The US Open has always been known for pushing the limits with green speeds, and this year's championship at Winged Foot was no exception.
New Zealand's Danny Lee finished the third round by taking six putts from a distance of just over a metre, before slamming his putter against his golf bag and withdrawing, citing a sore wrist.
The incident happened so quickly there was some confusion in the immediate aftermath as to exactly how many shots Lee had taken.
He eventually signed for a quintuple bogey nine, before withdrawing.
Ironically, the putt that he holed, at just over two metres in length, was the longest of the six.
"Everything changed midway through that third putt," Dylan Dethier wrote on Golf.com.
"That was the breaking point. After Lee's second putt trickled past the hole to easy tap-in range, he just … whacked it."
The final round wasn't without incident either, with Slovakia's Rory Sabbatini left red-faced after attempting to use Winged Foot's undulating greens to his advantage.
At the 15th hole, Sabbatini was left with a putt of around seven metres, almost straight downhill. With little chance of stopping the ball anywhere near the hole, he elected to play out to the right, using the slope to funnel the ball down towards the hole.
The set-up was fine in theory, except the point to where he putted it had no slope, and he was left further away from the hole than when he started.
"What on earth is going on here," Wayne Riley said on Sky Sports. "I don't think I've ever seen this shot, ever."
"I'm sorry, I've got to laugh.
"That was unbelievable."
It's hardly the first time a US Open has been overshadowed by a putting controversy. At the 2018 US Open, Phil Mickelson protested at the difficulty of the greens at Shinnecock Hills, deliberately hitting his ball while it was still moving, incurring a two-stroke penalty, which he said was preferable to playing the ball from where it was likely to end up.
"I wasn't going to have a shot. I don't know if I would have been able to save a shot or what not, but I know it's a two-shot penalty, hitting a moving ball," he said at the time.
"I tried to hit it as close to the hole as I could to make the next one and you take the two shots and you move on.
"I don't mean disrespect by anybody. I know it's a two-shot penalty. At that time I just didn't feel like going back and forth and hitting the same shot over. I took the two-shot penalty and moved on."
Such disasters aren't exactly a new problem, either. During the third round of the 1998 championship at Olympic, Payne Stewart watched a three-metre birdie putt turn into an eight-metre par putt, because the ball simply wouldn't stop anywhere near the hole, which was cut too close to the slope.
Hours earlier, Tom Lehmann, one of the most mild-mannered players imaginable and a devout Christian, had four-putted the same green, before screaming at a USGA official that the setup was "a f---ing joke," while John Daly called it "the worst I've ever seen."
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