Before the New Year I was playing in a Hooters Winter series event and ran into an interesting and awkward ruling.  In the first round I was keeping the scorecard of a competitor in my group who really got off to a tough start.  He was 4 or 5 over par through 7 holes and was amassing more putts than Sergio Garcia coming down the stretch of a major.  All of a sudden, the light went on in his head and he rattled off 5 birdies in the last 10 holes.  
    We went into the scoring tent and I handed him his card, which he checked and signed for a 71, one-under par.  When I was walking back to my car I began thinking about his round and how good of a comeback it was.  Going over the numbers in my head, I came up with 72 as his score and realized that I made a mistake on the 7th hole when I put him down for a 4, when in fact he had a 5.  I walked back into the scoring tent, checked his card and found my assumption to be correct.  
    The penalty: Disqualification.  The dreaded "DQ", "Dairy Queen", or simply "deke".  This now put me in the obviously awkward situation of having to confront my competitor and tell him of his misfortune.  This was made easier when I spotted him coming out of the bathroom.  
    I told him that I thought I made a mistake on his card and that he was disqualified.  Imagine walking up to a coworker and telling him that he's not going to get his paycheck that week.  That's the face that looked back at me.  Now the jury is still out on this debate in golf.  On the one hand, it is my duty to keep his scorecard as best I can, but on the other hand it is his job to check, double check, and triple check his scorecard at the end of the round (known as the DeVincenzo).  
    Here's where it gets tricky, part of me believes that he noticed the scoring error when checking his card and believed that he could get away with shaving a stroke.  There is absolutely no place for this in golf, especially when there are hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, and at that point it became my job to protect the rest of the field.