Lorne: "The one and only relevant question: Is anchoring a stroke of golf?"

As the bickering over the anchoring ban turns political, Lorne Rubinstein tries to get us thinking about the heart of the issue: is it a stroke or not?

This seems to me to be an argument about that cloudy and also dreamy subject of “growing the game.” That’s the new buzz phrase in golf. The PGA of America and Golf Canada, to cite two national organizations, are always going on about “growing the game,” and if that means changing the game, or at least one important aspect of it, so be it. They may be interested in growing the game, but maybe they don’t care about considering the central and fundamental question of whether anchoring is a stroke of golf.

This all leads to irrelevancy number two, which is that anchoring has been around for 30 or more years, and it has, in much more limited numbers, and so why ban it now? Phil Mickelson has said he doesn’t think anchoring should be part of the game, but that it’s too late to ban it. Why should that be? If it’s wrong, it’s wrong.