GOLF IS NOT THE ONLY “ISLAND OF SANITY”

By Charles E. Vasoll

The inspiration for this article came from my reading of a piece by Jimmy Roberts of NBC Sports in “The Met Golfer” entitled “Island of Sanity”. Roberts says, “In many ways this has been a pretty sad year in sports.” He mentions the baseball incident in which a player threw a chair at a heckling fan; a melee at a basketball game and then the steroids, which he said, seemed to be everywhere. “Mostly though, golf is an island of sanity in a sporting sea of questionable behavior” he writes.

His wish for the New Year was to see a football player admit to an official that he didn’t really catch the ball. It hit the ground. Or a basketball player who quietly raises his hand and agrees that the foul the official awarded an opponent in a close game was correct. Roberts says he wants other sports to be more like golf where the player calls penalties on himself. He gave, as an example, what Greg Norman did at the Hartford, Connecticut PGA tournament a few years back when he was contending for the win. Norman disqualified himself thinking the ball he played was illegal (it apparently was not).

Our sport of platform tennis has been right up there with golf when it came to telling the truth about play in the game. Maybe it was because platform tennis was largely adopted by many golf clubs as a winter substitute for their first love. They brought the honesty of their game to the courts. Whatever the source, it is a wonderful aspect to the sport.

Weren’t we all taught early on that you called the loss of point on yourself if you inadvertently hit the ball twice in one stroke or if you “carried” the ball? These are the types of infractions of which only a player might be aware. If you did not see whether your opponent’s ball was “in” or “out”, you conceded the point to them without question. We have to be careful that the etiquette of the game does not lose its support. Unfortunately, sometimes winning has become paramount.

Being kind to our opponents is even incorporated in the Official Rules. For example, when they commit a foot fault, which would be loss of a point, our rules even provide for a “grace foot fault”, saying in effect, we forgive you this first time. I know many players think that is going too far but we have had such a problem with this one regulation that stretching our tolerance in this way seems to have some value.

Quite frankly my advocacy of the “no let on net cord serve” rule was bolstered by the “imaginary net cord” call that a player might resort to when a serve was difficult to return and was close to clipping the net. Whether it was really a net cord was not clear but it became a “do over” and put the server at a disadvantage to have to serve again. By eliminating the question of whether it did or did not hit the net, the problem was solved.

We need to follow the principle of “giving the benefit of doubt” to your opponent. We need to be sure of “in” and “out” calls and be 100% honest on calls that we must make on ourselves. Then platform tennis can hold its head high with golf as the only sports that don’t need “officials” to enforce the Official Rules.

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