies and such.  But Ridley himself never once referred to the DECISION; he referred only to the RULE (section 33-7 of the Rules of Golf) as the basis for the committee’s ruling, even though the RULE makes no mention of TV viewers calling in with reports of rules infractions.  It is true that Ridley took no steps to correct the misinterpretations of the commentators, and that he said certain things that made it seem like he might have been thinking of the DECISION rather than the RULE, but it is highly unlikely that lawyer Ridley was confused about the differences between the DECISION and the RULE; it is quite reasonable to presume that Ridley was well aware of the precise meaning of every word he spoke and that he made a considered choice in electing NOT to refer to the DECISION.

D.  Possible Reasons For The Committee’s Action

So, why would Ridley cite only the RULE when his action appears to have been based upon factors never discussed in the RULE?   The rules violation would never have been spotted had it not been for video technologies and a “changing environment,” but those are factors that are never mentioned in the RULE, so why did Ridley cite only the RULE - the wrong source? 

Possible answer:  Ridley might have elected to cite the RULE instead of the DECISION because the RULE doesn’t make any mention of the distinction between ignorance of fact and ignorance of rules.  Ridley might have chosen to use the RULE because it does not explicitly shoot down the ignorant-of-the-law argument.  The RULE might have appeared to fill the bill, because it says nothing about facts vs. rules.  But that doesn’t cut it, certainly not for the lawyers in the audience, because the apparent permissiveness of the RULE is trumped by one statement in the DECISION that shows why Ridley was wrong in citing the RULE as authority for waiving the disqualification penalty (italics added): 

“The R&A and the USGA confirm that the disqualification penalty still applies for score card breaches that arise from ignorance of the Rules of golf.  As such, the decision reinforces that it is still the responsibility of the player to know the rules, while recognizing that there may be some rare situations where it is reasonable that a player is unaware of the factual circumstances of a breach.”  In other words, the twin rule-making bodies are making it very clear that ignorance of the Rules of Golf is never an excuse, not even if you try to invoke the RULE (Rule 33-7) as your authority rather than the DECISION.  If you sign an incorrect scorecard because you were not familiar with a Rule of Golf or you forgot it, you MUST be disqualified.  No exceptions, under either the RULE or the DECISION.

Or perhaps Ridley shied away from invoking the DECISION because the DECISION explicitly rules out ignorance of the Rules of Golf as a basis for waiving the disqualification penalty whereas the RULE never mentions ignorance, but just speaks in terms of the waiver being warranted in exceptional cases, and perhaps the crafty Mr. Ridley felt it was better to rely on wording that was vague (the RULE) rather than on wording that clearly went against the decision his committee wanted to take (the DECISION ).  The problem is, the DECISION cannot be ignored, because the DECISION effectively forbids the use of the RULE to justify a waiver of the disqualification penalty.  Surely lawyer Ridley must have known that.

Ridley made it painfully clear that he felt responsible for Woods’s plight, because he (Ridley) did not do a good enough job of investigating the phoned-in complaint, and thus he did not warn Woods to raise his score by 2 strokes to reflect a penalty for playing a shot from the wrong place – for improperly dropping his ball after the shot into the hazard.  Yes, it would have been sad if Woods had been disqualified because of his reliance on the silence of the rules committee.  Yes, that would have been an extraordinary situation.  And yes, it is maybe even conceivable that a new rule or decision could be adopted in the future, to attempt to address this kind of a situation, though this writer, personally, thinks that would be a bad idea.  Ridley’s concern about Woods becoming an innocent victim of circumstances might explain Ridley’s actions, but it does not excuse Ridley’s error.

E.  The Consequences

Where does this leave us?  It leaves us to conclude that Ridley, despite his lawyer-like efforts to establish a foundation for his committee’s decision (that is, to excuse and obscure his mistake), has screwed up in a manner that, if one may coin a phrase, is both Royal and Ancient.  He chose to cite the RULE, rather than the DECISION, as authority for the committee’s action, possibly in order to work a deception.  So, let us cut to the chase.  Regardless of their motives, Ridley and the sules committee made a decision that is clearly incorrect.  Woods should have been disqualified, regardless of the purity of Woods’s (or Ridley’s) heart of intentions.

