Since the notion of change is such a popular topic around the PGA Tour these days, here’s something worth changing:
Prohibit fans from using their cell phones to video the golf they’re not actually watching because they are watching their phones.
This isn’t a call for a Masters-like prohibition on cell phone possession inside the gates, though that makes the best event in golf even better. This is a simple suggestion nudging people to keep their phones on silent and in their pockets, not raised in front of their faces to capture Tom Hoge’s 12-foot birdie putt on the fourth hole on Friday.
Maybe it’s so they can go home later and watch what they could have seen better without their phone.
Isn’t the reason to attend a sporting event in person to actually see it, not tape it? Other than at Augusta, it happens at every PGA Tour event. A player leans over to hit a shot and the phones go up.
It came into sharp focus during the playoff between Daniel Berger and Akshay Bhatia at the Arnold Palmer Invitational after Berger planted his tee shot in the left rough, near the gallery ropes, on the playoff hole. As he stood over his second shot, almost all the fans near to him had their phones out to capture it.
Maybe it’s so they can go home later and watch what they could have seen better without their phone. There is one caveat to ending the taping of the action: If you’re a couple of rows deep and trying to see what you can’t, there are times when it’s easy to watch the phone being held up by someone else.
Most of us wish we spent less time looking at our phones than we do, having fallen into a habit that’s harder to break than smoking for some people.
It’s wonderful that we now have the ability, literally at our fingertips, to capture moments and memories and relive them immediately or months down the line without having to haul out a DVD player or send them off to a drug store to be printed.
It’s a hopeless notion, of course, denying fans the opportunity to video the golf they’re watching. Social media might not survive such a restriction.
But since this is the season for reimagining the PGA Tour, just imagine a day when fans use phones for the reason they were created – for texting.
Ron Green Jr.
Top: Ramsey Cardy, Sportsfile via Getty Images