Sport: Par Cut Off at the Knees

How Golfer Craig Stadler came to own a $37,000 pair of trousers has nothing to do with a paroled bank robber who served 4 1/2 years in federal prison. Stadler’s startling disqualification of two weeks ago is a complicated parable about the relative weight of rules. But it helps to view the affair from the vantage point of Rick Meissner, late of the golf circuit, who in lieu of a more traditional backer knocked off 19 savings and loans as he toured.

A hopeful player of not inconsiderable gifts, Meissner qualified for U.S. Opens at Hazeltine and Winged Foot during the ’70s. But his full-fledged entry into the profession was delayed by suspicions that as a young country-club golfer in Maryland, he was a cheater. It seems Meissner’s errant drives had a way of reappearing in-bounds. On those murky grounds, his first application to the P.G.A. was rejected. Here is the pertinent point: when he later faced the bar of justice, Meissner readily admitted poking his pistol in the nose of all those tellers, but he bitterly denied ever cheating at golf.

Unlike football, golf has no heritage of slipperiness. Offensive linemen are encouraged to think of undetected holding as an art form. Similarly, a baseball outfielder is expected to hold trapped balls aloft just as if they were caught. In baseball, overt cheating — scuffing balls, corking bats — brings only winks, while the real appreciation is reserved for breaches in the spirit of sportsmanship and fair play. Billy Martin waited for George Brett to hit a homer before objecting to the pine tar on his bat. The old Brooklyn pitcher Clyde King used to twist his cap slightly askew in hopes that the base runner on first would think he was glancing over. King got the idea from wearing two left sneakers in basketball games so that the defender could never tell which way Clyde was going by looking at his feet. Most sports are played this way, but not golf.

Tour golfers are forever calling penalties on themselves for imperceptible violations. Preparing to putt at the past Westchester Classic, Raymond Floyd noticed the ball move microscopically and docked himself a stroke. He fell out of contention, but the shot still meant $4,500 in lost pay. Twice, that same situation has cost Tom Kite tournament championships and a total of $59,800. Such scrupulous honesty is the rule in professional golf, though there are exceptions. Using her trusty antitrust iron, Jane Blalock once had to go to court to fight off a lynch mob of fellow competitors who wanted to ban Blalock for the way she marked her ball on the green. Bob Toski, her teaching pro at the time, prescribed professional help of a different kind. Publicly he wondered if she wasn’t “subconsciously” compelled to win. In the epilogue last year, Toski withdrew for a time from the senior tour amid allegations that he mismarked his ball.

In a TV match several seasons ago, Tom Watson urged Gary Player to turn over a new leaf rather than pat down the one growing behind his ball. Through that incident, a line seems to have been drawn: idealism on one side, opportunism on the other. Watson writes hard-and-fast books about rules (and innocently runs afoul of them still). Player considers himself more of an interpreter, like George Archer. Once, when his ball came to rest at the base of a tree, Archer summoned a referee and requested relief under the burrowing- animals statute. “What burrowing animals?” the official demanded. Archer knelt down and pointed in horror. “Ants!”

Poor Craig Stadler, a man who has never been able to keep a crease in his pants, was brought to his knees in the third round of the Andy Williams Open under a sappy tree. Tired of being described as a bag of cantaloupes, Stadler put down a towel before slapping the ball out and cheerfully going about his business. The next day, a bee stabbed him during his round, a portent of stings to come. While Stadler was persevering to a second-place finish worth $37,333.33, TV replayed his arboreal adventure. The switchboard, as they say, lit up.

Almost no amateur golfers play by the rules. They have come to an accommodation with themselves and one another to bump the ball in the fairways or nonchalant it on the greens. The game most of them play combines croquet with tiddledywinks. But they know the rules. Alerted by the whistle blowers, P.G.A. tour officials penalized Stadler two strokes for innocently “building a stance” with his flat towel and then disqualified him entirely because the scorecard he had signed the day before was now incorrect. Some might say the punishment fit the crime no better than the pants fit the criminal, but when did the rub of the green ever have anything to do with grass stains?