Tom Kennedy long ago became accustomed to making rulings, so it should come as no surprise that he’s taken a shine to being a rules official in golf.
Kennedy spent his professional career in the law field — as a criminal investigator, a deputy district attorney, a lawyer in private practice, then 16 years as a District Court Judge based in Colorado Springs, his lifelong home.
So the fact that the University of Colorado Law graduate has served as a volunteer rules official in Colorado over the past five years, playing an ever-larger role since retiring from the bench in 2015, makes perfect sense.
“The Rules of Golf — there are only 34 — but you have a huge number of decisions,” Kennedy said by phone on Friday. “The law is very much the same. The statutes that define criminal law, for example, are relatively small in number, but there are tens of thousands of appellate court decisions which interpret those. It’s very much the same discipline (in golf) of understanding what the rule is, but also understanding how they’re interpreted and how they’re applied in everyday circumstances.
“I think it was a pretty easy transition for me because I spent my entire adult life dealing with the law, dealing with the rules and learning how to understand them and apply them to the factual situation that existed at that time. As I told people when I first started doing this, I’m used to calling balls and strikes. That’s what I’ve been doing all my adult life. My mind works in a way that I’m able to grasp some of that stuff just because that’s what I’ve been trained to do all my adult life.”
The CGA tracks the number of dates worked by volunteer rules officials in a given year — counting CGA championships and qualifiers, USGA championships and qualifiers, CoBank Colorado Open championships and qualifiers, Junior Golf Alliance of Colorado tournaments, other junior events, and Colorado-based college tournaments — and more than 50 officials worked at least one day in 2017 on the CGA spreadsheet.
Impressively, nine people chalked up at least 25 days in 2017: Greg With (46 days), John Sova (37), Tim Hersee (33), Mike Boster (32), Mike Rice (31), Dennie Runge (31), Kennedy (26), former CGA president Jim Magette (25) and Brad Wiesley (25).
The CWGA, which officially joined forces with the CGA at the beginning of this year, also has a large group of volunteer officials and it presents its Volunteer of the Year Award at the Women’s Annual Meeting, which this year will be held March 3 at the Inverness Hotel & Conference Center.
For his part, Kennedy was recently presented the Jim Topliff Award as the CGA’s on-course rules official of the year for 2017. The honor is named for Topliff, a longtime tournament director for the CGA who passed away in 2007. Of the aforementioned rules officials, Hersee (2015), Wiesley (2012), With (2011), Rice (2008) and Sova (2006) have received the award.
Kennedy took on considerably more responsibility last year in serving as the chief official for a handful of events, including the Mark Simpson Colorado Invitational that the University of Colorado hosts at Colorado National Golf Club in Erie. In 2017, he was also part of ruling crews at multi-day tournaments such as the CoBank Colorado Women’s Open and Colorado Senior Open, the Colorado Junior PGA Championship and other college tournaments.
“From the first of May until the middle of October (in 2017) I spent a fair amount of time on golf courses,” he said. “I worked a lot more than I played golf this past year, there’s no doubt about that.”
The first step in Kennedy’s increased role — following his retirement from the bench in the summer of 2015 — was taking a rules exam at the end of a PGA/USGA Rules of Golf Workshop in 2016. Kennedy recalls he scored a 96 on the exam.
“I studied pretty dang hard,” the 69-year-old said. “I told people it was the hardest exam I’ve taken since I took the bar exam. And I studied about as hard for it as I did for the bar as well.”
Besides the basic appeal of being a rules official given his legal background, Kennedy was attracted to the position for a couple of other reasons.
“I knew I wanted something to keep me active and involved and outdoors,” he said. “I’m an outdoors guy. I golf and I hike and I bike. I spend as much of my leisure time as I can outdoors. (Kennedy is pictured at Canyonlands in southeast Utah.)
“Being on the golf course seemed to be something worthwhile and you feel like you’re giving something back to the game. As a judge I spent a lot of time working with kids who had come from troubled homes so I’d always had a soft spot in my heart for working with kids. It seemed like a natural fit to work with juniors on the golf course as well.” (Besides his work on the course, Kennedy is a former chairman of the board for the YMCA of the Pikes Peak Region.)
And there are social and intellectual aspects to rules officiating as well.
“I had an interest in it and it was a good niche,” said Kennedy, a former high school golfer (Palmer HS in Colorado Springs) who plays to an 11.8 USGA Handicap Index out of the Garden of the Gods Club. “The guys that I work with are guys very much like me — my same age group, avid golfers who were looking to give something back to the game. Plus, I’m a retired judge and I wanted to have something that continued to challenge me intellectually.”
After working some events as a chief official where another person of CRO caliber was on hand to help out as need be, Kennedy was on his own in that role at the CU Mark Simpson Invite in September. And, as often occurs, an issue came up that proved challenging.
On the 12th green at Colorado National, Kennedy said when the grounds crew was mowing, something had come lose from the mower and it had created a small trench — maybe a quarter-inch wide and not quite that deep — running right across the center of the green.
“None of us knew how to treat that,” Kennedy said. “You get that kind of oddball thing that I hadn’t seen before. That was the first time I was the chief official so I had to make the final decision. That was interesting. What I did was to let players repair (the damage) as if it were a ball mark in the line of their putt so the ball wasn’t hopping across this trench. I don’t know if that was the right decision or not, but that was the only thing I could come up with that made sense for me to do. I’d be curious to see what the USGA guys would say that we would do about that.”
Kennedy, and many rules officials like him, face more challenges ahead as the Rules modernization plan announced almost a year ago by the USGA and the R&A will take effect in 2019.
“I haven’t spent a lot of time really digging into the weeds with the new rules,” Kennedy said. “Some of the things certainly needed to be updated. I don’t mind having to learn new stuff; I like learning new stuff. Some of the stuff might create some challenges for the officials just because it’s going to be a change, and most of us have been playing the game under these rules or using them as officials for a long time.
“The purpose is trying to speed up the pace of play and also make (the game’s rules) seem like they’re fair. You have the publicized things like Lexi Thompson losing (the 2017 ANA Inspiration after incurring four penalty strokes). and the Dustin Johnson thing (at the 2016 U.S. Open, which he still won). Some people look at that and say, ‘Those rules are just unfair’ and it might cast a negative view on the game of golf because it seems like the punishment does not match the crime — like a quarter-turn of a golf ball that gives you no advantage. My feeling is they’re trying to make the Rules of Golf appear more fair. If you have a minor infraction, you shouldn’t have something that costs you a major golf tournament, like what happened to Lexi Thompson.
“I hope it accomplishes what they want — that people can look at it and say that’s fair and we avoid some of the slow-play issues which sometime are caused by (rulings).”
Spoken like someone who knows a little something about rules.
