Revisting The Dustin Johnson Episode, Because We Need To

In the August Golf Digest, Ron Whitten does an excellent job counting the number of hazards at 2015 PGA venue Whistling Straits while revisiting the whole bunker fiasco as idea behind playing all sand as a bunker.

Many will not enjoy the dredging up of this unfortunate moment, but considering that Johnson is a pre-tournament favorite and the incident has never sat well with anyone registering a pulse, it won't hurt to to rehash this as we return to the Straits Course. If nothing else, the talk will serve as a public service reminder to all players to not touch any area of sand with their club before impact.

There was this from Whitten's piece on DJ's odd episode, which ultimately ended up involving his brief, barely discernable pre-shot routine club grounding, not a grounding behind the ball to improve his lie. The randomness and lack of intent makes the entire thing that much more regretable.

Johnson told officials he thought he was in a patch of rough trampled by the gallery. Trouble is, every patch of sand at Whistling Straits is considered a bunker. The course looks like a links in towering sand dunes along the western shoreline of Lake Michigan, but in a previous life, the site was a flat Army air base, crisscrossed by concrete roadways and runways and containing the type of bunkers in which ammunition was stored. When Dye starting transforming it, he found no pure sand on site. The soil was rocky and mostly clay--even the beach was mostly rock--so Dye had 13,126 truckloads of sand hauled in.

Again, in Johnson's defense, photos taken before the Straits opened in 1998 show some of the faux dunes created by Dye were covered in sand, which had been dumped and spread in an apparent attempt to make them appear as natural sand dunes. But then tall fescue grasses overtook them, and the hillsides went from white and barren to green and wavy (golden in the fall). But in 2010, spectators' wear patterns might well have exposed some of that thin layer of sand.

This bit is highlighted not to dispute the findings in 2010, but to just remind all how peculiar the situation is given that the game on links evolved with a "play it as it lies" mantra and the PGA adopted this philosophy at Kiawah for the 2012 PGA, yet not at Whistling Straits. Whitten writes:

Player confusion might lie in the fact that this all-sand-is-a-bunker rule isn't universal. The opposite rule was applied at the 2012 PGA at Dye's Ocean Course at Kiawah Island, S.C., where nothing was considered a bunker. All sand was considered a "transition area," and players could ground their club anywhere. It also differs from the rule the USGA applied at last year's U.S. Open at Pinehurst No. 2, where only sand having rake marks was considered a bunker. All other patches of exposed sand were treated as "through the green," and a final determination was left with the rules official accompanying each group.

From the archives, if you want to relive the episode, there was this post on intent that might be worth a minute of your time. And this from Pete Dye, who would have none of it when talking about Johnson not recognizing he was in a bunker.

"I was standing right there," Dye said. "When he hit the ball in the bunker, the referee walked up to him and said, 'Do you need anything?' and Dustin said, 'No, I'm good.' There were no beer cans in the bunker, there were no chicken bones in there. Ray Charles could have seen it was a bunker."

The CBS coverage from back then showing the "split second" grounding, as Nick Faldo called it. Feherty's return to the bunker after the episode is telling in how (A) many people didn't understand the local rule (B) and how much he felt for Johnson in trying to ID the bunker as a bunker.

Five years later, it seems as if this episode ultimately still feels unresolved because the rule seems so contrary to the spirit of the game, especially since it was so clear that the situation was frenetic, uncontrolled and carrying such hugh ramifications.