Bryson DeChambeau received a two-stroke penalty from the R&A after his second round at The Open on Friday when he was deemed to have improved his lie in the deep rough on the fifth hole. DeChambeau’s drive found the thick fescue, and he appeared to trample down the long rough directly behind his ball before playing his next shot. The penalty dropped him from one shot off the lead to three back.
Brandel Chamblee and Paul McGinley broke down the incident on the Golf Channel.
McGinley walked through exactly where he saw the breach occur. “I think it’s a breach. The first five seconds when he got to the ball, that’s when the breach happened. He walked up, saw his lie, and his first thing to do was to stand behind the ball,” he said. “In standing behind the ball, he bedded down the grass behind it, which in turn was going to improve his back swing. For me, it’s a clear breach.”
McGinley added that DeChambeau did not accept the ruling well. “Bryson was obviously not agreeing with it, in a very stubborn way,” he said. “Your line of play is not just towards your target. It’s also your backswing. He’s standing right there where his club should be going back.”
Chamblee agreed the penalty was fair. “I do. Incontrovertibly,” he said. “He was in breach of 8.1, which says your actions in any way cannot move, bend or break the area around your golf ball. You cannot improve the conditions affecting the stroke and it was clear that his actions were improving the conditions of his stroke.”
Chamblee added: “He did everything but lay down behind it and take a weed whacker to the tall grass.”
McGinley said DeChambeau made the situation worse by not accepting the penalty gracefully. “Doing that and going to the media with a smile on his face, he would have won the situation, but he did not take that,” he said. “And he has made a bad situation worse here by not accepting the penalty with a bit of grace.”
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DeChambeau has missed the cut at all three of the year’s previous majors heading into The Open. Chamblee said earlier in the week that DeChambeau appeared to be chasing YouTuber Grant Horvat rather than major championship contenders like Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy.
