AUGUSTA, Ga. — Fred Ridley had his annual State of the Masters press conference Wednesday morning. (Tradition, tradition.) The club chairman sat in the middle of a windowless auditorium with a familiar face sitting to his left, Tom Nelson, the tournament’s media chairman. But to his right there was a new one, in that seat: Geoff Yang, an Augusta National member and a longtime USGA rules official. Yang, a tech investor from Northern California, is in his first year as the chairman of the competition committees, a position Ridley had all through the years Billy Payne was chairman of the club.
In this role, Yang serves as the ultimate rules official for the tournament, among other duties, including course setup. It is the ultimate behind-the-curtains position. You won’t see him, but you’ll see what he does.
Ridley took questions from 14 different media members Wednesday. Yang took one. It came from Jerry Tarde, the longtime editor of Golf Digest.
“We have the portraits of the founders staring at us on the wall here,” Tarde said. “What do you think would surprise Jones the most if he came back?” There was a little more after that, but that was the thrust of it.
There are two founders of the club, Cliff Roberts, a Midwestern banker, and Bob Jones, the great amateur who designed the course with the architect Alister MacKenzie.
“I think Jones would be amazed by a lot of things,” Yang said, “including how far people are hitting the ball and the level of athlete involved in the game. And I think the conditions have adapted to try to maintain those skills. I don’t think it would be any one thing. I think everything is a little bit of a reaction to where the game has gone.”
The response alone tells you that Yang can do careful and thoughtful when his public life calls for careful and thoughtful. What you wouldn’t know from that response is that Yang, who studied engineering at Princeton, has wry sense of humor with any eye for nuance and irony. Top rules officials — and Yang is now the Masters’ top rules official — typically seek to settle any rules debate in a binary way. A rule was broken, or not. When any of the four men’s Grand Slam events has a rules controversy it reverberates throughout golf, and that is especially true at the Masters.
There are still people talking about a drop Arnold Palmer took on Masters Sunday on the par-3 12th hole in 1958. Ken Venturi, Palmer’s playing partner that day, groused about the legality of that drop for decades, even though Bob Jones said Palmer’s drop was done correctly during play. That was the first of Palmer’s four wins in the tournament.
There are still people talking about the 1968 Maters, won by Bob Goalby after the great Argentine golfer Roberto De Vicenzo signed an incorrect Sunday scorecard. Had he signed for a correct score, Goalby and De Vicenzo would have played in an 18-hole playoff for the title. But that did not happen and Goalby walked off with a green club coat. Roberts sat with both men during a Butler Cabin interview and said to De Vicenzo that “in our hearts we will always regard you as one of the two winners of this tournament, without taking anything away from the new Masters champion.” That comment got deeply under Goalby’s skin — there was, under unfortunate circumstances, one winner — and remained there for years, until the annoyance finally gave way to acceptance.
In 2013, in the Saturday round, Tiger Woods took an incorrect drop after his second shot into the 15th green ricocheted off the flagstick and into a water hazard. Per the rules then, he could have been disqualified for signing an incorrect scorecard. Ridley, in the role Yang has now, ultimately decided to give Woods a two-shot penalty. Still gets discussed and analyzed.
This week, and in the years to come, Yang will face new rules questions, ones that will influence the outcome of the tournament. You won’t see much of Yang or hear much from him. But the rulebook rides herd over every aspect of this event, and any serious golf event. The Augusta National philosophy is to try to prevent rules problems before they happen or get out of hand. That’s what Jones did with Palmer in 1958. Yang, in his own way, will be asking a long series of questions: what do the rules say — and what would Jones do?
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