Popular pro given rare 4-shot penalty. His response was endearing

As Joel Dahmen walked to the 4th tee Thursday during the first round of the Shriners Children’s Open, something didn’t look right in his golf bag.

“We got to 4 tee and I grabbed a water and I walked over to my bag and I saw a 4-iron that was in the wrong spot and our stuff is always in the right spot,” Dahmen said after his round. “It wasn’t in the right spot.”

The reason the 4-iron wasn’t in the right spot? It wasn’t supposed to be there at all.

Dahmen was penalized four shots Thursday for having 15 clubs in his bag, one more than the legal limit of 14 under the Rules of Golf. The four-shot penalty (applied as two two-shot penalties over the first two holes) turned his opening round 1-over 72 into a five-over 76 which left him in 131st place in the 132-man field as first-round play was suspended due to darkness Thursday evening (and delayed Friday morning due to high winds).

The veteran pro, who has developed a large following after being featured in the first two seasons of Netflix’s PGA Tour docuseries “Full Swing” and was open about his life and career struggles on the show, was still after the round confused how the extra 4-iron got ended up in his bag.

But nevertheless, he owned the mistake and didn’t put it off on anyone, including his caddie Geno Bonnalie.

“Never happened to me before,” he said. “I travel with 15, 16 clubs. I think most people out here do depending on conditions and courses. You know, been traveling out here for a long time and never happened before. I’d like to blame Geno. That would be the easy thing to do. It’s not his fault either. I played Tuesday and Wednesday out here. We didn’t see it in there.

“Why, I don’t know. I don’t know how it got there. It sucks.

“It’s one of those weird ones,” he added later. “I have a Clif Bar that’s probably two months old in there. Like there is probably a banana that is rotting in that golf bag. There is all sorts of crap. It’s pretty easy to typically find an extra club, and unfortunately, we didn’t do it today.”

The penalty couldn’t have come at a worse time for Dahmen either. After a career year in 2020 when he finished 38th in the FedEx Cup and then earned his first PGA Tour victory in 2021, his Official World Golf Ranking has steadily declined to 229th, his worst since 2017, his rookie year on the PGA Tour.

Coming into the week, he was 124th on the FedEx Cup Fall points list meaning he needs good finishes over the final five events of the season to secure his place among the top 125 and retain his full-time status on the PGA Tour.

As of the suspension of play, Dahmen was projected to fall another four spots to 128th.

When he realized the extra club was in his bag, he said he knew the rule but still called over a rules official to “confirm everything.”

“It’s one of those weird ones that sticks with you,” he said of the rule. “It happens maybe once a year. I remember Ian Woosnam did it way back when at the British Open when he was around the lead.

“I knew it was a max of four, but I called over a rules official just to confirm everything, handed the club off, and played with 14 the rest of the way.”

In 2001, Ian Woosnam was tied for the lead going into the final round of the Open Championship when he and his caddie discovered he had two drivers in the bag on the second tee, putting him over the 14-club limit. Part of the issue was that Royal Lytham and St. Annes, that year’s host, started with a par-3, meaning Woosnam did not look for driver in his bag until the second hole.

There, he was assessed just a two-shot penalty since he discovered and removed the 15th club before playing the second hole. In Vegas, Dahmen was given a four-shot penalty, the maximum allowed for breaching Rule 4.1b. The rule states, “The player gets the general penalty (two penalty strokes) for each hole where a breach happened, with a maximum of four penalty strokes in the round (adding two penalty strokes at each of the first two holes where a breach happened).

According to the rule, the breach is determined to have happened when the player became aware of the breach. Since Dahmen became aware of the breach on the 4th hole, he was given the maximum penalty.

In that moment, Dahmen said “there might have been a couple curse words,” but then he thought about the bigger picture.

“I had a lot of people out supporting me today, helping our family foundation,” he explained. “It was one of those moments where you like want to lose it and you want to get mad, be mad at yourself, be mad at Geno, be mad at the world.

“But you look around and people are donating a bunch of money to our foundation and life is not that bad. It’s a mistake. It’s going to happen. Unfortunately happened at this moment in time.

“But, yeah, just stripped one down the middle after that and had plenty of birdie putts; we just didn’t make them today. Yeah, one of those where you live and learn. Geno feels terrible. I feel terrible. We’ll tee it up tomorrow morning and try to make a bunch of birdies.”

Dahmen will have his work cut out for him in Round 2. As of the Round 1 suspension of play, the cutline was sitting for the Shriners at 2 under with DataGolf projections giving a more than 60 percent chance to move to three or four under after Round 2.

Jack Hirsh

Golf.com Editor

Jack Hirsh is the associate equipment editor at GOLF. A Pennsylvania native, Jack is a 2020 graduate of Penn State University, earning degrees in broadcast journalism and political science. He was captain of his high school golf team and recently returned to the program to serve as head coach. Jack also still *tries* to remain competitive in local amateurs. Before joining GOLF, Jack spent two years working at a TV station in Bend, Oregon, primarily as a Multimedia Journalist/reporter, but also producing, anchoring and even presenting the weather. He can be reached at jack.hirsh@golf.com.