TV viewer gets Padraig Harrington disqualified from tournament
A. Isaac 
Yet again, golf is faced with another TV viewer calling in a rules infraction and subsequently getting a player disqualified. This time the victim was 3-time major winner Padraig Harrington whose ball barely moved as he marked it on a green.
Obviously Harrington was not happy with the ruling but handled it like a professional.
“I was aware I hit the ball [with the back of a finger] picking up my coin,” he said. “I looked down and was pretty sure it had just oscillated and had not moved, so I continued on. In slow motion it’s pretty clear the ball has moved three dimples forward and it’s come back maybe a dimple and a half. If I’d called a referee over it would have been pointless because if he’d asked me where my ball was I’d have said it was there. As far as I was concerned, it didn’t move.
“Going forward, maybe that [changing the rules] is a possibility. But it will be difficult. Signing your card is attesting your score is correct. We need to do that to keep a level playing field, so that someone down the road doesn’t look for an excuse to get out of a penalty.”
There’s a pretty simple solution to this whole, “viewer vigilantism”, and one that Yahoo’s golf editor Shane Bacon recently discussed on his blog after I had prompted him for a response to the Camillo Villegas incident.
Why not just access the appropriate penalty to whoever got the viewer to call in instead of just disqualifying the golfer? See, if you sign a card and didn’t access a penalty, you are automatically disqualified. So why not add a rule that says if someone from an outside party (not an official, playing partner, spectator, etc.) that could have IMMEDIATE influence on a player on that exact situation calls out a rules infraction, the player can still access the penalty to that hole, given a certain amount of time after (Say, until he hits a tee shot in the next round).
That makes entirely too much sense and seems too logical. Something golf has been missing for quite a few years.
Padraig Harrington disqualification prompts calls for rule changes [Guardian]
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