dustin johnson bunker / dustin johnson penalty, dustin johnson, dustin johnson girlfriend, bubba watson, steve elkington

dustin johnson bunker / dustin johnson penalty, dustin johnson, dustin johnson girlfriend, bubba watson, steve elkington

Assessing Johnson’s Bunker Bummer

Nick Watney looked like he would be the story Sunday at the PGA Championship, with an epic implosion that saw him fire a nine-over par 81 and lose his grip on the lead he held heading into Sunday’s play. Then poor Dustin Johnson showed up. Johnson received a two-stroke penalty on the 18th hole—knocking him down to fifth place—after he thought he had finished in a three-way tie and was headed to a playoff.


Johnson’s sin? Grounding his club in a sand trap. Now for the avalanche of follow-ups:
What is grounding?
In the simplest of terms, it’s when your club touches the ground before your swing. For example, when you address the ball and place the head of the club on the ground to ready yourself.
But I do that all the time when I golf!
Golfers are allowed to ground the club on fairways, at the tee, in the rough … pretty much anywhere but in a hazard, like sand.
Why doesn’t a professional golfer know this rule?
Johnson does. But the trap he found himself in wasn’t obviously a trap. Whistling Straits is famous for having sandy little spots all over the place, about 1,200 on the course. Many could fool even the most seasoned pro. “I just thought it was on a piece of dirt where the crowd had trampled [everything] down,” Johnson explained after the penalty.
The problem here is twofold: First, the crowd was all over that trap all weekend long, so it looked more like a “waste area” than a sand trap. However, the rules committee posted a set of rules explaining that the course has a lot of weirdly-placed bunkers, and if someone happened to land in something even slightly sandy — no matter where it is on the course, how tiny it may be, or even how many tire tracks it may have in it — he had to play it like a bunker.
So whose side do we take here?
This is where it gets tough.
“It was black print on a piece of white, 8 x 11 paper,” Steve Elling of CBSSports.com writes, in regards to the posted set of rules. “Not a lick of gray to be found.”
“Emotions aside, it’s hard not to commiserate with Johnson,” adds NBCSports.com’s Dan O’Neill. “But the PGA said it had warned players before the tournament that such sandy areas around the golf course were to be considered as such.”
The Journal’s Jason Gay feels that even though this call was correct, it didn’t have to be made. Common sense should have prevailed. “Instead of a rollicking three-way finish, the 2010 PGA will be remembered for a cold-blooded, by-the-book decision — enforcing the rules of a bunker that nobody outside of a few officials knew was a bunker.”
Johnson’s situation was eerily foreshadowed Wednesday by Sports Illustrated’s John Garrity, who wrote about traipsing through bunkers in the roped-off areas without even realizing it during practice rounds earlier in the week. “Roped-off spectator paths lead you right into the sand, which is neatly raked on one side of the rope and churned up like a child’s sandbox on the other,” Garrity writes. “And before you challenge that last metaphor, let me say that I saw flesh-and-blood children digging up rocks and building sand castles in bunkers overlooking the eighth green.”