ATLANTA – Sahith Theegala wasn’t 100% positive he’d brushed the sand on his again swing from a bunker on the third gap Sunday on the Tour Championship and a video overview of the incident was inconclusive. However even with that uncertainty, he was superb with the result — a two-stroke penalty for violating Rule 12.1.
“I’m nonetheless going to sleep nice. No matter, two photographs, I be ok with it. I feel it was a penalty. I feel I moved sand. Only a bizarre state of affairs,” Theegala mentioned following an in any other case textbook 5-under 66 that moved him into third place on the PGA Tour finale.
The choice would have been not informing officers instantly after the incident that he believed he’d brushed the sand and that merely wasn’t an possibility.
“I wouldn’t be capable of sleep,” he mentioned. “It felt like I moved the sand. It was sitting in my thoughts. If I went again after the spherical, appeared that up and came upon that it was a two-shot penalty, I might be [disqualified] proper now. I’m glad I introduced it up immediately.”
The “bizarre state of affairs” started when Theegala drove right into a bunker down the fitting facet of the par-4 third gap. He defined that his ball rolled up the face of the bunker earlier than settling again into the preliminary pitch mark leaving his ball “teed up within the sand.”
From 149 yards, Theegala launched his strategy simply in need of the placing floor however instantly sensed he’d brushed the sand, though he was not sure it was a violation of the Guidelines of Golf.
“It was a little or no quantity of sand. I can say that with full honesty and readability. It was not a really great amount of sand,” he mentioned. “Among the sand moved; possibly it did enhance it. But it surely was on the backswing.”
Theegala was assessed the penalty as a result of he’d modified his lie within the “direct space round” his golf ball. Had he touched the sand along with his membership away from that space there would have been no violation.
Regardless of the two-shot penalty, Theegala scorched the again 9 at East Lake with birdies at Nos. 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18 to maneuver to inside 9 strokes of third-round chief Scottie Scheffler.
