"It all goes back to this central pillar of the game, that you must sign properly for your own score."
/John Huggan's chat with the R&A's Peter Dawson about the likelihood of a rules re-write yielded the revelation that the R&A already has a re-write draft on disqualification about ready to go. Though I'm still not sure about the delineation between the Camilo and Padraig incidents.
"It all goes back to this central pillar of the game, that you must sign properly for your own score," says Peter Dawson, the R&A's chief executive.
Central pillar? That's play it as it lies, last time I looked!
And the governing bodies wonder why they have a perception problem.
"But we agree with the tours. If you couldn't have known that you had incurred a penalty, disqualification does seem inequitable. And, because we are getting more and more of these incidents, that penalty is coming more and more into focus. The feeling is that disqualification may be somewhat disproportionate. It certainly seems so when you start dealing with a 2mm situation like we saw with Padraig in Abu Dhabi (Harrington inadvertently nudged his ball with his hand - a fact only discernible in slow motion - in the process of picking up his marker).
Yes, Harrington's nudge was inadvertent but as Dawson noted, Harrington should have called an official ("Camilo broke a rule unknowingly, while the only thing Padraig could have done differently was to call a rules official, something we don't want to encourage necessarily.)
A former USGA championship winner sent this earlier in the week related to Harrington and the difficult of rewriting the language to differentiate between instances like his ball nudge and Camilo's divot-flick:
I can't believe that nobody has questioned Harrington's integrity because it's difficult for me to fathom that you wouldn't know that your ball moved or might have moved when you touched it while marking the ball and looking right at it (have you ever marked your ball while looking away??). Heck, when we address a putt looking down at the ball, we can't help but know that the ball changed position and Harrington had no clue even though he touched his ball? Highly doubtful in my opinion!