Johnson avoids bunker mentality after PGA gaffe – Boston.com

If Dustin Johnson can be believed, one lingering assumption from Sunday’s PGA Championship final hole fiasco can be dismissed. Johnson read the local rule sheet given to every player before the

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Earlier this week, when he spoke to the media from his boat off the coast of Myrtle Beach, S.C., Johnson maintained he knew the bunker rule that was in effect. If your ball was in it, you couldn’t touch the sand with your club prior to playing the shot, which is the two-stroke infraction Johnson committed while he was nursing a one-shot lead on No. 18. But after blowing his drive 40 yards right of the fairway, and into a swarm of fans who had been standing in bunkers like the one where his ball landed, Johnson said he thought the area was trampled-down dirt, not a sand bunker.

"Dustin, come here, we’ve got an issue,” Johnson remembered rules official David Price saying, after he putted out on the 18th hole, missing a 7-foot par putt that most thought was for the win, with the miss presumably sending Johnson into a three-hole playoff with Bubba Watson and eventual winner Martin Kaymer. "He said, ‘I think you grounded your club in the bunker,’ ” Johnson said. "I said, ‘What bunker?’ ”

As the fallout continues, the blame can be directed at multiple parties. At Johnson, who was ultimately responsible for knowing the rules, and in what instances they might be applied. At Bobby Brown, Johnson’s caddie, who also should have read the local rules sheet, and known the rule, and, in hindsight, should have told his man when they reached the wayward drive that the ball was in a hazard. And at the PGA, for creating the situation in the first place. Gallery control was an issue throughout the week, Whistling Straits not being an easy course to walk, and if a larger space had been cleared for Johnson when he reached his drive and surveyed the scene, perhaps he would have noticed the frame of the bunker he was in, and would have known what he could and could not do.

While it’s quite clear how the PGA was treating the bunkers — the local rules sheet described all of them, both inside and outside the ropes, as bunkers that were to be played as hazards — it didn’t keep many in the crowd from traipsing through them. People catching naps on the edges of bunkers and children attempting to build sand castles inside them were seen last week; according to the PGA’s rules, these areas were in play, no matter the condition created by the crowds.

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