Professional golfer Sahith Theegala showed again on Sept. 1 why golf is the sport where integrity matters most. In doing so, he brought back to me a memory nearly half a century old of young golfer Ben Crenshaw, one in which Crenshaw taught me a lasting lesson in sportsmanship .
The memory was from either the 1977 or 1978 New Orleans Open. After rain delays earlier in the week, Crenshaw was playing an unusually early morning round with future Hall of Famer Tom Watson and former PGA champion Don January. As a 13- or 14-year-old, I was one of only a handful of fans up early enough for the first few holes that day at Lakewood Golf Club. On the third hole, if memory serves correctly, Crenshaw hit into the trees, where the ball came to rest on some leaves and twigs. I was standing no more than 5 feet from him, with two or three other people, as he hit his next shot toward the green, after which I dashed away to try to get a good view of Watson’s next swing. As I turned to scoot down the fairway, though, I saw Crenshaw point to the ground and say something to his caddy.
When Crenshaw putted out on the hole, apparently for par, he said something to the walking scorekeeper — and lo and behold, he was assessed a bogey instead. I didn’t understand: I had seen every one of his shots, but his score was one stroke worse than what I had seen.
As it turns out, Crenshaw believed that as he took his club back, he had brushed a leaf or a twig, causing his ball to move, even if only by a fraction. If a player moves his ball before his forward swing, it counts as two strokes, not one. Only three or four fans were there to see the shot. I had a perfect view and didn’t notice the ball move. If Crenshaw hadn’t called the infraction on himself, not another soul in the world, perhaps not even his caddy, would have known anything was askance. Crenshaw, though, is someone who always has lived and breathed the essence of his game. What mattered was not what he could get away with, but what he, and he alone, thought he inadvertently had done. Integrity matters. Crenshaw called the penalty on himself and then moved on.
Forty-six (or 47) years later, enter Theegala. In the hunt at the season-ending, absurdly lucrative Tour Championship, Theegala found himself in a sand trap on the third hole. He hit his shot, and he immediately called for a rules official. The rule is that if you touch the sand before your shot, anywhere near where the ball lies, it’s a two-stroke penalty. Theegala thought he had scraped some sand.
Unlike Crenshaw in New Orleans, this time there was a camera to record the incident. In this case, the camera seemed to exonerate the golfer. The announcers replayed it in slow motion. They saw no sand move. I’ve watched it a dozen times. I see no sand move. ( Watch it here yourself.) Theegala, though, pronounced himself more than 90% sure that he moved some sand. If he had not called the penalty on himself, he said, “Oh, I wouldn’t be able to sleep .”
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In the end, the two-stroke penalty was the exact difference between Theegala finishing third and, instead, finishing tied for second. The difference in pay between being tied in second and third? An astonishing $2.5 million.
For Theegala, integrity is worth more than $2.5 million. For every child or young teenager watching, the lesson is priceless.
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