Smylie Kaufman has encouraged players to speak out more if they notice a potential rules violation following the controversy surrounding Bryson DeChambeau at The Open Championship.
Few will ever forget the drama of Friday night at Royal Birkdale, with the scenes of DeChambeau speaking with rules officials about an incident on the fifth hole earlier in the day.
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It was deemed that DeChambeau had made it easier to hit his approach from the long grass with how he had stepped around his ball during his pre-shot routine.
Clearly, the LIV Golf star did not agree with the decision to hand him a two-shot penalty at all. DeChambeau seemed to threaten to not continue playing in the championship.
Smylie Kaufman reacts to Bryson DeChambeau receiving a penalty at The Open Championship
And it has since been reported by the Daily Mail that DeChambeau even suggested that he was considering making a call to President Donald Trump, seemingly in the hope of having the penalty overturned.
You could make the case that DeChambeau has reason to feel hard done by. It is absolutely impossible to conclusively say that he intended to make his approach shot easier with how he walked through the grass.
However, speaking on The Smylie Show, Smylie Kaufman seemed to reject the idea that DeChambeau being on LIV Golf saw him singled out.
He did suggest that the decision could lead to some significant changes.
“I think a lot of fans will say are certain players being treated this way because they’re on the PGA Tour or they’re more liked, versus Bryson who’s on LIV and definitely a little bit on the different side than other guys, but it doesn’t change the situation that Bryson was in versus how rules officials handle any situation which is what are we looking at? What is the problem? I think video can be difficult, it’s tough. The whole Bryson thing, everybody can tell, he was being careless in there, but was he trying to cheat? I don’t think he was trying to cheat. He just didn’t need to do what he did, which was just stomp around like crazy. That was wild to me,” he said.
“But yeah, I think the USGA, with the Sam Burns thing at Oakmont, you look at the USGA with Wyndham Clark that continues to be compared to the Bryson thing, and just imagine if they had different angles to look at the Wyndham deal, to see if that was egregious or not. It certainly looks like it from that vantage angle, but I can tell you this, the amount of times I would go try to practice in what I felt was similar rough so that the ball wouldn’t move is often. That’s something that I would regularly do. But from that camera angle it looked terrible. You just don’t know exactly what you’re looking at.
“I don’t know if this is a good thing moving forward. You just hope that golf will be policed in a more strict way or having more video to help in all of this, and maybe even have players speak up about things that they do see, when they tell rules officials that they saw this and rules officials are able to say, ‘you know what, we know that you didn’t intend to do this, but we have two players that are not going to sign your scorecard because they saw this’. You can’t just continue to side on the players if other people saw something.
“It’s a hot topic, it’s an uncomfortable topic. It’s not one that I enjoy talking about, because you’re talking about somebody’s character and how they play the game, their integrity that they have, so I don’t enjoy any of it.”
The change the governing bodies should make after the Bryson DeChambeau controversy at Royal Birkdale
There is likely to be a huge backlash from players if any governing bodies call on them to intervene more often.
Firstly, it is going to take a brave player to call a penalty on their playing partner. If they are at all unsure about what may have happened on the other side of the fairway, they are surely going to keep quiet.
Secondly, elite players and caddies will feel that they have enough to concentrate on already without having to worry about policing those in the same group.
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It will certainly do nothing to help with pace of play.
Surely, the answer involves making sure that there is at least one rules official with every group, perhaps with that number increasing for the majors.
While it may not have changed the outcome for DeChambeau, the situation would have almost certainly not descended into the farce that it became on Friday evening.
And if DeChambeau was looking to try and get away with anything when he began to step around his ball, having a rules official right there would have surely prevented it as he would have known that he could not take that risk.
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