The Drop Heard ’Round the Golf World: 10 Years Ago Tiger Woods Received One of the Most Bizarre Penalties in Masters History
Tiger Woods is stalking the lead at a major championship again, and the vibe is glorious at Augusta National, where the spectators are buzzing with anticipation as he stands over a 60-degree wedge shot from the right side of the 15th fairway.
Woods is in contention late in the day during the second round of the 2013 Masters, and a birdie here would put him atop the leaderboard. He just laid up to a perfect number and has some 75 yards left for his third shot on the par-5 hole.
Five years have passed since his last major title, and the time in between has been filled with personal turmoil, doubts, swing changes and a stalled journey to Jack Nicklaus’s holy grail of 18 major titles.
After two years without a victory, Woods won three times in 2012 and has added victories earlier this season by four shots at Torrey Pines, by two at Doral and by two at Bay Hill and has returned to No. 1 in the world. The oddsmakers have him listed as the 3–1 favorite to win his fifth green jacket and 15th major title.
Now he’s seemingly ready to pounce on this opportunity, and his perfectly struck shot appeared destined to stop a matter of inches from the hole for that easy birdie he wanted.
But Woods’s Nike golf ball has other ideas. The ball lands softly, takes a couple of hops—and clanks off the pin, bounding back toward the left fairway into the pond that fronts the green.
Tiger Woods reacts when his third shot at 15 on Friday in 2013 hits the pin and bounds back into the pond.
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It’s a horrible break, a rarity in Woods’s career. Instead of stopping near the hole, the ball settles in the water, necessitating a penalty stroke, a decision on where to drop the ball, another shot and—remarkably—one that flew on nearly the same trajectory and line, stopping inches away for a tap-in bogey 6.
Or so we thought.
Nobody in the moment thought much of what occurred other than focusing on the bad luck that saw Woods lose two shots. His score of 71 seemed far worse than he played, as he jumped into contention with a solid front nine.
Still, Woods was in the mix, three strokes back of Jason Day, in a tie for seventh. It wasn’t nearly as close as he wanted to be, but he was within striking distance, paired with Gonzalo Fernández-Castaño in the seventh-to-last group for Saturday’s 1:45 p.m. tee time.
While a fifth green jacket was far from assured, there was plenty of anticipation, as was always the case when Woods was near the lead.
It wasn’t until several hours later that all hell broke loose.
A shocking sequence
Virtually the entire golf world missed what occurred on the 15th hole on April 12, 2013. Ten years later, the entire episode elicits all manner of opinion. The shot Woods hit that bounded off the flagstick was replayed dozens of times. So was the next one that he hit close to the hole. In real time—and in the hours afterward—nobody caught what had occurred: Woods had taken an improper drop in the fairway.
The CBS broadcasters never mentioned it. Nor did Golf Channel in its postround wrap-up show. Media on-site who interviewed Woods never noticed. And when Woods was interviewed by ESPN’s Tom Rinaldi in the moments after signing his scorecard, he casually said, “I played it two yards back’’ from where he hit his original shot, which did not trigger any alarm bells. Woods used the same terminology in his postround description of the shot with the media.
Tiger Woods told ESPN's Tom Rinaldi that he played his second ball "two yards back" from his original shot.
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“If I was the first person with access to him and to be able to ask him about what happened on 15, my hand is raised the highest in not knowing the rule," says Rinaldi, who now works for Fox Sports. “I certainly didn’t know it as well as I should have. But Tiger said it in such an open, willing, transparent way that he gave no indication or cue to me that he suspected he’d done anything wrong. We all know the golf rule book can make string theory look simple. But I had no idea what was to come after he walked out of the interview."
The shot, of course, still left everyone in shock.
“I watched it hit the pin," says Sean Foley, who was Woods’s instructor at that time. “I was bouncing back and forth with him and Rosey (Justin Rose, who Foley also taught then). I got there just in time. I think I was drinking a Stella and just dropped it. Such a pretty shot in the air. So quiet. You couldn’t hear a word from anybody. And he nipped that ball so tight off that downslope. It was the most flighted and slowest at the same time.
“Bounce, bounce, pin … in the piss. It if was an inch to the right, he might make 3 (for a hole-out eagle.)”
