This is all just getting to be too much.
As a golf fan, I very much enjoyed sitting back this weekend and watching the Farmer’s Insurance Open, one of the marquee events on the West Coast swing of the PGA Tour. With a field stacked full of major winners and the world’s top-ranked golfers, it was sure to be an exciting tournament.
And it was, but not for the reasons we were hoping.
While there was plenty of great golf played over the weekend, the entire tournament was marred by the actions of one Patrick Reed — the world’s No. 11-ranked golfer. If you haven’t heard by now, the short of it is that in the third round on Saturday, Reed took what many people (including myself) considered to be improper relief from a lie in the rough by lying to the rules official about what occurred and also by potentially manipulating the ground around where the ball was sitting. While there’s no way to tell whether the latter happened, it’s very clear that Reed took improper relief.
Reed went on to make a par on that hole and then proceeded to win the tournament the next day. Had the rules officials done their job and notified him of his improper relief, he would at the very least have been penalized one stroke and at worst been disqualified for signing an incorrect scorecard.
Any fan of golf knows that this isn’t Reed’s first brush with a rules violation. In December 2019 at Tiger Woods’ tournament The Hero World Challenge, Reed was assessed a 2-stroke penalty for improving his lie in the sand with his club. Former CBS golf commentator Peter Kostis said a couple of months ago that he’s personally seen Reed improve his lie during a tournament “four times.”
And that’s not even getting into the character questions that surround Reed, including the fact that he was kicked off the University of Georgia golf team after one season for allegedly cheating and possibly stealing from teammates. He’s yelled at on-course camera operators during rounds in the past, and last year his caddie and brother-in-law Kessler Karain punched a fan during a confrontation at the President’s Cup.
Reed’s cheating, whether real or imagined, does not bode well for the PGA Tour and its plans to heavily integrate sports betting into the fan experience. How could a serious golf fan possibly bet on the outcome of a tournament that a known cheater is playing in? I can say personally that there’s no way I would ever be comfortable betting on golf if Reed is in the mix somewhere.
And even more than the sports betting, there’s eventually going to be a serious issue among other players. In the immediate aftermath of Reed’s latest incident, a number of former players chimed in on social media about how bad this looks for the Tour. Some of Reed’s fellow competitors at the Farmer’s, Lanto Griffin and Xander Schauffele, made vague post-round remarks about how players like Reed are protected despite their behavior.
When two of the top 50 players in the world — including the No. 4 player in Schauffele — are calling out another top player for skirting the rules, the Tour’s governing forces would be wise to pay attention.