In the writer’s opinion, Fred Ridley has done something that could lead to enormous harm to the game of golf.  It does not matter whether he erred because (a) he merely misapplied the DECISION (it was definitely NOT intended to cover situations like Ridley’s inadvertently luring Tiger into signing what proved to be an incorrect scorecard by failing to detect the problem before the signing occurred), or (b) he knowingly staked out a new precedent for treating the old RULE as though it now were no longer to be considered affected by the DECISION, so that in the future a player can get a disqualification waived for ANY “exceptional” situation rather than merely where video technology leads to the discovery of unknown facts.  Either way,  this whole thing spells trouble.  From now on, any pro facing a disqualification for any reason whatsoever could simply plead good faith, justice, fairness, whatever, and then argue, “Hey, you did it for Tiger, you can’t discriminate against me just because I am not Tiger.” 

In other words, this is the gateway to a more-general breakdown in the enforcement of the Rules of Golf, a precedent for ignoring ALL the cumbersome, tedious, old-fashioned rules put together by a bunch of stuffy old white guys a hundred years ago.  Just read or listen to the commentators and fans talking about how the Ridley action was correct because a disqualification would have been “unfair” and the Rules of Golf are stupid and boring and no one cares about them anyway.   All they seem to want to talk about is outcomes, feelings, motives, fairness, and the like, rather than whether the rules were broken.  Next thing you know, they will be arguing that the Rules of Golf, like the US Constitution, should be read as a “living document,” to be changed by executive order whenever the rulers of golf feel like the current rules are a bit out of date or do not result in the right people winning.  Or might result in Tiger Woods not being allowed to play on the weekend.

For those of us who think the Rules of Golf reflect clear and concise and indeed elegant drafting, and who believe the game of golf has been remarkably well served by them, this controversy and its outcome are a travesty.  There is a good and logical reason for every single Rule of Golf, and when there has been an informed consensus for a change from time to time – the change has been made.  A wholesale abandonment of rules in favor of just doing whatever seems “fair” every time there is a controversy, is a terrible and pernicious idea.

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Final note: Here is a clarification, in response to initial comments upon this post.  This writer is agnostic when it comes to Woods’s decision to accept the committee’s decision and to remain in the tournament rather than voluntarily withdrawing.  Yes, it would have been a good thing, probably a popular thing, for him to do, but the committee gave him a break, and he accepted and ran with it.  I did not intend to criticize Woods’s decision.  My point had solely to do with the actions of the Masters rules committee, whose duty is to interpret and apply the Rules and Decisions of Golf, but which failed miserably in its attempts to perform that duty.  If the game of golf is the eventual loser, don’t blame Tiger Woods, blame Fred Ridley.

The following is the text of a letter I sent to the editors at The Wall Street Journal.  (The version they printed, in today’s Journal (4/11/13), was edited just a bit.)

Daniel Henninger, in “Capital’s Corruptions” (Wall Street Journal 4/4/13),  states that corruption keeps the poor down, suppresses growth, and kills capitalism, and that its eradication would be an appropriate focus for the new pope.  In making the case, Mr. Henninger treats corruption as though it were a cause, not an effect; a disease, not merely a symptom; something that could be eradicated if we attacked it.

Hayek was not the first (the early Israelites beat him to it) to observe that the very existence of government invites corruption, as the governed, having granted powers to their governors, are inevitably tempted to offer bribes and kickbacks to induce the governors to grant – or to reward them for granting – favors in the exercise of that power.  Power corrupts, absolute power, . . . and so on.  It is impossible to outlaw or eliminate corruption; it exists in every nation on earth.  But some nations are substantially more corrupt than others, and that is no accident or coincidence, because it is clear that the greater the degree of governmental intrusion into the normal operation of free markets, the greater the degree of corruption the country must eventually endure.  As Hayek has demonstrated, once a government gets into the business of picking winners and losers (i.e., planning the economy), it is inevitable that businesses will compete less and less on the basis of the price and quality of their products and services, and more and more on the basis of currying the favor of those in government with the power to determine who wins and who loses.  Just consider what has happened in the US in the areas of healthcare and financial services.  Sometimes the bribes and kickbacks are obvious and illegal; sometimes they are more subtle, and we call them “crony capitalism.”

