Joel Dahmen was penalized four strokes Thursday after having 15 clubs in the bag.
PGA Tour
As Joel Dahmen walks the 4th tee Thursday during the first round of the Shriners Open for Kidssomething didn’t look right in his golf bag.
“We got to the 4 tee and I grabbed a water and went to my bag and saw a 4 iron that was in the wrong place and our stuff is always in the right place,” Dahmen said after his round. “It wasn’t in the right place.”
The reason why the 4-iron was not in the right place? It shouldn’t have been there at all.
Dahmen what penalized four shots Thursday ABOUT having 15 sticks in his bagone more than the legal limit of 14 under the Rules of Golf. The four-stroke penalty (applied as two two-stroke penalties over the first two holes) turned his opening round of 1-over 72 into a five-over 76 that left him tied for 131st in the 132-player field as first round game. suspended due to darkness Thursday night (and delayed Friday morning due to high winds).
The veteran pro, who has developed a huge following after appearing on The first two seasons of Netflix’s PGA Tour documentary “Full Swing” and it was opened up about his life and career struggles on the showwas still confused after the round about how the extra 4-iron ended up in his bag.
But still, he owned up to the mistake and didn’t push it on anyone, including his caddy Geno Bonnalie.
“It’s never happened to me before,” he said. “I travel with 15, 16 clubs. I think most people here act depending on the conditions and courses. You know, I’ve been traveling here for a long time and it’s never happened before. I’d like to blame Geno. That would be the easy thing to do. It’s not even his fault. I played on Tuesday and Wednesday here. We didn’t see him there.
“Why, I don’t know. I don’t know how it got there. It sucks.
“It’s one of those weird ones,” he added later. “I have a Clif Bar that’s been there for maybe two months. Like maybe there’s a banana rotting in that golf bag. There’s all kinds of crap. It’s usually very easy to find an extra club, and unfortunately we didn’t do that today.”
The punishment couldn’t have come at a worse time for Dahmen either. After a career year in 2020, when he finished 38th in the FedEx Cup and then earned his first PGA Tour win in 2021, his Official World Golf Ranking has dropped steadily to 229th, his worst since 2017, his rookie year on the PGA Tour.
Coming into the week, he was 124th in the FedEx Cup Fall points standings meaning he needs good finishes over the final five events of the season to secure his spot in the top 125 and to maintained his full-time status on the PGA Tour.
Since the suspension, Dahmen was projected to drop another four spots to 128th.
When he realized the extra club was in his bag, he said he knew the rule but still called a rules official to “confirm everything.”
“It’s one of those weird ones that sticks with you,” he said of the rule. “It happens maybe once a year. I remember Ian Woosnam doing it many times at the British Open when he was around the lead.
“I knew it was the maximum four, but I called a rules official just to confirm everything, left the club and played 14 the rest of the way.”
In 2001, Ian Woosnam was tied for the lead going into the final round of the Open Championship when he and his team discovered he had two drivers in the second team bag, putting him over the 14 club limit . Part of the issue was that Royal Lytham and St. Annehost that year, started with a par-3, meaning Woosnam didn’t look for a driver in his bag until the second hole.
The PGA Tour winner accepts a rare 4-stroke penalty in extremely good humor
There, he was assessed just a two-stroke penalty after spotting and dropping the 15th club before playing the second hole. In Vegas, Dahmen was given a four-stroke penalty, the maximum allowed for the violation Rule 4.1b. The rule states, “The player takes the total penalty (two penalty strokes) for each hole where a violation occurred, to a maximum of four penalty strokes in the round (adding two penalty strokes to each of the first two holes where a violation occurred ).
According to the rule, the violation is determined to have occurred when the player became aware of the violation. Since Dahmen became aware of the break on the 4th hole, he was given the maximum penalty.
At that point, Dahmen said “there could have been some curse words,” but then he thought about the bigger picture.
“I had a lot of people supporting me today, helping our family foundation,” he explained. “It was one of those moments where you like to lose and be angry, be angry with yourself, be mad at Geno, be mad at the world.
“But you look around and people are donating loads of money to our foundation and life is not so bad. It’s a mistake. It will happen. Unfortunately it happened at this moment.
“But, yeah, I just stripped one down the middle after that and I had a lot of birdies; we just didn’t do them today. Yes, one of those where you live and learn. Geno feels terrible. I feel terrible. We’ll do it tomorrow morning and try to get a bunch of birds.”
Dahmen will have his work cut out for him in Round 2. Since the suspension of Round 1 play, the final line has been sitting for the Shriners at 2 under with DataGolf projections giving a more than 60 percent chance to advance in three or four later. Round 2.