In the shock of the moment, Woods first had to regroup. He had three options. One was to play from a drop area near the left side of the fairway. Another was to go on a line, straight back, from where the ball entered the water—which also meant on the left side of the fairway. The third option was to play the ball from as near as possible to the original spot.
“I’m always of the theory, ‘Let’s call a rules official if there is any doubt,’" says Joe LaCava, Woods’s caddie, who typically stayed out of any rules issues. “Tiger prides himself on knowing the rules and obviously on that one he didn’t or he thought he was O.K. There was a lot going on; a ball doesn’t usually hit a flag and go in the water. Then it’s yellow [a yellow-staked penalty area is treated differently than red]. He went down to the drop area to look at it and came back."
In that time, Woods appeared not to consider the option of going back from the pin on a straight line. Some have wondered whether perhaps that was what he was thinking when he went back from the original spot—that he could drop it as far back as he wanted.
“Well, I went down to the drop area. That wasn’t going to be a good spot, because obviously it’s into the grain; it’s really grainy there," Woods said afterward. “And it was a little bit wet. So it was muddy and not a good spot to drop. So I went back to where I played it from, but I went two yards further back and I tried to take two yards off the shot of what I felt like I hit.
“And that should land me short of the flag and not have it either hit the flag or skip over the back. I felt that was going to be the right decision right there."
Woods seemed pleased, but his own words indicted him. According to Rule 26-1a at the time, a player taking a drop in this situation “must drop as close as possible to the spot where he played the original shot."
Is two yards close enough? Apparently not. But Woods signed his scorecard without incident. The 71 was in the books. And he left the course believing that his 3-under-par total had him squarely in contention.
A call from home
Nobody knew what had played out behind the scenes as Woods took roughly an hour to finish his second round. A TV viewer—something that was common at the time—noticed the drop and wondered whether it was legal. So he alerted Augusta National officials that something might be amiss.
The viewer, however, was not just some random guy on a couch. The PGA Tour and the major championships might have taken dozens of such calls on any given week. But this happened to be David Eger, a longtime and respected rules official who had worked in an official capacity for both the United States Golf Association and the PGA Tour.
Eger was director of tournament administration at the PGA Tour from 1982 to ’92, then the senior director of rules and competition for the USGA from ’92 to ’95 before going back to the PGA Tour as its vice president of competition in ’95–96.
A fine player himself who was a member of the U.S. Walker Cup team three times and later played on the 50-and-over PGA Tour Champions, Eger, now 71, was watching the broadcast at his home in Charlotte and happened to step out for a minute as Woods was playing the 15th hole. He knew Woods was 5 under par for the tournament, and when he came back, he noticed Woods had finished the hole, and his score was now 4 under. What happened?
“I played it back three or four times before I made a call," Eger says. “I’m looking at something knowing there’s no divot hole when he played the [original] shot. And then there was a divot hole when he dropped. I could see that. And that’s why I kept replaying it to make sure.
“I hesitated on calling simply because I knew how controversial it was going to be. If it would have been Joe Schmo, I would have called in, too. It didn’t matter. I was trying to save the player from being disqualified."
Eger believed if Woods was not told of his infraction, he would sign for the bogey 6—which under the rules was wrong. When it was discovered he violated the rule (then Rule 20-7) for playing from the wrong place and not adding the penalty strokes, there would be no choice: Woods would be disqualified via Rule 6-6d.
So Eger called Mickey Bradley, a veteran PGA Tour rules official who was invited by the Masters to work the tournament. In addition to its own rules officials, Augusta National—like the other major championships—invites rules officials from around the world to help officiate. Bradley had spent time on the 13th hole that day, as the Masters typically might have a rules official or two at each hole.
“I’ve known David since the 1990s when he was head of the USGA rules, and he is very knowledgeable with the rules," says Bradley, who is now retired. “He realized I was at Augusta working. He watched Tiger drop and he called me.
“I had actually finished my shift. I was a rover sometimes; sometimes I’d sit at a hole. That day I was done and driving to a condo a little outside of Augusta, and he called me. I pulled over to the side of the road, and he said he watched Tiger drop and ‘you all need to look at it. He backed up from where his divot [hole] was. Which would be in the wrong place. He didn’t drop as near as possible.’"
