CARY, N.C. _ The sky stretched out forever above as Brian Claar enjoyed the glorious morning in a golf cart parked in a shadowy copse between two fairways. Moments of repose like this are a fringe benefit of being a roving rules official on the PGA Tour Champions, when the first groups are just making their way out on to the golf course and a tournament is just rousing itself to life, before the first angry player demands a ruling he won't get.
It didn't last long. Claar heard his name barked out, not over the radio in his left hand where the call would usually originate but from behind Prestonwood Country Club's 11th green, 50 yards away. It was a short but nimble drive: Under the rope barrier guarding the hole, across the fairway, back under the rope and up the cart path to where Neal Lancaster, Smithfield's favorite son, was in trouble Friday morning.
Lancaster had pulled his tee shot left on the par-3, left of the green and the path, and his ball sat on a narrow patch of grass between the cart path and the line of red spray paint marking a water hazard. Lancaster wanted to know if he could get a drop from the cart path interfering with his stance. He probably knew the answer, but it's Claar's job to give him the correct one.
"Your nearest point (of relief) is going to be on the path, and then if you don't want to play that we'll have to get you off the path," Claar told Lancaster. "So we'll have to go through two drops if you want to."
"Sure," Lancaster said. "I'm gonna leave it right here, buddy."
"You got it," Claar said.
As Claar walked back to his cart, Lancaster nipped the ball off the turf and left it 4 feet from the hole, any controversy averted. It doesn't always go that smoothly. There are times when Claar has denied a furious player relief, in front of galleries and television cameras, decisions that can (in a players' mind) cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Still, this was a typical moment in a typical morning for Claar, the senior tour's vice president of rules, summoned to go over a golfer's options or ensure the proper administration of a penalty or drop. In a sport where it's a point of both pride and tradition that players are expected to honorably police themselves, a rules official like Claar plays a curious role.
He is not quite referee, not quite arbiter, not quite adviser, but yet all of the three to some degree.
Claar, 60, spent 17 years on and off (but mostly on) the PGA Tour before embarking on this new career, the tour rookie of the year in 1986 and fifth-place finisher in the 1989 U.S. Open at Oak Hill. Now he does this for a living, getting out on the course before sunrise to double-check the setup and set the next day's hole locations, staying out until the last group finishes before preparations for the next round can begin in the gathering darkness.
"I didn't realize (as a player) the hours those guys put in," Claar said. "I would have thanked them more. It's dark to dark. Every decision we make is usually for them. No matter how hard we try, there's going to be a bad hole location. Whether the wind changed or the green speed changed or we just missed it. It's going to happen. ... I've been on both sides of it. I know how frustrating it can be."
But most rules officials are amateurs, from volunteers at local tournaments for the Carolinas Golf Association to USGA executives rising through the ranks. It's an odd job, and a thankless one: Very rarely is a rules official summoned by a happy golfer after a good shot.
"Usually if you're talking to them, something bad has happened," said Rusty Harder, the director of rules and championships for the Carolinas Golf Association.
