How - Dov Seidman [55]
To disqualify yourself from a major tournament is an extraordinary act of sportsmanship; to do so for something that may or may not have happened, and that nobody else saw, is downright remarkable. Toms has always been known as one of the good guys on the PGA Tour. His charitable foundation works with abused, abandoned, and underprivileged children throughout the country, and was heavily involved with on-the-ground support for the victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He’s easygoing and direct, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone with a bad word to say about him. When I heard about his sportsmanlike act, I sensed there was something important going on in Toms’s head, something key to achieving the highest levels of performance and success. So I called him on his cell phone while he was driving through the backcountry, returning to his Louisiana home. I asked him, essentially, “What were you thinking?” Here’s what he told me:
DAVID TOMS: When I got back to my hotel room that night after the first round and cleared my head a little bit, I started thinking about the 17th hole. I thought: If I hit a moving ball when I tapped in, it’s a penalty. There was a lot of gray area there, whether or not it wobbled, and I didn’t have anybody to call and ask. I’d already signed my scorecard, so I knew that if it was determined that it had happened, I would be disqualified.
I woke up early the next morning and went into the rules officials’ tent and told the head official the story. He went and looked at it on the tape and said he really couldn’t see anything. He finally said it was up to me; I could call it a foul or just move on to the second round. He was fine with me going ahead and playing.
But then he asked me, unofficially, “If you did finish first, how would you feel?” He just wanted to know my gut reaction. And I said I felt like I would be getting away with something, and I would feel like that for a long time, regardless of how I do. If I won the golf tournament, if I made the cut, or whatever, it still wouldn’t be fair to the rest of the field and it certainly wouldn’t be fair to me because I would have to live with it forever.
You just couldn’t continue the tournament?
DAVID: No.
Why not?
DAVID: Because I plan on playing golf for a long time. It’s not like it would just go away. What would the decision be the next time that there was a controversy like that? I wouldn’t have felt right, especially if I was the one to lift the claret jug [the winner’s trophy], and then all of a sudden, you know, it hit me.
That’s not the way golf is; that’s not the way I am. The organizers of the event, you know, they hated to see it happen, but I was really the only one that could make the call; so . . .
You made the call on yourself?
DAVID: I did. You know, there are things that only the golfer sees. Whether it was a breach of a rule or not, there was a doubt there that I just didn’t want to live with. I decided to disqualify myself and flew home. I felt like I did the right thing.
Is there something about your feelings here that you think would affect your ability to play golf?
DAVID: Sure. My actions there were going to affect me and affect the rest of the players playing in that golf tournament, just like in anybody’s line of work, whether it’s sports or business or whatever.
I understand, but those are your competitors. Your job is to beat them.
DAVID: (Laughing) In golf, we just call these [infractions] on ourselves; we don