The Golf Blog: For those of you who missed it...

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

For those of you who missed it...

SI.com has a photo gallery of the "infamous" drop.

The link can be found here.

13 Comments:

At 3:39 PM, Anonymous said...: Well SI report:

Last week Bamberger picked up an unlikely supporter in B.J. Wie, Michelle's fiercely loyal, protective father. He knows that his daughter, for all her prodigious physical talents, is still a teenager with much to learn. No doubt, now she will be more careful in applying the rules. On Sunday evening B.J. saw Bamberger in the press room and said, "Good job, Michael." Then he shook his hand.

Dos anyone know if this is true?
At 4:34 PM, Anonymous said...: No, I think Bamberger must have misheard. BJ Wie said, "Snow job."
At 5:25 PM, Anonymous said...: This incident just proves why every pro drags an official over to his ball every time something out of the ordinary happens...or even when it isn't out of the ordinary and everybody knows the rule. If an official had been with Wie for that drop, it would have been "blessed" by the offical. Johnny Miller (and others) have argued for years that calling for an official for every little thing is unnecessary. I wonder what he thinks now?
At 2:00 PM, Anonymous said...: You know what you can do with Sports Illustrated, don't you Michael - - - roll it (or 3-4 together) tightly and shove it in your mouth or up your ass - they are both the same!
signed - hemorrhoid
At 5:09 PM, AndrewsDad said...: Can someone else take a look at the SI pictures, specifically #5 of 7. There is no doubt in my mind that the drop was not from shoulder height which is what I thought was required. Can anyone else tell me what it looks like to them?
At 10:59 PM, Anonymous said...: You can't tell from the picture if she dropped it from shoulder height since the ball was already dropped in the picture. I do remember reading from one of the other press people there, who disagreed with Bamberger, that Michelle wasn't holding her arm out straight enough. It's something she should watch. However, given that her shoulders are probably 6 inches higher than the other players, I'm not sure if it gives her an advantage.
At 12:51 PM, AndrewsDad said...: Tht picture shows the ball in air so the picture was taken less than a second after she let go. It sure looks to me like her hand is well below shoulder height. The rule says shoulder height so the players height does not matter. The 2 club length rule gives an advantage to someone with a longer driver and the shoulder height could be seen as an advantage to a shorter player but that is the way the rule reads. If you have a problem with it, get the rules changed, until then, I would add the appropriate penalty strokes to your score before you sign your card.

Here is my problem with this whole mess.... we may not agree with what happened but the situation was treated properly by the rules officials with the information they were given when they received it. We may disagree with how the SI reported handled it but the rules permit what happened. Ultimately it is up to the player and caddie to make sure they follow the rules and per the official, that was not done. So if you do not like what happened, get the rules changed but in the meantime, I would suggest that Michelle Wie and her caddie figure out how to properly drop a ball.
At 2:36 PM, Anonymous said...: You should read George White's article http://www.thegolfchannel.com/core.aspx?page=15100&dv=5665109&select=17881&select2=0

Apparently he spent some time looking in to the position of her arm. To quote "photos taken immediately before the drop do seem to indicate her arm in an illegal position. However, photos taken from a different angle immediately as the ball is dropped indicate the arm was raised to a proper height. I can’t tell that a violation has occurred."
At 1:09 PM, AndrewsDad said...: The reason I brought this up was I was watching the Golf Channel the night of the DQ and they were talking about when to get a rules official involved and showed a clip of a PGA player who had a rules official involved specifically because of a question about the height of the drop. A few minutes later they showed video of the Wie drop which seemed obvious that it was from well beneath shoulder level. I was surprised that nobody on air mentioned it at the time since they had just talked about that same subject. The video angle was from the fairway. If you look at the SI picture, just to the left of Wie's bag in the distance is someone in a blue shirt holding something to his face, probably a microphone. I am guessing that is an on course reporter who had a camera by him so that was probably the angle. Now since that angle was below the level of Wie, if anything it would have made a drop from below shoulder height appear to be from higher.

Now how someone can look at picture #5 and not come to the conclusion that it sure looks like the hand was well below shoulder height is beyond me. Physics 101, the ball is 2 feet from her hand, so distance is 2 feet, acceleration is gravity, 32 feet per second squared. So the time can be calculated using 1/2 AT squared, which is going to be very small. So unless her hand was moving in a downward direction at a fairly fast rate, which per the video I saw, was not the case, then her hand in the SI picture is about where it was at the time of the drop.

It appears to me, based on what I have seen that the drop was illegal just based on that. Obviously it does not matter now but I have a hard time when people complain about no way of knowing where the ball was so there is no proof yet there are pictures which appear to show a drop from below shoulder height and they say its inconclusive. My bottom line is that clearly, Wie was at best very sloppy with the drop, both in the location and how it was done, so her and the cady need to take primary responsibility. If she drops no closer to the hole and from shoulder height, basic golf 101, none of this would have happened.
At 6:11 PM, Anonymous said...: I still say the picture is inconclusive. Michelle's hand is farther from the camera than her shoulder, so it would tend to look lower, especially if the picture were taken with a wide angle lens. Note that her arm seems to point directly toward her caddy's head. He's is bent over, but not that far.
At 12:03 AM, AndrewsDad said...: Her hand would artificially appear to be lower if the camera was pointing down towards her, which this clearly is not, and also if her hand closer to the camera than the rest of her body, once again, not the case.

Now look at the caddy, his watch is about at his knee. If he was to stretch out his fingers, they would be at least half way between his knee and the ground. I am about 6'1". If I were to stand straight and measure the distance between the end of my fingers with my hand by side and then about half way between the ground and my knee, that is about 20 inches. So assuming he is about 6 foot, that would put the top of his head a little over 4 feet tall. But a better way would be to do a ratio by simply measuring both of them with a ruler and since we know M.W. is 6 foot, calculate his bent over height. She measures about 6.5 inches on my ruler, he measures 4 inches. So if we take half an inch as a unit then her 13 units divided by her actual 72 inche height gives about 5.5 inches per unit. His 8 units gives him 44 inches which is almost 4 feet. Now if you measure the distance from her shoulder to the top of her head, that is almost 1 inch, or almost 2 units which would be about 10 inches in real height. I checked myself and from the top of my shoulder to the top of my head was right about 10 inches. So that should be close. So the top of her shoulder should be about 62 inches tall, the top of his head is somewhere in the 4 foot range, 48. The top of his head is easily 12 of more inches below her shoulder.

Now don't make me dust off my Math and my Comp. Sci. degrees again.
At 6:51 AM, Anonymous said...: I'm not sure I understand your calculation, but it sounds like you are comparing their heights on the picture which you can't do since he is farther from the camera and would appear smaller.

I tried bending over the way he is and it seems like my forehead ends up around 6 inches below where my shoulder normally is. Beyond that, he appears to be standing somewhat uphill from where she is, but that may be also due to the distortion in the picture.

But even if you are right and his forehead is 12 inches lower than her shoulder, since he is probably 8 feet away, her arm is a very small angle below straight.

None of this can be determined accurately from the picture, which is my original point. The picture is inconclusive and we should give her the benefit of the doubt.
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