Sanctioned Gambling's Coming To Pro Golf, So What Will Be Done About Cell Phones?
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An unbylined APF story quotes PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan saying gambling is coming to golf next year, saying “it’s all about engagement”. The focus continues to be on integrity matters.
"Once you start to participate, you can eliminate negative bets," he said. "We've done a ton of work to make certain that that's the position we're in.
"I think when we come forward, you'll see that we've taken significant steps to address that. We're going to participate in a thoughtful way and I'm really comfortable with that."
While the engagement angle is absolutely spot-on and key to keeping people interested during languid five hour rounds that the tour embraces, the lack of concern about interference continues to confound.
As I write for Golfweek, Bio Kim’s silly three-year suspension in Korea is still a silly one-year ban that warrants compensatory sponsor’s invites.
(Full news story here on the KPGA’s softening of their original suspension.)
While Kim was no angel in flipping off a fan whose cell phone went off as he was trying to win a golf tournament and pay his bills, he’s also a victim of golf’s reversal on phones and belief that fans could behave. The sport went from from policing, confiscating or banning phones at tournaments to encouraging fans to become documentarians.
Look, we all love our phones and the younger demographic that golf wants to attract will not attend a tournament if they were to be separated from their baby or unable to promote their presence. The same goes for older adults now too. That’s fine. But policing the use of mobile devices near competition must not be solely up to caddies and volunteers to police. Golf cannot be naive to the inevitability that a noisy mobile device could be used to alter the course of a tournament (and therefore, a bet).
I have no idea what the solution is, but an incident in the gambling age seems inevitable. Then there’s the overall look is peculiar and energy deadening to a sport already deprived of fan noise. Just look at the scene from this week’s ZOZO Championship:
