Brad Wiesley was just about to retire and spend the rest of his days in pursuit of birdies and aces when wife Cindy remarked, “You can’t spend every day playing golf.”
Brad may have blinked for a moment like a deer in the headlights. “I think my first year of retirement I probably tried,” he says. It even occurred to him that he might shave a few strokes off his index (now 16.1 at Indian Peaks) if he knew the rules better, so he went to a rules school at the USGA’s New Jersey headquarters.
There, he met Colorado Golf Hall of Famer Jim Bunch, who told him, “If you want to give back to the game and really learn the rules, call the CGA and start officiating.”
And there were those headlights again. Brad took Bunch’s words to heart and has since become a top rules official for not only the CGA, but the NCAA and USGA. In addition to not playing golf every day, he’s officiating 50 to 70 tournaments a year – while also teaching rules classes and seminars and continuing to attend rules seminars.
“My wife is right,” says Brad. “You can’t play golf every day. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be on the golf course most every day.”
It makes sense that the Rules of Golf are unendingly fascinating to Brad Wiesley. He retired after 35 years in law enforcement. Policies, procedures and communications expertise seem to be strong prerequisites, from the likes of his colleagues on the CGA Rules of Golf committee. There’s Tom Kennedy, a retired judge. Karla Harding, a retired traffic engineer. Sandy Schnitzer, a retired public school educator.
“I’m actively recruiting one or two pilots who are close to mandatory retirement,” Brad says. “Pilots deal with rules and procedures as part of their job.”
Are you a closet rules nerd, rules geek, or rules volunteer? Whatever the label, if you review the CGA Referee Training and Certification process and decide to get official, here are three of your kind.
The name might sound familiar because Laura was executive director of the CWGA before the women’s and men’s associations became one in 2018. Kate Moore, then the CWGA director of competitions, told her, “If you’re going to be the executive director of a golf association, you should know the rules.” So they signed up for the USGA’s four-day class in March 2017 in Pomona, Calif.
“And I hadn’t really looked at the rules,” Laura remembers. “To me, the rules were this skinny little book that you put in your golf bag. And then I discovered a thing called the decisions book, which was over 500 pages long and had all the exceptions to the rules. And I realized that while the rules might be easy at the 20,000-foot level, once you peel back the layers, you see that there are all these different variables, and different, unique things that can happen. That is because the golf course is not a tennis court or a basketball court, where things are fixed.”
Laura’s retired now and plays recreational golf as a member of Hiwan for the season, evacuating to Florida for her winter golf. But she hasn’t gotten over her fascination with the rules of golf, serving as a rules volunteer for both the CGA and the FSGA while enjoying solving “rules geek” scenarios with a mentor and fellow volunteers.
“I’m a natural problem solver,” she says. “I started my career in credit card operations for American Express. And operations is all rules, policies and procedures. I was with Amex Europe when the Berlin Wall came down. West Germany had credit cards, but East Germany did not. And so all of a sudden we had to figure out the policies and the procedures for East Germans, when there was no credit history to make decisions.”
Some days, rules officiating sounds just as rewarding – especially working junior tournaments, where the young players need lots of help navigating rules scenarios.
“Just today I worked a junior tournament, and on the last hole the last group, two young men, 13 years old, hit their second shots within six inches of each other,” she says. “And they called me over, asking, what do we do?”
Laura showed the player closer to the hole how to mark and lift his ball so the other could play first, and the boys were smiling and happy at the solution. “A father came over and said, thanks for helping out. That happens a lot. We’re there to help, and to make it fair.”
Rules officiating really isn’t like his old job in law enforcement, says Brad. “If you stop somebody for a traffic violation or have some kind of criminal behavior, they’re not writing themselves the ticket or arresting themselves. The officer makes the call whether to send the person to court, give them a warning, do what is appropriate to the situation. The officer actually has some discretion about how the enforcement happens.
“In golf, there’s no discretion. I can’t walk up and say, well, this is just a warning for hitting the ball in the pond. No penalty on this one today, that’s your warning, let’s not do it again.”
Also, he says, “Most golfers want to play within the rules and do the right thing. Very few are trying to get away with stuff. Generally, if people aren’t applying penalties, it’s because they don’t know about them.”
Brad says he doesn’t levy penalties, the rules do. He prefers officiating at the college level, where he spots future superstars like Collin Morikawa and can help save strokes even for players who know the rules.
“Occasionally there are situations where really good golfers can head down a path where they just have no idea about the rules and how they apply,” he says. And then he tells of a college kid who got into such trouble on a par-3 that he was coming up with a score of 14 or 15. “I got there and listened to the whole story and got some help from some other rules officials because it was all so complicated. But by the time we got done with it, his actual score was an eight. So I ended up saving him about six strokes by applying the rules correctly.
“A lot of the satisfaction in this comes from helping somebody to get it right, especially when they’re not sure.”
The executive director of the CGA wears his badge as “ultimate rules nerd” of the association with pride. He and Director of Rules and Competitions Lewis Harry enjoy bantering about this rule or that one, often humorously, on their monthly Spirit of the Game YouTube episodes. He oversees the association’s rules programs and volunteers, and attends Rules of Golf committee meetings.
“I love the term ‘nerd,’ “ he says. “I mean, nerds are some of the coolest people in the world. They’re cerebral, and curious, and they take a deep interest in going beyond the surface of something. I close my eyes and picture our rules committee, and they’re all nerds and I love them for it.”
Ed’s love affair with the rules began when he had to know them in his job as PGA section tournament director. He needed a score of at least 92 for credibility’s sake, so he memorized the “definitions” section of the Rules book because, he likes to say, “The rules define golf and the definitions define the rules.” The strategy worked, and since then his rules expertise carried over to CGA tournaments and even to U.S. Opens.
He notes that lawyers make good rules officials, with one caveat: “Helpfulness is the human quality we look for. You really are there to help. And the people there to ‘gotcha,’ the mall cop with the chest puffed out, officious, ‘I’m in charge,’ they’re the worst. Every time I go into a rules situation, I always say, ‘How can I help you?’ Instead of going in with an attitude of, ‘Oh, what’s this guy trying to get away with?’ “
Another valuable quality: the ability to operate a radio and cell phone and the willingness to use them. Rules volunteers on the course can always radio a captain – someone like Brad Wiesley, for instance – for help in a complicated situation. And championship competitors can themselves reach out directly to CGA staffers by calling the number on their scorecard.
Ed listed lunches, uniforms and thank-you gifts among the rewards rules volunteers can expect, but he says the biggest one is intrinsic. “These are almost all retired people, looking for something to do that they find meaningful and a community to stay engaged with. And rules officiating keeps your brain sharp.”
The best of the best might ultimately be reimbursed for expenses and even paid, as Brad is for his NCAA work, or catch the eye of the USGA and officiate events as big as the U.S. Open.
“That’s pretty much word of mouth,” says Ed. “You just do good work and good things happen.”
Get started in the apprentice program by visiting the CGA’s Volunteer Center.
Veteran journalist Susan Fornoff has written about golf for publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, ColoradoBiz magazine and her own GottaGoGolf.com. She became a CGA member when she moved from Oakland, CA, to Littleton in 2016, and ghost-writes as “Molly McMulligan,” the CGA’s on-course consultant on golf for fun. Email her at mollymcmulligan@gmail.com.