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Speaking to reporters from East Lake Golf Club ahead of this week’s Tour Championship, Jon Rahm explained spectators can be overheard discussing gambling “every single round” and “way more often” than anyone not on the course would be able to determine.
“I mean, it’s very, very present,” he said. “In golf, spectators are very close, and even if they’re not directly talking to you, they’re close enough to where if they say to their buddy, ‘I bet you 10 bucks he’s going to miss it,’ you hear it.”
Max Homa was involved in a verbal dispute with a fan during the third round of the BMW Championship on Saturday when the spectator allegedly yelled “pull it!” when Homa was in the middle of his backswing.
Homa told reporters afterward one of the fans said they made a $3 bet on him to miss a putt:
“There was a probably drunk — I hope, for his case, or else he’s just the biggest loser there is — but he was cheering and yelling at Chris for missing his putt short,” Homa said. “And he kept yelling — one of them had $3 for me to make mine — and I got to the back of my back stroke and he yelled, ‘Pull it!’ pretty loud.
“I made it right in the middle, and then I just started yelling at him.”
It’s unclear if the fan made the bet through an official sportsbook or was simply placing a wager with the people around him, but the PGA Tour did eject him from the spectator section.
Laura Neal, PGA Tour executive vice president of brand communications, told ESPN’s David Purdum on Monday the issue of spectators trying to distract players for betting purposes “isn’t rampant,” but security teams will take “swift and immediate action to protect the integrity of the competition.”
Rahm did note for the most part fans are “pretty good” about telling players the positive side of things: “‘I got 20 bucks you make birdie here,’ things like that. But no, it’s more often than you think. It’s not caught on TV maybe, but it’s something that happens, yeah.”
More than 30 states across the country have legalized sports betting since the United States Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on it in 2018.
Neal noted the PGA Tour hasn’t added any new measures to protect against potential issues of fans attempting to distract golfers for betting purposes.