So Bradley called Fred Ridley, now the Augusta National and Masters chairman who was then head of the Masters rules and competitions committee. Ridley, the last U.S. Amateur champion [1975] to not turn pro, had served as USGA president previously and worked many tournaments himself as a rules official.
“I said, ‘Fred, David called me and you need to look at Tiger’s drop.’ So Fred was aware of it,” Bradley says. “To him, it was like splitting hairs. They didn’t question him. At the time I got the call, Tiger was still on the course.
“To be fair, the committee should have penalized Tiger. And Fred’s a rules expert. But he thought it was splitting hairs."
It’s quite possible that Ridley and the rules officials he conferred with believed that it was a technicality. “As near as possible’’ is a bit of a nebulous term. What if Woods had dropped a foot closer? Two feet closer? They made a judgment in the moment and didn’t believe it was a penalty. (The rule now states that you drop within a club length, not “near as possible.”)
But not broaching it with Woods would become a big part of the controversy when the rest of the world realized what occurred.
Both Eger and Bradley suggested that given the information they had, it would be prudent to at least ask Woods about it.
“If someone raises a point like this, with the player in scoring, you simply say, ‘Tell us about the 15th hole. What went on there? Did you drop as near as possible?’" Eger says.
That didn’t happen. Woods signed his card, and all the commentary was about the bad break; the storm clouds would soon start to form.
‘I think it’s going to be a big deal’
After finishing work that evening, Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee headed down Washington Road to a well-known Augusta restaurant called TBonz. While dining with colleagues, Chamblee had a prediction.
“Tiger is going to get DQ’d tomorrow morning,’’ he said. “He took a bad drop and he signed that scorecard. Nobody caught it."
Golf Channel was not on the air live at the time of Woods’s shot on the 15th, but Chamblee watched it closely, and replays dominated the show he was part of that evening.
As he again studied the shots on 15, Chamblee did not say during the broadcast what he told his dinner companions later.
“When we showed the highlight on the air live on Friday, I saw where his divot [hole] was from the first shot and then from the next shot and it hit me," Chamblee says. “Live on the air. Holy cow. He did not drop as near as possible to his initial spot.
“In commercial break, I argued for us to replay it, ‘I think it’s going to be a big deal.’ And I got overruled. And sure enough it blew up overnight."
The first signs to the public that something was amiss came on a late-night CBS highlight show of the second round. It was during that short broadcast when then CBS analyst David Feherty broached the idea that Woods may have taken an improper drop.
“It’s one of those rules of golf that nobody ever paid attention to or looked at or performed properly," Feherty says. “He just dropped the ball. You’re supposed to drop it as close as possible, which technically means you have to try and drop it into your own divot [hole]. Nobody f---ing does that. Imagine if you dropped it and it did go in the divot [hole]. You’d look like a fool." (Although technically, you’d have had to redrop because a ball in the divot hole the ball could be deemed closer to the hole.)
Soon, the idea that Woods had taken an improper drop and might be disqualified went viral. Social media commentators weighed in. Grainy video appeared.
But by the time the story picked up momentum, it was after midnight. Nobody from Augusta National was available to comment. When people began arriving at the course Saturday morning, it was all anyone was talking about, with the expectation that Woods would get bounced from the Masters because he signed a scorecard with a lower total than he shot. Throughout his pro career, Woods had never been disqualified from any tournament.
Technically, he had not added the two-shot penalty for taking the wrong drop at the 15th hole. Woods’s score said 6. He had actually made an 8.
“At the time, it was pretty cut-and-dried to me," Chamblee says. “He took an illegal drop. He incurred a penalty and he signed a wrong scorecard. That’s a disqualification. Then he implicated himself when he talked about taking the drop a yard or two back from his initial spot. There’s a lot that went on there."
And a lot that was unknown. Nobody early in the morning knew that a TV viewer had alerted Augusta National rules officials to a possible rules violation. And it would be weeks before it was learned that the person who called in was Eger, a respected rules official whose suggestion to ask Woods about it to avoid disqualification was not heeded.
Woods learned about the controversy early Saturday morning when he got a text from his agent, Mark Steinberg. He hustled to Augusta National to confer with the rules committee.
