I fallowed this link to the video. This is the 1st time I have seen the footage. To me it looks like the ball moves a hair. There is no evidence one way or the other if the ball moves back to its original spot or not. This is because the camera moves at the same time the ball moves.

When I put my mouse on tigers shoe,which is stationary, and keep it there. The camera moves to the right then upward just as the movement in the ball happens. It is a hand help camera shot. The camera is not on a tri-pod. This movement in the camera will help make it look as if the ball has rolled.

If this is what the PGA used to penalize Tiger they are wrong about the evidence. If there are other video shots of the ball then they might be correct.

There is no way that ball moves back to its original position.

There is no way anyone in the world would know for sure if they were standing above the ball trying to pull a stick out of the way. Who would call it on themselves when they don't know if it really moved?

His reaction was, "****, this thing is going to move if I keep pulling on that stick."

Haven't any of you ****ers played Jenga before?

I doubt the man who knows that there are always eyes on him would knowingly try and slip one past the world.

But he said it oscillated, so that means he saw it move, right?

It's OK if it moves. As long as it moves back to its original position. Sometimes you ground your club and the grass moves the ball. If you pick your club up and everything goes back to how it was before it moved, you are fine.

If your ball moves and stays. It's a 1 stroke penalty if you move it back before hitting. It's a 2 stroke penalty if you hit it and never moved it back.

There's no way that ball 'oscillated' . .. It was more of a sudden motion.. Oscillating is the word that's used, and the way you describe it is correct.. Tigers ball had more of a quick spin and then stop. Oscillating is more like the grass under the ball moves, but the ball never changes contact with the blades of grass under it, and when the club is picked back up, the ball basically returns to the same spot. Tigers ball spun a little, and there is no way it was spinning back in the other direction.

Watch the movement of the camera not Tigers ball (ignore his ball). Watch his shoes or something that is stationary. Everything on the screen moves.

if he was only gonna punch it out 15 feet, wtf was he even messing around with those twigs for?

Yeah, I was posting as I saw the video, hadn't seen his comments yet. That makes it slightly better, but I still think its likely that from his vantage point it would have been simple to see it actually moved positions. It looks to me like it rotated a couple degrees, not dropped down.

And if it was something that happened as he grounded his club it would be one thing because who knows how close he would be looking at that, but he was right on top of this, with his only focus being making sure the ball didn't move.

At absolute minimum he should've called an official in.

I don't see the point of calling an official in this scenario. What is the official going to do?

Two strokes for a half millimetre because some dumb ass called it in.

What a sport.

They should either have on-course officials call enforce all the rules, or people phoning in from their couch enforce all the rules.

I'm not saying any rules should be broken, just that this shouldn't be a rule in the first place. Clearly it should be followed as long as it is a rule.

What separates golf from other sports is that other sports do not penalise athletes for meaningless details that does not improve or change the athletes position and/or chances and that the athlete in many cases has little or no possibility of knowing happened at all.

You're not going to find out the next day that Barcelona lost a game they won on the night because someone later found that the ball moved imperceptibly before Messi took a penalty, causing them to lose the resulting goal and get an extra goal against as punishment.

Golf is different from many other sports in that the players are expected to, and usually do, try their very best to uphold the rules themselves rather than, as in other sports, have grey areas where it's somewhat considered ok to break them if they can get away with it.

Rules like these seem more designed to see just how far they can push players to test their integrity rather than have any actual reason for existing based on keeping the game fair and avoid cheating.

How is this good in any way?
What advantage was gained?
What's good about non-officials trying to enforce rules?

Your statement comes off like a PGA official cop out.

yea, but its Tiger Woods. He doesnt follow the rules very well.

LOL, that happens all the time in other sports. In soccer, offside can be a matter of inches, which really doesn't matter for a skilled striker. In basketball, a Lebron dunk can be called back if Bosh is on the clear other side of the court fouling someone not even in the play.

Those are bad analogies that have little or no relevance.

Unless someone loses points because someone called in hours after the game to point out something nobody noticed, or could be expected to notice, at the time, this can't be compared.

Your offside example is decided, rightly or wrongly, right there and then by a referee/linesman. And further, an offside is not a meaningless detail with no influence on how a game plays out - it's a very important part of a soccer game as it's played today.

And your second example makes even less sense - while Lebron might not be responsible for the foul, it was still committed by one of his team mates and therefore the team loses an advantage they would otherwise have had. If you're going to compare an individual sport to a team sport, the team as a whole has to be considered the competitor.

The soccer analogy would be great if after a match was over they reviewed the tape, noticed an offside, and called off a goal.

Depending on the country they called this on the death toll could be huge!

Which guys on tour dig black chicks?

the whole thing is a turn off. if this is the way tournaments will be officiated, i'll likely watch less golf on tv over the years. i watch live sports to see live outcomes. if i want to find out the actual scores later in the day once all of the ***** have chimed in, i'd watch sportscenter

Mark Wilson, Tom Kite, Carl Petterson.

Just to bring up the issue. "Hey, I'm not sure what happened, I think it just oscillated but I'm not 100%. Can you see if there is any video?"

CYA.

+1
knowing how much he(tiger) is under the microscope with all the haters out there, he should know better to cover all his bases. if he felt the ball might have oscillated, he should have called over official to state this for the record. even if the official would have done nothing more than to just acknowledge the fact. this way if the video came in after the round he would have something to fall back on and have more of an argument against the penalty.

61 from Kuchar today.

So Tiger has to play by different/stricter rules then everyone else? The rule was not set up for this type of movement. If the ball had moved an inch. He would have put it back and taken a 1 stroke penalty. The ball would likely not have been as close to it's original position as it was when Tiger played it.

By the rules, Oscillation is a judgement left up to the player. This is taking that judgement away from the player and giving it to someone with a cheap hand held camera not on a tri-pod.