US PGA Tour's petulant reaction to Rory's move

FROM THE GOLF.COM WEBSITE
PRESS TENT: By Steve Beslow
When young European upstart Rory McIlroy announced his intention to drop his US PGA Tour card on Tuesday, the Tour had a difficult choice to make.
Either it could be understanding and try to (at least outwardly) embrace the desire of talents like McIlroy and Martin Kaymer to play closer to home more often, or it could take some action against the increase in players abandoning ship.
As CBSSports.com's Steve Elling describes, the US Tour went with the second option.
Rory McIlroy's decision to quit after one year as a member of the US PGA Tour will come with a few strings attached.
If not some barbed wire.

The 21-year-old, who has already cracked the top 10 in the world rankings and won as a rookie this year on the U.S. tour, surprised fans and followers on Monday when he announced he was dropping his PGA Tour card after one season because, in part, he was homesick and over-extended.

According to US PGA Tour rules, if McIlroy drops his membership he will be limited to 10 appearances at sanctioned or co-sanctioned official U.S. events per season over the next five years, which includes the four majors and three official World Golf Championships events, said Andy Pazder, the PGA Tour's senior vice president of tournament administration.

Other non-members in good standing, for lack of a better term, can play in 12 US PGA Tour events. McIlroy on Monday told reporters in the U.K. that he would cut back on his U.S. schedule after dropping his membership in 2011, but was apparently unaware that quitting carried certain restrictions.

"I will play 11 or 12 there next year and I will be happy with that," McIlroy said.

Not exactly.

"That would be erroneous," Pazder said. "We are in the process of sending a note to Rory and his management."

On the surface, this isn't that big of a deal--McIlroy had planned to play 11 or 12 tournaments, instead he'll play 10--but there's a little more to it than that:

World No. 1 Lee Westwood managed to slip through some cracks in 2010, and he's managed by the same company, ISM.

Westwood played in 11 US PGA Tour events even though he dropped his U.S. membership after 2008 and is still within the five-year window. Had Westwood not withdrawn from the US PGA Championship because of an injury, he would have played in 12 US PGA Tour-sanctioned events, two more than he should have been allowed to enter based on his maximum of 10.

Pazder said the tour decided a few years ago that in such situations, they would not prohibit a player from competing in a cross-sanctioned WGC event if he had reached 10 starts already.

"We were not going to sit there and say, 'You should not have been able to play Memphis, so now you can't play here,'" Pazder said of the WGC start Westwood made in midsummer at Firestone.

So, how did Westwood dodge the regs? "We did not closely monitor his play in US PGA Tour events," Pazder admitted.

The US PGA Tour has already been called out on its double standards once this season (with the Jim Furyk alarm clock debacle), but that's not what I see as the Tour's main motivation in this case. Rather than playing favourites, the Tour is coming off like a spurned lover, lashing out at the Euros who are starting to take their relationship with golf's biggest cash cow for granted.

I can appreciate that the US PGA Tour wants to show that it's not going to be bullied around by young, foreign players, but can't it think of a way that makes it look less small and petulant than enforcing a rule that doesn't really help anybody?