In a recent Sports Illustrated interview, Woods downplayed the controversy, suggesting that it was all handled routinely.
“They called me in, and I told them exactly what I had done," Woods says. “They gave me the ruling, and that was it. It was not a disqualification. You got a two-shot penalty and off you go. And I was like, ‘O.K.’"
Woods never suggested that he was upset about not being told in the scoring area that there was an issue—although that would be an understandable reaction.
He did say, however, that several times in his career he’s been asked about possible rules issues before signing his card.
“They brought me in a couple of times on rulings back when Jack Stephens (Augusta National’s chairman from 1991 to ’98) was there," Woods says. “People caught it on camera and called it in. That’s not the first time that’s ever happened there. Not the first time it ever happened to me as a tour pro. And it’s happened to a lot of us out here.
“They call in, during the day, overnight, see replay, highlight shows. And with high-def it was happening more often."
It took hours, however, for Augusta National to discuss the ruling and offer up why Woods had not been disqualified.
And that presented a lot of time for analysts and commentators to weigh in. There was considerable consternation that Woods was getting a favor. Some suggested he should withdraw.
“We were on at 7 a.m. until about noon," Chamblee recalls. “And we didn’t have the full story at all. We were doing our best to navigate the difficulty of that day. And in my mind, that committee had O.K.’d something that was not right."
During a news conference, Ridley explained that the Masters rules committee became aware of a concern that Woods had violated the drop rules via a television viewer. He did not mention Eger. The committee, he said, looked at replays of the drop and the shot and determined Woods had not violated a rule. And never said anything to him.
Woods’s own words, the controversy that ensued, the numerous questions that arose about the drop caused the rules committee to take another look. And that’s when it was determined that Woods had violated Rule 26—but that Rule 33-7 should also be invoked, which at the time spared a player from disqualification in the event that he signed his scorecard without the committee bringing forth the proper information.
“Tiger was entitled to have the benefit of that decision when he signed his scorecard," Ridley said in a news conference that Saturday. “And to me it would have been grossly unfair to Tiger to have disqualified him after our committee had made that decision."
Honest mistake or special treatment?
Many failed to see the nuance of the situation. To them, Woods broke a rule, didn’t add the penalty strokes, signed an incorrect scorecard and should have been disqualified.
It didn’t matter that the Masters committee admitted a mistake in not taking a possible infraction to him. This was special treatment. And, of course, nobody knew at the time that Eger was the one who called in. That changed the equation considerably.
In the years since, golf’s rules have been amended to not allow calls from viewers at home—even though the idea is to get the rules right, no matter the source of the information. Rules now also allow for the applying of penalty strokes after the fact (an exception to Rule 6-6d) when a player could not know he broke a rule when signing his card. It happened to Cam Smith last year at the FedEx St. Jude Classic, where rules officials didn’t question him about a drop, thought better of it overnight, then asked him about it the next morning. Smith told them exactly what happened, and it was a violation—so two strokes were added before the final round.
It wasn’t until a few weeks after the Woods’s controversy that then SI writer Michael Bamberger uncovered the fact that Eger was the mystery caller.
That changed the dynamic of the entire story. A respected rules official calls in a possible rules violation. On-site, rules officials review it and dismiss it without informing Woods. Then those same officials are later faced with disqualifying him?
As Bamberger wrote: “It should be noted that Eger’s call saved Woods from disqualification, because it spurred Ridley’s incorrect interpretation, which was challenged by Woods’s own comments to ESPN, which enabled Ridley to invoke Rule 33-7, the one that allows wrongs to be righted.’’
A few months later, Golf Digest did a Q&A with Eger—who won four times on the PGA Tour’s 50-and-over circuit—in which he explained the situation in more detail. He said he figured Bradley had told Ridley who called in the possible violation.
“When a TV viewer calls in—and I handled many call-ins myself when I was at the PGA Tour—you consider the source," Eger said. “You weigh the person’s credibility and knowledge. Ridley apparently looked at my objection that Tiger’s drop wasn’t at a point ‘as nearly as possible’ from where he’d played his third shot, and rejected it. Fred’s comment that it would be ‘splitting hairs’ on the drop being improper was a stretch, to say the least."
