PGA Tour golfer Davis Riley made an eagle on his last hole of the second round in the CJ Cup Byron Nelson on Saturday, which he desperately needed to get inside the cut line after being assessed a two-stroke penalty for accidentally using the slope feature on his distance device on an earlier hole.
Riley was 5 under after 36 holes, which was the projected cut line with a handful of golfers still playing at TPC Craig Ranch in McKinney, Texas. The second round wasn’t completed on Friday because of inclement weather.
Riley, the 98th-ranked player in the world, informed a PGA Tour rules official that he had seen the adjusted distance for slope when measuring his tee shot on the par-3 17th hole, his eighth hole of the round.
The PGA Tour is experimenting with allowing golfers to use range finders in an attempt to speed up play, but they’re not allowed to use the slope features. It’s the third event in which the devices are being used.
“Unfortunately, it was just kind of one of those moments where your heart sinks a little bit, like you’re just throwing away two shots,” Riley said. “It is what it is. That’s the rules of golf. And we certainly have a trial period here with this, and I know the [United States Golf Association] is trying to do something about the range finder and the pace of play.”
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Riley hit his tee shot on No. 17 to 12 feet and made par. After finishing the hole, he informed PGA Tour rules official Ken Tackett about the incident. Tackett told him there would be a two-stroke penalty because he had breached rule 4.3, and Riley would be disqualified from the tournament if it happened again.
The double-bogey 5 dropped him to 3 under. He carded birdies on Nos. 18 and 4, and bogeys on 3 and 6, which left him needing an eagle on the last to make the 36-hole cut.
Riley was 13 shots behind 36-hole leader Scottie Scheffler, who had a six-stroke lead at 18 under.
“In that moment, I was just, like, ‘Wow,'” Riley said. “It’s just one of those times that it just sucks. It was a tough deal, and it’s just a bad break. All I can boil it down to is bad luck that, by the time you put the thing in there and pull it out, it switched from just raw number to slope. It was tough.”
The irony was that Riley didn’t gain much of an advantage because the golf course at TPC Craig Ranch is so flat, there’s not much of a need to know the slope on shots.
Still, Riley said he had to self-report the incident to protect the field.
“It’s very important to me because I love this game,” Riley said. “That’s kind of something my coaches from a young age, my parents instilled in me. This is a game of integrity, so play with it and act that way. When something like that happens, you just have to own it up and just that’s part of the game, the integrity of the game.”
It wasn’t the first time Riley called a penalty on himself. In the final match of the 2013 U.S. Junior Amateur, he was assessed a one-stroke penalty when he said his ball moved while he was addressing a putt. He lost to Scheffler, 3 and 2.
