HONEST GOLFER PAYS THE PRICE

Golf stands by itself in an area of personal accountability. It has rules – many of them preposterously complex and arcane – and golfers follow them. Even to the extent of penalizing themselves in tournament play.

“You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank as to praise him for playing by the rules,” golf great Bobby Jones once said.

To which Tom Watson added many years later: “There is no surer or more painful way to learn a rule than to be penalized once for breaking it.”

So Scott Stallings, a three-time winner on the PGA Tour, gives us one more lesson in sportsmanship and style. He turned himself in for an inadvertent use of a performance enhancing substance and on Tuesday was suspended for 90 days for that infraction.

All Stallings knew was that he was tired much of the time. So his doctor prescribed DHEA for his persistent fatigue. It is a banned substance. When Stallings realized what he had done, he gave himself up. No one knew what he had done, except him.

“Whether I intended to or not, I took something that wasn’t allowed. I called a penalty on myself, that’s the best way to look at it,” Stallings told GolfChannel.com. “I did it immediately, so much so it took (the Tour official) by surprise.”

Stallings, the world’s 101^st-ranked golfer, never failed a drug test and didn’t set out to break the rules. But he promptly owned up and accepted the penalty.

In an age of denials and excuse-making and controversies in other sports about cheating, Stallings stood tall. He did the right thing. And that is, as it should be, a lesson in painful accountability.
 
 
Post By: Larry Weisman, a longtime sportswriter for USA TODAY, blogs for Twistity.com. Follow him on Twitter @MrLarryWeisman .