THE MEMORIAL TOURNAMENT PRESENTED BY NATIONWIDE

July 19, 2020

Slugger White

Muirfield Village

Quick Quotes

Q. Give us the interpretation of the rule and why you docked him two shots.

SLUGGER WHITE: The rule is 9.4. It was a ball at rest by the player, moved, and since he didn't put it back, he was assessed a general penalty, which is two strokes. That's pretty much the bottom line.

Q. Just to clarify, because there sometimes is confusion right now with the word intent. He says he didn't mean to do it. That doesn't apply here?

SLUGGER WHITE: That would not apply. Intent is not there, no. When he put the club down behind the ball, it moved ever so slightly to the left, so it changed positions. He accepted it like a gentleman and the man that he is, and we just went on with it.

Q. Can you just give us a little bit of that conversation you had with him when you walked in?

SLUGGER WHITE: He was -- I guess someone had said something to him before he got to me and got to the scoring area, and he just said, What are we doing? I showed him, and he said, Well -- he said, If it moved, I accept the penalty, and we'll go from there.

Like I say, he could not have been more of a gentleman and took it in stride, and that was about it.

Q. Final thing: Did you or your staff think about notifying Jon after the 16th hole that you were looking at it?

SLUGGER WHITE: We didn't come up with it until he was on the 18th tee basically. We were going back and forth with it to look at it. Had it been like maybe a one-shot lead it might have been a different story. I don't even think that would have been a different story.

But we didn't find out about it until later on, and we got that from television.