First Church Of Tiger Woods Founder: "What happened here was that the head PGA Tour rules official simply made up a new rule"

In an April Fools-esque guest column for Huffington Post, "Conservative filmmaker/commentator John Ziegler has declared a conspiracy theory of grand proportions by suggesting that PGA Tour VP Mark Russell cheated to help Tiger Woods make the cut last week in Charlotte.(You may recall--but I doubt it--that Ziegler ran the mildly disturbing and mercifully defunct website, TigerWoodsIsGod.com.)

Clearly, Huffington Post has retired not only fact checkers, but spellcheckers too.

Quite simply, what happened here was that the head PGA Tour rules official simply made up a new rule because he was either afraid of upsetting Tiger Woods, hurting the tournament's television ratings, or both. This really wasn't even a close call. (Any doubt about this was elliminated when Russell did give Woods a free drop, but had no idea where to drop it. Inherent in "virtual certitude" is that you at least know exactly where the ball was when it was alledgedly picked up.)

Yes it was an imperfect, troubling and awkward situation. You can certainly make the case that Russell could have ruled the other way, but to suggest a grand conspiracy is absurd. But Ziegler does it anyway:

Of course, since Woods still failed to make the cut and the vast majority of the golf media views the Tour and Tiger as their virtual bosses, there was almost no public outcry under the dubious premise that there was "no harm no foul" (as if attempted bank robbery is any less egregious than the successful variety).

A less ostrich-like analysis of this situation however reveals that this event was extremely significant, not just for golf, but for all of sport.

First of all, golf is supposed be a game where the rules govern everyone the same. This is not like basketball where it has long been accepted that star players get better treatment from the referees (and, not coincidentally, basketball is also the sport with the most legitimate charges of game fixing/staging).

The PGA Tour has now basically ruled that it is almost impossible for Tiger Woods to be penalized for a lost ball because, since he always has a large gallery, it can simply be presumed that someone picked the ball up and ran away. If even the tradition-based game of golf has placed itself on this slipperiest of slopes, then the rest of the sports world may well be far worse off than even the most pessimistic of us may already presume.

Yep, it's all over! Now basically.

It's all the celebrity culture's fault:

With these precedents set, it is becoming far too easy to see the melting of the core of what made sports great to begin with. The distance between the PGA Tour cheating to help Tiger Woods and its tournament television ratings, and the NFL deciding that a Super Bowl with Tim Tebo quarterbacking a team from New York in the Super Bowl is just too much to resist, is not really all that far.

Tebo!!! Or, Tebow? Guess he's not so famous as to have his name spelled correctly.