Rozner: Worlds, stars, rules collide at Masters

Every sport talks about growing the game.

And no sport offers louder lip service than golf, which concludes a Masters with two very different storylines colliding at Augusta National.

The first part of the week celebrated the 20-year anniversary of Tiger Woods' dominant victory as a 21-year-old, which ushered in a new era of golf, and Arnold Palmer's remarkable life and career, which sadly ushered out another.

"The King" piloted the TV generation of golf with his popularity and created the PGA Tour as it's known today, a corporation worth more than $2 billion.

Palmer founded a TV network, built cities and designed courses all over the world, bringing the game to places that had never seen it before.

Growing the game, right?

When Woods burst on the scene, he didn't live up to the hype.

He obliterated it.

Woods took the golf world by storm and tore it to shreds, forcing tours and courses to change designs because Woods made them obsolete.

Fifty years to the week of Jackie Robinson's debut, a black man won in the Deep South at Augusta, where cooks and chauffeurs and maintenance workers emerged from backrooms to watch a man of color own the course and walk triumphantly up 18 with his head held high.

Growing the game, right?

He so dominated over the next 12 years that he made golf fun for a generation of kids that never thought about playing golf until Woods became the most popular athlete in the world.

"I've idolized him ever since I saw the '97 Masters," said Jason Day, who spent 19 weeks as World No. 1. "He's why I decided to play golf. I wanted to be like Tiger Woods."

Dozens of others now on the PGA Tour have said the same thing, Rory McIlroy among them.

"We used to stay up late, because the tournaments on Sunday didn't end until midnight in Europe," said McIlroy, who was 15 when Woods won the 2005 Masters. "I know exactly where I was when he made the chip on 16 in '05.

"He's the reason you have so many young guys out here on Tour now who could have played other sports, but picked golf. He's the reason we all make so much money. He's the reason for a lot of things that have happened in our sport."

Woods was No. 1 in the Official World Golf Rankings for 683 weeks. Greg Norman is second at 331 weeks.

McIlroy has been there for 95 weeks at seven different intervals, fourth all time behind Nick Faldo at 97. Dustin Johnson, the best player in the world today, has been there for seven weeks.

"No one has ever put more distance between himself and the rest of the field than Tiger," McIlroy said. "He made it cool to be a golfer. We all wanted to do it."

Growing the game, right?

And then there's what happened at the LPGA's first major of the season last Sunday.

Lexi Thompson was cruising to victory when she was told while walking to the 13th tee that she would be penalized 4 strokes for an infraction that occurred the day before.

Even if you believe she committed the foul - which is questionable considering she marked a ball from the side to avoid another player's line, and that you could probably penalize every player on the course at least once a day for missing the mark by a fraction - how could an email from a viewer a day later change the course of history?

No other sport has referees at home, and golf - by the way - has them walking with the players and watching on TV in the trailer. They didn't see it. The other players and caddies didn't see it.

But even if true, and with no intention behind the action, the cards were signed and scores were on the board.

No other sport changes a score a day later.

What if the tournament had been over already? The LPGA would not have changed the score or the outcome, so why is it OK after the third round?

And not every player is on TV every minute, unless they are stars like Thompson.

Is that fair?

Even if the infraction occurred, she did not knowingly sign an incorrect card, so is the extra 2-stroke penalty fair?

This is just common sense stuff and with everything that happened last year to Dustin Johnson at Oakmont and Anna Nordqvist at CordeValle, you would think they wouldn't wait until 2019 to do something about it.

But they will. It's the USGA making the rules.

Everyone was talking about it at the Masters this week, the stain on the game and the unfairness of it all. It's enough to make some people hate the sport.

Growing the game, right?

brozner@dailyherald.com

• Listen to Barry Rozner from 9 a.m. to noon Sundays on the Score's "Hit and Run" show at WSCR 670-AM.