Cell phone to blame for Ogilvy's miss

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SAN FRANCISCO -- As incidents go, it was almost comical. And Tiger Woods and Steve Stricker hardly needed any help anyway.

But on a day when almost everything seemed to go bad for Ryo Ishikawa and Geoff Ogilvy, a ringing cell phone and a fan who couldn't keep his mouth shut added to their misery.

The International team members were already 1-down in their match on the third hole when Ogilvy ran into problems while trying to putt for a par that would have given them a halve. By the time he missed the putt, Woods was apologizing to him even though both he and Stricker were blameless.

"Tiger did a classy thing and apologized for that, not that he had anything to do with it, but we hate to see stuff like that happen," Stricker said.

What happened was the phone of a course marshal standing near the green started ringing as Ogilvy stood over his putt. When he backed off and then stood over it again, the phone rang again.

The players and their caddies looked into the crowd to see who the offender was, and it turned out to be a marshal. But he apparently was not familiar with how to turn his phone off and it rang several more times before he finally retreated out of sight.

Stricker said he thought it went off seven different times, but Woods held up five fingers to indicate it wasn't that much. But when Ogilvy went to finally hit the putt, a fan yelled out a reference from the movie "Caddyshack" and he ended up missing it.

"You know the only part that was intentional was the guy yelling out, which was absolutely uncalled for," Woods said. "And this is not what golf is all about."

Woods and Stricker went on to beat Ogilvy and Ishikawa 6 and 4 in the alternate shot format, the biggest win by any team on the day.

Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press

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