Peter Dawson
Royal & Ancient chief executive Peter Dawson believes the PGA and European tours should start going public with their discipline of players.
The U.S. tour does not disclose when a player is fined, and the European Tour typically keeps such matters quiet. It made an exception when Tiger Woods was shown on TV spitting on the green in Dubai because of the enormous publicity. Woods later apologised on Twitter.
"I would not want to give the impression in any way that the standards of behaviour in golf are poor," Dawson told the Press Association on Tuesday at Royal St. George's. "I think they are very high, and golf is still held up as a model for many other sports. These particular incidents that we see do get a great deal of publicity and rightly so.
"As regards what the tours' disciplinary policy should be in terms of whether it should be made public, I think if you look at the wider world of sport, that has become the norm," he said. "There are many good reasons for keeping it quiet, but I think it's possibly something that the tours who do that should look at changing, because I think putting these things in the public domain has a lot of benefits -- especially now that golf is an Olympic sport."