Totalitarian, command/control, planned-economy states like Russia and China have extremely high levels of corruption: under regimes like theirs, if you want something done, you bribe somebody – otherwise, it never gets done, regardless of how capable and honest a competitor you might be.  No pope can do much about corruption  – certainly, no pope with a predilection for economic class-warfare, regardless of the piety of his motives. You want to curtail corruption?  Get the government out of the business of planning the economy.

Mr. Henninger, by focusing upon the effect rather than the cause, is playing right into the hands of the Obama crowd, who no doubt would attack corruption in the only way they know how:  mock reform, in the form of even more governmental-regulation.

John Cochrane, in “Treasury Needs a Better Long Game” (Opinion, Wall Street Journal, 3/4/13) has finally spoken the truth one dare not utter: we are on the verge of experiencing a doomsday scenario for the US bond markets, the so-called “death spiral” when deficit-spending spooks the bond markets, which forces the price of Treasury obligations down, which in turn increases the deficits, which force Treasury obligations further down, and so on.  A “China Syndrome” in financial markets, where everything melts down and burns its way to the bottom – the destruction of America’s economy, maybe the world’s.

Prof. Cochrane had already laid the foundation for this scenario, in ”Running On Empty” (Books section,  Wall Street Journal, 3/2/13), in which he made the case for the likelihood of that scenario, observing that our cumulative response to the financial crisis of 2008 (or thereabouts) has been for the government to guaranty still more bank debt and then (having thus merely enhanced the incentives for risky behavior) to impose mountains of new regulations that are supposed to compel the bankers to stop engaging in risky behavior – as though such regulations might have even the slightest chance of actually accomplishing that goal.  (Prof. Cochrane went on to spell out the obvious cure that should have been undertaken, but still has not, which is that we need to increase the capitalization of the banks, not the regulation of them, while we try to see about the business of restoring economic growth and overall fiscal sanity.) Andy Kessler, in any earlier piece, “When Interest Rates Rise, Watch Out” (2/22/13), had also sounded the alarm on the financial terror that lies ahead and that would be realized via the bond markets.

Can something be done, to dodge this approaching asteroid before it can inflict upon us the equivalent of a nuclear or electromagnetic-wave attack?  Yes, and Prof. Cochrane has spelled it out: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the US Treasury to issue long-term Treasury bonds (with fixed interest rates that are somewhat higher than the rates on our currently outstanding short-term Treasuries), in exchange for all of the outstanding short-term Treasuries (which have very low floating interest rates), a swap that would not require Treasury to sell any bonds and that could increase our annual interest costs by an amount that is pretty substantial (though quite a bit less than even the short-term costs of the various Obama “stimulus” programs) but would buy us a lot of time to get our fiscal house in order and would cost us chicken feed in comparison to what the swap would save us over the time it would take us to achieve fiscal order.  Will something be done?  Prof. Cochrane has not spelled it out, but it is not difficult to read between his lines:  NO, because the last thing the President (or for that matter, the Fed Chairman)  wants to do, before the 2014 elections, is anything that might inflict pain on the voters, even if the pain is only temporary and even if it is far less than the pain that awaits the voters after 2014 if nothing is done to tackle this financial crisis-in-the-making.

I do not think the professor is crying wolf.

Peggy Noonan, in “The Anti-Confidence Man” (Opinion, 3/9/13), seems to be living in a time-warp.  Five years into the Obama era, she is still critiquing him as though he were a sort of wonky LBJ (or maybe a thuggish Gene McCarthy), still wondering why he is waiting so long to install any of the easy, obvious fixes that would re-start the stagnant economy.  “It’s all so frozen, so stuck. Just when American needs a boost . . . Mr. Obama is making the same mistake he made four years ago . . he does not see it.  He thinks he’s in a wrestling match . . . Once they (the American people) do (have jobs), so much will follow – deficits will go down . . . There’s little sense he sees this.”

Sadly, it is not the President who “does not see it”, it is Ms. Noonan.  The President sees exactly what he wants, which is a steady march (actually, a decline) toward Democratic Party domination of all three branches of government and a collectivist, statist, planned-economy government, and if it means keeping the economy on hold – rather than fixing our fiscal and monetary policies, which would cause temporary pain (spiking interest rates) and might thus cost him the mid-term elections – he is more than willing to oblige.  The President is not oblivious to our pain, he is manipulating it – and winning.

