A Golfing Principle
The Lowest Score Isn’t Always the Best Score
It was a hot July day outside Chicago at Cog Hill Golf and Country Club. The second round of The 1994 Western Open was underway and the threesome of Davis Love III, Tom Watson and Andrew Magee had reached the 14th hole.
Love was hovering around the cut line—the score required to play the final two rounds of the tournament on the weekend. Back then, the top 70 players (and ties) in a 156- player field qualified to play the final 36 holes. The players referred to Saturday and Sunday on tour as, “the cash rounds.” If you wanted to cash a check that week, you had to make the cut.
Love had a short par putt and had marked his ball with a coin. Watson, lining up a birdie putt, asked him if he could move the coin to the left by the width of his putter head to ensure that his putt wouldn’t roll over his mark.
Love moved his mark, Watson putted and then Love putted out. The three players walked to the 15th tee. Love had a sudden thought. “Did I move my mark back?” he asked.
Frank Williams, his caddie, had no idea because he had been raking the bunker Love had played from a moment earlier. Like most players, Watson and Magee weren’t paying any attention to what another player was doing; they were focused on their own games and their own thoughts.
Love thought he had moved the marker back, but he wasn’t certain. “I think I have to add one to my score,” he said. “I’m just not sure.”
It is not uncommon in golf for players to call penalties on themselves, whether someone else witnesses the penalty or not. For Love, the son of a golf pro, this was as much a part of playing the game as hitting a driver off the tee. Although the rules of golf say that a player is allowed to give himself the benefit of the doubt, he looked at it differently: when in doubt, penalize yourself.
He ended up shooting 75 that day, which gave him a two-day total of two-over-par 146. The cut came at one-over-par 145. The penalty he’d called on himself had cost him the chance to play the “cash rounds.”
If he had played on the weekend and finished dead last, Love would have won about $2,000. At year’s end, he finished 33rd on the money list—$766 away from finishing 30th. In those days, the top 30 finishers on the money list automatically qualified for the Masters the following April. There is no bigger tournament in golf than the Masters and missing the Masters was especially unthinkable to Love.
He had spent most of his boyhood in Atlanta, a couple of hours down I-20 from Augusta, where the Masters was played. In fact, his father had led the Masters on the day he was born in 1964. Love had played in the Masters five times and had come to think of it as an annual quest. Now though, he would have to win a PGA Tour event during the first three months of 1995 to qualify because he had called that one-stroke penalty on himself in July.
Love played well early in 1995, but not well enough to win a tournament. With two weeks left prior to the Masters he was tied for the lead at Bay Hill, the tournament hosted each year by his hero, Arnold Palmer. But he faded late Sunday and finished tied for fourth.
I was there that day and I spent some time with Love after he finished his round on Sunday. I had spent a good deal of time with Love while researching A Good Walk Spoiled—my first golf book, and found him to be one of the most likable athletes I’d ever met.
“How are you going to feel,” I asked, “if you don’t play the Masters this year because you called a penalty on yourself that you aren’t sure you committed?”
Love looked at me as if I had asked him if he’d considered giving up golf to join the space program. “How would I feel,” he asked, “if I won the Masters and then spent the rest of my life wondering if I cheated to get in?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. To Love, calling the penalty on himself—regardless of consequences—was automatic. Many players—most?—would have given themselves the benefit of the doubt, as the rules allow.
Years later, at the same Western Open golf course, Tiger Woods was (legally) moving twigs around his golf ball on the first hole. Accidentally, he moved a twig that caused his ball to move. Accident or not, that was a two-stroke penalty. Woods didn’t call it.
A camera crew recorded the incident and turned the tape over to Slugger White, the tournament director. When Woods finished his round, White showed him the tape.
“The ball didn’t move, it oscillated,” Woods insisted.
White showed him the tape repeatedly and—repeatedly—got the same answer. “I’m sorry Tiger,” White said. “The ball moved. You have to add two to your score.”
Woods was furious and, according to White, their relationship was never the same. My guess is if the same thing had happened to Love, even though his fellow competitors hadn’t seen what happened, he would have instantly announced it to them.
Love’s story had a happy ending. The week after Bay Hill, in New Orleans—the last event before the Masters—Love won the tournament. He cried in the post-match TV interview because he was so happy and relieved. A week later, he finished second to Ben Crenshaw in the Masters.
Although he never won at Augusta, Love went on to win 21 times on the PGA Tour, including the 1997 PGA Championship. He was elected to The World Golf Hall of Fame in 2017 and twice captained the U.S. Ryder Cup team. He also captained a President’s Cup team and is the only man to win both the Ryder Cup and a President’s Cup as captain.
Beyond that, there’s probably never been a player better-liked by his fellow pros. When the U.S. team captained by Love lost the 2012 Ryder Cup, all 12 players cried in the locker room.
“Some of it was because we’d lost the Ryder Cup,” said Brandt Snedeker, one of those players. “But a lot of it was because we felt we’d let Davis down. If anything, we were trying too hard because we wanted to win so badly for him.”
Four years later, Snedeker and the rest of the 2016 Ryder Cup team wept again—this time celebrating because they had won for captain Love.
To this day, Love doesn’t think of his act of sportsmanship in 1994 as worthy of discussion. “I just did what I had to do. If you think you might have broken a rule, you broke the rule. I just did the right thing. I never regretted it.”
There are many in sports—and in life—who don’t see doing the right thing as an automatic. For Davis Love, it’s always been automatic.
John Feinstein is one of the world’s most prolific and respected sports journalists, a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, and a member of six Halls of Fame. His 47 books include two #1 New York Times bestsellers; a third, Caddy for Life, which became an award-winning documentary on Golf Channel; and a fourth, the novel Last Shot, which won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for mystery writing in the Young Adult category. He also a does color commentary for VCU, George Mason, and Longwood basketball, the Navy radio network, and is a regular on The Sports Junkies. John lives in Potomac, Maryland, about 10 miles northwest of Washington, D.C.