"It was like giving someone the death penalty on hearsay.”

Jim Achenbach digs up more on the dreadful Duramed DQ of Sarah Brown and it paints an ugly picture considering that there was an on-site testing device (not used) and some silly on-course behavior from the rules official, who is identified in the story as Jim Linyard. I'd like to give Linyard the benefit of the doubt since this isn't exactly the big leagues of officiating work and there were inevitably issues with determining conforming clubs on a tour that only this month adopted the groove condition of competition, but it's hard to look past the events reported by Achenbach.

“I asked him (Linyard) what he would do if he was wrong,” said Keith Brown, who was caddying for his daughter. “What if he disqualified Sarah and later found out he was wrong? How would he rectify that? He refused to answer. He said: ‘The club is illegal. Sarah is disqualified.’ That was it. It was like giving someone the death penalty on hearsay.”

As for compensating Brown for a lost paycheck...

At this point, there has been no discussion about a financial payment to Brown.

“She had averaged 4 under on the back nine,” her father said. “I pleaded with them to let her finish the round. She had a real shot at a top 5 or even a top 3. Instead, they held up play for probably 20 minutes. They were sitting in a golf cart with a laptop. A crowd was gathering. Sarah was sobbing the whole time. It was a circus.”

“The rules official came up when Sarah was on the ninth green,” said her father. “He started pulling clubs from her bag. She had a 10-foot birdie putt on 9, and she could see him pulling the clubs because he was directly on her line. She burned the edge of the cup on 8, and she did it again on 9. She was ready to play the back.”

Keith Brown, a former mortgage banker who has not had a job for the last year and a half, said his daughter was “devastated and sobbing uncontrollably on the course, but she impressed the heck out of me. By the time we got to the clubhouse, she was dignified and she was courteous. We knew they were wrong, but she kept herself under control.”