Johnson’s observation (at pp 57 and 58 of the Harper Perennial 1958 edition) is that the early Israelites, though they had their kings and other leaders, resisted the bestowal of too much power upon them – and resisted (with permanent effect as it turned out, until the establishment of the modern State of Israel after WW II) the establishment of a more formal state with geographic borders.  “On the other hand, if kingship and state became permanent, their inevitable characteristics and needs would encroach upon the religion, and worship of Yahweh would succumb to internal corruption.  The dilemma was unresolved throughout the First and Second Commonwealths; it remains unresolved in Israel today.” (emphasis added).  That is a terse and rather cryptic foreshadowing of the modern truism that the very existence of government invites corruption, as the governed, having granted powers to their governors, are inevitably tempted to offer bribes and kickbacks as inducements to grant – or as rewards for the granting of – favors in the exercise of that power.  Power corrupts, absolute power, . . . and so on.

Hayek, of course, has written a thousand brilliant variations around the fundamental theme that no government, no central plan, no matter how smart and informed, can ever be as effective and efficient a processor and organizer of pertinent information as free markets; even the smartest government is always playing catch-up, as its best plans are virtually stillborn at utterance, because of  government’s inability to assemble and process as much of the extant data as markets perpetually reflect and refresh, and because any modest utility is instantly rendered obsolete by the birth of new data.  Not to mention that the governors, by the very nature and scope of the jobs (and even apart from political bias and ideology), can never be as smart and well-informed as the actual economic players in a free market.

Back to the Eureka moment: thus there are two reasons why the whole Marxist, Socialist, Fascist, Collectivist, Progressive, Leftist, Obama-ist model of substituting governmental planning and non-essential regulation for free and lightly-regulated markets is doomed to fail.  Government is inherently, unavoidably, both corrupt and stupid; the more government, the more the corruption and stupidity.

The one false note in the piece is Mr. Henninger’s statement, in his concluding paragraph, that “Barack Obama is indeed in sync with the public will . . .”, an opinion that ignores the fact that nearly half the country voted against him and the likelihood that a very sizable portion of that half considers the man to be completely bizarre and a menace to the country.

And then, Mr. Henninger concludes this otherwise dramatic piece with this:  “In the next four years, that could prove to be a problem.”   Talk about the elephant giving birth to a mouse.

We Are At War.  Our Second Civil War Has Begun

It is conceivable that what I am about to disclose will be news to the Obama Coalition:  that curious blend of most of the Have-Nots of America with the cluster of favored Haves who manipulate them, such as the academy, the media, the entertainment industry, organized labor, Chicago politician-thugs, and the crony-capitalists – the co-opted elements of cyberworld and Wall Street and other select parts of what used to be called the private sector.  The Coalition folks quite possibly do not realize that we are now deeply engaged in a second Civil War in this country, one that might not cost lives but that will alter the country, if the Coalition wins, even more radically than the first did or could have done.  As far as the non-Coalition half of the country is concerned, their views and values are so different from (and they are so offended and antagonized by) the views and values of the Coalition half that they see no possibility of a reconciliation and indeed they see no point to making further attempts to achieve a reconciliation.

For the non-Coalition folks (essentially, the American Right), there is no longer any political solution out there, no conceivable compromise or accommodation with this President, that would be of any interest or value to them.  That is not to say that the American Right is unable and unwilling to compromise and live with the American Left; it is so say that the American Right is uninterested in attempting any further compromises or accommodations with Mr. Obama.  As far as they are concerned, he is an alien from another planet, far beyond the spectrum of anything they expect in an American President.  For some of them, it is a matter of the shocking escalation of the country’s movement toward a collectivist, statist model of government; for others, it is the escalating war on individual and economic liberties.  For many, it is just a gut reaction to the massive growth in spending and the sense that the President is concerned mainly with amassing political power and control, not in taking meaningful actions to re-vitalize the economy.  They get it, that he is deadly serious when he talks about transforming the country, changing it into the kind of place they or their ancestors once risked death in order to escape.  They are not saying he is objectively right or wrong, merely that he is talking about some other country, not America. Regardless of the specifics, they do not want to live with him, they do not want to live in his version of America, they do not want to continue to accommodate his followers and acolytes and dependents, and they are no longer interested in making any deals.  A great many of them, wistfully, are making plans to move to another country.  For the American Right, this is no longer about working things out with someone like a Clinton or even an LBJ, about maintaining the separation of powers, or about changing Administrations from time to time to keep the pendulum from swinging too far away from the political center.  This President has pushed them way beyond all such possibilities.  We are now talking, sadly, about the end of America, its conversion into some weird channeling of France or China or some other place that people want to move out of, rather than into.   They are way, way past “this could be a problem.”

