AUGUSTA, Ga. – Fred Ridley held his annual State of the Masters press conference on Wednesday morning. (Tradition, tradition.) The club chairman sat in the middle of a windowless auditorium with a familiar face seated to his left, Tom Nelson, the tour’s media chairman. But to his right was a new one, in that spot: Geoff Yang, an Augusta National member and longtime USGA rules official. Yang, a technology investor from Northern California, is in his first year as chairman of the competition committee, a position Ridley held throughout the years that Billy Payne was chairman of the club.
In this role, Yang serves as the final rules official for the tournament, among other duties, including course organization. It is the last position behind the curtains. You won’t see it, but you will see what it does.
Ridley took questions from 14 different members of the media on Wednesday. Yang took one. It came from Jerry Tarde, the longtime editor of Golf Digest.
“We have portraits of the founders looking back at us on the wall here,” Tarde said. “What do you think would surprise Jones the most if he came back?” There was a bit more to it, but that was the gist of it.
There are two founders of the club, Cliff Robertsa Midwestern banker and Bob Jones, the great amateur who designed the course with architect Alister MacKenzie.
“I think Jones would be amazed by a lot of things,” Yang said, “including how far people are hitting the ball and the level of athleticism involved in the game. And I think the conditions are set up to preserve those skills. I don’t think it would be one thing. I think it’s all a little bit of a reaction to where the game has gone.”
The answer alone tells you that Yang can be careful and thoughtful when his public life calls for care and caution. What you wouldn’t know from that answer is that Yang, who studied engineering at Princeton, has a wry sense of humor with an eye for nuance and irony. Chief rules officials—and Yang is now the Masters’ chief rules official—usually seek to resolve any rules debate in a binary fashion. A rule was broken, wasn’t it? When any of the four men’s Grand Slams has a rules controversy, it reverberates throughout golf, and that’s especially true at the Masters.
There are still people talking about a decline Arnold Palmer took part in the Masters Sunday on the par-3 12th hole in 1958. Ken Venturi, Palmer’s partner that day, fretted over the legality of this fall for decades, even though Bob Jones said Palmer’s fall was made correctly during the game. It was Palmer’s first of four tournament wins.
There are still people talking about the 1968 Maters, won by Bob Goalby after Argentine great Roberto De Vicenzo signed a wrong Sunday note. Had he signed for a correct score, Goalby and De Vicenzo would have played in an 18-hole playoff for the title. But that didn’t happen and Goalby left in a green club coat. Roberts sat down with both men during an interview at the Butler Cabin and told De Vicenzo that “in our hearts we will always regard you as one of the two winners of this tournament, taking nothing away from the new Masters champion.” That comment got under Goalby’s skin—unfortunately, there was a winner—and stayed there for years, until finally annoyance gave way to acceptance.
In 2013, in Saturday’s round, Tiger Woods took a foul putt after his second shot on the 15th green ricocheted off the flagstick and into a water hazard. Under the rules then, he could have been disqualified for signing the wrong card. Ridley, in the role Yang now has, ultimately decided to give Woods a two-stroke penalty. It is still discussed and analyzed.
This week and for years to come, Yang will face questions about the new rules, which will affect the outcome of the tournament. You won’t see much of Yang or hear much from him. But the rules drive the herd over every aspect of this event and every serious golf event. Augusta National’s philosophy is to try to prevent rules problems before they happen or get out of hand. That’s what Jones did with Palmer in 1958. Yang, in his own way, will ask a long series of questions: what do the rules say – and what would Jones do?
