Opinion: Pro Golfers Should Still Keep Score—But Let’s Reduce the Penalty for an Incorrect Card

Last week, Jordan Spieth was disqualified from the Genesis Invitational because he signed an incorrect scorecard. 

Spieth made a bogey on the par-3 fourth. His playing partner, Tom Kim, responsible for recording Spieth’s score, mistakenly put him down for a par. 

After a poor finish to his round, Spieth hastily checked with the scoring official to make sure the scores he had written down for himself—which were not official—matched with what the PGA Tour had in their system.

All the numbers matched so Spieth signed his card and bolted before Kim arrived at the scoring area. 

But Spieth’s official score was on the card Kim had. And Kim had it wrong. 

If Spieth waited for Kim, delayed signing his card or remained in the scoring area instead of immediately leaving, there would have been no issue. He committed a cardinal sin for competitive golf and got punished for it. 

To his credit, Spieth laughed about it later. He knows the rules. It is standard practice across competitive golf. 

Regardless, this incident reignited a two-pronged debate. 

Why are PGA Tour players responsible for keeping their own score, especially when there are cameras, ShotLink data and walking scorers with each group? We all know what his score was so why are we going through this antiquated system? 

And why is the penalty for an incorrect scorecard so harsh? A clerical error leads to a DQ? 

My suggestion is that we keep the same scorekeeping system (with a couple of tweaks) but reduce the punishment for incorrect cards.  

Why Players Should Still Keep Score

I am ready for the passionate responses to this one. 

I get it. It’s 2024. If you go to a PGA Tour event, you will see an enormous amount of coverage in an effort to accurately track each shot. It seems counterintuitive for anything to be manual. 

Virtually every other sport has official scorekeeping as the competition is happening. We all know how many points the Miami Heat have scored midway through the third quarter. It doesn’t need to be verified by the players. 

But golf has some singular challenges that don’t apply to other sports. The more you pull on this thread, the more you realize it would be an immense challenge to drastically change the current system—and it would all be for something that maybe happens once a season on the PGA Tour. 

Let’s start here: There are thousands of professional golf events each year and 99 percent of them have no shot-tracking data or walking scorers. The game is kept track of by those playing it. 

When you sign your card and your fellow competitort’s card, you are attesting to the legitimacy of the round. There is no other way to reliably keep score for the vast majority of professional golf events, let alone amateur golf tournaments where there are sometimes no witnesses at all to the competition. 

If you want to draw the line with PGA Tour events being the only tournaments where players are not asked to keep score, there are still serious complications. 

Namely, who will keep score? 

Walking scorers are volunteers. They are trained and usually accurate but they can make errors. 

ShotLink data, also run by volunteers, is mostly correct but can have mistakes, especially in the case of strange rulings. And ShotLink is not even present at many PGA Tour events. At some tournaments like the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, one course being played has ShotLink (Pebble Beach) and the other doesn’t (Spyglass Hill). 

There are dozens, sometimes hundreds, of golf balls in play at one time. Spieth has most of his shots shown on TV, but Alex Smalley (to use a random player) might go an entire tournament with fewer than 10 percent of his covered. 

How are we going to verify what both of them shot in a uniform way? 

Use TV coverage for one of them and not for the other? Trust the ShotLink/walking scorer data 100 percent and assume it is accurate at all times? According to PGA Tour players, there are occasionally inconsistencies between live scoring and reality. 

One comparison I’ve heard a lot this past week is that the PGA Tour is like the IRS with taxes. They “know the actual score” but are ready to punish people for not reporting the score correctly in the same way the IRS “knows what you owe” but penalizes those for not filing taxes accurately. 

I think this is a misguided criticism. The technology helps to flag issues between live scoring and what the written scorecard says—officials will bring that up to players in the scoring area and it almost always gets corrected. 

The PGA Tour (and all of us watching) knows Spieth made a bogey. But the Tour does not necessarily know Smalley’s score after he took a free drop that the walking scorer accidentally marked as a one-stroke penalty. 

