I wrote recently about distractions and what they can do to your golf game.  We just witnessed at a professional level how a distraction can and did affect the outcome of a tournament on the PGA Tour.

Tiger Woods and Padrig Harrington were the last group on the golf course standing on #16 when a rules official told them they were out of position and needed to speed up.

Padrig is known to be slow, but they were the last group and the rest of the field was no where near them to be in contention.  The tournament winner was going to be either Tiger or Padrig.  Let’s also put this in perspective, no one on the tour has been penalized for slow play since 1982.

Tiger proceeded to birdie the hole while Padrig triple bogeyed trying to speed up his play.  Tiger won the tournament by four shots.

Now this distraction could have gone two different ways.  Padrig could have just blew off the warning knowing there have been no penalties for slow play in many years and kept playing at the level he was playing.  Or he could have let this bother him.  As it turned out, he let this bother him, sped up and clearly lost his tempo on that hole.

This could have hurt Tiger as well but he did not let the distraction bother him as he hit his next shot one foot from the hole.