Ben Coley asks why a penalty for one player under a new code of conduct scheme led some internet sleuths down the wrong path.
Victim shtick as strong as ever
Four years on, its future uncertain amid confirmation of PIF's withdrawal, and with more recent reports suggesting that PIF is now loaning it money, LIV Golf is fighting for life. Might now be the time to stop acting like a victim, I wonder.
In fairness to the once Saudi-funded golf league, it was not company policy to leap to the defence of Joaquin Niemann when he became the first player to be penalised under a new code of conduct scheme all four majors signed up to. Sergio Garcia, his fellow LIV Golf player, escaped with a warning at Augusta, but Niemann's reported 50-yard club toss saw that bypassed and a penalty assessed instead.
Yet the immediate reaction from some of the most prominent pro-LIV voices online – some staff members, others seemingly still working on that – was to draw comparisons with their favourite target, perhaps the only player who could've switched sides and won the war for LIV, Rory McIlroy. Presumably, his steadfast refusal to do so is partly why he's the first thought in a LIV fan's mind when anything controversial occurs.
One year ago, nine months prior to the new scheme, McIlroy threw a club in the US Open. It went about 15 yards, straight down the fairway, endangering nobody. It was not pleasant to watch and McIlroy, the sport's biggest active star, ought to know better. Who he is and where he plays his golf does not mean making excuses for what he does and on this occasion, and a handful of others throughout a near two-decade top-class career, he behaved poorly.
What that has to do with Niemann's penalty, nobody thinking rationally seems to know. And, in a classic demonstration of the online numbers game, it didn't seem to matter when the simple facts were laid out. McIlroy was not punished under a 2026 code of conduct for something that happened in 2025. Players on both sides of golf's divide have escaped punishment, because their offence took place before it became an offence.
What's most cynical about this is that some of the accounts posting provocatively, weaponising both Niemann and McIlroy, extracting from their infractions the maximum possible returns for blue-tick accounts that might make 50 dollars with a few more retweets, did not perform the natural second step once they'd been corrected. That step is to remove the original tweet. Instead, those posts were left to foment anger where there ought to have been none.
Buried beneath all this was the infraction itself and lost completely was the chance to agree to a simple conclusion: it is to golf's benefit that poor behaviour such as that Niemann is reported to have displayed will now be punished properly. It's taken too long. This is a pious sport which rushes to tell others about its virtues. Only if they are upheld by stringent enforcement of proper rules can that remain. This was a win for all to celebrate.
A major step in the right direction
As for Niemann, perhaps one day we'll look back on this episode as the making of him. This is a fabulous young golfer in possession of all the shots, one who waltzed to victory in one of the strongest and best PGA Tour events, added an Australian Open, and has made winning look straightforward on the LIV Golf circuit. Everything says he should be one of the best in the world. Everything, except his record in majors.
Last month's top 20 in the PGA was good, last year's top 10 in the PGA was a breakthrough in some ways, but the substance is still lacking. He's made 67% of major cuts but 15 of those 18 have seen him fail to make a tangible impact. Some like to compare him to Ludvig Aberg, but Niemann at the highest level has done nothing to merit such a comparison. Aberg has had four chances to win one of these and he's played in only 10. Niemann is running at 0-for-27, and it'll be 0-for-28 come Sunday.
And yet there was something powerful and convincing about the way in which he responded to the penalty he was handed for Thursday's misconduct, which resulted in an 11 at the fifth hole and a round of 78. Though self-inflicted, to battle back from that with a stunning 65 was deeply impressive and could help him to graduate to the level he's undoubtedly good enough to operate at.
After a miserable Open Championship last year, Niemann sacked many of his team in an attempt to crack the code. When he returns to major championship golf, whenever that may be, he might find that it was taking ownership of his own actions, digging deep to find a response, that set him on the right path.
Great Scott
This was not in fact Adam Scott’s 100th major, but his 101st. Scott played in the Open at St Andrews in 2000, a fitting place to start, but then waited a year for his second try. It is from this major, 25 years ago, that he began a streak of consecutive appearances that now stands at three-figures and counting. This puts Scott in a club, if two people can ever be a club. The other member is Jack Nicklaus.
It would be disingenuous to suggest that Scott was expected to get within hailing distance of any of Nicklaus’s records and certainly not 18 majors, but wrong too to deny that one more than one was projected when this sweet swinging, Tiger Woods acolyte first appeared at the turn of the century. Scott had people talking Down Under, he had people purring at UNLV, and at the very least Australian golf had itself a new superstar. It was how many; which ones. It wasn’t supposed to be 'will he ever do it?'
