Playing by the Rules.

Yesterday at the Masters, it was the Chinese teen who had a stroke added to his score for playing too slow. Today, the rules enforcers assessed Tiger Woods a two-stroke penalty for incorrectly placing his ball yesterday, after it hit the flag and jumped back into the water.

Karen Crouse, formerly of the PBPost now with the NYTimes, makes it sound a bit worse than it was. Here's her description:

On the hole in question, a 530-yard par 5, Woods laid up. His approach clanked off the flagstick and caromed into the water. He took a drop two yards behind his original divot and hit his approach to inside three feet. In his comments after his round, he seemed to incriminate himself when he explained his thought process on the drop.

The rules state that a golfer should play his ball “as nearly as possible” at the spot from which the original ball was played. Woods did not sound like someone who was making the drop as close to the original spot as possible when he said: “Well, I went down to the drop area, that wasn’t going to be a good spot, because obviously it’s into the grain, it’s really grainy there. And it was a little bit wet. So it was muddy and not a good spot to drop. So I went back to where I played it from, but two yards further back, and I took, tried to take two yards off the shot of what I felt I hit.”

Here's another at the Sporting News :

The possible violation involves Woods' play on the par-5 15th hole. He dropped a ball in the fairway after his approach shot on 15 hit the flagstick and rolled into a water hazard. By rule, Woods should have either dropped the ball in a designated drop area near the green; on a line between the flag and where the ball entered the water; or as close to the spot of the initial shot as possible.

Woods chose the third option, but he admitted after the round that he dropped the ball about two yards behind the original spot. Woods also appeared to drop the ball to the left.

"I went down to the drop area, that wasn't going to be a good spot, because obviously it's into the grain and it was a little bit wet," he said, according to a transcript published by ASAPsports.com. "So it was muddy and not a good spot to drop. So I went back to where I played it from, but I went two yards farther back and I tried to take two yards off the shot of what I felt I hit."

According to The Golf Channel's Jason Sobel on Twitter, playing pros told him that Woods violated the rule, but that rules officials (Sobel didn't say whether they were Masters officials) said Woods didn't.

If Masters officials determine today that Woods did break the rule, he would be assesessed the penalty and his second-round score would change to 73. Because Woods claimed a 71 after his round Friday, he would be DQ'd for signing for the wrong score.

Woods' former swing coach Hank Haney said via Twitter that he doesn't believe Woods knowingly violated the rule, but he added that it's very possible that Woods is in trouble. "When he said he dropped 2 yards back i thought he had a problem," Haney wrote.

So in rejecting the drop area as being too muddy to play, he wasn't rejecting the two-yard forward spot where he had originally played it from, but the official designated drop area near the green. Instead he went back and simply was two yards off the spot, which also violates the rules as Haney noted...

Crouse explains why Woods signing the score card with the wrong score, before the penalty was assessed, was not an automatic disqualification:

Woods, 37, could have been disqualified for signing an incorrect scorecard. But after reviewing the incident with Woods, the rules committee at Augusta National chose to add two strokes to Woods’s score and allow him to play the weekend. The ruling was first reported by Golf Channel’s Steve Sands.

The committee invoked a rule, 33-7, which allows a penalty of disqualification to be waived or modified in exceptional cases. The rule was added in 2011 to address the issue of armchair rules officials calling in or posting to Twitter violations that were clearly inadvertent.

Having Woods continue to compete this weekend is defintely an exceptional case, one could argue -- especially when it was such a great shot to begin with (hockey's equivalent of hitting the pipes...) and the placement was a bit more benign than Crouse's description perhaps suggests.

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* I am curious to see if with the penalty, Tiger now tees off earlier today than originally scheduled with the lower score...


ADDED: I hope the NYTimes clarifies Crouse's language, as the way she led into the quote leads readers to possible misinterpretation...

WaPo's Barry Svrluga is clearer about what Tiger was talking about:

After his ball entered the water at the 15th, Woods could have played his next shot from a designated “drop zone,” a circular area from which players who hit shots into the water may continue play. Woods, though, said in remarks that were later televised that the drop area was “a little bit wet, so it was muddy and not a good spot to drop.”

In such an instance, according to Rule 26-1 in the “Rules of Golf,” he had two remaining options. He could have dropped a new ball “as nearly as possible at the spot from which the original ball was last played.” Or he could have dropped “keeping the point at which the original ball last crossed the margin of the water hazard directly between the hole and the spot on which the ball is dropped, with no limit to how far behind the water hazard the ball may be dropped.”