The Rules Enforcers
After a combined 81 years administering justice for the European Tour, rules enforcers John Paramor and Andy Mcfee last month called time on their illustrious careers. TG caught up with them to discuss rules, regrets and retirement
A life in the game with two of golf’s best-known Tour officials.
John Paramor is smiling at the prospect of playing more golf. For the last 44 years, he’s had to make do with administering the rules of golf while trying to appease angry golfers. But not anymore. Last month, both Paramor and Andy Mcfee, his partner in defeating crime, called time on their European Tour careers after roaming the fairways at a combined 35 Ryder Cups and close to 1,000 tournaments each, including more than 100 Majors championships.
Along the way, Paramor (65) and Mcfee (62) have spent a day with the US President, butted heads with Seve Ballesteros and rewritten the Rules of Golf. Ahead of their final appearance at the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, fittingly in the shadow of the European Tour HQ itself, we invited the pair to reminisce about their storied careers and reveal what it’s really like saying no to a professional golfer…
How did you become a European Tour referee?
JP Because I couldn’t hole enough putts! I was young enough and stupid enough to think I might be able to play this game for a living. Then I spent a year caddieing for a gentleman called Peter Butler. He always played a practice round with Neil Coles, Clive Clark and Bernard Hunt – all Ryder Cup players – and I soon realised I wasn’t that good. Peter put my name forward when he heard the Tour were looking for someone to study under George O’grady and Ken Schofield gave me my break. I started a day after my
21st birthday on the 5th of April, 1976, as a sort of junior rules official.
AM My story is very similar. I was playing off one, but realised that I wasn’t good enough. I went off to university, got a degree in geography and then got told by a friend that someone was going to resign from their job at the PGA. I wrote to the secretary, Colin Snape, offering my services and it happened to arrive on the same day as the resignation letter. Colin rang me and asked me to come in for an interview the next day and I started the following week. That was June 1980. I spent three years with them as a tournament director, and joined the Tour in 1983.
How different was the Tour back then compared to now?
JP It was quite different. There were only a handful, maybe 20 or 30, full-time tournament professionals. The rest of the guys had alternative employment in the winter, and it was almost like a club outing or a cricket tour. Then the Tour took off at the start of the ’80s and it became pretty serious because the rewards went up. Andy and I were part of that growth and we were forever taking people on.
AM Do you remember we made the mistake of persuading Ken (Schofield) that we needed to employ more people? We advertised, and that was a big mistake. Between us, we must have gone through 600 applications. Now the European federations recommend people to us. We’ve gone down the route of hiring ex pros, and that was deliberate to break down this ‘us and them’ mentality which was in danger of developing.
How would you describe your working relationship with the players?
JP In the mid-’80s, we were accused of not treating the players with enough respect. That came as a complete surprise to me, but we all made a conscious effort, while doing our jobs, to make sure that we couldn’t be accused of being disrespectful. I think we were successful in turning that around, and our relationships with the players is excellent. I was heartened by the number of players who came up to me when they found out we were going and were very grateful for the years of service we put in.
AM John’s right. Most promoters and managers say ‘yes’ to players, so they don’t understand the word ‘no’. When people are not used to hearing that word, it can make things a little fractious, especially as a referee!
Do any particular incidents or arguments stand out?
AM There’s been loads over the years. One or two get a little out of hand in the heat of the moment. But either by the end of the ruling or certainly by the end of the day, the player comes up to you and says, “I’m really sorry about that”. There’s nothing that really lingers, but you can’t not have close working relationships with players because we see them every week and we are making decisions that affect them directly. But we do have disagreements and often that’s coloured by their score. Everything is fine when a player’s shot 68 but if they’ve shot 75, they want the tournament to be cancelled.
JP I was reminded of an incident recently during The Open
‘Players are so used to hearing “yes” everywhere they go, they don’t like it when we say “no” to them. It can make things a little fractious!’
Championship at Hoylake when a ruling came in from Mike Davis, who has been running the Rules of Golf for the USGA for however long. He wanted a second opinion, so immediately I was filled with terror. I found Mike and he said, “I’m just over here with Bill Haas and someone found his golf ball by treading on it. I told Bill that if he couldn’t establish where it was, that he should drop his ball at this point, on top of the flattened grass, and to proceed”. I said I don’t see any problem with that, but then I heard Miguel Ángel Jiménez shouting across the fairway, saying, “It’s not right, this grass was very long and now you let him drop on top of the grass? It’s wrong”. He wouldn’t let it go, even though it’s in the rule book, and ended up causing quite a scene.
But the sting in the tail came three years later when he wanted me to talk him through the new Rules of Golf ahead of January 2019. I went through a number of them and I remember saying, “Oh incidentally, if you or someone else happens to move your ball in a search, the new rule will be that you estimate the position and place the ball on that spot. There will be no dropping.” He nearly choked on his coffee laughing at that one.
Are there any players who you think would make a good referee?
JP A lot of the Scandinavian players. I think people from the Nordic countries have a philosophy, it may even be a rule, that you cannot go on to the golf course and play without having a certificate from the professional who takes you through a number of rules. I always thought that was a pretty good idea which should be copied elsewhere.
AM There’s not a lot of middle ground because there are golfers who I can have a pretty in-depth discussion about the rules with, and others who don’t have a clue. That’s something we’ve tried to change latterly by doing some online rules examinations. But even the tournament committee recognise it’s a problem we need to address because it does slow the game down.
JP It is very disheartening when you are called to a ruling, and it’s actually taking relief from a cart path. You do wonder how so many players got to where they are today without knowing the basics, but then the rules can be very strict and players almost want that reassurance from a referee to avoid a penalty. The good thing now is that there is a little wriggle room with the new rules so if a player has made their best efforts and is only a little bit out, they will not be penalised.