The President Is Keeping Up The Offensive

From this writer’s perspective, every day brings news of yet another presidential speech, program, regulation, executive order, etc., that I find so appalling, so offensive, that it is like playing Whack-A-Mole (with dozens of moles), trying to keep up and to explain my objections to every single thing these people are trying to pull.  There seems no further point in trying to tackle the details of each new assault they direct at the America they so dislike.  I am appalled by the values and principles that drive these people.  I just don’t want to have to indulge them any longer.  I don’t want to share a country with them.  I don’t want to watch the movies they make or read the books they write. I am exhausted with trying to fight through the bias with which they have turned our mass media into their propaganda and PR arm.   I see no upside to trying to find common ground with them.  They have declared war against me, and I’d be prepared to see the country just split and to forfeit to them New England and the Beltway and the rest of Blue-state America.  Would I be willing to give up even California?  You bet:  the only part worth saving, Silicon Valley, will be Death Valley after a few more years of Jerry Brown’s stewardship.  Eric Schmidt, the Obama Administration’s boy toy, may stick around as the token crony-capitalist, but the rest of the Valley will head for Austin, Texas or other free-enterprise zones outside of CA.

He Gave Us Ample Warning

It is not as though Mr. Obama has deceived anyone regarding his ultimate ambitions and intentions.  Yes, he has seduced the Have-Nots with his unfulfillable promises of a lifetime of state welfare, where everything they want is free of charge and paid-for by the hated rich and there is no reason to bother to get a job.  But for those with the means to absorb Mr. Obama’s words and who take the trouble to read those words carefully and grasp their meaning, be they on the Left or the Right, there is really no deception at all.  The President’s words make certain things abundantly clear:

• that he wants to  eliminate the two principle features of our republican form of government – the distribution and separation of powers among its three branches, and the Constitutional framework that outlines and limits the powers delegated by the people to their government and that articulates a bill of citizens’ rights;
• that he would like to replace our traditional governmental system, with its checks and balances between the legislative branch and the executive branch, with a parliamentary system, in which the leader of the dominant political party is in control of both the executive and the legislative functions of the government and thus has far greater power than under our present system for so long as his party is the most popular party nationally;
• that he believes the judiciary should decide cases on the basis of “fairness,” national interests, and more useful outcomes, rather than on the basis of laws, precedents, and the Constitution – and that it has the power to do so, because the Constitution is a “living document” that means whatever the dominant party thinks it should mean today (which may be exactly the opposite of what they thought it meant yesterday);
• that he wants to convert us to a centrally-planned and exhaustively-regulated economy; and that he wants to replace our free-market capitalism with a form of Chinese-style “state capitalism,” which involves a business sector but  does not involve free markets and is not really capitalism at all.

The President’s idea of “liberties” and freedoms has little to do with the American notion of freedom to do things (such as free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, etc., under our Bill of Rights) and consists, instead, of freedom from things– such as freedom from poverty, freedom from ill health, freedom from having to pay for your own birth control, and freedom from having to endure neighbors who are better off than you are (or more religious).   His attitude toward America as the world’s benevolent super-power, supporting peace and stability while keeping the world’s bullies from abusing their neighbors, is:  Forget about it – we need to spend all of our earned (and borrowed) money on enhancing the welfare state, not on maintaining the military capabilities needed to support our peacekeeping role.

Is The Journal Content With This Passive Role?

I don’t know what is holding Mr. Henninger back, but this train, if it has not already left the station, is fully boarded, and the doors are closing.  Could the President have been any clearer?  If all of this is not enough for Mr. Henninger to go beyond, “this could be a problem,” what else would it take?  Is Mr. Henninger waiting until he is really, really certain that the President is serious and is not going to change his objectives or his methods?   Is Mr. Henninger waiting for the President to make a formal declaration of a state of emergency so that he can invoke emergency, executive powers, maybe activate his ObamaCare Ready Reserve Corps?  Must the Democrats re-take the House in 2014? Must Germany invade Poland?  What’s it going to take?

Or maybe we have already witnessed Daniel Henninger being angry.