“Andalusia is being this year the star in Spain from the point of view of professional golf.”
Pablo Mansilla is living a sweet moment both in his role as referee and as president of the Professional Technical Committee and Sports Director of the Royal Andalusian Golf Federation (RFGA). The fact is that this autonomous community is once again hosting important professional tournaments and he has also been appointed referee for the men’s golf tournament at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
“From the point of view of professional golf, Andalusia is being the star in Spain this year,” says this lawyer by profession with an office in Marbella. “We have had the Spanish Men’s Open at Valderrama, the Spanish Men’s Championship at Doñana Golf, where the Andalusian Marcos Pastor won, and the Spanish Women’s Championship at Guadalmina, and in September we are going to have the Spanish Women’s Open at Aloha and the Alps Costa del Sol at Lauro Golf. We also have a new professional circuit in Andalusia for Andalusian professionals and the Gecko Tour, now with Ken Lingwood at the helm, which is a circuit for professionals that seems to settle even more in the Costa del Sol”.
-It seems that the public administrations are once again aware of the importance of golf as a tourist attraction and are once again taking up the economic support of relevant tournaments…
-A few days ago at the presentation of the Open de España Femenino the Junta de Andalucía, with the presence of the Minister of Tourism and Sport, the Tourist Board of the Provincial Council of Malaga and the Association of Municipalities of the Western Costa del Sol, met and all three agreed that the way to deseasonalize tourism in the Costa del Sol and Andalusia is largely through golf. The three institutions agree that they are very willing to support golf-related sporting events.
-Does that mean that there can be continuity in that sense, do you think we could relive the golden years when Andalusia hosted up to five tournaments of the different European circuits, as happened in 2010 and 2011? Last year the Volvo World Match Play, the Andalucía Masters, the Open de España Femenino, the Open de Andalucía and the Benahavís Senior Masters were played. The Junta de Andalucía invested up to three million euros in some tournaments.
-I don’t think we will reach those figures, it was a lot of money and it will be very difficult to invest that much. Anyway, I think we are on the right track by sponsoring a series of tournaments in Andalusia.
-Andalusian amateur golf is at a very high level, with some outstanding exponents such as María Parra, number two in the world ranking, Mario Galiano and Ángel Hidalgo, among many others. And professional golf, is it also at a good level?
-We have Marcos Pastor, winner of the Spanish Professional Championship this year, Miguel Ángel Jiménez, Azahara Muñoz, Belén Mozo and Noemí Jiménez. María Parra is going to be a professional herself and could be a surprise, as Azahara did in her day, when she won her first tournament as a professional, the Madrid Ladies Masters. And it would not be her first professional tournament, because she has already won in the Let AS (Access Series), which is the second division of the Ladies European Tour, and I think she is the second in the ranking, being still an amateur.
-As a referee at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, what is going to happen with golf, because more and more potential players are being announced as deserters, including Rory McIlroy, who has criticized deserters in the past?
-In the first Olympic Games that included tennis, something similar happened in the sense that many great players did not want to participate. Ivan Lendl didn’t participate, Boris Becker I think didn’t participate either… In Rio I don’t think the problem is Zika, but motivation. The Olympic Games are not going to count for Ryder Cup purposes, they are going to lose a week of rest, they have a major very close, the PGA Championship, and on top of that you add Zika and the problem of insecurity, which also exists. Let’s hope it happens like in tennis, where the first edition was very weak because the players were not aware, but the next one they were.
-What did you think of the controversy over the referee’s decision in the last US Open, which was postponed from the 5th hole, where the ball moved on the green, until the leader and eventual champion of the tournament, Dustin Johnson, did not finish his round?
-There are two fundamental errors here. The first is clearly by the first referee. The decision they finally made that he had a penalty stroke is textbook. The referee approached the player and asked him if he had done anything that would have caused the ball to move and the player said no. He should have asked more questions. He should have asked more questions. I think he asked him if he had rested the club and the player said no, but what Johnson interpreted – like most of the players who then took to Twitter – is if he had rested the club behind the ball, that he hadn’t rested it, which is what we used to call setting up the stroke, that is, resting the club immediately behind or in front of the ball. But that has changed in 2016 and it no longer affects the penalty, the rule. Now what it affects is whether you put the club behind, in front, to the side or wherever, whether you actually caused the ball to move. And in this case Dustin Johnson had indeed rested the club next to the ball, and you can clearly see in the video how the ball moves immediately after he hit the ground with the club when making practice swings to the side. There is a decision that specifically tells you that you have to assess a number of factors, and almost all of the factors were against the player. It even tells you that you have to penalize even if there’s doubt that the player would have caused the ball to move. What happened there is, I think, that the referee failed to ask questions. And his second mistake is that when you are assigned to a match, to a group, you have to be watching everything that happens, so he should have been able, without asking the player, whether or not he had caused the ball to move.
What happens further down the road? That the USGA (United States Golf Association) has a policy that says that when they have to make a decision based on television images, instead of making that decision on their own, they have to wait for the player to review the images with him. That is the problem and I think they are going to review that policy. In this case the presence of Dustin Johson would not have been necessary, because it would have been enough to see the images and apply the penalty directly. What can’t be is that you don’t know what cards you are playing with.
The same thing happened to Monty (Colin Montgomerie) years ago at Valderrama on the 10th green. John Paramor, the head referee, approached him on the 12th hole and told him that the ball had moved on the 10th and that when the round was over they had to review it. They watched it on TV and did not penalize him because, although it looked like he had leaned the club close to the ball, since the TV shot was from behind, the distance from the club to the ball was not visible. Monty said that he had not caused the ball to move and since there was not enough evidence of the distance between the put and the ball and no other witness wanted to say anything, he was not penalized. It was the same situation as with Dustin Johnson, although with a different ending: the player was warned as soon as possible -two holes later (in Johson’s case, seven holes later)- that there was a possibility of a penalty.
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