Eger went on to say in the Golf Digest story that talking to Woods was “Rules 101" and he wondered whether a history with Ridley dating to the 1989 Walker Cup—when Ridley was the captain and Eger played for him—might have been involved. “Ridley isn’t my biggest fan," he said.
In an interview all these years later, Eger says he regretted those comments. “I wish I hadn’t done that, wish I hadn’t said that,’’ Eger says. “I wrote Fred a letter after that and apologized."
The fallout was that Woods had an 8 on his scorecard instead of a 6—and instead of the 4 he would have had if he simply never hit the flagstick.
Was it the worst break of his career?
“I think about what happened at the British Open more than any other. Royal St. George’s," Woods says, referring to the 2003 Open in England where on the first hole his opening tee shot was lost. He opened the tournament with a triple-bogey 7 and went on to lose by two.
“The gallery told the marshals the wrong spot on purpose. And so we all looked in that one spot. Three holes later these guys come up to me and go, here’s your ball. So they did it on purpose. And I missed a playoff with Ben Curtis. Those guys messed with the spotter and got me."
That stings. Perhaps the 2013 Masters does, too, although Woods never really let on.
Trailing by five strokes after the penalty instead of three heading into the third round, Woods shot 2-under-par 70 to close within four shots of leaders Ángel Cabrera and Brandt Snedeker. He was tied for seventh.
On the last day, Woods birdied the 9th, 10th, 12th and 15th holes but never got closer than three strokes on the back nine. He ran out of holes; the Friday bad luck coupled with the penalty loomed even larger.
“The hardest part for me was, it’s Friday afternoon," LaCava recalls. “Is he going to win the tournament? I don’t know, but he was playing awfully well. And I felt like it squashed all the momentum we had."
Cabrera and Adam Scott tied after 72 holes, with Scott winning in a playoff to become the first Australian to win the Masters.
Woods finished with a final-round 70, in a tie for fourth, four back—the four shots he lost due to his ball hitting the flagstick and the penalty for the improper drop being the difference. He made no excuses. “We could do that every tournament we lose," he said.
Tiger Woods acknowledges the crowd in the final round of the 2013 Masters.
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Golf’s rules around Tiger’s drop, then and now
When Tiger Woods’s drop at the 15th hole went awry during the 2013 Masters, several rules came into play. But citing them now is challenging because the Rules of Golf underwent a major overhaul in ’19, with some rules reworded and having different number classifications.
With the help of David Staebler, director of rules education for the United States Golf Association, here is a rundown of the various rules in play in 2013 and how they might be different today.
• When Woods’s ball hit the flagstick and went into the water
He had three options and the one he chose, stroke and distance, was then Rule 20.5. “Making the next stroke from previous stroke made. As near as possible.’’
That rule is now 14.6, but it has a slightly different procedure; the drop is still from the previous stroke made but within a club length of the original shot.
(A driver is typically in the 45- to 46-inch range, so if Tiger went back a “yard or two’’ it would have been close but of course all he needed to have done was pull out a club to determine.)
• When Woods failed to play from the correct spot
Rule 20-7 was “playing from the wrong place.’’ It is now Rule 14.7 with the same terminology.
• Woods’s scorecard error
The penalty was for “playing from the wrong place.’’ Woods did not add the two-stroke penalty.
Rule 6-6d was “wrong score for the hole.’’ That rule is now 3.3b(3). But the more recent version of the rule has an exception written in.
The default ruling is disqualification for attesting a score lower than what was shot, but the exception is for “a penalty that you didn’t know occurred.’’ In that case, even though the scorecard was signed, a DQ is avoided, and the penalty strokes are added. But that is not how Woods’s case was resolved. This exception was added to the rules in 2016.
• Woods’s not getting disqualified
Rule 33-7 was used. It gave the Masters rules committee “discretion to waive disqualification’’ if it considered such action warranted. Fred Ridley, the head of rules at the time, determined that such a decision was necessary, because the committee failed to inform Woods of a possible violation it knew about.
Now, that rule no longer exists. As Staebler said, several exceptions have been built in to the rules since 2019 that go about trying to avoid disqualification. Now, according to Rule 1.3c(3), a committee cannot waive disqualification. Basically now “the rules are the rules and the penalties are the penalties and you need to apply that penalty.’’