Is Tiger Woods a cheat?

Tiger Woods has been accused of being a cheat. Picture: Toby Melville

Tiger Woods has been accused of being a cheat. Picture: Toby Melville

Published Oct 22, 2013

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London – Is Tiger Woods a cheat? I don’t believe the evidence from four rules disputes this year to be conclusive enough to draw that most damning of verdicts.

However, Brandel Chamblee, the American golf channel analyst who has provoked understandable outrage from the Tiger camp, was surely on safer ground when he also opined Woods had been “cavalier with the rules”.

To my mind, Tiger’s behaviour at the Masters in April and at the BMW Championship in Chicago in September certainly went against the grain when it comes to the spirit of the game.

The other two are not really worth discussing.

At the Abu Dhabi Championship and the Players Championship, Woods took action on the agreement of his playing partners. In both instances, that absolves him of any question of intentional wrongdoing.

As we said at the time – and all your emails since have rather proved the point – it’s the one at Augusta that will haunt him.

In the second round, Woods dropped from the wrong spot after his ball ricocheted unluckily off the flagstick at the 15th into a water hazard. Yes, I get the argument that because the rules committee acted in a wholly incompetent fashion by not alerting him to the fact he had broken the rules, even though the evidence was supposedly in front of them at the time, they applied “exceptional” circumstances and allowed him to play on.

However, this is supposed to be a self-policing sport. That’s exactly why cheating is so frowned upon.

Are you seriously telling me that such greats of the past as Bob Jones, having been told that he had broken a rule and having signed for an incorrect scorecard, would have seized upon a technicality handed him by the rules committee as a means of playing on over the weekend at the Masters? Not a chance.

Meanwhile, at the BMW event, Woods was retrospectively given a two-shot penalty because his ball moved while lifting a twig. Television evidence proved this pretty conclusively and yet Woods continued to argue the toss.

One report over the weekend said Woods was so convinced he was in the right, he didn’t even bother studying the footage properly. How cavalier can you get?

No, I don’t think Woods is a cheat. But the problem when you are cavalier with the rules is that a number of people will think you are. – Daily Mail

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