The game of golf dates back to roughly the 15th century, so you’d think the rules would be settled by now. Apparently not.
As vice-chairman of the Professional Golfers’ Association of America (PGA) rules committee and head golf professional at Kennett Square Golf and Country Club, Tom Carpus ’83 has long made it his business to pace the fairway, citing infractions and formulating new rules to address previously unforeseen circumstances.
“Once you start diving into the rule book, you find out very quickly that there is a lot more to it than you ever thought. Even when you become an expert, there is always something you can learn, and it is evolving all the time,” said Carpus, a graduate of the LeBow College of Business.
He is one of the game’s foremost experts, having excelled as a player (he was inducted into the Drexel University athletic hall of fame in 2007) before assuming the role of referee in all of golf’s biggest tournaments.
“My job is to be conspicuously inconspicuous. The players know where to find me, but I am out of the way. I’ll be walking along, but you won’t be seeing me on TV.”
— Tom Carpus, head golf pro at Kennett Square Golf and Country Club
We caught up with him a week before his 19th appearance at the PGA Championships, and he was calm as could be, having recently overseen the club championships at Kennett. “I’m already in the right frame of mind,” he said.
A graduate of Darby High School, raised in a family of modest means, Carpus was the first in his family to go to college. He’d take the subway to West Philadelphia and work the campus golf course after classes. At that time, the school’s golf program was minimal. “We would get two golf balls and six bucks for lunch and it was a blast!” he recalls. “I enjoyed the heck out of it. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
Those two balls launched a lifelong career. He went pro in 1985, and soon became an expert on the rules. He joined the PGA rules committee in 1995 and has gone on to officiate at 15 PGA Championships, the Masters Tournament and numerous other tournaments for the PGA and other major organizations. He earned PGA Master Professional status in 2004 and in 2007 won the PGA of America’s Horton Smith Award at the national level.
For those who don’t know the game, these are major credentials. They give him the right, for instance, to walk side by side with Tiger Woods in the nation’s biggest tournaments. It sounds like an intimidating job. Who wants to argue a call with a man whose net worth is estimated at $600 million?
It doesn’t bother Carpus.
“Our job is to administer to the rules, so you remove the face, you remove the personality. We have a golf ball in a certain situation and here’s what we do. Sometimes players are not going to agree with you, but that’s just part of the game,” he said.
That doesn’t mean it is all a walk in the park (although, literally, it sort of is).
“The hardest rulings I have made have been here at my club. These are members at a private club, they are my employers,” he said. “So we have a committee and the whole premise is that we let the book make the rules, and not me personally. And at the end of the day, most people want to play by the rules.”
Despite his high professional profile in the game, his personal profile while on the job is considerably more low-key.
“My job is to be conspicuously inconspicuous,” he said. “The players know where to find me, but I am out of the way. I’ll be walking along, but you won’t be seeing me on TV.”