Have you ever caught a player cheating?
JP It doesn’t happen that often, thankfully. But there was one when Simon Dyson did deliberately break a rule and tapped down a spike mark on his line. Ironically, that would now be permitted – he was obviously a few years ahead of his time. He was penalised for that and taken to the committee to explain his actions. It was regarded as a serious breach of our code. The other famous one I’ll let Andy continue with because it happened during the qualifying school process which Andy was running.
AM This player was the son of Sweden’s greatest sportsman, Sven Tumba. It started when a professional rang me up and said, “I played with such and such (Johan Tumba), how did he get in the playoff? He didn’t shoot 144, he shot 146. I dug the cards out for the second round and there were two discrepancies. I ended up sending the cards to the Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory for analysis and they proved that the player’s card had been altered. We took this to the tournament committee and the chap was found guilty of altering his card. He appealed it but the board found him guilty and he was banned (for 10 years, later reduced to three).
Are there are any times when you have made an incorrect ruling or one you regretted afterwards?
JP The biggest mistake I ever made involved Simon Khan. I regret it to this day. It was on the final day in Switzerland in 2004 or 2005. There had been a change to a rule, one
I had misinterpreted or at least misunderstood, and I incorrectly disqualified him because I thought he had picked up a ball when he should not have done. I was gutted when I realised what I had done. I wrote to him saying how sorry I was. It was such a bad moment for me. Simon handled it beautifully. But I still get upset when I think of it.
AM Everybody is human and we all make mistakes, particularly under pressure. The trick is to not make too many of them, otherwise you won’t last the 40 years we lasted.
If you could change one rule in golf, what would it be?
AM You should have asked that two years ago because we’ve changed most of them now. We were fortunate enough to have a seat at the rules review table with The R&A and USGA. We had the opportunity to basically change a lot of the really daft rulings.
I personally think the game is in a good spot right now. There are a couple of tweaks which need to be made, but there are something like 220 clauses in the rule book now and only two of them are causing a headache. We’ve clearly still got an issue around the caddie positioning, but we fixed those with clarifications.
JP The only thing we still struggle with is pace of play. People ask why we don’t hit people with penalties, but very rarely is a player stupid enough to get two bad times and get hit with a one-stroke penalty. Once they’ve had their first bad time, they pick up their pace of play and cease to be a problem. We also fine players for slow play. And from the way the players actively appeal these fines, you can tell they don’t like it, so it has a pretty good effect.
John, do you still get asked about the slow-penalty given to Guan Tianlang, who was 14 at the time, at Augusta in 2013?
JP That was a tough one. I tried very hard to tell him what was going to happen if he did not speed up. But he backed me into a corner. In the end I had no choice (he received a one-stroke penalty).
AM There’s this misconception that the longer you spend over a stroke, the better your result will be. But JP and I can tell you that after 80 years combined, it’s actually the reverse. When we time people, we see them making more birdies hitting it within 30 or 40 seconds. The guy who spends the extra 20 seconds looking at a putt never holes it.
What are some of the strangest rules incidents you’ve experienced?
JP Everyone remembers I had a ruling with Seve Ballesteros at Valderrama, concerning a hole by a tree. That was quite simple, even though it took a long time to resolve, but seven months later I had probably the most technical ruling of my career. It was a case where Colin Montgomerie hooked his second shot left and the ball ended up on a plate which had been left outside the commentator’s hut, which was on top of the car path. To add to that, directly between the hole and the ball was a massive TV tower and we also had some overhead cables. That took a while to work out.
AM The weirdest one I experienced was at the Kenya Open when Tommy Horton had a putt to force a playoff and left it hanging on the lip. I turned away and then heard the crowd laughing. I didn’t think anything of it and assumed he had just tapped in, but it was brought to my attention about 15 minutes later that Tommy had pulled apart his putter and held the shaft in his left hand and the head in his right hand when he holed out. I had to look in the rule book and because Tommy had already left, I had to delay the prize giving and wait for him to get home to ask him what he’d done. He confirmed that he had taken the shaft out of the club and, of course, I had to disqualify him. He might as well have kicked it in the hole because the club has got to have a head and a shaft. He was only the chairman of the tournament committee at the time… and I was refereeing my second tournament!
You both famously spent a day in the company of George Bush Snr at the Ryder Cup. What was that like?
AM Yes, 2002. He loved his golf and spent all day asking questions. It was an amazing experience.
JP George Bush turned up again in 2006 and I was asked to do a similar job to Andy. It was a great pleasure and honour, but you get grilled by the secret service. They said whatever you do, don’t lose your escort. That’s all well and good until the President says he wants to go to X-Y-Z. He was like, “Don’t worry about them. You just go for it”. We were on a four-seater cart with Herb Kohler, who owns Whistling Straits and the Old Course Hotel. I was going flat out and I failed to notice a fold in the ground. Luckily, the President saw it and grabbed the side of the buggy, but Herb Kohler flew off the back and fell on his ass on the ground. Thankfully, he was alright.
What will you miss most now you’re retired?
JP Apart from the money (laughs)? The camaraderie. I think Andy will probably agree. We will miss the players, the caddies, the fellow referees and even the members of the public. I always tell people this is the best job in the world and I’ve loved every single minute of it.
AM I agree. I’ll miss the people most. There is no us and them these days. The Tour is one big happy family now. One thing I will particularly miss is the banter which goes on down the radio. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff you hear through your earpiece!
‘We fine players for slow play and it’s not inconsequential. From the way they actively appeal those fines, you can tell the players don’t like it. So clearly it works’