Did Rory McIlroy cheat: A breakdown of his controversial Abu Dhabi penalty

This is the moment when Rory McIlroy committed a two-stroke penalty in the first round of Abu Dhabi-Aldar Championship. I'm Brian Bellingy with Golf News Net here to explain the rules situation involving Rory McIlroy in that first round played at Yas Links in Abu Dhabi, the first of two events on the DP World Tour Playoffs. McIlroy was playing the par 4 12th hole at When he hits a pitch shot that doesn't quite reach Yazlinks, having a difficult time with the hole. the putting surface and it rolls back to him, and unfortunately for him, rolled into what he said was a sand-filled divot. Ball is in its place, and like a lot of professional golfers trying to assess a lie, he put the club head behind the golf ball. And in the process, you can see that he moves and permanently moves a piece of grass out of position, therefore improving his lie. The grass never returns back to where it was, and so under the rules of golf, that's improving your lie. That is not allowed. That means McIlroy, after the round, was shown the video by DP World Tour officials. And he concluded, like they did, that he violated the rules and was going to be assessed a two-stroke penalty. So it went from having a double bogey six on the hole to a quadruple bogey eight. He explained after the round of the DP World Tour why that happened and what he saw. Yeah, they showed me a video from 12. 12. Hit my first chip shot from down the bottom of the hill didn't get up came back down and rolled into a divot and then as I went to sort of just get a feel for the lie the close-up of the camera you can see like a little piece of grass around the divot sort of lies down as I put my club down behind the ball and it doesn't I guess the grass doesn't return back to its original position. I'm in a position. And I don't like, obviously there's no intent, I play by the rules, I feel like this, you know, this is never really, you know, I try to do everything that I can to never end up in these positions. But just by looking at the video. Like, it doesn't look very good. Thank you very much. Obviously, that wasn't my intent. I'm just trying to get a feel for the lie. The ball's in a sort of bottom of a sandy divot, and I'm trying to feel like if I can get a 54 degree, like, onto the back of the ball. I think it's a good example. But in the process, this piece of grass is sort of laid down, and it doesn't... You know, the technical, I guess the technical term for the rule is if you press down on the piece, I don't feel like I pressed on, but at the same time, I don't want the perception of, of like people thinking like I got away with something either. So I'm happy to take the two shot penalty and move on and move into tomorrow. The penalty that McIlroy got for improving his lie is justified. And this is something that should be called more frequently in professional golf. A lot of players do this type of thing and it's been going on. For a really long time, players get into a certain difficult lie outside of the fairway, and they put the club head behind the ball, trying to assess a lie, at least under the guise of that, and in the process, oftentimes trample down some grass, because after all, you have a metal club head, and you're putting that on grass. It's not necessarily going to return exactly where the grass was before that moment happened. And more often than not, Rules officials on all professional tours just look the other way. And let players do this. There was some commotion about this during the US Open involving Wyndham Clark. He vehemently denied that that was an issue. He's pointed the blame at players like Brooks Koepka. And over the years, there have been plenty of players who have done something like this. It's been seen on video during a telecast, and it's been called out by a fan, but not necessarily led to a two-stroke penalty for improving lies. Hopefully, this is a precedent-setting thing, and it sets the marker for what players can and cannot do in these types of situations. But the best policy when trying to assess a lie is to try to come up with grass near the ball, not directly behind the ball, so that you don't run into these types of issues where you wind up improving your lie unintentionally, or intentionally for that matter, but getting caught because of video close-up of the lie in the first place. So McIlroy accepted the penalty, realized it looked bad, even if that wasn't his intention. They say there's no intent in the rules of golf. That's not totally true. They did say that McIlroy clearly had violated the rule. He needed to take that two-stroke penalty. He didn't want to give the appearance that he was against that notion or that he didn't think he deserved it. So we move on into the second round of the Abu Dhabi Aldar Championship.