Of course, Scott did do it: C’mon Aussie and an Augusta photograph that will outlive us all. That by the way helped ensure he had won at least one tournament every year since 2001, a record extended to the end of 2014. Those wins have dried up since though and Scott, 46 next month, might have suffered for a light schedule packed with Signature Events. There is a sense that his major window may well have closed and here, at Shinnecock, he was never a factor.
So it’s a missed cut and onto Birkdale we go, the sort of place perhaps he could roll back the years. This missed cut will see him fall out of the world’s top 50, which is notable because it places this phenomenal streak under threat. Scott has a lifetime Masters exemption and should manage to make the field for the PGA Championship, which typically invites the top 100, but will he be in the US Open next year? Is it possible that this, a week that began as a celebration, marks his farewell to the US Open?
You never know when it’s going to be the last time, so while this is no eulogy, let’s take the opportunity to recognise a fine career. Thirty-three titles, one major. Perhaps he is an underachiever, perhaps he should’ve done more, but someone has to be the best one-time major champion in history, don’t they. I’d say Adam Scott, along with his longtime friend Justin Rose, would have to be a strong contender for that.
Compounding mistakes
It's a bit of an old commentary trope, one we seem to have managed to get rid of, that great players don't follow one mistake with another. They do. Quite often. And that's not because they're not great, it's because golf is hard; because, when you have frittered away a shot, the chances of frittering away another actually increase if anything. A highly technical sport played as well in the mind lends itself to this.
Nevertheless, it was still jarring, even after Jon Rahm had done it, even after Dustin Johnson had done it, to watch Rory McIlroy go from prime position to back-against-the-wall in three short holes. Well, some that he'd made short. McIlroy had less than 80 yards into the 10th hole and made bogey. He had wedge in his hands at the par-three 11th and made another. And he had wedge again at the 12th and somehow made another.
Each was somehow worse than the one before. At the 10th, that 70-odd-yard short required absolute precision, and McIlroy simply made a technical mistake, blading a wedge in a fashion familiar to the club golfer, less so a grand slam champion. At the 11th, the mistake was worse because it was one of poor calculation; this was a good shot that ended in the worst position possible. The 12th was a blend of the two: poor execution, poor judgement. Suddenly, from second place he was no longer in the top 10.
What made this so maddening was that McIlroy had, in the end, landed a plum draw. That wasn't the case on Thursday, but such was the turnaround on Friday evening that his wave suddenly had the best of it. Playing in a steady but manageable breeze, he had sauntered through eight holes, picking up two birdies, hitting the ball basically where he wanted to hit it. None of McIlroy's mistakes came from being out of position. Off the tee, he was imperious.
And the problem with this is that eventually, you will find trouble off the tee. So when McIlroy did, at the 14th, making double-bogey, the three bogeys he could've avoided added to the one mistake which was harder to. Birdies at the 12th and 13th had restored McIlroy's position inside the top five, but this one sent him back outside of it and as more mistakes crept into his long-game, he couldn't recover.
It all leaves him with a much bigger job to do this weekend and with players seemingly expecting conditions to be intensified, tossing away shots when they were at their most generous was not without precedent, not even among the greats of the game. It was, however, surprising. These are the mistakes McIlroy has done so well to eliminate from his game. The sense of 2023 created by Wyndham Clark's name at the top of the leaderboard was underlined by McIlroy impersonating the clumsier version of himself, the one who found ways to lose.
From here, it will be a big ask to find a way to win. But not without precedent.
Bias, what bias?
Monday, 7am: the late starters are going to have an advantage. Tuesday, midday: the early starters are going to have an advantage. Wednesday, 5pm...
And so it went until it seemed absolutely clear that being out late early on day one would indeed represent a significant advantage. At the end of Thursday's play that amounted to 1.1 shots but with the prospect of the gap widening, as these players returned in the morning to first finish their first rounds, then play their second rounds.
Except that things worked out differently. Friday morning was blustery; the afternoon was slightly more settled. Those who had suffered on Thursday, had waited patiently through the fog and then played in the cool, damp, windy weather, got paid out. The gap didn't fully narrow, but at less than half a stroke this so far has not been a US Open where tee-time plays a significant role in outcome.
Might that change on Saturday?
