Golf Drama: Bryson DeChambeau's Penalty Unfolds Live

The best Friday you can remember in a while. We had two Royal Berkdale course records and ties for the lowest rounds in major championship history, courtesy of Lucas Herbert and Sam Burns, but we ended the day with, and this is very appropriate because we are in England, a piece of true Shakespearean theater, smiley, Bryson DeChambeau. He makes birdie at the 18th, the post to 66, 7-under for the tournament, solo second, or so we think, and we then learn shortly after that that Bryson will potentially be assessed a two-shot penalty for improving his lie on the second shot at the fifth, the par four fifth hole. What unfolds next, smiley, is somewhat unprecedented, right? We watched live, like this was on USA Network, unfolding, Bryson, RNA officials, heated fashion, debating whether or not he should be penalized right there on the fifth where he hit that second shot. You observed large parts of this process. You just broke it down on Live From on Golf Channel. Just give us the key details of the story through your lens. Well, we had a plan to go do a preview at the ninth hole, and we were going to do some stuff with the fescue, blah, blah, blah, and I had heard something in my ear before we went off coverage that there was something going on in scoring. I didn't know exactly what that was. It's like, what could that possibly be? My brain was already a little bit turned on to a potential violation of sorts, but I didn't know exactly what it could be, but I'd actually seen during one of our commercial breaks something posted on Twitter with Bryson and a potential rule violation, but it didn't click for me after the round. That's something that they were looking at and potentially assessing the penalty, so I immediately called my producer for Live From and was like, hey, let's cancel this thing. We need to go out to the fifth hole, and at that point, it appeared to me from watching USA Sports that they were going to head out. They were already on their way. I was like, we need to go. We hopped on like we were the mystery machine in Scooby-Doo trying to do a little investigation, Inspector Gadget, and I tell you what, we come out of the compound, and we were about to take a right, and two carts are coming from the left, and Bryce and I make eye contact, and we both knew it's like one of the odds of this. We weren't supposed to make eye contact in this. We were supposed to just observe, and I was like, all right, let's go. Let's go find. Let's go find out what's going on, and we watched that whole thing that everybody else did back home on television just what took place, which is Bryson pleading his case, a bit damning video evidence that I think a lot of people were pointing to, and so when I watched the whole scene take place, Bryson was pretty adamant about that there should be a penalty, as well as Caddy Gregg, so as soon as everybody cleared out of there, and then officially the two-shot penalty was given to Bryson, and that Charlie from the RNA came up and delivered that news to the media. They initially had a reaction, Brandel and Paul, and of course, they were very pro-two-shot penalty in this, and at that point, we had been down there long enough for me to assess the situation. We tried to cross-reference camera angles, trees, leaves. We are literally doing a puzzle to try to find the exact spot. We're trying to nail this thing down, so we triangulated the whole thing until we found, you know, being a detective, we found our clue. We found the chalk line. We found the divot, and so we found the divot, and we're like, this is it. This is where the murder happened. It was Bryson DeChambeau and the fescue ride of the fifth hole with the gap wedge. That's right. My producer and I went through all the scenarios. We went through exactly what we saw Bryson do, and then we looked at where Bryson hit his shot, and then we started looking at his backswing. Did it touch the fescue? Would it have touched the fescue? And so we're doing all of this in real time, trying to come up with what we thought. It really wasn't our job to determine whether it was deserved a penalty. I'm just trying to go through the player's standpoint of what did he have available in that moment, in that shot, that maybe prior to that wouldn't have been an avenue for him, and could he have just altered his setup to play the shot with the fescue being high, and so that was my goal on it. It's a crummy position to be in because I know people will agree on one thing and then other people see it another way. So all I tried to do in that situation was just try my best to go in the player's mind of what did he have available, and would it have been easier to hit to where Bryson hit it with a normal backswing versus not a normal backswing. And I think after doing a little bit of recon, doing some practice swings, trying to position the fescue down versus up, I felt like he could have played the shot originally as intended with the fescue where it was. He would have had to alter some things and may have had to have played a fraction further left, but he didn't. In this situation, if it wasn't his intent to knock down the fescue, it wasn't needed in this situation. So I'll start there, but did he change potentially the situation of his lie and the area of an intended swing by his actions? I think most people would agree that the fescue was not the same as it was before he got there. So in that instance, that's where the RNA is on the two shot penalty. I think most people could see that side of it. And all I will say is that he would have just had to change and alter his swing to hit it where he did. I hit it. I kind of caught it a little thin, landed it on the green. It was actually an excellent shot when the fescue was up. You know that's where I'm good. These are the situations that I can get out of, so let's not act like this is something... And honestly, I think they even asked me this. It's like Pauly did. He said, was he lucky to find the golf ball? Absurdly lucky to find that golf ball. And he ended up making a five anyways. He probably would have made a five on his provisional ball. I know he pulled it left, but still. And he probably in this instance, wish he didn't find the golf ball, so he didn't have to deal with any of this.