Tony Romo’s latest run at professional golf ended with a pencil rather than a putter. The 46-year-old was disqualified from a Korn Ferry Tour pre-qualifier for signing a card with a lower score than the one he actually shot, per a Golf.com report published this week.
The round was played Friday, October 2, at The Club at Forest Ridge in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. The event was the opening stage of Korn Ferry Tour Q-School, run locally by the South Central PGA section, with the top 37 and ties advancing. Romo opened with a 76 and a 75 and sat 13 strokes off the 36-hole lead.
The Scorecard
Romo’s card for the final round read 74. The trouble was on 16 and 17.
His marker for the day was Brandon Rice, a pro from Louisiana. A section pro monitoring the group recalled Romo three-putting for a bogey 5 on the 16th, then three-putting again for a 5 on the 17th. Romo wrote down a 4 on both. Two strokes.
Under the Rules of Golf, a player who signs for a lower score than he made and does not fix it within 15 minutes of leaving the scoring area is disqualified. There is no judgment call in it. PGA Tour rules official Rob Keller reached Romo by phone, and Romo took responsibility for the wrong card.
Nothing in the reporting suggests Romo did this deliberately, and nobody involved has said so. Keller noted that the group had been put on the clock for pace and that Romo was frustrated with how the day had gone. Keller also said the mistake changed nothing about the result: even the 74 Romo signed for left him three strokes outside the number.
Two Pieces of Bad News, One Day
That round was played the same day CBS and Romo announced they had mutually agreed to part ways after nine years, a run that made him the network’s lead NFL analyst alongside Jim Nantz. J.J. Watt has taken the chair next to Nantz and Tracy Wolfson for the rest of the season. In his statement, Romo said he planned to take a break and focus on his health and family before moving on to whatever is next.
So the golf was not a fallback he was reaching for in a panic. It was something he had already entered, the way he has chased qualifiers on and off since he stopped playing football, and it collided with the worst professional week of his life.
Where This Leaves Him
Nothing here is a scandal, and it should not be treated as one. An amateur missed a cut at a first-stage qualifier and botched the bookkeeping on the way out of scoring. That happens at every level of the sport, most of the time without anyone noticing.
What it does settle is the fantasy that Romo has a second act waiting on a golf course. He has never held Korn Ferry Tour status, and three rounds in the mid 70s at a sectional pre-qualifier is not the profile of a man about to get it. The thing he was actually elite at was talking about football for nine years on the biggest broadcast in America, and that is the career worth rebuilding. He said he wants time to think it over. He should take it.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.