After a tense engagement, the rules official ruled in favor of Sorenstam."It was her word versus my word," Creamer said. "I don't feel that it crossed [the hazard]. We're never going to agree because she saw it differently. ... In my heart of hearts, I did not see it cross. It's her conscience. If she thinks it did, it did."
Clearly, Ms. Creamer ruffled some feathers by standing up to the mother hen of golf. Popular or not, kudos to Paula for paying attention to her playing partner's actions and to raise any rule infraction concerns immediately. As we all know, she could have tried to DQ Annika by pulling a Bamberger!
But another incident between the two illustrated some of the silliness of golf. On the 16th green, Annika asked if she could fix what she believed to be a ball pitch mark in the line of her putt. Creamer thought it was instead a spike mark, green damage that can’t be repaired under Rule 16-1c of the Rules of Golf.
Pitch marks, spike marks, what the heck is the difference? They are both man-made alterations to the putting surface. However, the Rules of Golf only allow golfers to repair "damage to the putting green caused by the impact of a ball." The rules of golf are supposedly based upon principles of fair play, but how is this fair?
For example, consider an overweight golfer wearing long metal spikes who follows a bizarre pre-putting routine where he makes multiple practice strokes in a circle around the hole. So, not only are these spike marks unusually deep and damaging, there are also a large number of them encircling the hole. Can you imagine playing behind this clown? You might as well play pachinko.
In my opinion, any man-made damage to the green should be repairable. That seems fair to me.
