"The year 2010 will not be remembered for any particular playing accomplishment but rather for Dustin Johnson failing to realize he was sharing a bunker with dozens of spectators who had nowhere else to go on a depraved course that led mobs into hazards."

I suspect that Frank Hannigan would just point us to his timelier-than-ever Golf Digest story after some of the rules-related groveling following Ian Poulter's unfortunate "lucky" coin incident Sunday.

The Rules of Golf, it was reported in bona-fide media and anonymous blogs, are an ass. It was all very Tea Partyish in that the government, in this case the rules-making USGA, was denounced as causing nothing but harm. The rules, said the critics, were made by doddering old men in a haphazard manner designed to irk those with common sense who were sure all the publicized rules confrontations could have been handled in some ad-hoc manner resulting in no penalty for the likes of the nonreading Johnson, who, after all, didn't mean to ground his club in a hazard and surely gained no benefit in doing so.

Mind, the USGA has asked for trouble by performing badly in many areas of its provenance. It foisted upon the game a new groove rule on the basis that doing so would improve the game dramatically, whereas all it did was make golf a more expensive game by encouraging golfers to buy new clubs for no good reason. But handling the Rules of Golf is what the USGA is good at. (I exclude Rules 4 and 5 on equipment, the evolution of which has been a disaster.) Because the USGA is good at rules, the game is one of law and respect.

Cheating, taken for granted not only in other games but throughout our society, is not tolerated in golf.

He goes on, as only Frank can, highlighting a baseball incident this summer and how such a thing would never be tolerated in golf.