Congratulations Tiger and Rocco – updated

What a great day of golf from both of them. Even par for 18 holes. I was rooting for Tiger to make his putt on the extra hole as I didn’t want it to end on a bogey. Rocco, I’m sure everyone at Hannastown has been going crazy all day. Congratulations on being the classiest runner-up possible.

[Update] My long lost twin brother Bill and his wife Renee ask why Tiger was not timed.

Until you are being timed, you can take as long as you like to hit a shot. There is no 40 second clock (with an extra 10 for being first to hit from an area such as the fairway) until then.

Before you start to be timed you have to be playing slower than the published pace of play. For groups of 2 at the US Open this is somewhere around 4 hours. In a normal tournament where you were not the first group or the only group on the course, you would also have to be out of position relative to the group in front.

Until you are over time and (if applicable) out of position, you can not be timed. According to the NBC, on Sunday, Woods and Westwood were told they needed to catch up after the third hole. They spent the rest of the day on the borderline of being out of position, but where never seriously behind and got caught up a few times.

I’m sure that if they were behind and Rocco had gone to Mike Davis and complained they would have been timed. Without him saying anything, they would have had to get behind by more than a couple of minutes to get put on the clock. Even then the first step would have been to speak to them and ask them to catch up, followed by timing if they didn’t.