Rules debate swirls during pro’s historic Open round, caddie shuts it down   

SOUTHPORT, England — If you’re looking for a new caddie — that is, a caddie you can root for, as you maybe once did for Golf Ball (Adolphus Hull) or Fluff (Mike Cowan) or Bones (Jim Mackay) — we are proud to shine our special GOLF.com CaddieLight (trademark pending) on Nick Pugh, white-bearded Englishman bagman for Lucas Herbert, Australian golfer who carded a bogey-on-the-last 62 on Friday, here at the Royal Birkdale breezeway. Sixty-two! This LIV Golf Ripper is good. As for his caddie, Nick Pugh, he is, to recycle an old phrase, of golf. When a guy is, you know.

To go right to the “news” and please note the quotation marks: During Herbert’s round, TV viewers and viewer viewers could see Pugh using a rangefinder. You can use a rangefinder in LIV Golf play. You can’t use a rangefinder at PGA Tour events or the Masters or the U.S. Open or the British Open. (You can at a PGA Championship.) So people, including the broadcasters calling the action for Sky Sports, were asking: What is going on here — is this legal?

Totally.

Because Pugh was not using the rangefinder as a rangefinder. He was using it as a binocular. And that is permitted by R&A rules for Open play. And Pugh was super-careful to make sure he was doing the right thing the right way.

This is what he told reporters Friday afternoon:

“On LIV Golf we’re allowed to use a rangefinder for distance-measuring purposes. I know we can’t do that here or at the U.S. Open. But there was another player and caddie at the U.S. Open who was given the OK to use a rangefinder without the battery out. 

“I inquired early in the week with the R&A, with one of the rules officials. I said, ‘This is what happened in the previous tournament. Would this be OK?’ She went to the powers that be — right to the very top, and I was given the green light.

“So I informed our playing partners on the first tee yesterday. I informed our walking referee and I asked her for a second opinion. I said, ‘Can you just make sure this is absolutely correct?’ To which she came back on the second tee with a thumb’s up. 

“My eyesight isn’t great — these glasses aren’t here to make me look cool. I sometimes struggle when the ball comes down. This guy hits it a long way. He hits one 380 yards yesterday — with a 3-wood. And if he wants to know if the ball’s in the bunker or not, these old eyes don’t see it so well. So, I’ll generally use the rangefinder, which pretty clearly has no battery inside.”

With that, the veteran caddie, a former club pro who attempted to qualify for British Opens without ever making it, held up his rangefinder in the vicinity of his stylish, oval, tinted glasses and showed the gathered reporters the cavity on his rangefinder that had a hole where a battery would be, were it set up to measure distances. No battery, no capacity to measure distances, no chance of a rules violation.

You admire anybody who does the right thing the right way, and explains it all with a certain élan. This guy is loaded with élan. In this age of the technocrat caddie, it’s a joy to see again. Billy Foster, Seve’s old caddie, is working this tournament, his 41st Open. He can do Ballesteros better than Seve could do Seve. (How’d you four-putt there on 16, Seve? I mees, I mees, I mees, I make.) The other day, I asked Pugh about the rakes, here at Royal Birkdale. “These R&A-sanctioned rakes, with their widely spaced teeth, guarantee that there will be ridges” in the bunkers, he said. Those ridges.

On Friday afternoon, Pugh offered me a little detail. First thing in the morning, the bunkers are as smooth as an egg, raked by a machine that is more like a road-construction paver. Then the balls enter bunkers — there are 104 of them here — followed by the players and their clubs and their caddies and those R&A-sanctioned rakes. By the time the caddies leave their work sites, they leave lines of ridges behind. The ball settles deep in them. It’s challenging. Pugh raked bunkers twice on Friday. Once for his player, once for another caddie. “Some of the bunker-raking here,” he said, “is not good.” This from a man who prizes good bunker-raking.

Touring caddies are like everybody else in this world, looking for status within their peer group. “It was cool,” Pugh said, referring to how his fellow loopers responded to his man’s round of 62, tying the record for the lowest score ever recorded in a major championship. “They’re patting me on the back.

“But I’m also one wrong club away from being called an idiot again, so I won’t get too far ahead of myself.”

Now that’s the spirit.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at I asked Pugh about the rakes.