There could, in theory, be a paid walking scorer with every group that records an “official score” but A) it might not be feasible to staff rules officials with every group for every tournament and B) there will still be instances where the player needs to verify their score, which already happens under the current system. 

Could caddies carry an iPhone and submit an “official score” as play happens? Possibly, but it seems vulnerable to more mistakes than we have now. Bad weather conditions, carelessness and not having the player check their score after each hole are all roadblocks there. 

One realistic tweak to be made (at least on the PGA Tour) is mandating that players remain somewhere in the scoring area until their playing partners have arrived. I also think there can be more of a grace period where, if a mistake is caught within a couple minutes of someone signing an incorrect card, the score can be corrected without penalty, even if someone has momentarily left the scoring area. 

I agree that golf rules can be archaic and too hung up on certain traditions but this checks-and-balances system works. Golf is a game of integrity where each player has responsibility for the score they shoot. Players can and do assess penalties on themselves which also often isn’t accounted for in live scoring. 

Is it too much to ask for these extremely well-compensated players to sit in the scoring area for three minutes and verify their scores? If they do, any discrepancy will be caught. Among thousands and thousands of PGA Tour rounds, this is almost never a problem. 

I will concede that it’s frustrating to watch a player like Spieth get punished for carelessness when we know exactly what he made on that hole. We have video of him making a bogey. It’s clear as day. 

But it’s not always clear as day. And there has to be one rule across the board for PGA Tour golf.

Reduce the Punishment for an Incorrect Card

Where I do think golf goes too far is when players get disqualified for an incorrect card. 

Instead of a blanket rule across all levels, this should be a local rule where the PGA Tour or any other organization can give a player a two-stroke penalty for an incorrect card rather than disqualifying them. 

My reasoning is this: almost all incorrect cards at the highest level of play are a result of negligence. 

There should be a punishment for failing to uphold a standard that protects the field but disqualifying someone is too harsh. 

Having played a ton of competitive golf myself, I can say with confidence that almost all golfers who attempt to cheat aren’t doing so by arguing they made a 5 instead of a 6. 

There are incidents of cheating in pro golf, whether it’s a shady drop or subtly improving your lie. But at most levels, and especially on the PGA Tour, it’s almost unheard of for a player to say they made a lower score than in reality. 

I understand the argument that you can’t leave this open for interpretation. If someone signs for a score lower than what they made, then it’s impossible to be 100 percent sure of their intent. 

But I would argue that a two-stroke penalty is severe enough to be an appropriate punishment regardless of intent. As I mentioned, golfers at the PGA Tour level are usually being covered in numerous ways. And when they aren’t, their fellow competitor and caddie have a role to keep them accountable. 

This happens so rarely that it seems crazy to take a player out of a tournament. 

And this is an entertainment product—kicking Spieth out of your event is not helpful to the product. 

Parting Thoughts

I understand why people get so fired up about this. 

Golf is an odd sport that has a lot of old rules carried over from decades (or centuries) past. 

But there is something unique, meaningful and maybe even a touch romantic about a sport where the players are responsible for their score. 

Could the process be tweaked and modernized slightly? Yes. 

Should the penalty for an incorrect scorecard be reduced to two strokes? I think so. 

However, golf’s scorekeeping system has mostly been successful over the years. There are instances of boneheaded mistakes—like when Roberto De Vicenzo missed out on a playoff at the 1968 Masters because he signed for a score one stroke higher than he made—but they are incredibly rare. 

And, it’s worth noting again, this is a system that is used at all levels of golf to accommodate when only the player knows exactly what their score was. 

Even on the PGA Tour, that checks-and-balances system is still needed to ensure the integrity of the competition. 

Do you think it’s time to overhaul scorekeeping on the PGA Tour and in other big events? Should we change the penalty for an incorrect card? 

I would like to hear your ideas and thoughts. 

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